Nietzsche and Untimeliness:
The "Philosopher of the Future" as the Figure of Disruptive Wisdom
Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg
Introduction
One of the most striking features of Nietzsche's philosophical writings is his extensive use of figures or figurative embodiments of various forms of wisdom, culture, and ways of life. These range from such literary and historical figures as "Strauss the Confessor" and "Schopenhauer the Educator" to "great heroic figures" (Napoleon, Caesar, Thucydides), to mythical figures such as Apollo and Dionysus, to animal or chimerical figures (Zarathustra's "serpent and eagle," the "dragon," and the "camel"), to poetic or even allegorical figures (the "pale criminal," the "Last Man," and, perhaps most famously, the "Übermensch"). Some have even argued for the presence of important postcolonial political figures in Nietzsche's writings (e.g., the figure of "the Black" or "the slave"), while others have urged us to view Nietzsche himself as a literary figure par excellence and exemplary "test case" of his own moral perfectionism: "creating and discovering himself" in his own writings as "an Übermensch." 1 Whatever one thinks of these latter claims, it is undeniable that Nietzsche's writings are full of figures. Indeed, one is hard pressed to think of any other philosopher who has so extensively and systematically used literary and poetic figures in his writings. And this pervasive employment of figures and figurative language is not restricted to one period in Nietzsche's literary career. The figures are there from the early ghostlike figure of the "last philosopher" in Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the 1870s (cf. P, § 38), throughout the later post-Zarathustran writings, [End Page 1] e.g., in the figure of the "comedians of the ascetic ideal" in the Genealogy of Morals (1887), or in the transformed figure of "Dionysus" in Twilight of the Idols (1889).
Yet despite Nietzsche's pervasive employment of innovative figures and "valuable [figurative] exemplars" (UM III, § 6), few commentators have ventured to undertake a systematic analysis of just what Nietzsche was trying to accomplish through his constant use of figures and figurative language. 2 This is surprising given the current debates and controversies regarding how best to read Nietzsche, e.g., as either a philosopher, a literary critic, or a rhetorician. 3 Situated, as they are, at the "interface" of philosophy, literature, and rhetoric, Nietzsche's figures would seem to play an important role in any successful attempt to illuminate these controversies. Like Plato's picturesque images and myths, Nietzsche's figures are not just inessential "icing on the (conceptual) cake," but are part and parcel of one's understanding of his thoughts and values. The figures are essential for the proper understanding of the direction and development, both intellectually and affectively, of his unique philosophical views.
The lack of attention paid to Nietzsche's use of figures is likewise surprising given the recent interest in issues of language in Nietzsche's texts. And yet most commentators who are interested in issues of language in Nietzsche tend to focus either on interpreting his "multifarious stylings"—the epigrammatic, the aphoristic, the apothegmatic, and the metaphorical—or they discuss the many difficulties involved in making sense of Nietzsche's hyperbolic, seemingly self-contradictory (and self-consciously self-referential) manner of expression. Few have directly addressed the question "Why figures?" Why the constant emphasis on figurative language and thinking? Perhaps not surprisingly, those who have addressed this issue have failed to reach any consensus. Heidegger, for example, makes the intriguing suggestion that because the thoughts Nietzsche is grappling with are so hard to bear (so untimely), "no prior, mediocre human being" can think them [discursively, propositionally]. . . and "that holds for Nietzsche himself. . . . Nietzsche must therefore first create poetically the thinker [figure] of [these thoughts]" before he can come to terms with them. 4 By way of example, Heidegger further observes that "the communication of the thought most difficult to bear [i.e., the thought of the eternal return of the same] . . . first of all requires the poetic creation of the figure who will think this thought [viz., Zarathustra]. . . . But in such creation [of the figure], the doctrine itself cannot be wholly disregarded." 5 More recently, Peter Berkowitz has made the claim that Nietzsche's preferred figures of the "Übermensch," the "free spirits," and the "Philosopher of the Future" function as emblems of a sort—the "identifying mark" of a new philosophical sobriety, a "free spirited skepticism"—which Nietzsche hoped would eventually help philosophy break free from traditional (dogmatic) metaphysical thinking. 6 Wayne Klein, on the other hand, offers a far [End Page 2] more general understanding of the Nietzschean figures as simply "that which possess form" and have "rhetorical" import; in other words, they are literary forms designed simply to elicit various readings and interpretations on the part of the reader in order to be understood (thereby, presumably, keeping the game of interpretation alive). For example, according to Klein, "Apollo is not merely the god of figuration, he is a figure himself, which, like the very figures he creates, must be read to be understood." 7 By contrast, Daniel Conway sees Nietzsche's use of figures, especially his "untimely figures," as serving a far more specific function: viz., offering modern human beings exemplars of a new kind of political wisdom—one that addresses the "previously unapproachable question of political legislation: what ought humankind to become?" 8 Finally, John Sallis ascribes "a certain attunement to these [Nietzschean] figures, a certain movement both from them and through them, an enactment of a certain figural disclosure" that, he claims, Nietzsche employs to "reawaken . . . such insight into art as the [ancient] Greeks once achieved." 9 According to Sallis, what one encounters in Nietzsche's texts is "primarily a question neither of concepts nor intuitions but rather of figures." 10
These examples should suffice to illustrate the diversity of interpretations regarding Nietzsche's use of figures. In what follows, we shall reexamine the issue of figuration in Nietzsche's writings. Why the constant reliance on figures (or, alternatively, figurative images and masks)? What does Nietzsche hope to achieve by repeatedly introducing poetic or representative figures into his philosophical writings that he could not achieve through the use of more traditional straightforward discursive thinking and conceptual analysis? What is Nietzsche trying to reveal or conceal by invoking such figurative exemplars as Apollo, Dionysus, Zarathustra, the "higher men," and the "philosophers of danger"? What ways of life, understanding, values, or types of wisdom is Nietzsche commending or excluding? Does each of the figures embody a different kind of wisdom? Is there a hierarchy among them? Do some succeed while others fail? More specifically, how do we account for Nietzsche's self-professed preference for "untimely figures" and "meditations" which "act contrary to our time and thereby on our time, and let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come" (UM II, "Foreword")? What exactly is it about "our time" that these "untimely" figures are intended to counteract or disrupt? How (if at all) do they succeed in getting us to "look afresh" at those aspects of modernity "of which our time is rightly proud," but which Nietzsche insists are "injurious to it, and a defect or deficiency in it?" (UM II, "Foreword"). Whether Nietzsche is correct in his disparaging characterization of our modern cultural dilemmas remains an open question. What is of interest to us in this essay is Nietzsche's innovative use of figures as a means of challenging the mold of our current cultural horizon and creating new forms of discourse and disclosure for further philosophical investigation. Of special concern to us, in this context, is Nietzsche's use of the "untimely [End Page 3] figure" par excellence—the "Philosopher of the Future"—as the representative figure or "exemplary model" of a new kind of wisdom: a disruptive wisdom (cf. P, § 19).
The Use of Figures in Nietzsche's Writings
In the first paragraph of his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche observes that the ancient Greeks (whose cultural achievements he greatly admired) revealed "the profound mysteries of their views . . . to those with insight, not admittedly via concepts, but through the penetratingly vivid figures of their gods (Gestalten ihrer Götterwelt)." In an unpublished manuscript from the same period, the Dionysian World View (1870), Nietzsche further remarks that "all these [Greek] figures (Gestalten) breathe the triumph of existence, and exude a luxuriant vitality . . . and represent an often overlooked trait of the most profound wisdom" (DWV, § 2). Similarly, in one of his last published works, the Antichrist (1894), we still find Nietzsche referring to figures—in this case, the figure of "the redeemer"—as offering us insight at "an instinct level for how one must live . . . for a new way of life" (AC, § 33). It seems, then, that throughout his career, Nietzsche was constantly experimenting with different figurative models in order to gain insight on how to live, and indeed, how to do philosophy in an age that Nietzsche regarded as increasingly decadent. 11 But why the emphasis on figures as opposed to concepts? 12
First and foremost, Nietzsche's preference for figuration has to do with the (alleged) fact that "we understand figures directly; all such [figurative] forms (Formen) speak to us [immediately, intuitively]" (DWV, § 1). Moreover, "figures convey to us through dreamlike states what, in turn, first engenders representations," and only later concepts (DWV, § 2). Likewise, "philosophy is always invention beyond the limits of our current experience; and in this sense, it is a continuation of the mythical drive, essentially done in Bildern" (in images and in figures; P, § 53). 13 Admittedly, it is the role of "the Philosopher" to come along and try to "replace this figurative thinking with conceptual thinking" (P, § 116); but the implication is that figurative thinking (Bilderdenken) is always already "out there" ahead of what we can currently formulate conceptually and discursively in the prevailing philosophical language available to us. The poetic and literary figures outstrip, in some sense, what can be stated (at the present time) propositionally; and subsequent philosophical reflection on the figures and what they embody generates new concepts and propositions that, in turn, are outstripped by new and more innovative figures.
Of course we might simply dismiss this predilection for figurative language [End Page 4] and images as a special instance of the early Nietzsche's "Romanticism" and his somewhat exalted "romantic" view of art and the cultural possibilities of art (as opposed to history, science, and even philosophy). For example, Nietzsche stresses in the "Truth and Lies" essay of 1873 that our original and most fundamental involvement with the world (our "Urerlebnis") is essentially an artistic and transforming one in which an exploratory effort is made to express (via images and figures) what cannot (in his view) be adequately expressed in the shared language available to us (except metaphorically; cf. TL, § 1). As Arthur Danto observes, the early Nietzsche has a tendency to turn the old empiricist view on its head and view the world as a tabula rasa upon which we as "artistically creating subjects" make our impressions. Nietzsche also has a tendency to limit the role of reason (logos) in order to make room not for faith, but for myth and art. 14 At the very least, he has a tendency to see an interdependent relation between our mythos (our images, figures, metaphors) and our logos (reason, concepts, propositions). In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche stresses that it was the "dreamlike figure" (Traumerscheinung) who kept appearing to Socrates in his final days, extolling him to "practice music," which provided Socrates with "the only hint of any scruple about the limits of logical thought" (BT, § 14). As is well known, however, Nietzsche's enthusiasm for the cultural possibilities of romantic art in general (and Wagnerian art in particular) declined somewhat after the "Truth and Lies" essay (cf. HAH, §§ 146, 222, and 223); and Nietzsche's quest in his later works may be described, in part at least, as an effort to show "how life, philosophy and art can have a deeper, more congenial relationship to one another" even in the "twilight" and decline of the dominant cultural role of art, e.g., after the ancient Greeks. 15 Yet in the context of this effort, his enthusiasm for figures did not wane; if anything, he became increasingly reliant in the later works on new and ever more innovative figurative representations and "masks" of his own "dangerous" and "untimely" views. In his words, "that which is most profound always loves masks" and, we might add, figures (BGE, § 40). Why?
