Untimely Meditations is one of the least read of Nietzsche’s works. In this article, we look at why more attention ought to be paid to the essays in this collection, but also why Nietzsche considered them to be “untimely.”
What Are the Untimely Meditations?
Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations is a collection of four essays written between 1873 and 1876. These works were preceded by his first publication, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and followed by Human, All Too Human (1878).
It is no exaggeration to say that the essays in Untimely Meditations have received but the tiniest fraction of the attention given to the other works just mentioned. However, for Nietzsche scholars and those with an interest in his philosophy, there is much to be found in these essays.
It is largely accepted within Nietzsche Studies that his work can be usefully categorised into three periods: early, middle, and mature. The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations are considered to be from Nietzsche’s early period, with Human, All Too Human marking the beginning of his middle period.
One of the possible reasons for relative lack of interest in the “untimely works,” even from those interested in Nietzsche’s early writings, is that they lack the drama and originality of The Birth of Tragedy—a work that truly shocked the establishment when it was first published—but also lack the style and cleverness of the writing found in Human, All Too Human. Indeed, of all of Nietzsche’s published work, the texts included in Untimely Meditations are the closest to what we might expect of traditional philosophical essays.
Nietzsche actually planned to write thirteen essays to be included in the collection, but only managed four. A fifth essay on philology was published posthumously. The four essays we do have cover very different subjects: the German theologian David Strauss, the use of history, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and the composer Richard Wagner.
What supposedly links these subjects is a sense of untimeliness. It is to this idea that we turn now.
What Did Nietzsche Mean by “Untimely”?
When Nietzsche talks about “time” in the sense of “untimely,” he is not referring to being late or coming at the wrong moment. Rather, he wants us to think of untimeliness as being akin to being unfashionable or out of date.
In German, the title is Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. Unzeitgemässe means untimely or outmoded. Betrachtungen refers to something like reflecting or scrutinising. The influential Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann opted for the English translation most commonly found today: Untimely Meditations. However, there are many other editions of Nietzsche’s work published under different titles. These include Thoughts out of Season, Untimely Reflections, Unmodern Observations, Inopportune Speculations, and Unfashionable Observations. It is difficult to pick a best option out of this list, but various translations give us a good starting point in our attempt to understand what Nietzsche was driving at.
What we have in Untimely Meditations are four essays in which Nietzsche subjects various topics to scrutiny. The ideas he expresses are, he says, out of season, unmodern, or unfashionable. However, what he means by this is not that his ideas are old-fashioned, dated, and no longer relevant. In fact, we can take Nietzsche’s references to fashionable ideas with a pinch of salt. That is, there is a degree of mockery in his references to modern ideas.
Nietzsche is lampooning the tendency in his time to promote ideas as new and fashionable. By referring to his essays as un-timely rather than timely, he is taking a swipe at ideas that are currently fashionable. What he is suggesting is that modern ideas become fashionable not because they are useful and insightful but rather because people simply repeat them in the belief that it will make themselves look modern and on trend.
There is, however, another sense in which Nietzsche’s essays are untimely.
Comparisons of Past and Future
At the time of writing, all writers write their texts in the present. It is impossible to write something in the past or the future, but of course, one’s writing can be about the past or the future. A history text, for instance, is focused upon things that have already happened, often a long time ago. A science fiction novel might be set in the future.
At the same time, it is not uncommon for writers to draw on the past or make speculation about the future in order to speak about something happening at the present time. Take prophecy, for example. Prophets talk about what will happen in the future, but they do so in order to convince people today to change their ways. In other words, the prophet says something like “look around you, we are acting contrary to the way we ought to; if we continue to do so, then this will happen in the future.”
In Untimely Mediations, Nietzsche makes several references to the past (and to the future), but he does so in order to make observations about today. Here, Nietzsche compares and contrasts his contemporary time with the ancient world, particularly Greece. He does so to critique a modern attitude that he sees as inferior to the attitudes held by the Greeks centuries ago. Here we can see how these kinds of observations are untimely or out of fashion. Nietzsche is criticizing modern ideas and fashionable ways of seeing the world by comparing them with the attitudes and dispositions towards life held by a previous civilization.
There is one more related way in which Nietzsche’s thinking in the essays (and in his work as a whole) is “untimely,” and we will look at this now.
Born in the Wrong Era
Nietzsche is not simply suggesting that we ought to return to an old-fashioned way of thinking about life and the world. What he proposes is something new and unique: a way of using the Greeks to address modern concerns and think about the future. Whenever a thinker comes along and offers us something new and original, there is always a sense that they are “untimely.” We might say of a radically new thinker that they are “ahead of their time.” When something is fashionable to say or á la mode, then by definition it cannot be unique. The ideas in Nietzsche’s essays, collected in Untimely Meditations, are original and unique. By referring to them as “untimely,” he wants to draw attention to their uniqueness and originality.
