Untimely Meditation Research Articles

IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND: ON THE HISTORY OF MIND AND OTHER MATTERS

ABSTRACTIn The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Perspective of Meaning, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with contemporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philosophers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog's book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog's “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog's denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog's “untimely meditations” also show that much.

Pessimism, “Darwinism,” and the Value of Life in Hartmann and Nietzsche

Abstract In the Germany of the 1860s and 1870s, the problem of the value of life was urgently debated, as a consequence of the two culture-defining systems of thought that had risen to prominence in those decades—Schopenhauerian Weltschmerz and the theory of evolution—and the degree to which they could be reconciled. On one hand, the struggle for existence affirmed the pessimistic inference as to the suffering and meaninglessness of the cosmos; on the other, it appeared to promise moral and material improvement in human affairs. This article reconstructs the historical connections between the emergence of pessimism and Darwinism, most clearly represented by the work of Eduard von Hartmann, and it argues that Nietzsche’s programmatic statements on life, culture, and pessimism, from the Untimely Meditations on, are best understood in light of this context and his engagement with Hartmann’s writings.

Reply to My Critics

Reply to My Critics Margaret Watkins (bio) Science is related to wisdom as virtuousness is related to holiness; it is cold and dry, it has not love and knows nothing of a deep feeling of inadequacy and longing. It is as useful to itself as it is harmful to its servants, insofar as it transfers its own character to them and thereby ossifies their humanity. As long as what is meant by culture is essentially the promotion of science, culture will pass the great suffering human being by with pitiless coldness, because science sees everywhere only problems of knowledge and because within the world of the sciences suffering is really something improper and incomprehensible, thus at best only one more problem.1 When Nietzsche writes these words in “Schopenhauer as Educator” in 1874, nearly a century after Hume’s death, he is not using “science” (Wissenschaft) to refer only to what we now know as the natural sciences. Indeed, as another essay in the Untimely Meditations makes clear, history is as much, if not more, in Nietzsche’s sights as biology or physics. He is naming a peculiar irony here: in the quest for a certain kind of progress—the progress of knowledge—we can end up killing any hope of progress for life. Certain methods of historical study are forms of enquiry whose spiritless effect is to “let the dead bury the living.”2 Our relentless quest to catalog and preserve the old robs us of the higher ways we might learn from it, or overcome it. We “historians of philosophy” can do this by reading past philosophers as dead artifacts, focusing intently on how they were responding to their particular contexts and pursuing their own projects. As indispensable as such study is, it can kill the texts’ potential to continue to inspire and inform philosophical thought of our own. [End Page 163] In writing The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays,” my hope was to counteract this tendency in myself and in readers of Hume—to show that these works often neglected by contemporary philosophers are still capable of inspiring life-giving, generative philosophical thought. (I do not say they are of more than “mere” historical interest; abusing the study of history with such a pernicious adverb runs counter to every fiber of my being.) Such thought need not be optimistic, encouraging, or even morally admirable at every step. It need simply inspire our own thought, activate that love of truth that Hume says can never “be carried to too high a degree,” or (preferably and) show us how that truth matters for human life (EHU 5.1).3 My attempts to achieve this aim have two primary modes: showing that the Essays can inspire vital philosophical reflection and arguing that they are themselves philosophical or works of philosophy. To put my cards on the table: the enemies within (and without) that run counter to this effort are the tendency to put a piece of philosophical writing under a microscope (whose lens might be analytic or historical) without ever asking why it matters, and the tendency to dismiss the writing as philosophical because it does not fit neatly into one of the current categories of our discipline or our understanding of “the” early modern philosophical project. I am therefore pleased that both my generous interlocutors, Jacqueline Taylor and Andre Willis, recognize my attempt to extend as well as explain Hume’s insights. There is far too much insight in their own contributions for me to do justice to. I will therefore limit my discussion to three main topics: the notion of Humean public spirit I attempt to elucidate in the book, the related problems of analytic distance, and the pressing question of the difference between Hume’s projects in other philosophical works—especially the two Enquiries—and his projects in the Essays. Although there is no essay called “Of Public Spirit,” it is still a significant concept for the Essays. The initial advertisement to the 1741 volume of Essays, Moral and Political included this observation: “Public Spirit, methinks, shou’d engage us to love the Public, and to bear an equal Affection to all our Country-Men; not...

