Books In The Series

2NIETZSCHE’S UNFASHIONABLE OBSERVATIONSsecond essay on history. In the second, positive half, Nietzschesketches a plan for a healthy, productive modern culture in histhird essay on Schopenhauer, and presents an exemplary individual in his fourth essay on Wagner.3 Or, more straightforwardly,the book moves from the dehumanised individual to the corruptculture that gave rise to him. It then shifts to a healthy culture andthen finally to an exemplary individual who could be the fruit ofthat community.This early work is significant for two reasons. First, it is an important work for understanding Nietzsche’s development. It introducestwo positive ideals that would animate his philosophical project forthe rest of his career: the exemplary individual and culture. In hismajor mature works, Nietzsche celebrates a variety of higher individuals: the Übermensch (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), the philosopher ofthe future (Beyond Good and Evil) and the sovereign individual (TheGenealogy of Morality).4 In many ways, these exemplars of humanityrepresent the ultimate aim of his philosophy. Accordingly, attendingto their first appearance in his corpus can shed light on Nietzsche’sview of human excellence. Throughout his career, Nietzsche alsoexamines the cultural preconditions for the emergence of genius.Although he famously lauds Apollinian and Dionysian Greekculture and castigates modern culture in The Birth of Tragedy, theObservations develops a theory of culture and extends his culturalcritique of modernity to its economic and political conditions.Thecritique of the scholar and the state in this work, for instance, remainimportant in Nietzsche’s late reflections on the preconditions forthe higher human being.The Observations is significant for a second reason: it is itself animportant, under-appreciated work of philosophy, particularly inits ethics. Nietzsche’s ethics of the Übermensch is often regarded asa philosophical embarrassment.5 It is regarded in this way because3See Nietzsche’s own gloss on the structure of the book in Ecce Homo – he groups the firsttwo Observations as critical, while the latter two ‘point to a higher concept of culture, toreestablish the concept of “culture”’ (EH ‘Why I Write’, ‘The Untimely Ones’, 1).4There is an ongoing scholarly debate about whether the sovereign individual is in fact aNietzschean ideal. See, for instance, Janaway 2006; Leiter 2010; Acampora 2006.5See Detwiler on its ‘odious’ character (1990: 5).5928 Church.indd 204/12/18 2:52 PM

INTRODUCTION3many readers understand it to be a form of social Darwinism.Yetthe Observations offers a considerably more sophisticated accountof the nature and justification of the exemplary human being.For Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, natural existence is irrational and valueless. Unlike Schopenhauer and like Kant, however,Nietzsche argues that we can confer value on our existence byrealising our distinctively human freedom. Unlike Kant, Nietzscheholds that the achievement of freedom comes not at the end ofhistory, but in the peaks of human excellence. This excellence isspiritual in nature and so takes cultural form in art, religion andphilosophy. Culture shapes the life of a community, giving it ameaning and purpose it otherwise lacks.This work, then, reveals Nietzsche at his most idealistic, incontrast to the naturalism often attributed to him in the worksof his later period.6 Idealism and naturalism are complicated andcontested terms in the history of philosophy, and especially soin the context of Nietzsche scholarship. By naturalism, Nietzschescholars generally mean the position or belief that our biologydoes and should determine and guide our lives. By idealism, Imean to invoke the philosophical tradition inspired by Kant andfollowed by Schopenhauer and Lange, among others. Again, inbroad strokes, this view holds that our self-determined ideals andidentities should determine and guide our lives.7 The Observationsalso highlights Nietzsche’s fundamental commitment to freedom.In this early work, natural inequalities do not determine our fateand our moral status; rather, Nietzsche insists that we are able toshape our life in our own image.8 This work uncovers the basiccommunal nature of his ethics: individuals do not gain value bythemselves, at the expense of others, but only in concert withothers for the benefit of all.9 All these philosophical claims areto my mind quite compelling. They reveal that Nietzsche had adeeper and more complicated relationship with his philosophical6On Nietzsche’s mature period naturalism, see Emden 2014; Leiter 2013.See recent work on Nietzsche’s early idealism: Havas 2000; Church 2016.8A good deal of recent work on Nietzsche’s view of freedom has been published. See, forinstance, the essays collected in Gemes and May 2009.9See recent work on Nietzsche’s valuing of community, for instance Young 2006; 2014.75928 Church.indd 304/12/18 2:52 PM