In part, his predilection for figures and "masks" may be because, according to Nietzsche, "philosophy has no common denominator: it is sometimes scientific, and sometimes artistic" (PCP, § 168); but in its origins, it is based on what he terms "a metamorphosis of the artistic drive" (
As Nietzsche once remarked in a letter to Brandes (10 April 1888), "the person who does not find himself addressed personally by [my] work will probably have nothing more to do with me." 19 The figures, it would seem, are also designed to offer the reader that "profound personal significance" Nietzsche evidently attached to his own "dangerous," untimely meditations. The figures offer the reader "personal embodiments" of certain ways of living, images of particular human possibilities or particular human persona. For example, Nietzsche often uses the pre-Socratic philosophers as figural embodiments or exemplars of a way of life (and a kind of wisdom) that has largely disappeared in the modern world, and that he thinks needs to be revived: viz., an "untimely" or "out of season" way of life that struggles tirelessly to combat "the taming and restraining influences of . . . contemporary culture." 20 As Nietzsche describes it in his essay "Schopenhauer as Educator," the philosopher's job is to "measure, stamp, and weigh things," to establish "new values" and "new images of humanity," and to provide his and her contemporaries with "new images of life" (cf. UM III, §§ 3-4). But according to Nietzsche, the philosopher best accomplishes this job of educating others, not through abstract doctrines and treatises—at least not initially—but by way of personal example, for example, through the "courageous visibility of the philosophical life" of a Thales, Anaxagoras, Socrates, or even Schopenhauer (UM III, § 3; cf. TAG, §§ 3-4). Nietzsche's figures are thus designed to address that personal dimension, and to "serve as a [personal] example," so that the [End Page 6] reader can understand his work "as though it were for the [individual reader] he had written" (UM III, § 3).
As Nietzsche once described it in a letter to his sister (15 August 1885), the figures also function as "fishhooks" or "bait" for "attracting and capturing the personal attention of the readers he was so desperately trying to reach." 21 In some cases, this "bait" takes the form of "moral exemplars and models," or "exemplary specimens" of human advancement, for example, great literary and world historical figures such as Homer, Manu, Thucydides, Socrates, and Goethe (cf. UM III, § 2). 22 In some cases, he employs figures of particular saints and martyrs as "exemplary specimens" of faith, piety, simplicity, honesty, suffering, self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-denial. 23 In both cases, these "exemplary specimens" embody ways of living or sets of related practices that remind us of the powers of perfectibility that reside within each of us by providing us (via the figures) with the "visible epitome" of such moral perfectionism (UM III, § 2).
Nietzsche believed that the contemporary world was short on actual existing heroic "models and exemplars." Thus the figures also offer Nietzsche "brave companions and imaginary free spirits"—in the absence of any actual existing ones—that help keep him (and his readers) "in good spirits while surrounded by ills," e.g., the decadence of modern society (see Z, "Prologue"; TI, I). 24 Such imaginative figures or figurative companions (Zarathustra, Dionysus, the Übermensch, the "music practicing Socrates") help Nietzsche identify himself with a possible future (nondecadent, nonnihilistic) community —a community of "free spirits," "revaluers," "hyperboreans" (see AC, 1). Such figurations provide poetic exemplars of emulation for those "who must come one day"—those "men of the future," those "antinihilists," those "victors over God and nothingness"—and for their epochal "revaluation of values" and attempted (future) enhancement of humanity (see GM II, § 24). Figures thus function as imaginative or indirect ways of producing redemptive "exemplars and models" in the absence of actual "timely" ones. Put differently, the figures provide "microincarnations" of Nietzsche's own moral perfectionism or expressionism since, in his view, the macro level (of political and cultural institutions) has become "motley" and "decadent" in the contemporary world, and characterized by nihilistic tendencies. In this sense, the exemplary figures in Nietzsche's works begin to take on some of the mediating role traditionally played by civic and cultural institutions in "healthier" times (e.g., in ancient Greek Sittlichkeit). 25
In light of Nietzsche's later perspectivist claims and his perspectival denial of transcendent/metaphysical meanings, humankind must, in his view, begin to create for itself new (nontranscendent, nondogmatic) meanings in order to secure its own continued (imperiled) existence. Such nontranscendent meanings Nietzsche hoped to glean, in part at least, from the heroic exploits [End Page 7] of his figurative exemplars and models, e.g., from Zarathustra, or from "the example supplied by the outward life" of certain ancient Greek and Indian philosophers (cf. UM III, § 3). In his view, such exemplary figures help to test the limits and "plasticity" of the human soul as well as that of our modern cultural horizon. 26 From his sometimes "untimely" and "dangerous" figural experiments, humankind can begin to compile a storehouse or repository of wisdom upon which the evolving species can draw. His figurative embodiments of perfection (or imperfection, as the case may be) provide an imaginative resource from which others can begin to derive inspiration and courage. As he observes in the Untimely Meditations: How completely this courageous visibility of the philosophical life is currently lacking in
In this context, Nietzsche's figures can also be seen as offering a partial answer to the enigmatic question Nietzsche raises in one of his most haunting aphorisms in Ecce Homo: viz, "How can one become what one is?" The figures aid us—visually, metaphorically, aesthetically—to strive to become who we really are, our "ownmost selves." In some cases, the figures are specifically designed to help reveal those all too conventional elements of one's character—elements that Nietzsche refers to as "timely," "complacent," "self-satisfied," "decadent," "reactive," and even "resentful." More often than not, Nietzsche claims, such "timely" elements have been inauthentically grafted on to one's own "untimeliness" or authenticity by decadent and corrupt institutions at the macro level. 27 In Ecce Homo, for example, Nietzsche writes that "his own becoming is inscribed" in those very figures he depicts in his Untimely Meditations: for example, in the figure of David Strauss as "Confessor" and "cultural philistine," or, alternatively, of Montaigne as a figure of "joyful living," or Schopenhauer as a figural embodiment of education (cf. EH V, § 3). In the same work, Nietzsche goes on to say that he first had to be "many things in many places to become the one thing—or to be able to attain the one [ownmost] thing." He claims that "he had to be a scholar too for some time," as well as a "philosophical laborer," before becoming a "free spirit" (cf. EH V, § 3). Nietzsche's figures are designed to help him (and us) confront (imaginatively and personally) those contradictions, inconsistencies, and inauthenticities that must be engaged in order for him (and us) [End Page 8] to emerge more fully and authentically. To paraphrase Zarathustra, "what returns, what finally comes home to me," from such an engagement is "my own self" (Z III, 1). Figures such as "the scholars," the "philosophical laborers," the "higher men," provide a kind of imaginative "litmus paper" test for whether or not one can live one's life "joyfully" and "affirmatively" according to that figurative model. As Nietzsche once observed, "the only genuine test of any [philosophical] doctrine or critique is whether or not one can live by it" (UM III, § 8). What many of his figures reveal, however, is that one cannot. Even the heroic figure of Zarathustra finds that he cannot live in accordance with his own Übermensch ideal, for he is choked with nausea when confronted with the prospect of the "eternal return," and all that it entails, viz., that the "small man" or "herd man" will also recur eternally. The figurative test of the "eternal return of the same" reveals that even Zarathustra's affirmative Übermensch model is based on "ressentiment"—in this case, resentment against the "small man"—and hence grounded in the self-same "reactive" mode of evaluation Zarathustra strives to overcome (cf. Z II, 11, 20). In a similar way, the various figures of "the dogmatists," the "philosophical laborers," the "higher men," and the "last men" all reveal themselves to be flawed, and thus incapable of functioning as exemplars embodying "a great stimulus to life" (cf. TI, IX: 49). Paralleling Kierkegaard's use of pseudonymy which attempts "to give voice to all the different characters within him," Nietzsche's goal in his use of figurations is to make his readers and himself aware of their flaws, not by directly criticizing or refuting them, but by setting them forth in such a way as to reveal their inconsistencies and absurdities. 28
From what we have seen so far, we can conclude the following: all of Nietzsche's figures, the heroic exemplars as well as the less than heroic ones, are designed to emphasize, first and foremost, the aesthetic and organizational features of certain types of lives, characters, and cultures. In doing so, they elicit an immediate and direct aesthetic reaction on the part of the reader. For example, we respond immediately to a badly organized character's blemishes, rather than to the abstract moral quality of that character. Or in the case of Nietzsche's "courageous exemplars," the pre-Socratic Greek and Indian philosophers, we react immediately "to their bearing, to what they wore and ate, and their morals, rather than to what they said or let alone what they wrote" (UM III, § 3). By stressing aesthetic and organizational features, and by appealing directly to the aesthetic sensibilities of his readers, Nietzsche's figures draw you in, address you personally, and make you identify with them, for better or for worse. For example, we react more strongly, at least at first, to the figure of the "pale criminal" (e.g., the literary figure of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment) than we do to an abstract sociological discussion of crime and its causes, or punishment and its effects. A dry academic discourse or treatise, however important, does not elicit the kind of personal identification with a certain experience or character the way a skillfully designed and therefore seductive figure does. [End Page 9]
Yet Nietzsche's figures, more often than not, offer a peculiarly disruptive kind of seduction. They are designed to seduce us into something "untimely" and "out of season"; they lure us into experiencing the world differently and thinking differently about the world. They help us to alter or refine our aesthetic sensibilities, for example, by discouraging us from simply deferring to those "useless squanderers" or "cultural philistines" who currently preside over the "catalysis of culture." 29 As an aesthetic counterpoint to the current "timely" decadent figures who dominate our cultural horizon, Nietzsche offers "untimely" alternative figures. For example, he offers the figures of the "buffoons," the "comedians," and the "untimely ones," who, in his words, "free themselves [from the squanderers and philistines] only by farcical caricatures and ridiculous re-interpretations" (TAG, § 19). To quote Ian Hacking, Nietzsche is one of those thinkers who is always "working and living at the edge of our moral sensibilities," and who is concerned to generate ethical problems for us that are often not yet experienced by us as problems. 30 Nietzsche's treatment of these emerging ethical issues is typically cast in terms of "masks," irony, contradiction, and especially in terms of "untimely" figures—figures that are often "self-consuming," disruptive, offensive to some, and characterized by a "hammerlike" force that crushes our foundationalist aspirations and opens up new spaces for thinking and acting.