Nietzsche often referred to himself as a “posthumous” author. He even referred to himself as being born posthumously! In the preface of one of his later works, The Antichrist (1895), he writes:
“This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them are alive yet. Maybe they are the ones who will understand my Zarathustra. There are ears to hear some people – but how could I ever think there were ears to hear me? – My day won’t come until the day after tomorrow. Some people are born posthumously.”
In his autobiography Ecce Homo (written in 1888 and published posthumously in 1908), Nietzsche also refers to himself as a posthumous person. What Nietzsche means is complicated, but put simply, he believed people were not ready for his ideas. That is, he will not be properly understood until people reach a level of understanding that allows them to understand and appreciate his work. We see above in the preface to The Antichrist that Nietzsche thinks the readers he is writing for may not yet be born.
The Essays in Untimely Meditations
We have seen that the four essays in Untimely Meditations are on Strauss, history, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. The composer Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima had an enormous influence on the young Nietzsche. It would be fair to say that Nietzsche was in some way infatuated with both of them. However, this infatuation did not last, and Wagner ceased to be, in Nietzsche’s eyes, a visionary capable of steering people towards greatness.
The Wagners were initially very supportive of Nietzsche, and it was to them that he dedicated his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche would later be embarrassed by the influence his admiration for Wagner had over the text. The essay on Wagner included in Untimely Meditations was written around this time. However, Nietzsche’s affections were already cooling at the time of writing. The essay, titled “Wagner at Bayreuth,” is highly personal to Nietzsche and a difficult text for his readers to interpret. Indeed, Nietzsche had to be persuaded to publish it at all.
The first essay of the collection is on David Strauss; however, the figure of Wagner looms large. Nietzsche was motivated to write the essay, at least in part, by Wagner’s animosity towards Strauss. The two had had some very public disputes. However, despite ostensibly being about the German theologian, Nietzsche’s essay is actually a critique of smug and self-assured Germans who believe their culture to be better than anyone else’s.
Nietzsche’s essay on Schopenhauer, titled “Schopenhauer as Educator,” is actually more about education than it is about the German philosopher. Indeed, there is nothing about Schopenhauer’s philosophy in Nietzsche’s essay. He had been at one time very impressed by Schopenhauer (as was Wagner), but at the time of writing, Nietzsche had already rejected Schopenhauerian ideas.
Let us turn now to Nietzsche on history.
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
This essay has received much more attention from Nietzsche scholars than the other essays in the collection. However, at the time of writing, it was the least successful of Nietzsche’s untimely essays. Of interest to scholars in this essay is Nietzsche’s elitist attitude, as well as the idea that history serves a purpose rather than being something of interest in its own right.
There are two things worth noting about Nietzsche’s title for this essay. The first is that he added the qualifier of “for life.” That is, he is talking about how history can be used—or abused—in the service of life. It is well beyond the scope of this article to go into Nietzsche’s philosophy of life; it will suffice to say that he believed that great individuals felt well-disposed to all aspects of life and that the weak and degenerate despised life. He also thought that many respected philosophers, such as Socrates, secretly hated life and sought to disparage it. For Nietzsche, the value of history can only be judged by how it is used to promote life.
A second thing worth pointing out is the actual words Nietzsche used in the original German. The original title of the essay is “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben.” We can note with interest that Nietzsche chose the word “Historie” rather than “Geschichte.” The former is usually used to describe events that have happened, and the latter for accounts of what those events meant to those who experienced them and to us today. What this suggests is that Nietzsche is not really talking about the kind of History that is taught in universities, but something closer to the stories we tell about ourselves. He is more interested in the emergence of political myths than in the teaching of history.
“Untimely” Is Nietzschean Code For “Radically New”
Nietzsche thought that contemporary thinkers claiming to produce new and fashionable works were simply regurgitating popular ideas. By referring to his essays as “untimely” and himself as “a posthumous writer,” Nietzsche lampooned faddish writing and other people’s claims that certain ideas were new and refreshing.
By describing himself and his works as “untimely” or not in fashion, Nietzsche is really claiming that what he has to say is new and original. When something is fashionable, it means that many people agree with it and follow it. So-called “fashionable ideas” are therefore ones that most people assent to. However, for an idea to be new and original, it must be one that few have heard of or know about. Since Nietzsche believed his ideas to be radically new, they could not, by definition, be fashionable. Hence his use of “untimely” as a label.
We saw that on the surface, there seems to be little linking the subjects covered by the essays included in Untimely Meditations. And, in addition, sometimes the essays do not even seem to be on the subject suggested by their titles. This is most apparent in the case of “Schopenhauer as Educator.” However, careful readers will see a common thread running through Nietzsche’s essays. In each, there is a criticism not only of “fashionable ideas,” but on how these ideas are used by those wishing to shape society.
In Nietzsche’s work as a whole, we see that he is deeply concerned with reevaluating our values in order to bring about radical change in how we think about society and the human condition. Here, in these early “untimely meditations,” we see the beginnings of Nietzsche’s thinking in this area.