Nietzsche and Emerson on History

This paper aims to show how Nietzsche was influenced by Emerson in developing a conception of history as a set of values to be embodied in order to gain a deeper insight into the essence of reality. It is a conception that Nietzsche first expressed in his second Untimely Meditation, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874) and that fully developed in the period of his so-called “free spirit philosophy” (1878-1882). Firstly, I will briefly outline the relationship between Nietzsche and Emerson. Secondly, I will illustrate Emerson’s stance on history. Thirdly, I will show how Nietzsche drew from Emerson’s thought.

Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson

Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson

The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche

The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche

Embarkation for Abdera: Historicization in Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation

Embarque hacia Abdera: Historización en la Segunda meditación intempestiva de Nietzschee Abstract: This article develops a novel reading of the threefold division of modes of historicization in Nietzsche’s Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life . It argues that Nietzsche’s stance is closely matched, and indirectly responds, to specific features of the argument for progress in human history that Kant presents in Conflict of the Faculties . Kant had hit upon interest, boredom, publicity, and forgetting as systematic problems for the philosophy of history, and Nietzsche’s thought on history takes up these concerns. I argue that Nietzsche’s reaction to these Kantian problems prompted him to subtly dissociate historicization and historicity. This manoeuver allowed him to counter the conceptual challenges Kant had established and to align his notions on history with those on ethical normativity in lived life, embracing what he elsewhere rejected as a “moral ontology.” Resumen: Este artículo desarrolla una lectura novedosa de la triple división de los modos de historización en Ventajas e inconvenientes de la historia para la vida de Nietzsche. Se defiende que la postura de Nietzsche está estrechamente emparejada con las características específicas del argumento del progreso en la historia humana que Kant presenta en el  Conflicto de las Facultades respondiendo indirectamente a ese escrito. Kant había señalado el interés, el aburrimiento, la publicidad y el olvido como problemas sistemáticos para la filosofía de la historia, y el pensamiento de Nietzsche sobre la historia retoma estas preocupaciones. Se sostiene que la reacción de Nietzsche a estos problemas kantianos le llevó a disociar sutilmente la historización de la historicidad. Esta maniobra le permitió replicar a los desafíos conceptuales que Kant había establecido y alinear sus nociones sobre la historia con las de la normatividad ética en la vida vivida, abrazando lo que en otros lugares rechazaba como una “ontología moral”. Keywords: Nietzsche, Kant, Second Untimely Meditation , boredom, historicity, historicization. Palabras clave: Nietzsche, Kant, Segunda meditación intempestiva , aburrimiento, historicidad, historización.

Sexual difference and the conduct of critique (Nietzsche and Irigaray)

For Nietzsche, a phenomenon, a belief, a mode of knowledge, or of subjectivity, confronts us with the possibility of creating, rather than presupposing, the criteria for its evaluation. In his Untimely Meditations, he widened the parameters of criticizability in just this way, proposing that history might be evaluated from the criterion of whether it is good or bad for life. Nietzsche provokes us to ask what the right question is to bring to history. Stepping back to formulate a response might allow us to appreciate the difference between interrogating the accuracy of historical accounts and assessing their effects.

Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen,” III. Schopenhauer als Erzieher; IV

Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen,” III. Schopenhauer als Erzieher; IV

Nietzsche’s early concept of culture

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyze and elucidate Nietzsche’s early definition of culture in Untimely Meditations. In Nietzsche’s early work the concept of culture refers to a shared world, and his idea of culture is concerned with the question of how the shared world is formed. I argue that in his early ideas in relation to this question, Nietzsche believes language and art are significant as the basis for a shared world, and this is reflected in his definition of culture as ‘unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people’. It is my argument that language is the common basis for a shared world of a people, and art is what shapes the shared world, giving it form or style, and making it richer.

Book Review: Review Essay: Rawls’s Untimely Meditations, or On the Use and Abuse of Rawlsianism for Life In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, by Katrina Forrester

Book Review: Review Essay: Rawls’s Untimely Meditations, or On the Use and Abuse of Rawlsianism for Life <i>In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy</i>, by Katrina Forrester

Book review: Nietzsche’s Culture War: The Unity of the Untimely Meditations

Shilo Brooks’ study on Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (UM) (1873-76) is one of the few scholarly works that examines all four of these early essays in combination. Even taken separately, there are fewer independent studies of the UM compared with The Birth of Tragedy (BT) (1872) and the middle works (1878-82), except for “The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life” (HL) (1874), which has garnered the most critical attention. Brooks suggests a compelling reason to investigate all four works together. His organizing principle is reflected in his title: the four essays were individual constituents of a large-scale “culture war”—a philosophical Kulturkampf (p. 12)—that the young Nietzsche waged against Bismarck and the political, social, and cultural conditions in his newly established Reich. Brooks’ decision to treat all four pieces in a single monograph makes eminent sense, and the fact that Nietzsche assembled the essays under the title UM suggests he saw them as part of a common endeavor—or at least as reflective of a certain prevailing mindset at the time: “[W]hen viewed from the perspective of his later works, the critique of German culture featured in the Untimely Meditations and the plan Nietzsche sketches to revitalize it provide a holistic if early blueprint for his later attempt at a revaluation of values” (p. 15).