Nietzsche would hardly agree with Alain de Botton's recent assertion that philosophical wisdom is just a matter of finding comfort in consoling figures, images, and ideas. 31 For Nietzsche, philosophy is not about offering consolation for frustration and suffering at all; it is about disrupting those prevailing "timely" human, all too human myths and illusions (especially, as we shall see, the myths and illusions associated with the ascetic ideal) which perpetuate that suffering and frustration. As he says, "to make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task." 32 In this context, Nietzsche's most innovative figures, the "Philosopher of the Future," the "music-practicing Socrates," etc., are, as Marianne Cowan puts it, "timely by being untimely," for they help to provide an affirmative, nonascetic, and antinihilistic alternative to our prevailing cultural idols and societal discontents. 33 They help to fashion an interpretive context in which the suffering, fragmentation, and social malaise endemic to modern society become meaningful, even transfigured.
Timely and Untimely Figures
Nietzsche was certainly not the first philosopher to make use of figures in the context of his overall philosophical project. They abound in Plato, and Hegel (in his Philosophy of Right) gives a famous figure of philosophical wisdom: the "Owl of Minerva," which, Hegel says, "only begins its flight [End Page 10] with the onset of dusk." 34 Having argued that we cannot fully understand the meaning of world-historical deeds because such meaning always depends upon a future we cannot foresee; and having warned us that we cannot overleap our own time any more than we can "jump over Rhodes," Hegel concludes that the only self-transparency available to us lies in philosophy, which "comprehends its own time in thought," and "rejoices in the rational comprehension" of the historical present. As Hegel expresses it in another image, philosophical wisdom allows us to see "the rose in the cross of the present" (PR, "Preface"). But philosophy can "paint its gray on gray" and "reconcile us to the historical present" only when "a form of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated, only recognized after the fact" by traditional philosophical analysis. As Allen Wood observes, Hegel's views "are not necessarily conservative in their import, since they allow for rational action to actualize the existing social order, reforming it by correcting (as far as we are able) its (inevitable) contingent flaws and bringing it as fully as possible into harmony with its rational idea." 35 But they do seem to rule out the possibility of radical change of the "timely" social horizon based on historical and philosophical reason.
In a surprisingly parallel passage from one of his early essays, Nietzsche also depicts traditional philosophy and its "unmeasured and indiscriminate knowledge drive" as always coming on the scene after the fact "as a sign that a form of [cultural] life has grown old" (P, § 25). Nietzsche does not completely reject this traditional characterization of philosophy; indeed, he later insists that his own genealogical method prefers the "gray" of conceptual analysis (GM, "Preface"). But from the early 1870s onward, he also offers the reader an alternative figure to the "owl" of traditional philosophical wisdom: the "Philosopher of the Future" (P, § 59). This figure is variously characterized in Nietzsche's writings as "appearing during those times of great danger," as being "the brakeshoe on the wheel of time," and as always being "far ahead of [his] time" or "untimely" (P, § 24). He also claims that this figure "commands and legislates" "the bad conscience of [his] time" (BGE, §§ 211-12). Moreover, Nietzsche insists that, to date, "there is no appropriate category" for such a philosopher (P, § 53), that he or she is an "anomaly" of sorts and "unclassifiable" (PCP, § 173), or atopic in the ancient Greek sense, meaning "out of place," hence "strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable, and disconcerting." 36 In order to understand him, we must therefore imagine or re-create "a totally new type of philosopher" as opposed to the "philosophers of the present." We must imagine a "philosopher-artist," a "music practicing Socrates," i.e., a philosopher whose activities "are often carried out by means of metaphor," whose love of wisdom ruptures "commonplaces" and "completely breaks with the customs and habits" of daily life; a philosopher whose "selective knowledge drive" is pursued, not for knowledge's sake, but "in the service of the best possible life," and a philosopher who will "forcibly [End Page 11] wring nihilism from the fabric of modernity" (P, §§ 25-26, 37, 44-53; see also BT, § 17 and GM II, § 24). 37 But what accounts for this Nietzschean emphasis on the "untimely" as opposed to the "timely" figure of wisdom? Why emphasize the "anomalous," "atopic" character of this "new species" of philosopher as opposed to what he terms the "stunted" and conventional character of past and present philosophers? (UM III, § 3). Why stress the "disruptive" side of wisdom rather than the conciliatory? Why the "brakeshoe of time" rather than the "rose in the cross of the present"? 38
Nietzsche sees the language of philosophy and traditional conceptual thinking as always embedded in an "inarticulable" shared background of practices, what Heidegger would later term a "clearing," which contains a concealed epistemic content or understanding of being within which particular events become evident, and things and people appear as intelligible. This shared background of language, customs, habits, and skills, against which objects and people appear as meaningful and usable, is never itself fully accessible to philosophical reflection or wholly representable as a system of beliefs and values. It is more of a historically transmitted "horizon" that we have inherited, which we largely take for granted, and which we do not completely control. As Nietzsche puts it, "the philosopher [as well as others] remains caught in the nets of [the] language" of our "timely" cultural horizon (P, § 118; cf. UM IV, § 5). One of the major difficulties confronting Nietzsche's "untimely" and "dangerous" meditations is how to think about and question one's own epistemic, linguistic, and nomothetic horizon. How does one go about opening up a space in which to think about that which typically demands no thinking and which is usually taken for granted by the prevailing culture? How does one think within a horizon that one wants to open up to critical scrutiny when the only modality of thought available to undertake this scrutiny is the very one being put into question? It is at this juncture that Nietzsche's "untimely" "atopic" figures play an important role in helping us (and Nietzsche) "twist free" or "recoil away" from the constraining "nets" of our modern nomothetic horizon, pointing us toward possible ways of thinking and acting beyond it. But before we examine how this works, we first need to ask ourselves: Why does Nietzsche feel such an urgent need to "twist free" of the "timely (zeitgemäß) present"?
Nietzsche believes that there is something more than slightly "askew" about our modern cultural horizon, and he struggles in his various works to articulate this problem. In his earlier works he tends to attribute many of our civilizational discontents to what he calls a "motley" or "modish" culture that lacks the "unity of style" that characterized earlier "healthy" cultures, such as ancient Greece (cf. UM I, § 1; III, § 6). He is also critical of the "uncultured chauvinists" who equate military superiority (e.g., Prussian superiority after the Franco-Prussian War) with cultural superiority; and he particularly singles out those voyeuristic self-satisfied newspaper readers and consumers [End Page 12] of popular culture whom he dubs the Bildungsphilister ("cultural philistines"). 39 He rejects many of the most distinctive features of the political, cultural, and intellectual landscape of late nineteenth-century European (and especially German) civilization, criticizing those self-professed heirs of the Enlightenment who hold peace, quiet, tranquillity, and decorum to be the high point of life (cf. UM II). Contra the "Hegelians" of his day, he "laments the blind power of the factual and the tyranny of the actual" (UM II, § 8), and he bitterly condemns those who would use "monuments of the past" to block new attempts at greatness (UM II, § 2).
In later works, he tends to identify the basic cultural problem as one of "decadence," claiming that the "sustaining and informing values of humankind have all been decadence-values." 40 Sometimes he identifies this decadence with corruption, insisting that "the supreme values of mankind . . . [are] values which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, lording under the holiest of names" (AC, § 6). More often, however, he understands the decadence of modern culture in terms of its inability to generate new life-affirming values. 41 "A society unable to produce new positive values is decadent, and Nietzsche seems to think such decadence is self-evidently the worst thing that can happen to a society." 42 Our "timely" culture, then, is a decadent one in which, according to Nietzsche, our prevailing values, especially those of social egalitarianism, have become "weak," "ossified" and "congealed," and we are now parasitically living off the capital of past accomplishments—accomplishments that, according to Nietzsche, were always grounded in a social inegalitarianism, a "rank ordering" of social differences, and a "pathos of distance" (cf. BGE, § 260). Whatever one thinks of these claims, we can see that, in this context, many of Nietzsche's preferred "timely" figures are figures of decadence—for example, the "tarantulas," who "wreak vengeance and abuse upon all whose equals we are not" and whose "will to equality shall henceforth be the name for virtue" (Z II, 7); or the "dragon," who says "all value has long since been created," and hence there is no need for new values (Z I, 1); or the "cultural philistines," who declare that "all seeking" after values is at an end (UM I, § 2). The same holds true for those "timely" figures of philosophical wisdom, "philosophical laborers" and "scholars," who, in Nietzsche's words, "prefer to dwell in gloomy places" and are marked by "a politely masked contempt" for anything new and contrary to "the old ways of doing things" (UM III, § 8).
