Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Introductionhence to significant parts of his own self; and this alone wouldhave been a sufficient reason for him to accord these texts a specialplace in his heart. Saying No to oneself, however, is not withoutits costs, as few have appreciated better than Nietzsche, thefuture exponent of amor fati. And indeed, the Meditations sometimesthreaten to become unbalanced by their author's polemicalzeal and to be overwhelmed by a seething spirit of resentment.Thus it is perhaps fortunate that the original series was nevercompleted. This, at any rate, seems to have been Nietzsche's lateropinion, when, in the previously cited letter to Brandes, he notesthat there were originally supposed to be thirteen essays and thenadds: 'fortunately, my health said No!'The Untimely Meditations are, however, just as important for whatthey praise as for what they reject, even though, as we have now hadseveral occasions to note, much of this same praise was also ameans for distancing - and thereby separating - the author ofthese paeans from certain powerful influences and stimuli. This isespecially true of the last two, which, f r all their overt praise of'Schopenhauer' and 'Wagner', are demonstrably products of a,mind that has already largely freed itself from the direct influenceof either of these two heavily idealized figures.The personal significance for Nietzsche of these works thus hadnothing to do with the alleged accuracy of his portraits of the subjects.What mattered to him instead were the new ideals of cultureand of humanity that he was able to project under the inspiration -,or, to use a term he himself employed in this context in EcceHomo, under the 'signs' - of 'Schopenhauer' and 'Wagner' .26 Evenif there is a certain amount of wishful thinking contained inNietzsche's later claim that his earlier praise of them was nothingbut a device for freeing himself of their influence, and even if thepraise and veneration expressed for them in the UntimelyMeditations was to a certain degree sincere and heartfelt: even thisis something toward which Nietzsche later expressed his personalgratitude, as, for instance, in the following passage from anunpublished draft, written in August or September 1885, for apreface to a collected edition of the Meditations:What I, in my 'younger years', once wrote about Schopenhauerand Richard Wagner - or rather, what I painted about them, andperhaps in an all too audacious, overly-confident and overlyyouthful'fresco' style - is something I certainly have no desireto examine in detail today as 'true' or 'false'. But suppose that Ixxvi