Three Timely Untimelies: Heidegger and Derrida on Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation

The essay reflects on Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation, ‘On the Use and Disadvantage of the Study of History for Life’, especially as Heidegger reads it in section 76 of Being and Time and as Derrida reads Heidegger's reading of it. Derrida's concludes his first seminar on Heidegger, Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l'Histoire; Cours de l'ENS-Ulm 1964–1965, by reflecting on Heidegger as a Nietzschean antiquarian.

Before Empirical Turns And Transcendental Inquiry: Pre-Philosophical Considerations

I approach the idea of empirical turns and transcendental theories indirectly. I do not start “post-“ or “neg-” anything; instead I begin pre-philosophically—that is, before everyone has a position and opposes other positions—with Heidegger’s “preparatory hermeneutical” question: As whom and with what concerns do empirically or transcendentally minded philosophers of technology respond to their experience of technoscientific life? For example, in his second Untimely Meditation, Nietzsche identifies his concern as one of “taking advantage” of historical knowledge “for life,” that is, he understands himself to be motivated by a life-driven, not scientific “need.” But how are “needs” in Nietzsche’s sense to be distinguished? The question leads straight to Heidegger’s idea of a hermeneutics that comes “before philosophy”—a “hermeneutics of facticity” that considers “what goes on in [i.e., motivates] a philosophy before it becomes what it is”? I argue that once Nietzsche’s notion of need is expanded and deepened in Heidegger’s direction, we gain some clarity about how to appropriate any information “for life,” whether it is science-based, culturally operative, or phenomenological. I then consider Ihde, Stiegler, and the future prospects of empirical turns and transcendental theories in light of this idea.

Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson by Benedetta Zavatta

Reviewed by: Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson by Benedetta Zavatta Marta Faustino ZAVATTA, Benedetta. Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson. Translated by Alexander Reynolds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xxv + 265 pp. Cloth, $90.00 Even though Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche’s work has long been acknowledged within Nietzsche scholarship, Zavatta’s book is the first thorough and finely detailed examination of Nietzsche’s fruitful and enthusiastic reading of Emerson throughout the various stages of his life. Its solid and, up to now, neglected philological basis is the book’s greatest strength. Zavatta carefully goes through Nietzsche’s notebooks, letters, and personal library, perspicuously tracing the underlinings, comments, and annotations in his copies of Emerson’s works. Since Emerson appears only three times in Nietzsche’s published writings, this is an important and much needed work, which Zavatta carries off with exemplary care and mastery of the sources. The book is divided into five main chapters that reveal the affinity of Emerson and Nietzsche by tracing two of their fundamental philosophical [End Page 422] concerns: the development of individuality, on the one hand, and the overcoming of this individuality once it has been achieved, on the other. After surveying the development of scholarly work about Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche and exploring why the study on the Emerson–Nietzsche relation could emerge only almost a century after Nietzsche’s death, in chapter 1 (“The Reception of the Emerson-Nietzsche Relation”) Zavatta insightfully discusses four major themes in Nietzsche’s writings where this affinity, and more specifically Emerson’s influence, can most evidently be ascertained. Chapter 2, “The Struggle against Fate,” deals with the problem of fate, determinism, and free will in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Zavatta ascribes a compatibilist account of freedom to Nietzsche and shows that fundamental insights in his construction of freedom as agency were influenced by Emerson. Despite important differences between the two authors on this topic, Emerson played a decisive role in shaping Nietzsche’s combination of determinism with the sense of being free as an agent of one’s own actions. The problem of freedom interested both authors, Zavatta argues, more from a psychological point of view than from a theoretical one, converging on the idea that “the feeling of freedom coincides with a feeling of personal attainment and achievement.” In chapter 3, entitled “Self-Reliance as Moral Autonomy and Original Self-Expression,” Zavatta focuses on Nietzsche’s criticism of Christian morality and the interrelated transvaluation of values, highlighting Emerson’s contribution to his alternative model of morality. Describing both authors’ models as forms of pluralistic “virtue ethics,” Zavatta uses Emerson’s notion of “self-reliance” to clarify Nietzsche’s ideas of individuality and respective “journey of individualization,” chronologically personified in the figures of “Schopenhauer as educator,” the free spirit, and Zarathustra, all of which Emerson helped to shape. For both authors, becoming an individual equates to conquering moral autonomy, even if they disagree on how precisely true individuality is attained and moral autonomy achieved. Chapter 4, “Society or Solitude?”, discusses Nietzsche’s critique of compassion and what Zavatta calls the “transvaluation of egoism.” Zavatta shows that Emerson decisively influenced Nietzsche’s positive appraisal of egoism as “individualism,” which also involves a higher and healthier form of concern for and commitment to the well-being of the collectivity. Special attention is given to the topic of friendship, which Zavatta defines as a form of “love for the distinctive individuality of the other person.” According to the author, Emerson led Nietzsche to extend his “ethics of friendship” to society as a whole, whereby the latter “becomes the model for all social relations.” In the fifth and final chapter, entitled “Making History and Writing History,” Zavatta addresses Nietzsche’s views on history and historiography throughout the various stages of his work, highlighting the influence Emerson exerted on the evolution of Nietzsche’s position from the second Untimely Meditation to the works of the middle and late [End Page 423] periods. Zavatta argues that Nietzsche’s reading of Emerson was crucial to the former’s abandonment of the virtue of “active forgetting” from Human, All Too Human onward and the discovery of a healthy and virtuous...

Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver

Reviewed by: Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America by Ben Carver Christopher Ferguson (bio) Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver; pp. xviii + 292. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £79.99, $109.99. In Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, Ben Carver describes his book as a study of the “nineteenth-century imagination of worlds that history might have produced” (1). Specifically, he analyzes the writing of “alternate histories” and identifies the wider contexts that produced them. Carver defines “alternate histories” as literary works wherein an author identifies a single point of historical divergence (example: Napoleon’s decision to begin his retreat from Moscow in September rather than October of 1812) and from this point imagines all subsequent history evolving in a new direction as a result of this change. (By leaving Russia earlier, the Grande Armée avoids decimation by the Russian winter, and Napoleon remains undefeated and rules over a massive French empire until his death from old age.) Carver contends that a wide variety of nineteenth-century authors—including British journalists, French philosophers, and American housewives—engaged in imaginative rewritings of history not only in order to imagine alternate “forms of society” or “the history of nations that might have followed,” but also as a means of “working with and often testing ideas about cycles of cause and effect that had produced the world they lived in” (5). Nineteenth-century alternate histories thus represented an important medium that allowed reflection on how new forms of knowledge, such as archaeology, astronomy, or the natural sciences, “altered the understanding of the past” (1). Carver’s book is one of several recent works interested in analyzing the production, content, and meaning of fictional histories, with Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (2018) being the most notable among them. Indeed, it is difficult to assess Carver’s study without comparing it with Gallagher’s, and Carver himself notes some important affinities between their [End Page 688] two studies. This includes their shared preference for the phrase “alternate history” as opposed to “alternative history,” the first strictly referencing “a narrative set of circumstances that history might have produced” while the second also potentially encompassing nonfictional accounts which “offer marginal perspectives normally excluded from histories of a subject” (11). Carver’s definition of what constitutes an “alternate history,” however, is more fluid and inclusive. While Gallagher draws clear distinctions between “alternate histories,” “alternate history novels,” and “counterfactual histories” on the basis of both their formal elements and contents (Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction [The University of Chicago Press, 2018], 5), Carver argues that the “boundaries between alternate and counterfactual histories are hard to establish.” Such distinctions, he contends, are “anachronistic” to the study of nineteenth-century “historical imaginaries” because none of these styles had “solidified into a form that [contemporary] writers and readers were conscious of” (12). Despite these differences of definition, Carver and Gallagher analyze many of the same works, including Louis Geoffrey-Château’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde [Napoleon and the Conquest of the World] (1836), Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie [Uchronia] (1857), Auguste Blanqui’s L’éternité par les astres [Eternity According to the Stars] (1872), Edward Everett Hale’s Hands Off (1895), and Edmund Lawrence’s It May Happen Yet: A Tale of Bonaparte’s Invasion of England (1899). These varied works are united not only by their presentation of fictional histories but also by their relative obscurity and the rarity with which they have been utilized by other scholars; the same might be noted about most of the other texts Carver examines, including Richard Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (1819), Benjamin Disraeli’s early novel The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), an essay on astronomy and the plurality of worlds by Thomas De Quincey (“System of the Heavens As Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” [1846]), and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s feminist utopia Mizora: A Prophecy...