In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that the main source of our modern discontents is what he calls "the ascetic ideal." He thinks that Western culture, ever since the decline of the Greek tragic age, has been dominated by, and depended upon, moral values associated with Platonism and Christianity (and their idealization of asceticism). He insists that it has been so dominated by the ascetic ideal that it will be difficult to wean Western culture away from these values "without a cultural transvaluation of staggering [End Page 13] proportions." 43 Why did the ascetic ideal triumph? Simply put, it gave human suffering a meaning and, according to Nietzsche, any meaning for suffering is better than none: people would rather "will nothing than not will at all" (GM III, § 28). While its overt message may be that this world—the natural world, our everyday life—has no ultimate value and ought therefore to be denied in favor of some "other world" or "true world" view (cf. Z I, 3); nonetheless, the ascetic ideal still gives us a feeling that there is, after all, something worth living for—something that can satisfy our psychological need for a sense of power and effectiveness in life—even if this feeling of effectiveness is attained through "dishonest" ascetic means of self-denial and devaluation of the natural world. Nietzsche argues that the "self-contradiction" represented by the ascetic ideal is that, in fact, it is a disguised form of the "will-to-preserve-life" (GM III, § 13). Its valuation-plus-interpretation both gives suffering a meaning (the figure of the "ascetic priest" says "we suffer because we are guilty") and initiates a process of excess "debauchery" of feelings, a spiral of feelings of guilt, ascetic practices, sense of sin, etc., which, temporarily at least, numbs the suffering (GM III, § 19). For a long time, the ascetic ideal actually served an essential life-enhancing function: it helped humanity overcome depression and disgust with life caused by the constraints of modern urbanization (cf. GM II, § 16). It gave life meaning, spurred our willingness to go on, to keep acting and willing. In short, it gave humankind a feeling of power, a feeling that we could effectively take on even more suffering and endure it. 44 As such, the ascetic ideal "saved the will" and transformed man into "an interesting animal," characterized by "depth and intelligence," and "pregnant with a future" (GM I, § 6 and II, §16). Why then, according to Nietzsche, did it fail?
It is the idiosyncratic problem of the ascetic ideal that, while it cultivates truthfulness and introspection (e.g., Christian confession about self and world), it is "a form of valuation which requires its devotees to make claims and have beliefs that won't stand up to truthful introspective scrutiny (such as that moral action arises from altruistic sources)." 45 Hence it eventually "dissolves itself" (GM III, § 27). It dissolves what is "exoteric" in the ideal, namely, the "other-worldly myths," the comforting illusions, the "lie involved in the belief in God," while still clinging to the life-denying "esoteric" remnants of the ideal (GM III, § 27). "The awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training" in the ascetic ideal is that humanity can no longer get what it really needs from the ideal—viz., a feeling of power and effectiveness in the world—except by denying or ignoring the cornerstone of that ideal, the "will-to-truth." One would feel foolish rather than powerful in embracing a life-denying ideal if one's motive for embracing it were to feel better about life. 46 Hence the need for an alternative culture-wide ideal.
But this brings us to what Nietzsche claims is "the most terrifying aspect of the ascetic ideal" (GM III, § 27). For "when the death of God informs our [End Page 14] lives, when the true world has been abolished with it, [when] loss of faith in values per se accompanies loss of faith in those values specifically nurtured" by the ascetic ideal, and when the theological foundations and sanctions for morality collapse, "only a pervasive sense of ultimate purposelessness, meaninglessness, remains." 47 Thus, humanity is in grave danger from the "harmfulness" of the ascetic ideal and its inevitable demise (EH III; WP, §§ 2, 3, 12). Simply put, it will be increasingly difficult for people in the modern world to avoid realizing that traditional moral beliefs (as grounded in the ascetic ideal) are false; and the dissolution of these beliefs will cause serious social and cultural dislocation: the modern world will be increasingly oriented toward "wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth," as well as unchecked consumption, materialism, pessimism, passive nihilism, and general social malaise (EH XIV, § 1). 48 As Bernd Magnus observes: "The triumph of meaninglessness, the Absurd, is at the same time the triumph of nihilism. When the highest values become devalued nihilism is a danger not because there are no other possible values, but because most of Western humanity knows no other values than those associated with . . . [the] ascetic ideal." 49
Hence, as Nietzsche sees it, there is an urgency to promote an alternative ideal. However, the vexing problem confronting any attempt to formulate a "nonascetic" ideal is that the various disciplines of modernity—science, history, art, politics—can be shown, upon genealogical analysis, to be bound up with the ascetic ideal in complex and subtle ways. It is here that Nietzsche's most "timely" of timely figures, the "Nay-sayers and outsiders of today," "all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, these skeptics . . . these last idealists of knowledge . . . these free, very free spirits," appear on the scene to "disclose" or exemplify, in a peculiarly performative way, "what they themselves cannot see, for they are too close to themselves: viz., that this [ascetic] ideal is precisely their ideal too" (GM III, § 24). In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Hegel's notion of immanent critique, Nietzsche's "timely" figures all reveal a discrepancy between their performative utterances and sayings, on the one hand—for example, their performative denial of any theological or metaphysical foundations and sanctions for values—and their effective or practical ways of measuring and justifying these claims, viz., that they are to be accepted simply "because they are true." What makes these self-professed timely "opponents of the ascetic ideal, these counteridealists" suspect is precisely "the most captious, tender, intangible form of seduction" of the ascetic ideal: faith in the absolute value of truth, in "truth for truth's sake" (GM III, §§ 23-24). "That which constrains these men, this unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative . . . it is faith in a metaphysical value, the absolute value of truth, sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone" (GM III, § 24).
Through their performative utterances and effective claims to knowledge, Nietzsche's timely figures all reveal themselves to be flawed in that they are [End Page 15] all still captivated by the ascetic ideal (albeit in disguised forms) and hence incapable of offering a nonascetic, nonnihilistic alternative to it. For example, the figure of the "Man of Science"—the reigning "god of modernity"—can only offer as an alternative ideal the underlying belief in the importance of "being scientific," coupled with the faith that science alone can redeem the human condition. His striving after objectivity (i.e., "truth" about the world as it is "in-itself"; the "lawful and necessary") requires the "Man of Science" to adopt an attitude of "disinterested" objectifying investigation: for example, holding himself back from imposing an interpretation on results, refraining from allowing his interests to play a role in determining the outcome of the investigation, etc. (cf. GS § 335). This is a case of a (relatively close) approximation in the cognitive sphere to the ascetic ideal (e.g., directing human energies back against themselves). While this practice has important uses and is successful in certain contexts, and while Nietzsche has no objection to science as an activity (see his note entitled "Long Live Physics," § 335), what it does not give us is a new "counterideal" to the heretofore reigning ascetic ideal, that is, a set of positive values for life. And to the extent that it offers us an "ideal" for life, that of "being scientific for the sake of being scientific," it is simply the "latest expression" of the ascetic ideal. In a similar "performative" way, the "pale atheists" reveal themselves to be flawed in that they condemn the comforting illusions of the theological, metaphysical tradition, but without condemning that which condemns life, viz., the values generated by the ascetic ideal and thus, in Nietzsche's view, generated out of a situation of failure. 50 Likewise, the "utopian socialists" and "free thinkers" disclose themselves to be all-too-bound to the ascetic ideal. They see this life as valuable only in terms of some unrealized (and probably unrealizable) future state of affairs, such as the utopian "worker's state," which involves sacrifice and self-denial here and now (e.g., embracing the next "five year" plan, denying oneself the comforts of religious beliefs, and taking a stand against natural desires and practical inclinations). Even those "philosophical laborers" and "Wissenschaftler" after "the noble models of Kant and Hegel" who claim to overcome dogmatic metaphysics still reveal that they too are held captive by the ascetic ideal. As Nietzsche says, in their knowledge and thought "affects grow cold, the tempo of life slows down, dialectics replace instinct, seriousness is imprinted on their faces and gestures (seriousness, the most unmistakable sign of a labored metabolism, or a struggling, laborious life)" (GM III, § 25; BGE, § 211).
Nietzsche even goes so far as to suggest that his own preferred figure for destructuring the traditional moral (ascetic) mode of evaluation, the figure of "the genealogist," is still characterized by an unconscious collaboration with the ascetic ideal. For even the "genealogist" reveals that the values which structure his or her discourse—for example, the desire to get a more honest account of the origin of values, the drive to provide a truer account of morality [End Page 16] than the Christian-ascetic—are the very ones his analysis puts into question. The timely figure of the "genealogist" exemplifies that he too is characterized by "faith" in the overriding value of "truth for truth's sake." As such, he exemplifies, in a performative way, the continuing presence of the ascetic ideal in the practice of his own "counter" genealogical method, thus "exposing the genealogist's own subjective interests and prejudices" and consuming his own "originary authority." 51
So Nietzsche's innovative use of "timely figures" in connection with his own genealogical analysis discloses, he thinks, a common unifying thread connecting the strands of our cultural decadence and societal discontents. This is the unconscious collaboration between the ascetic ideal and the various modern disciplines of thought and action. According to Nietzsche, the unquestioned faith in "truth for truth's sake" remains the moving force behind so much of modern thought and knowledge. Moreover, the unconscious internalization of the ascetic ideal (in its various subtle guises) is still the way most contemplative people explain and justify themselves, search for meaning, or find value. Given the grave danger Nietzsche thinks humanity faces vis-à-vis the ascetic ideal and its pending demise, it is extremely important for him to sketch possible modes of self-overcoming, forms of perspectival knowledge, experimental ways of thinking, that would not be committed, either explicitly or implicitly, to the ascetic ideal and to the metaphysical tradition in the West that supports it. But how can one break out of the shell of the prevailing cultural horizon and open up alternative spaces of discourse and disclosure within which new nonascetic, nondecadent, and antinihilistic ideals and values can be generated? How can one go about embodying or exemplifying a modality for thinking beyond the prevailing modality? Can one successfully represent an aspect or aspects of a possible counter-ideal that would reconnect our legitimate pursuit of knowledge and truth to the natural world, knowledge to the senses, truth to our cognitive interests that are rooted in our practical interests as human beings—thus removing any excuse for devaluing the natural world, or abstracting knowledge and thought from that world? Or alternatively, is it possible for us, while still embodying the ascetic ideal in complex and subtle ways, to accomplish a "twisting metamorphosis" or "twisting recoil" away from the ascetic ideal that would loosen its stranglehold, deflect the advent of a dead-end nihilism, and provide us with at least an intimation of what may lie beyond our prevailing (decadent) cultural horizon?