4NIETZSCHE’S UNFASHIONABLE OBSERVATIONSpredecessors than previously considered. As such, they portray aNietzsche unfamiliar to many readers, casual and scholarly alike.The aim of this book, then, is to reconstruct the overall argument of Unfashionable Observations. To do so, I will discuss in theremainder of this Introduction the genesis and composition of thiswork in the context of Nietzsche’s life. In the first chapter, I willthen situate the overall argument of the work in the debates oflate modern philosophy, in particular comparing and contrastingNietzsche with Kant and Schopenhauer. Chapters 2–5 then present Nietzsche’s argument through an introductory section thatdiscusses the argument as a whole, a structural overview, and then asection-by-section commentary on the essays. Chapter 6 concludeswith a brief discussion of Nietzsche’s own mature views of thisearly work.This book is intended as a guide for students reading theObservations. It is most profitably read all the way through, alongside Nietzsche’s text, since later essays refer back to claims inearlier essays. However, readers interested in only one essay, oreven a few paragraphs of one essay, may benefit from consulting my running commentary on these portions of the text. Thisbook also aims to contribute to Nietzsche scholarship, both onthe Observations – in my interpretation of the whole and its parts– and on Nietzsche’s early practical philosophy.Chronology of life and workIn April 1873, when Nietzsche began work on the Observations, hewas still lecturing at the University of Basel as a professor of philology. He maintained a close relationship with Cosima and RichardWagner, and still saw Wagner as the last living hope for the renewalof German culture. In the previous few years he had written anumber of works that departed strikingly from his philologicaltraining, works that dealt with grand philosophical and culturalthemes. He had published The Birth of Tragedy (January 1872), helda popular lecture series On the Future of Our Educational Institutions(January–March 1872) and composed an unpublished essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (April 1873). After the classicistUlrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf published his scathing review5928 Church.indd 404/12/18 2:52 PM

INTRODUCTION5of The Birth of Tragedy in 1873 – and Wagner and Nietzsche’s friendErwin Rohde launched counter-attacks – Nietzsche delved further into philosophy and culture, penning a series of notes on thenature and significance of the philosopher (sometimes referred toas Nietzsche’s Philosophenbuch).What motivated him to write the Observations in particular? Nietzsche himself offers an answer in an unpublished notefrom 1875, which was intended to contribute to an envisionedintroduction to a collected edition of all the ‘Unfashionables’[Unzeitgemässen]. The ‘genesis’ [Entstehung] of the work was dueto three causes: first, his ‘desperation’ at seeing Wagner’s projectin Bayreuth decline into debt in 1873, after the auspicious cultural event a year before at the groundbreaking ceremony forWagner’s opera house (KSA 8.5[98]). In the first appearances ofthe Observations in Nietzsche’s notebooks, he originally entitledthe book ‘Bayreuth Horizon Observations’ (KSA 7.19[303]), inan effort to provide philosophical support for the endeavour.Second, Nietzsche ‘discovered’ in his own ‘deep reflections’the ‘most fundamental problem of all culture’ (KSA 8.5[98]). Hislectures on educational institutions and his Philosophenbuch wereconcerned deeply with the decline of culture in modernity, andhow to arrest or reverse this trend. In 1872 Nietzsche even wentso far as to compose a memo ‘to submit as a question to theReichsrat’, purporting to demonstrate that it had ‘missed a gigantic opportunity of founding an authentic German educationalestablishment for the regeneration of . . . “culture”’ (Hayman1980: 152). The Observations, then, is devoted to identifying thisfundamental problem of culture – as well as a distinctive solutionto it – which we will explore in the next chapter.Finally, Nietzsche traced the triggering cause of the work to aconversation with Wagner in April 1873, in which Wagner complained to him about David Strauss’s recently published book, TheOld Faith and the New. Nietzsche read Strauss’s book, and he beganwork immediately on his first Observation, which was a vicious critique of the work. He completed it on 25 June 1873, a mere twomonths after his conversation with Wagner, despite being nearlyblind for several weeks because of treatment with ‘atropine (deadlynightshade)’ (Hayman 1980: 162).5928 Church.indd 504/12/18 2:52 PM

