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THE four untimely essays are altogether warlike. They demonstrate that I was no ‘Jack o’ Dreams’, that I derive pleasure from drawing the sword − also, perhaps, that I have a dangerously supple wrist. The first attack (1873) was on German culture, which even at that time I already looked down on with remorseless contempt. Without meaning, without substance, without aim: a mere ‘public opinion’. There is no more vicious misunderstanding than to believe that the Germans’ great success in arms could demonstrate anything in favour of this culture − not to speak of its victory over France… The second untimely essay (1874) brings to light what is dangerous, what gnaws at and poisons life, in our way of carrying on science −: life sick with this inhuman clockwork and mechanism, with the ‘impersonality’ of the worker, with the false economy of ‘division of labour’. The goal gets lost, culture − the means, the modern way of carrying on science, barbarized… In this essay the ‘historical sense’ of which this century is so proud is recognized for the first time as a sickness, as a typical sign of decay. − In the third and fourth untimely essays two pictures of the sternest selfishness, self-discipline are erected against this, as signposts to a higher concept of culture, to the restoration of the concept ‘culture’: untimely types par excellence, full of sovereign contempt for all that around them which was called ‘Reich’, ‘culture’, ‘Christianity’, ‘Bismarck’, ‘success’ − Schopenhauer and Wagner or, in one word, Nietzsche…
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Of these four attentats, the first enjoyed an extraordinary success. The noise it called forth was in every sense magnificent. I had touched a victorious nation on its sore spot − that its victory was not a cultural event, but perhaps, perhaps something quite different… The reply came from all sides and by no means merely from old friends of David Strauss, whom I had rendered ludicrous as the type of a German culture-philistine and satisfait, in short as the author of an ale-house gospel of ‘old faith and new’ (− the word culture-philistine [Bildttngspbtlister] has remained in the language from its employment in my essay). These old friends, whom as Würthembergers and Swabians I had cut to the quick when I found their prodigy, their Strauss comical, replied as staunchly and uncouthly as I could possibly have wished; the Prussian retorts were cleverer − they had more ‘Berlin blue’ in them. The most indecent came from a Leipzig paper, the infamous ‘Grenzboten’; I had trouble restraining the enraged Baselers from taking steps against it. The only people unconditionally on my side were a number of elderly gentlemen and their motives were mixed and in part undiscover-able. Among them Ewald of Göttingen, who gave it out that my attentat had proved fatal to Strauss. Likewise the old Hegelian Bruno Bauer, in whom I have from then on had one of my most attentive readers. In his last years he liked to refer for example Heinrich von Treitschke, the Prussian historiographer, to me for a hint as to where he might find information about the concept ‘culture’ which he had lost hold of. The most thoughtful, also the longest commentary on the essay and its author was uttered by a former pupil of the philosopher von Baader, a Professor Hoffmann of Würzburg. He foresaw from this essay a great vocation for me − to bring about a kind of crisis and supreme decision in the problem of atheism, the most instinctive and ruthless advocate of which he divined me to be. It was atheism which led me to Schopenhauer. − By far the best heard and most bitterly felt reaction was an extraordinarily strong and courageous defence by the usually so moderate Karl Hillebrand, that last humane German who knew how to wield the pen. His essay appeared in the ‘Augsburger Zeitung’; it is included in a somewhat more cautious form in his collected writings. Here my essay was represented as an event, a turning-point, a first calling of oneself to order, as the best of all signs, as a real return of German seriousness and German passion in spiritual things. Hillebrand was full of high regard for the form of the essay, for its mature taste, for its perfect tact in distinguishing between the person and the matter at issue: he designated it the finest polemical writing to be written in German − in the art of polemics so dangerous and inadvisable for Germans. Unconditionally affirmative, even more severe than I had ventured to be on the ruination of language going on in Germany (− today they play the purist and can no longer construct a sentence −), equally contemptuous of the ‘leading writers’ of this nation, he ended by expressing his admiration for my courage − that ‘supreme courage which calls the favourites of a nation to account’… The after-effect of this essay has been downright inestimable in my life. Up to now no one has sought to quarrel with me. One keeps silent, one treats me in Germany with a gloomy caution: I have for years employed an unconditional freedom of speech for which no one today, least of all in Germany, has his hand sufficiently free. My paradise is ‘beneath the shadow of my sword’… What I really did was to put into practice a maxim of Stendhal’s: he advised one to make one’s entry into society with a duel. And how well I had chosen my opponent! the foremost German freethinker!… In fact it was a quite new kind of freethinking which therewith first found expression: to the present day there is nothing more foreign or unrelated to me than the entire European and American species of ‘libres penseurs’. I even feel myself more deeply divided from these incorrigible shallow-pates and buffoons of ‘modern ideas’ than I do from any of their opponents. They too want in their own way to ‘improve’ mankind, after their image, they would wage an implacable war against what I am, what I want, if they understood it − they one and all still believe in the ‘ideal’… I am the first immoralist –
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That the untimely essays designated with the names Schopenhauer and Wagner could contribute very greatly to an understanding of these two cases, or even to the posing of psychological questions about them, I would not like to assert − a few things in them of course excepted. Thus, for example, what is elemental in Wagner’s nature is even here with profound certainty of instinct designated as an actor’s talent the methods and objectives of which are only consequences of it. What I really wanted to do in these essays was something quite other than to pursue psychology − a problem of education without its like, a new concept of self-discipline, self-defence to the point of harshness, a way to greatness and to world-historical tasks demanded its first expression. What I did by and large was to take two famous and still altogether undetermined types by the forelock, as one takes an opportunity by the forelock, in order to say something, in order to have a couple more formulas, signs, means of expression in my hands. This is, with perfectly uncanny sagacity, even indicated in the third untimely essay. It was in this way that Plato employed Socrates, as a semiotic for Plato. − Now, when I look back from a distance at the circumstances of which these essays are a witness, I would not wish to deny that fundamentally they speak only of me. The essay ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’ is a vision of my future; on the other hand, in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ it is my innermost history, my evolution that is inscribed. Above all my solemn vow!… What I am today, where I am today − at a height at which I no longer speak with words but with lightning-bolts − oh how far away I was from it in those days! − But I saw the land − I did not deceive myself for a moment as to the way, sea, danger − and success! Great repose in promising, this happy looking outward into a future which shall not always remain a promise! −Here every word is experienced, profound, inward; the most painful things are not lacking, there are words in it which are downright bloodsoaked. But a wind of the great freedom blows across everything; the wound itself does not act as an objection. −How I understand the philosopher, as a fearful explosive material from which everything is in danger, how I remove my concept ‘philosopher’ miles away from a concept which includes in it even a Kant, not to speak of the academic ‘ruminants’ and other professors of philosophy: as to this the essay offers an invaluable instruction, even admitting that what is being spoken of is fundamentally not ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ but his opposite, ‘Nietzsche as Educator’. − Considering that my trade was at this time that of a scholar, and perhaps too that I understood my trade, an astringent piece of psychology of the scholar which suddenly appears in this essay is not without significance: it expresses feeling of distance, my profound certainty as to what can be my task and what merely means, interlude and extra. It is my sagacity to have been many things and in many places so as to be able to become one person − so as to be able to attain one thing. For a time I had also to be a scholar. –