We do not know if Nietzsche is correct in his identification of the "ascetic ideal" (and its pending demise) as the main source of modernity's problems. Nor do we know if he is correct in his insistence on the urgent need to commend some alternative (nonascetic) ideal to modernity's attention. However, a full century of world wars, unchecked consumption in the Western world, and environmental degradation since Nietzsche predicted the immanent demise of the ascetic ideal suggest that he was not wrong. What we are [End Page 17] interested in exploring, in the final section of this essay, is Nietzsche's innovative use of the untimely figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" as a means of parodying and disrupting the prevailing cultural horizon and as a vehicle for opening up new (nonascetic, nondogmatic) spaces of disclosure.
The Philosopher of the Future as the Untimely Figure of Disruptive Wisdom
As we saw in the last section, Nietzsche's "timely" figures are designed to disclose, in a performative way, what Nietzsche sees as the institutionally inscribed evidence of the unchallenged cultural dominance of the ascetic ideal. They also highlight, he thinks, the need for an alternative nonascetic ideal. Nietzsche in general prefers to leave the formulation of this ideal to his much heralded "new species of philosophers"—the "philosophers of the future"—whose task it will be to formulate counter-ideals for life which are "life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, and even species-cultivating" (BGE, § 4). These "philosophers of the future," Nietzsche tells us, will have to redeem us "not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which is bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothing, nihilism" (GM III, § 24). But how? Nietzsche's conceptual attempts to articulate some actual content for this counter-ideal are vague. For example, he talks in terms of "renaturalizing the ascetic ideal" (WP, § 915), as well as "wedding [its] bad conscience to all unnatural inclinations" (GM II, § 24). He also suggests reinterpreting "objectivity" as an ideal in terms of becoming "master over the Pro and Contra of one's affects"—meaning, presumably, that one should allow as many different affects and perspectives on a thing to arise as possible, and engage as many of these affects and perspectives as possible. At the same time, all should be subordinated to some overall project or ideal (but without any dogmatic commitment to the "objectivity" of values or to a "real" or "true" worldview). But these disappointingly sparse remarks fail to provide a "serious" solution to the problems he raises. So where to now? "Where is the will that might express an opposing ideal?" (GM III, § 23).
Though Nietzsche hints that his "untimely" figures "supply" the best available strategy to date for weaning us away from the ascetic ideal, if we look again at those most "timely" of timely figures—the "mere free spirits"—we see that the discrepancy between their performative utterances and their practice reveals a flaw that is significant in this context. For these "free, very free spirits" in whom "the intellectual conscience dwells and is incarnate today" still exemplify a decided lack of "courage" in their conscience: they lack the [End Page 18] courage to disclose to themselves that the ascetic ideal, which they profess to deny, "is still their ideal too, they themselves embody it today . . . for they still have faith in truth" (GM III, § 24). "Take care, philosophers and friends of wisdom, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering for truth's sake!" (BGE, § 25). In a performative way, the timely figure of the "mere free spirit" helps to cultivate the "courage of conscience" as a requisite feature of "genuine wisdom" by exemplifying the lack of such courage. This, in turn, helps bring to light what would still be required of those "genuine" free spirits and "true philosophers": namely, the courage to pursue truth "for life's sake," to recognize that "their knowing is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power" (BGE, §§ 205, 211). 52 But again, why use figures rather than propositions to convey this idea?
One suggestion is that Nietzsche employs figures as the preferred mode of presentation of his "untimely" and "dangerous" ideas in order to avoid one of the most common traps of the ascetic ideal—viz., the trap of "dogmatism," or in other words, the trap of accepting an ideal or doctrine as having an absolute, fixed, nonperspectival claim to value "simply because it is true." One of Nietzsche's most commonly expressed fears is that his own "untimely meditations" will come to be valued not as "a great stimulus to life" but simply "for truth's sake": "Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts. . . . You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths" (BGE, § 296). Thus he employs poetic figures to convey his "untimely" message so that both the mode of presentation, as well as the content being presented, will exemplify the very novelty and "courage of conscience" he exhorts his "true philosophers" or "philosophers of the future" to pursue. So, again, the effect of the poetic figure is to make the reader ask, not dogmatically, "Does Nietzsche get it right?" but rather, "Who do I become, and what do I do, as a result of trying to understand the figure?" 53
Another possible suggestion here is that the use of "solemn pomp-and-virtue names" such as "courage" and "conscience," as well as other "moral" terms, to characterize the alternative values and ideals of the "philosophers of the future" is itself suspect, and thus inadequate to the task at hand, simply because such terms have already been corrupted "by common [or dogmatic] usage" (cf. BGE, §§ 295, 230). 54 Moral terms and "pomp-and-virtue names" generated in the situation of experience of failure (e.g., the demise of the ascetic ideal) are themselves, according to Nietzsche, a form of "counternature" (cf. TI, V). So just as the ancient Greeks needed to appeal first to mythical figures (e.g., Apollo and Dionysus) in order to "heal the wound of existence" in the "tragic age" (BT, § 7); and just as the "ascetic ideal" needed to employ its own mythology (e.g., the passion and resurrection story; the promise of heaven and hell) in order to succeed in overcoming "the will to nothingness" in the early modern age; so too Nietzsche thinks his own transvaluative [End Page 19] attempts to formulate nonascetic counterideals for a late-modern age will first have to appeal to alternative myths and figures in order to be accepted and understood. Perhaps this is why his most dangerous and experimental ideas are always articulated by untimely and disruptive figures. For example, it is the disruptive figure of the "Madman in the Marketplace" who first announces the "death of God" as well as "the night continually closing in on us" (i.e., the nihilism to follow the collapse of the ascetic ideal; see GS § 125). More important, it is the disruptive and untimely figure of the cold "Demon" who "steals after you in your loneliest of loneliness" to proclaim what Nietzsche says is "the basic idea of Zarathustra" and, hence, a possible competitor to the ascetic ideal, viz., the doctrine of "eternal recurrence" (see GS § 341; EH IX):
This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. . . . Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (GS § 341)
Here, Nietzsche employs a disruptive figure, the demon, to articulate an "untimely" nonascetic myth, the myth of the recurrence cosmology, in order to facilitate the eventual acceptance of an alternative practical nonascetic doctrine for life. His disruptive figures help him to postulate a possible alternative nonascetic ideal for those future postmoral humans (who can perhaps dispense with the myth) in order to help them become the kind of people who would consider the demon's message "divine." The untimely myth of the recurrence cosmology provides a disruptive strategy of sorts for finding intrinsic value in life itself, that is, for valuing the process of living as an end in itself and not merely as a means to an end beyond the process. 55 It provides a way to formulate a figurative test of one's underlying attitude toward life. The demon asks us to take the willingness to relive one's (figurative) recurring life as a measure of the affirmation of one's actual nonrecurring life. The transformative effect of accepting the demon's "crushing" message is that those people who possess the "courage of conscience" to "joyfully react to it" will not be tempted to disesteem life by contrasting it with something eternal, unalterable, suprahistorical, or intrinsically good, i.e., some "true world" [End Page 20] or "afterworldly" view. Likewise, by having the myth of eternal recurrence promoted by a disruptive, self-consuming figure, Nietzsche can commend a possible nonascetic competitor ideal to universal attention in a way that is nondogmatic and open-ended. Both the presentation as well as the content of the commended alternative ideal would accord with Zarathustra's transvaluative question, "This is my way; but where is yours?" (Z III, 11). The figure of the demon challenges us to "learn the meaning of [our] own individual lives" from the general "picture of life" presented by the recurrence myth (cf. UM III, § 3). He invites each of us to consider what would be the transformative effects in our own lives of accepting the ideal of affirming eternal recurrence. What would this require of us? What kind of life would it entail? The demon cannot tell us; we must discover it ourselves. We must become, in Zarathustra's words, "our own judge and law-giver" (Z I, 17). The ideal of recurrence does not tell us beforehand what our alternative values should be, only that whatever they are, they should always be rooted in gratitude and service to life rather than resentment against it. To be a possible alternative to the ascetic ideal, it would admittedly have to supply some general content, namely, do whatever is necessary to affirm eternal recurrence; for example, overcome the oppression of your present situation if it prevents you from getting a sufficient sense of power and effectiveness in relation to life except by devaluing life. 56 But the implementation of the ideal would always be particularistic, contextual, nondogmatic, and open-ended.
Finally, Nietzsche uses untimely figures to mount a challenge to the hegemony of the ascetic ideal, in part, because he believes that any alternative counter-ideal that he might promulgate conceptually would necessarily "outstrip the diminished faculties of [his] late-modern readers" who cannot, as yet, escape the "nets" of their decadent cultural horizon. "Indeed, by the time receptive audiences finally arrive on the scene, this supposed counter-ideal may be entirely otiose" or even obsolete. 57 As a consequence, Nietzsche claims to delegate "the installation of an alternative ideal to his mysterious successors": the "philosophers of the future." 58 Ostensibly at least, he resigns himself to the subterranean task of "endogenous disruption" from within the closed system of the ascetic ideal—parodying it, "arousing mistrust of it," loosening its stranglehold, and implementing experimental strategies for both challenging it and surviving the "twilight of the idols." He tends to count himself and his "friends" among that "first generation of fighters and dragon-slayers" who will "suffer both from the sickness as well as the antidotes" of the ascetic ideal (UM II, § 10). On the whole, Nietzsche characterizes his role in the struggle as one of raising questions not acceptable to the established order and not easily integrable into that order: using "hammers" to smash "commonplaces" regarding history and culture (cf. UM II, § 1); using "stern discipline" in order to "combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves new habits, a new instinct, a second nature so that our first [decadent] [End Page 21] nature withers away (UM II, § 3); and using "weapons of humor" to generate a "lost sense of strangeness," surprise, and "ironic self-awareness" that may one day turn "history" and "knowledge" against itself and lead to a "new hunger" that transforms the outside world (cf. UM I, § 2; II, § 8). But Nietzsche typically defers the "commanding and legislating" of positive alternatives to the ascetic ideal to the "philosophers of the future" (cf. BGE, § 211).