6NIETZSCHE’S UNFASHIONABLE OBSERVATIONSThe four essays composing the Observations were published separately as free-standing essays from 1873 to 1876. As a result, scholars have tended to treat the essays separately, that is, as stand-aloneworks. From the very inception of the project, however, Nietzscheconceived of the essays not as free-standing, but as parts of a unified whole. Each essay was published as part of a whole work thatNietzsche entitled Unfashionable Observations. Although, as we willsee, he sketched many different plans for the series, the Observationswere unified by their respective treatments of the thematic concerns discussed above: the notion of the exemplar and the politicaland cultural preconditions for its genesis. One of the main aimsof this Guide is to counter the tendency of the scholarship andto disclose the overall argument that animates and structures thework’s different parts. By understanding the Observations as a wholebook, we can profitably compare its overall argument to that of TheBirth of Tragedy before it, and the ‘Free Spirit Trilogy’ (Human, All TooHuman, Daybreak and The Gay Science) that follows it.The book’s title in German is Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, whichis difficult to translate into English, and has led to a wide variety oftranslations. Unzeitgemäss means literally not [un] in accordance [gemäss]with the times [zeit]. This could mean ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘unmodern’,as one translation has it. As we will see, however, Nietzsche doesnot aim to turn back the clock to pre-modern culture, but ratherto improve the corrupt conditions of modern culture for a betterfuture. The term has been most commonly translated as ‘untimely’,which renders the German with a literal English analogue. Yetthe English word presupposes that there is an appropriate timethat Nietzsche has failed to find. A more positive term – thoughless literal – is ‘unfashionable’, which is preferred in the StanfordUniversity Press translation that I cite throughout this book. Thistranslation captures Nietzsche’s insistence throughout the work thathe fights against the superficial fashions of the times in an effort toimprove culture.10 However, even this translation misses some of thesubtlety in the German. Most importantly, gemäss is related to Massin German, which refers to a standard or measure for evaluation.10See Schaberg (1995: 31n) and Arrowsmith (1990: xi) for more support on this point.5928 Church.indd 604/12/18 2:52 PM

INTRODUCTION7The title, then, announces this dual project of the book: Nietzschedevelops a standard (Mass) from within and against the age, but alsoaspires for that standard to be timeless (unzeit).The word Betrachtung means an ‘observation’ or an ‘examination’ – that is, a concrete activity of regarding or looking closelyat something. However, the word also can mean a (metaphorical)‘reconsideration’ or ‘reflection’ or ‘meditation’, in the sense thatwe observe or examine the contents of our own minds. A populartranslation has been ‘meditation’, which connects Nietzsche’s workto that of Descartes, but, as several commentators have remarked,there is little evidence that Nietzsche intended this connection.11More likely, Nietzsche employed the term because of its scientificconnotations, since he was steeped in reading neo-Kantian scientific treatises, beginning in the early 1870s.12 As such,‘observations’seems the better translation.The style of the work marks a departure from the dense Schopenhauerian philosophical prose of The Birth of Tragedy, and it anticipates the light, aphoristic style that Nietzsche would develop justafter the Observations. Nietzsche’s style is ‘timelier’ inasmuch as headopts the traditional essay genre in an attempt to reach a broaderpublic audience. In contrast to his works before and after, Nietzschedevelops a sustained line of argument across the 40–50 pages ofeach essay, although with many digressions and repetitions. As others have noted, the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays isevident here.13 The essay form allows us to discern the structure ofargument in each, which I outline at the beginning of each chapter.The first Unfashionable Observation, his critique of David Straussand of the ‘philistine’ culture he represented, was published inAugust 1873. Due to its polemical broadside against contemporary writers, it received a great deal of attention and critical scrutiny, with over nineteen reviews in just a year after publication(Reich 2012: 276–412). In a letter to Wagner in September 1873,Nietzsche brags that his essay has had an ‘indescribable effect’,11Gray 1995: 396; Zuckert 1976.See Nietzsche Wörterbuch entry on Betrachtung (Nietzsche Research Group 2004: esp. 294,312f.).13See Cavell 1990; Stack 1993.125928 Church.indd 704/12/18 2:52 PM

