Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Introductiontrying to accomplish in his later writings. His letter to Brandesthus continues: 'The Untimely Meditations, youthful writings in acertain sense, merit the closest attention for [understanding] mydevelopment. 'In addition, they always retained a profound and essentially privatemeaning for their author. The deeply personal significance ofthese texts is alluded to, albeit elliptically, in a fragment fromSpring or Summer 1877: 'Heart first poured out in UntimelyMeditations' Five years later, in mid-December 1882, Nietzscheseemed to reaffirm this sentiment when he presented Lou Salomewith a copy of Schopenhauer as Educator, accompanied by thecomment, 'this book contains my deepest and most fundamentalfeelings'.Among the 'fundamental feelings' that 'pour from Nietzsche'sheart' in the Untimely Meditations, perhaps the most obvious is hisangry and sometimes bitter rejection of so many of the most distinctivefeatures of the " cultural, political and intellectual landscapeof late nineteenth-century European (and especiallyGerman) civilization, with a special animus reserved for the professionto which he himself devoted more than a decade of hislife. Rejection, however, is by no means the only 'deep' feelingexpressed in these works, which also bear convincing witnessto their author's candid and enthusiastic veneration for certainpowerful ideals and for particular individuals (above all,Schopenhauer and Wagner) whom he treats as personal embodimentsof them. Still more importantly, the Meditations testifypoignantly to their author's growing awareness of his own unique taskand individual vocation as a thinker. Let us consider each of these'basic sentiments' in turn.The negative pathos that pervades all four of the Meditations isimpossible to miss and was uppermost in Nietzsche's mind when,in a letter to Hans Bulow of 2 January 1875, he reported his decisionto set aside the next five years 'for working out the remainingten Untimely Meditations and thus for clearing my soul as much aspossible of this polemical-passionate garbage'. The UntimelyMeditations provided the young Nietzsche with an effective andbadly needed vehicle for 'externalizing' and 'getting rid of whathe characterized as 'everything negative and rebellious that is hiddenwithin me' .25It was in the Untimely Meditations that Nietzsche first found thecourage to 'say No' to his age and to his fellow scholars, andxxv