Not surprisingly, commentators have never reached consensus on the identity of these mysterious successors. Many tend to equate the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" with that of Zarathustra's "Übermensch" who will "preside over the long-awaited completion of the human species," but about whom Zarathustra claims "there has never yet been one" (Z II, 4). 59 In an attempt to shed some light on this issue, we turn to a particularly revealing passage in Nietzsche's fourth "Untimely Meditation":
The figures which an artist creates, while not the artist himself, are nonetheless a succession of forms upon which he has bestowed his love and which tell us something about the artist himself. Just consider Rienz, the Flying Dutchman and Senta, Tannhäuser and Elizabeth, Lohengrin and Elsa, Tristan and Marke . . . here we stand before a development in the innermost recesses of Wagner's own soul. . . . Schiller's figures, from the Robbers to Wallenstein and Tell, go through a course of ennoblement and likewise express something of the development of their creator. (UM IV, § 2)
So too, we suggest, Nietzsche's figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" conveys a similar self-referential reverberation. Like Nietzsche himself, the philosophers of the future are always "forward-looking." They are concerned first and foremost with "announcing the emergence of a new way of philosophizing," an open-ended, performative way that would be constituted and defined in and through the very activity of the philosophical experimentation. 60 In this context, the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" calls to mind certain aspects of the old Aristotelian notion of "phronesis" or "practical wisdom," i.e., a philosophical activity that is neither completely arbitrary nor thoroughly rule-governed, but always oriented toward "responding to the peculiarities of the given situation" and always directed at uncovering "just what the situation requires" of each of us. 61 As Nietzsche writes, "What a [genuine] philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot be taught: one must "know" it from experience—or else one should have the pride not to know it" (BGE, § 213). The philosophers of the future are the ones who will be constantly looking forward, defining and redefining themselves in and through the immanent critiques and self-consuming parodies provided by the figurative exemplars they experiment with.
Second, as Alexander Nehamas observes, the figure of the Philosopher of the Future "need not necessarily be interpreted in the obvious chronological sense" in which they have typically been interpreted by most of Nietzsche's [End Page 22] readers. "A philosophy of the future need not be a philosophy that is composed in the future. It can also well be a philosophy that concerns the future." 62 Thus the implied answer to Nietzsche's own rhetorical question—"Are there such philosophers today? . . . Must there not be such philosophers?"—is yes: they are the very philosophers who are engaged in the forward-looking figurative self-experimentations Nietzsche himself is engaged in (BGE, § 211). As such, they share in many of the "goals and highest aims" of Zarathustra's promised (but never realized) Übermensch. For example, they share in his "free-spirited skepticism," his experimentalism; they too have learned to say "no" to a decadent age; they too speak frankly (in the Greek sense of parrhesia) without the sanction of the community (or "herd"). 63 However, they do not share in Zarathustra's reactive resentment against the "small men" or the "herd men," or against those who fail to live up to the Übermensch's dogmatically stated goals and drives. While challenging the status quo, they do not devalue or denigrate it; instead they strive to transfigure it. While recognizing (with an ironic self-awareness) that they suffer from many of the same flaws they fight against, the philosophers of the future adopt forward-looking strategies of resistance that disrupt and recoil from within the closed system of the ascetic ideal, contributing, gradually, to its self-overcoming. As such, they share many of the same qualities as that of Nietzsche's "Nay-sayers and outsiders": the mere "free spirits," the honest, traditional atheists," etc. They avoid much of what the "free spirits" and "free thinkers" avoid, but they do not misinterpret this avoidance ascetically or dogmatically in a way that devalues life (cf. GM III, § 10; BGE, § 44).
This brings us to a third point: the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" is the untimely figure who refuses to be a dogmatist. As opposed to such dogmatic timely figures as "the mole and the dwarf who say, Good for all, Evil for all" (Z III, 11), the philosophers of the future "legislate and command" for themselves without assuming dogmatically that they are legislating for all. As Nehamas says, "The philosophers of the future cannot engage in the creation of a new [dogmatic] table of values that will hold [universally] for all people and that will 'enhance' everyone." 64 However, contra Nehamas's claim, they must somehow commend or propose alternative nonascetic ideals to humanity's attention. They must do so by employing experimental figurative exemplars that reveal or unearth discrepancies, for example, between performance and practice, which critique and even consume themselves immanently, and that disclose a metaphorical "picture of human life" (e.g., that of the "eternal return of the same," or that of the "will-to-power") from which the individual is invited "to learn the meaning of an individual life" in all of its diversity and manifoldness (cf. BGE, §§ 215, 224). The philosophers of the future are thus the ones who must exemplify in their philosophical performances the very open-ended, nondogmatic, nonascetic values they commend. This is why, for example, they must leave it up to the individual [End Page 23] readers to decide whether and how to respond to the demon's "universal" message of recurrence. In this way, Nietzsche's untimely figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" helps the reader both confront and overcome the commonly held (culture-wide, ascetic) belief that there must be something like absolute, final "fixed" truth about one's self and one's world, but without at the same time falling into a nihilistic ascetic devaluation of self and world.
This brings us to our fourth point: the untimely figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" is a peculiarly self-consuming figure. To paraphrase Higgins and Magnus, it exhibits the paradoxical quality of a poetic figure catachresis; that is to say, it is both something literal and figurative and neither literal nor figurative at the same time. It is a literary figure that both encourages literal interpretation by constantly offering us alternative suggestions for possible ways of living, and yet it constantly undermines these by its own figurative self-parodies and immanent self critiques. 65 It is thus a figure whose usefulness lies precisely in its resistance to reification or reduction to something fixed, absolute, final, or traditional. Like Nietzsche himself, the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" continuously questions and disrupts the "commonplace" by keeping in play the tension between our "fixed" traditional concepts and literal interpretations, on the one hand, and our more "fluid" myths and metaphors, on the other; and this tension between the literal and the figurative is essential, in Nietzsche's view, for helping to integrate art and knowledge into new cultural forms that may someday deflect the advent of nihilism and make our lives tolerable again. 66 The philosopher of the future accomplishes this by employing figures from various domains to draw upon the diversity of human experience and by implementing immanent critiques and figurative self-parodies. In doing so, the philosopher of the future interprets the text of the world open-endedly, without closure. On the other hand, however, the philosopher of the future is himself or herself an experimental untimely figure, subject to precisely the same immanent destructuring as the other figurative exemplars he or she employs. In this sense, it is hard to see how a philosopher of the future could ever be fully realized in a straightforward literal sense. Rather, like the figure of the Übermensch, the image of the Eternal Recurrence, or the very figure of Zarathustra, the philosopher of the future is neither literal truth nor illusion but, instead, something like "the salient forms of imagery figuring centrally in myths." 67 As Richard Schacht observes:
Their "truth" or justification is a matter of their [educational] value as a means of enabling us to come to understand something important about life and the world that they do not literally describe or designate. [E.g.] Nietzsche does not tell us things about Zarathustra, and have Zarathustra proclaim and "teach" things about the Übermensch and the Eternal Recurrence, in order to have us "learn" them. Rather, he does so in the course of . . . his effort to prompt us to the sort of response that may foster and further the enhancement of our lives. 68 [End Page 24]
Like other mythical figures (e.g., Apollo and Dionysus) that have the power to shape our ways of thinking and feeling but which are misunderstood if subjected to an all-too-literal true/false dichotomy, so too the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" is best understood as a means to our education and development. It is a figure that prompts us to the sort of response that may further the education of our lives, for example, by cultivating in us a sensibility capable of passing the Demon's "recurrence test." The philosopher of the future, like Zarathustra and the Übermensch, is best interpreted as a figurative device in the context of Nietzsche's educational project (or Bildungsprozeß) of transforming our sensibilities, rather than literalistically. As Nietzsche sees it, figures are necessary for education; but rather than fix upon them, we are to use them as an aid in reaching the developmental point at which we can, perhaps, go on without them, or at least go on with new, fresh, and more innovative figures.
The philosopher of the future, then, is best viewed as an "untimely" figurative model for reeducating and forming (in the sense of bilden) our aspirations for enhancing life, rather than providing us with literal doctrinal information to be learned or adopted. The philosopher of the future provides posterity with a figurative exemplar capable of performing the kind of educational function Nietzsche had discussed earlier in his essay on Schopenhauer, and which he claims Schopenhauer as an exemplary "figure" of the "educator" (Erzieher) had provided for him, viz., a stimulus for drawing us outward (erziehen) and upward toward "becoming who we are." In a decadent age, Nietzsche insists, "we have to be lifted up—but who are they who will lift us?" (UM III, § 5). The educational figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" does so by evoking an alternative form of a truly human "future humanity"—a "new image and ideal of the free spirit"—healthy and vital enough "to be enduringly useful to the world and creative and spiritualized enough to justify it." 69 At the same time, however, those (like Nietzsche) who educate themselves by working their way toward this "new image" of the free spirit they themselves are becoming—while providing others with exemplars and "visible epitomes" for moving in that direction—count as being "philosophers of the future" because of their experimentalism, radical disillusionment, uncompromising truthfulness, and unqualified life affirmation.
Nietzsche, of course, denies that he himself or any of his readers has yet attained this goal. Rather, he insists that they must first educate themselves (e.g., via the figurative experimentations and Bildungsprozeß depicted in Zarathustra), drawing themselves "out and beyond" what they and the world already are toward what they might become. Yet it is the idiosyncratic feature of the philosopher of the future that who or what he or she is, is not given antecedently to the figurative self-experimentations in question. Thus like Nietzsche, the philosophers of the future must construct themselves out of the figurative exemplars they themselves are experimenting with. This is the [End Page 25] "new kind of philosophy" practiced by the "new kind of philosopher." 70 Thus the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" is the exemplary figure of Nietzsche himself who constantly re-creates and discovers himself as an exemplar of the kind of philosopher he hopes to become, and who he hopes others will pick up on. But what kind of philosopher is this? What kind of exemplar?
This brings us to our final point about the philosopher of the future. According to Nietzsche, "their enemy was ever the ideal of today," and as such they will ever appear "as disagreeable fools in questionable masks," "vivisecting the virtues of their time" (BGE, § 212). There is an ironic self-awareness in the presentation of Nietzsche's "untimely" figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" which reflects Nietzsche's own recognition that he himself remains implicated in the very cultural predicaments he criticizes, that even he cannot step outside his culture. And if Nietzsche is correct in arguing that the "ascetic ideal" is a central part of modernity—and if he is correct in further claiming that humanity is in grave danger from this ideal, and that even his own genealogical attempts to make us aware of this fact and to put this ideal in doubt remain tainted by this very ideal—then what remains to be done about it?