8NIETZSCHE’S UNFASHIONABLE OBSERVATIONSand that a ‘tremendously hostile literature has emerged against[him]’ (Reich 2012: 311). The elderly Strauss was puzzled thata young academic would attack him so vociferously. Unrelatedto Nietzsche’s essay, Strauss died not long after its publication.Nietzsche reported feeling guilty, thinking he was partly responsible for Strauss’s death (Young 2010: 171).In July 1873 Nietzsche proceeded to dictate an essay thathe would not bring to publication, ‘On Truth and Lies in anExtra-Moral Sense’. However, the themes and concepts of thisimportant work reappear in the Observations in ways that we willexamine below. In the second half of 1873 Nietzsche sketchedseveral plans for the Observations. Initially, and indeed through1876, he conceived of the book as comprising twelve or thirteen essays, an ambitious project that would have required himto adhere to a ‘publishing schedule of one Observation every sixmonths’ (Schaberg 1995: 40). The proposed topics included art,religion, science, philosophy, the university, scholars, journalists, history, the military, nationalism and language, all of whichwere to be discussed in the context of the corruption of modern culture and the possibilities for its renewal (Reich 2012:311; KSA 7.19[255], 19[274], 19[330], 29[163–4], 30[38], 32[4];KSA 8.1[3–4], 16[10]).After composing an ‘Exhortation to the German People’in the autumn of 1873, in support of Wagner’s Bayreuth project, Nietzsche continued to work on the second Observation inNovember and December of that year. The essay ‘On the Utilityand Liability of History for Life’ has been the most importantof all the Observations for later critics, but it was received ratherunfavourably by his friends, most notably the Wagners, but alsoErwin Rohde (Reich 2012: 457).14 Cosima Wagner described it as‘very unripe’, criticising Nietzsche for failing to use examples andfor not providing a clear structure for his discussion (Reich 2012:458). The immediate critical reception of this essay was also quitemuted, as it garnered only four reviews (Reich 2012: 458–79).The‘David Strauss’ essay sold poorly – just over 500 copies out of the14See Jensen (2016: ch. 1) for a wealth of information on the title and genesis of this work.5928 Church.indd 804/12/18 2:52 PM

INTRODUCTION9original 1,000 printed – but the ‘History’ essay fared even worse.Just over 200 copies were sold (Schaberg 1995: 205–6).The third Observation, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, tookNietzsche a bit longer to write than the previous two. He senthis completed draft to his new publisher in August 1874, andit appeared in print on his thirtieth birthday, 15 October 1874(Young 2010: 195). This essay begins the positive or constructivetask of the Observations, as Nietzsche himself ‘promised’ in a letterto Emma Guerrieri-Gonzaga, an admirer who was enthralled withNietzsche’s criticisms of culture but who also longed for his visionof the ‘future religion’ (KGB 4.370).The Wagners’ reception of thisessay was warmer, with Cosima writing, ‘This is my Unfashionable [Unzeitgemässe]’, in part because it reminded her of the ‘Birthof Tragedy’ (Reich 2012: 482). As Julian Young reports, one of themore amusing reactions to the work was an anonymous telegramthat read, ‘You are like the spirit that you can understand, butyou are not like me. [Signed] Schopenhauer’ (Young 2010: 199).Schopenhauer had died in 1860.In the first half of 1875 Nietzsche began work on a fourthObservation, ‘We Philologists’, but abandoned it in its early stages.The notes for this essay are collected in KSA 8, notebooks 1–5. Inthese notes, Nietzsche continues his examination of the ‘meaningof life’ [Sinne des Lebens] and the ‘vale of life’ [Wert des Lebens].He argues that the modern philologist ‘kills off his own existence’ by making himself ‘wholly the product of preceding generations’, and by generating labour ‘exclusively with a view toposterity’. The philologist does not live for himself, but in his‘ant-like labor’ he lives for others (KSA 8.3[63], WC 340). Hedoes not have a ‘calling’ to exist for himself, but always for others (KSA 8.3[64], WC 341). The Greeks, by contrast, provide analternative model of living in naïve freedom for themselves (KSA8.3[55],WC 338), a model that is misunderstood and distorted bymodern philologists. At the same time, Nietzsche does not advocate a simple return to the ancients, but sees in the universalityand self-reflection of the modern age an opportunity to ‘educatethe great individual in a wholly different and better way than byleaving his education to chance, which has been the case untilnow’ (KSA 8.5[11], WC 348).5928 Church.indd

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Charles Bambach Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Daniel Conway Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, Robert Guay Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Ryan Harvey and Aaron Ridley Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, Vanessa Lemm Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, Paul Bishop