The two essays translated in this volume form the second and third
parts of the _Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_. The essay on history was
completed in January, that on Schopenhauer in August, 1874. Both were
written in the few months of feverish activity that Nietzsche could
spare from his duties as Professor of Classical Philology in Bâle.
Nietzsche, who served in an ambulance corps in '71, had seen
something of the Franco-German War, and to him it was the "honest
German bravery" that had won the day. But to the rest of his
countrymen it was a victory for German culture as well; though there
were still a few elegancies, a few refinements of manners, that might
veneer the new culture, and in this regard the conquered might be
allowed the traditional privilege of conquering the conquerors.
Nietzsche answered roundly, "the German does not yet know the meaning
of the word culture," and in the essay on history set himself to show
that the so-called culture was a morass into which the German had
been led by a sixth sense he had developed during the nineteenth
century--the "historical sense": he had been brought by his spiritual
teachers to believe that he was the "crown of the world-process" and
that his highest duty lay in surrendering himself to it.
With Nietzsche, the historical sense became a "malady from which men
suffer," the world-process an illusion, evolutionary theories a
subtle excuse for inactivity. History is for the few not the many,
for the man not the youth, for the great not the small--who are
broken and bewildered by it. It is the lesson of remembrance, and few
are strong enough to bear that lesson. History has no meaning except
as the servant of life and action: and most of us can only act if we
forget. This is the burden of the first essay; and turning from
history to the historian he condemns the "noisy little fellows" who
measure the motives of the great men of the past by their own, and
use the past to justify their present.
But who are the men that can use history rightly, and for whom it is
a help and not a hindrance to life? They are the great men of action
and thought, the "lonely giants amid the pigmies." To them alone can
the record of their great forebears be a consolation as well as a
lesson. In the realm of thought, they are of the type of the ideal
philosopher sketched in the second essay. To Nietzsche the only hope
of the race lies in the "production of the genius," of the man who
can bear the burden of the future and not be swamped by the past: he
found the personal expression of such a man, for the time being, in
Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer here stands, as a personality, for all that makes for
life in philosophy, against the stagnation of the professional
philosopher. The last part of the essay is a fierce polemic against
state-aided philosophy and the official position of the professors,
who formed, and still form, the intellectual aristocracy of Germany,
with a cathedral authority on all their pronouncements.
But "there has never been a eulogy on a philosopher," says Dr. Kögel,
"that has had so little to say about his philosophy." The essay on
Schopenhauer is of value precisely because it has nothing to do with
Schopenhauer. We need not be disturbed by the thought that Nietzsche
afterwards turned from him. He truly recognised that Schopenhauer was
here merely a name for himself, that "not Schopenhauer as educator is
in question, but his opposite, Nietzsche as educator" (_Ecce Homo_).
He could regard Schopenhauer, later, as a siren that called to death;
he put him among the great artists that lead down--who are worse than
the bad artists that lead nowhere. "We must go further in the
pessimistic logic than the denial of the will," he says in the
_Götzendämmerung_; "we must deny Schopenhauer." The pessimism and
denial of the will, the blank despair before suffering, were the
shoals on which Nietzsche's reverence finally broke. They could not
stand before the Dionysian outlook, whose pessimism sprang not from
weakness but strength, and in which the joy of willing and being can
even welcome suffering. In this essay we hear little of the
pessimism, save as the imperfect and "all-too-human" side of
Schopenhauer, that actually brings us nearer to him. Later, he could
part the man and his work, and speak of Schopenhauer's view as the
"Evil eye." But as yet he is a young man who has kept his illusions,
and, like Ogniben, he judges men by what they might be.
Afterwards, he judged himself too in these essays by "what he might
be." "To me," he said in _Ecce Homo_, "they are promises: I know not
what they mean to others."
It is also in the belief they are promises that they are here
translated "for others." The _Thoughts out of Season_ are the first
announcement of the complex theme of the _Zarathustra_. They form the
best possible introduction to Nietzschean thought. Nietzsche is
already the knight-errant of philosophy: but his adventure is just
beginning.