Anticipating Heidegger's notion of encouraging "marginal practices" that help prepare the way for a new cultural paradigm, Nietzsche's response is to explore different ways of thinking and being within the "nets" of modern life; for example, experimenting with heretofore unexplored configurations of agency (via untimely figures such as the "Demon" or the "Madman), or using Zarathustrian irony, parodies, grotesqueries, and especially humor to turn that which oppresses us (namely, the remnants of the ascetic ideal) to our own strategic advantage. 71 In this sense, the "Philosopher of the Future" stands as a figurative substitute for the modern world—intended for a humanity in the process of transition, teetering on the abyss of nihilism, ready to be weaned away from the prevailing myths (of the ascetic ideal), but not mature enough to do without those myths. The "Philosopher of the Future," as an untimely figure catachresis, is designed to engender a new enthusiasm for life in a transitional age and to provide its own antidote to ensure that this enthusiasm does not congeal into a new kind of dogmatism. 72 How does Nietzsche ensure this? By using comedy and absurdity to combat "the spirit of gravity" in a decadent age (cf. Z IV, 17). Another way to put this is to say that the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" is a comic substitute or stand-in—a "comedian of the ascetic ideal"—who generates laughter at what others (including the mere "free spirits") take to be serious, and who embodies a lightness of being that, in Nietzsche's view, provides the only antidote to date to the advent of nihilism. As Zarathustra says, "the courage [of conscience] that puts ghosts [End Page 26] to flight creates goblins for itself: courage wants to laugh" (Z I, 7). Alternatively, the philosophers of the future will often appear in the guise of the figure of the "musical Socrates" Nietzsche discussed early on in the Birth of Tragedy, viz., the figure who can integrate (comic) art and knowledge into a form that will make life tolerable again. Like Socrates, they will appear as buffoons (and ugly, impudent, disagreeable ones at that), raising what appear to be silly questions about what everyone else thinks they know. Like the figure of Socrates, they will be "ambiguous, troubling, and strangely disconcerting." 73 They will deploy their figurative experimentations and self-parodies to make us laugh at that which everyone else takes to be serious; but like Socrates, they will also use these figurative devices to get us both to take the right things seriously, and to see them for what they are. They will do what Nietzsche himself does in the section of the fourth book of Zarathustra entitled "On the Higher Man": put in question via self-parody their own most cherished ideals—in this case, Nietzsche's long-standing ideal of the "higher type of humanity" or the "highest exemplars" (which he subjects in book IV to a good-natured lampooning through a "comic procession" of "higher" types, culminating in the "ass festival" and "drunken song"; see Z IV, 18-20). By using such self-parodic figural devices in this way, the philosophers of the future (in their musical-socratic guise), counter our human-all-too-human tendency to take Nietzsche's own images and ideas seriously in the wrong way (viz., as having a dogmatic cognitive content to be learned), and enable us to take them seriously in the right way (viz., as reconfiguring and opening-up spaces for alternative human possibilities). 74
As practitioners of a new musical-socratic "comic" art form, the philosophers of the future help generate anomalies about the modern world by making us laugh at what we take seriously, making us see that many of these "serious" aspects are contingent and not necessary aspects of life, and thus are aspects in need of transformation (since they are making trouble for life). Through their experimental figurative critiques and self-parodies, they evoke the promise of alternative human possibilities—different ways of thinking and acting that enhance life, while simultaneously undermining these suggestions from within (via laughter and self-irony) so that we do not take them seriously in the wrong way as specific truths and dogmas to be embraced. In this way, the philosophers of the future, while remaining bound to the ascetic ideal in complex and subtle ways, disrupt or "punch holes" in it, twist and recoil away from it, and thus prepare the stage for a possible future nonascetic, nonnihilistic paradigm shift in modern life. In Zarathustra's words, they create "the chaos in themselves" and in others which makes it possible for humanity "to give birth to a dancing star" and to avoid the impending tragedy of "the last man" (Z, "Prologue"). [End Page 27]
Conclusion
Nietzsche was acutely aware of the fact that humans cannot step outside their cultural horizon at will. To deflect the dangers implicit in, for example, the advent of nihilism, Nietzsche evokes the untimely disruptive figure of the philosopher of the future who, as the "comedian" and "musical-Socrates," makes us laugh at what we take to be so serious about life: our "regimes of truth," our ascetic devaluations of the natural world, etc. As untimely atopic figures who make us laugh at our "holiest of holies," the philosophers of the future disrupt our commonplaces, and by disrupting, teach us how to open up spaces for rethinking our ways of being and acting in the world, and to revaluate our basic aspirations and sensibilities. Paraphrasing Diogenes, Nietzsche asks, "How can any [philosopher] be considered great who has not yet disrupted and disturbed anyone? And indeed, this ought to be the epitaph of our current university philosophy: it disrupted no one" (UM III, § 8). By disrupting us, these untimely atopic philosophers of the future evoke the promise of alternate forms of humanity, new ways of valuing the earth and one's life on it, thus drawing us "out and up" toward becoming who we are.
Why should anyone voluntarily wish for their life to be so disrupted? What exactly is to be gained by accepting the "disruptive wisdom" that Nietzsche's untimely atopic philosophers of the future dispense? Why is this disruption valuable or desirable? Nietzsche's answer: we need disruptive wisdom because we are all "in danger of being cheated out of [ourselves]," cheated out of our authenticity (UM III, § 4). Nietzsche believes that the vast majority of human beings are all too caught up in the common, everyday deployment of things: those "human arrangements" that "distract our thoughts" so that we "cease to be aware of life" (UM III, § 4). Thus if I am to "remain my own," and fashion an authentic life for myself, then according to Nietzsche I must first "renounce everything I once reverenced," renouncing even "reverence itself" (HAH, "Preface," § 6). I must be disrupted from my unthinking commitment to those human, all too human "arrangements" that distract and distance me from myself. Only by being disrupted can I eventually transform those "taken for granted" structures that previously determined me; and only then can I become, in Nietzsche's words, "master over [myself], master also over [my] virtues." "Formerly they were your masters; but they must become only your instruments" (HAH, "Preface," § 6).
Nietzsche recognizes that, as well as great promise, there is also great danger in this disruptive education. The great danger is that of being "wounded" in the "deepest and most sacred part of [one's] being" by having taken away those vital "commonplaces" that heretofore gave one's life meaning (UM III, § 3). And if one cannot deal with this loss (and the subsequent anxiety it [End Page 28] engenders) by finding creative antidotes and alternatives, then one may wind up in the position Nietzsche attributes to the poet Heinrich von Kleist following his encounter with Kant's critical philosophy: namely, it disrupted his feelings of certainty about the world, disturbed his sense of belonging, his commitment to transcendent truths, etc.—thus generating a "crisis situation," which culminated in his suicidal nihilism (UM III, § 3). (Perhaps this is why in those two key disruptive sections of the Gay Science where the "death of God" and the "greatest weight" of the eternal return are discussed, Nietzsche employs the negative and even dangerous figures of the "Madman" and the "Demon" to express these untimely ideas.) On the other hand, the great promise of these untimely figures (and the disruptions they cause) is that they generate a kind of wisdom by awakening us from our dogmatic slumber in the commonplace, and by making available to us new ways of thinking about ourselves and the world; that they reeducate our aspirations and sensibilities by asking such questions as "What is it like to think about the world and oneself without God?" or "What is it like to think about the world and oneself within the framework of the demon's message?" In forcing us to encounter such disturbing questions, the untimely figures disrupt our inherited "first nature" (the way of life we were previously deployed in) for the purpose of overcoming it—giving us "insight into [our] wants and miseries, into [our] limitedness, so as then to learn the nature of the antidotes and consolations" (UM III, § 3). Being forced to face up to one's own misery and limitedness is always disturbing and untimely, but it is also the beginning of the process of the creation of a new way of life and self. Disruptive figures and the wisdom they impart help liberate, stimulate, and inspire us to experiment with new ways of thinking and valuing, all of which contribute, Nietzsche says, to the reconstituting of oneself as a transformed "second nature." The philosophers of the future, as untimely figures of disruption, educate us (in the sense of "paideia," or Bildung) in the possibility of transforming our character, and thus generating a new way of life. They are positive figures of education for late modern humanity, figurative exemplars with admirable traits to be emulated (as Nietzsche claims Goethe, Schopenhauer, and even Wagner were for him). Or better still, like Socrates and even Nietzsche himself, they are the ones who, in the process of disrupting commonplaces and experimenting with generating an untimely life of their own, constitute themselves as self-styled figurative exemplars of disruptive wisdom for others—exemplars from whom others are eventually led to question their lives and urged "to learn the meaning of [their] own lives . . . and to comprehend from [them] the hieroglyphics of a more universal life" (UM III, § 3). [End Page 29]
Note on Texts and Citations
For Nietzsche's works, we have used the Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999). However, we have generally followed the standard translations of Nietzsche listed below, and the alterations we have made are usually minor ones. A list of abbreviations and corresponding texts follows.
AC = Der Antichrist (The Antichrist). Translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche.
BGE = Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil). Translated by Walter Kaufmann in Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
BT = Der Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy). Translated by Walter Kaufmann in Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
DWV = Die dionysische Weltanschauung (The Dionysiac World View). Translated by Ronald Speirs in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings.
EH = Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann in Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
GM = Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals). Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
GS = Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science). Translated by Walter Kaufmann.
HAH = Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All-Too-Human). Translated by R. J. Hollingdale.
P = Der Philosoph. Betrachtungen über den Kampf von Kunst und Erkenntnis ("The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge"). Translated by Daniel Breazeale in Truth and Philosophy: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the 1870's.
PCP = Der Philosoph als Arzt der Kultur ("The Philosopher as Cultural Physician"). Translated by Daniel Breazeale in Truth and Philosophy.
TAG = Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen (Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks). Translated by Marianne Cowan.
TL = "Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne" ("Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense"). Translated by Daniel Breazeale in Truth and Philosophy. [End Page 30]
TI = Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols). Translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche.
UM = Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations). Translated by R. J. Hollingdale.
WP = Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power). Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.
Z = Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche.
Queens College/City
Notes
Portions of this article were originally presented at the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium Public Issues Forum,
1. See Sander L. Gilman, "The Figure of the Black in the Thought of Hegel and Nietzsche," German Quarterly 65, no. 2 (March 1980), 141-58. See also Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 51; and Alexander Nehamas, Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
2. One commentator who does focus on the figural dimension of Nietzsche's thought is Paul de Man. Yet in his influential book, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), de Man concludes that, in works such as the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is "curiously ambivalent with regard to the main figures of [his] own discourse" (94).
3. For example, Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading claims that Nietzsche's work "straddles the two activities of the human intellect that are both the closest and the most impenetrable to each other—literature and philosophy" (103). Two more recent contributions to this debate have been made by Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), and Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (New York: Routledge, 1993).
4. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), vol. II, 30.
5. Ibid., 34.
6. See Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 13-14, 16-17. While their reasons differ, both Heidegger and Berkowitz agree in their conclusion that Nietzsche's ingenious attempts to overcome the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy ultimately fail.
7. Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 102-6.
8. Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 2-3.
9. John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 16-17.
10. Here we should note that Sallis is one of the few commentators who comes close to understanding the figures as we do, namely, as educational devices designed to generate certain experiences that could not be generated by cognitive means alone. As we shall argue, the figures make perceptible "to those today capable of insight (den Einsichten)" certain disruptive experiences that the reader would otherwise not have; and in doing so, the figures help bring about a profound transformation of the way in which life and the world are regarded, both existentially and evaluatively. See Sallis, Crossings, 14-16, 26.
11. If Berkowitz is correct in claiming that "Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the most philosophical of Nietzsche's works because it displays most vividly the kind of life demanded by the supreme form of truthfulness about morality" (129), then it is important to note that it is also [End Page 31] the work that contains the greatest number of diverse and remarkable kinds of Nietzschean figures from beginning to end.
12. A more concise account of what we mean by "figures" would be helpful at this juncture. However, the various German words that Nietzsche uses (e.g., Gestalten, Gebilde, Erscheinungen, and Figuren), and that are commonly translated as "figures" or "figural," range widely in meaning. Sometimes they are apparently intended to mean "image" or "image-type"; sometimes "character" or "persona"; sometimes "form" or "appearance"; sometimes "pseudonym" or "mouthpiece"; sometimes "trope" or "ideal"; and sometimes "mask" or "disguise." These meanings are not mutually exclusive or inconsistent; for all these "synonyms" are conceptually related, and all revolve around the "literary" center of Nietzsche's writings. Still, a more precise and narrow definition for these terms proves somewhat difficult to articulate. In light of these considerations, we have concluded that the translation that makes the most sense in the contexts that we are concerned to explore in this essay is the one used by both Walter Kaufmann and Ronald Speirs, e.g., at BT, § 1, namely, "figures." In our view, this translation is especially appropriate for capturing the unique function that many of Nietzsche's "Gestalten" or "Gebilde" play in dispensing a "disruptive wisdom" that is not readily available from more traditional approaches to philosophy. Nietzsche's "figures" exemplify, embody, or are emblematic of certain experiences, certain ways of being in the world that cannot be easily conceptualized within the prevailing matrix of concepts currently available. As we shall argue, Nietzsche's "figures" offer his readers personal embodiments or exemplary models that challenge, provoke, stimulate, and inspire for purposes of education. In some cases, Nietzsche's "figures" help generate in his readers new forms of experience that push them beyond their normal, everyday presumptions and presuppositions. By relying on these "figures," Nietzsche is able to acquaint his readers with "untimely" perspectives from which the received wisdom of the day can be called into question.
13. Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 30-34.
14. See Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36-67.
15. This passage from Nietzsche's 1875 notes is quoted from Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 119. In sections 222 and 223 of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche speaks of living in the "evening twilight of art" and of the artist as a "glorious relic." He also claims that "the scientific man is the further evolution of the artist." Yet as Thiele notes, in Nietzsche's final years of work "the concept of the 'philosopher-artist' continued to occupy his thoughts (WP 419). In its broadest terms, the reason for the coupling of philosophy and art is straightforward. Philosophy is the most spiritual will to power, not because will finds its highest realization in philosophical thought or writing, but because it finds its highest incarnation in the philosopher himself. The philosopher is his own experiment in living, in the enhancement and sublimation of the will to power. He is, in effect, his own artistic creation: 'The product of the philosopher is his life (first of all, before his works). That is his work of art'" (119).
16. Sarah Kofman, "Accessories (Ecce Homo, 'Why I write Such Good Books,' 'The Untimelies,' 3)," in Nietzsche: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Sedgwick (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 146-47.
17. See ibid., 146.
18. "Though a child of the present time," Nietzsche claims that he was nonetheless able to "acquire untimely experiences" by "drawing on the experiences of others" from earlier times, especially via the "Hellenic" myths and figures (see UM II, "Foreword").
19. Cited from Daniel Breazeale's "Introduction" to R. J. Hollingdale's translation of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxiv.
20. See Marianne Cowan, "Introduction" to Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. M. Cowan (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1962), 11-12. In this sense, Nietzsche uses figures, e.g., the figures of the pre-Socratic philosophers, as an educational means for reinventing [End Page 32] and rediscovering a past understanding of philosophy and philosophical wisdom as a "way of life."
21. See Breazeale's "Introduction," xxiv.
22. Also see Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 2; 10-13.
23. Nietzsche is often quite positive toward the ascetic practices of particular saints and martyrs (and even of particular artists and philosophers), especially insofar as such practices embody an important dimension of self-discipline and self-mastery (cf. GM III, §§ 5, 9, 12). However, as we shall argue, one of the most important things Nietzsche's "untimely" figures are designed to disrupt is the "idealization" of asceticism.
24. See also Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 32-33; 47.
25. See ibid., 48-50.
26. See ibid., 17-20.
27. See Breazeale, "Introduction," xlvii; see also Nehamas, Life as Literature, 193-95.
28. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 150.
29. See Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 51.
30. Ian Hacking, "Our Fellow Animals," The
31. See Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (
32. Note from 1875. Cited from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), 50.
33. Cowan, "Introduction," 12.
34. G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), "Preface." Hereafter abbreviated as "PR."
35. See Allen Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 232.
36. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 158.
37. Also see Daniel Conway, "Comedians of the Ascetic Ideal," The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal, ed. Daniel Conway and John Seery (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 83-89; and Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 56-60, 147-58.
38. Here we should note that Nietzsche's notion of "untimeliness" parallels, in many ways, Hadot's understanding of the ancient Greek notion of atopia, or the "strangeness" of the philosopher in the human world. According to Hadot, "One does not know how to classify him, for he is neither a sage nor a man like other men. He knows that the normal, natural state of men should be wisdom, for wisdom is nothing more than the vision of things as they are . . . and wisdom is also nothing more than the mode of being and living that should correspond to this vision. But the philosopher also knows that this wisdom is an ideal state, almost inaccessible. For such a man, daily life, as it is organized and lived by other men, must necessarily appear abnormal, like a state of madness, unconsciousness, and ignorance of reality. And nonetheless he must live this life everyday, in this world in which he feels himself a stranger and in which others perceive him to be one as well. And it is precisely in this daily life that he must seek to attain that way of life which is utterly foreign to the everyday world. The result is a perpetual conflict between the philosopher's effort to see things as they are from the standpoint of universal nature and the conventional vision of things underlying human society, a conflict between the life one should live and the customs and conventions of daily life. This conflict can never be totally resolved" (58).
39. See Breazeale's "Introduction" to Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, xiii.
40. See Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy," in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 45.
41. See Raymond Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 56 and 174.
42. See ibid., 174.
43. See Magnus, "Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy," 51. [End Page 33]
44. As
45. Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History, 21.
46. See Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 184-87, 191-92, 234.
47. Magnus, "Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy," 51.
48. See Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History, 178.
49. Magnus, "Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy," 51.
50. Among other things, Nietzsche has in mind Feurerbach's attempt to save Christian ethics by abandoning or naturalizing its "transcendent" metaphysics.
51. See Conway, "Comedians of the Ascetic Ideal," 78.
52. Elsewhere, Nietzsche singles out the "courage of conscience," the courage "to discover and endure spirit-crushing truths," as a "practical necessity" and defining (Nietzschean) virtue for the attainment of "genuine wisdom" (cf. BGE, §§ 5, 42-44; see also Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 241). Such wisdom consists, in part, in the ability to disrupt and even reverse commonly held perspectives "at will" (EH I, § 1). Today's "free spirits" lack the requisite "courage of conscience," and hence lack the requisite wisdom needed to formulate life-enhancing values, because they still cling to "the most terrifying aspect of the ascetic ideal," viz., the "will to truth," the desire for "truth for truth's sake" (cf. GM III, § 23).
53. See the interview with Alexander Nehamas entitled "On the Philosophical Life," in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 8 (Spring 2000): 31.
54. See Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 257.
55. See Clark, 232-33; 282-83.
56. Ibid., 284-85.
57. See Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 104.
58. Ibid.
59. Cf. Harold Alderman, Nietzsche's Gift (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977).
60. Cf. Alexander Nehamas, "Who Are the Philosophers of the Future? A
61. See Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 15-16.
62. Nehamas, "A
63. Cf. Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 13-14.
64. Nehamas, "A
65. According to Magnus and Higgins, a self-consuming figure, character, or concept is one that "requires as a condition of its intelligibility (or even possibility) the very contrast[s] it wishes to set aside or would have us set aside." See their "Introduction" to The
66. See Raymond Geuss, "Introduction" to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xii.
67. See Richard Schacht, "Zarathustra/Zarathustra as Educator," Nietzsche: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Sedgwick (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 232.
68. Ibid., 232.
69. See ibid., 226-28.
70. See ibid., "A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil," 51.
71. See Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 137, 141.
72. See "Zarathustra/Zarathustra," 233-39.
73. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 148.
74. See "Zarathustra/Zarathustra," 240, 246.
No comments:
Post a Comment