Critical commemorations

ABSTRACT Drawing on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, this contribution will examine commemorative practices alongside critical modes of historical engagement. In Untimely Meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche documents three historical methodologies—the monumental, antiquarian and critical—which purposely use history in non-objective ways. In particular, critical history desires to judge and reject historical figures rather than repeat the past or venerate the dead. For instance, in recent protests against racism there have also been calls to decolonize public space through the defacement, destruction, and removal of monuments. There is thus much potential in critical history being used to address ongoing harms.

The dithyrambic dramatist: A Nietzschean musical-performative conception

The concept of the dithyrambic dramatist – introduced by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the fourth essay of his Untimely Meditations of 1873–76 – is one of the most performance-oriented concepts to emerge out of the nineteenth century in which theatre was often associated with dramatic literature. This article investigates the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist by tracing, in the first instance, the underlying musical perspectives – already evident in The Birth of Tragedy of 1872 – which led Nietzsche to develop the concept. In the second instance, the author articulates what may be considered as its key conditions, namely the visible–audible and individual–collective relationalities. In view of the arguments brought forward, the concept of the dithyrambic dramatist is located as an interdisciplinary element that emerged out of an art form – music – to which Nietzsche was intimately associated in his youth as a composer. The author further proposes that, rather than a metaphor to philological tropes, the dithyrambic dramatist is a concrete manifestation of interdisciplinary and performative foundations that inform Nietzsche’s analytic perspectives.

Letter from the Editor

Dear Readers,In this issue, several authors contribute their insights on social and political themes in Nietzsche: Robert Miner looks to the works of the “middle period” to add nuance to Nietzsche's critical attitude to socialism; Birte Loschenkohl asks again what Nietzsche has in mind with his enigmatic call for “great politics,” arguing that Zarathustra holds the key to understanding his vision; and Sacha Golob looks back to the second Untimely Meditation to analyze Nietzsche's views on education and the role that exemplary figures like Schopenhauer can and should play in that process. Iain Morrison, too, by focusing on the question of how drives and affects create the systems of value that take hold within communities, advances the discussion of “value creation” in Nietzsche.In addition to four penetrating reviews of five new works on Nietzsche in the book reviews section, we also bring to readers interested in Nietzsche and digital humanities an analysis by Marc Colsen of the accuracy, user-friendliness, and relative merits of the two most used electronic databases of Nietzsche's work, Nietzsche Source and Nietzsche Online.For links to prior issues accessible through Project MUSE and JSTOR, to the International Society of Nietzsche Studies, which will host its annual workshop in Oxford at the end of June 2020, and to the North American Nietzsche Society, whose biennial meeting will be in Atlanta in October 2020, and for general information about subscriptions, submissions, and author permissions, please visit us at http://jns.gsu.edu.Yours truly,Jessica N. Berry

Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions by Robert C. Holub

Reviewed by: Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions by Robert C. Holub Babette Babich Robert C. Holub, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 524. Cloth, $85.00. What is the nineteenth century? If some historians of the "long" nineteenth century date its beginning back to 1750, does it end in 1900 or, as is said, in 1914 or, as one German historian reflects on the ongoing influence of the so-called "historical century," is it still ongoing? In [End Page 622] continental philosophy, the nineteenth century seems to have a certain durability, to take the case of Slavoj Žižek and other Hegelians like Robert Pippin. Is Nietzsche representative of his own times? Or is he, as he himself says, "posthumous"? Robert C. Holub's book introduces Nietzsche as "The Timely Meditator" (1), the better to contradict what Holub describes as Nietzsche's "conscious effort to present himself as an 'untimely' thinker" (1). Yet the question of the nineteenth century interested Nietzsche as a thinker of his times, timely and untimely, and as a Classicist, a professional theorist of history. In his key "untimely" meditation on The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, Nietzsche reminds the reader that it is "only out of the highest force [Kraft] of the present that one can interpret the past, only in the strongest exertion of your most noble qualities will you fathom what in the past is worth knowing and preserving. Like to like! Otherwise you will drag the past down to yourselves" (§6). In the penultimate section of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes that the nineteenth century encompasses everything in the eighteenth century that produced a Goethe but now engenders only "a chaos, a nihilistic sigh, utter cluelessness" (§50). As a result: "Isn't the nineteenth century, especially at its conclusion, merely a strengthened, courser, eighteenth century, that is, a décadence-century?" (TI §50). Dismissing Nietzsche's scholarly formation as a philologist, which included classical hermeneutics, archaeology, and methodological discussions on how to set history on the path of a science (see Barthold Georg Niebuhr, whom Nietzsche cites in his own essay on history), while his book's chapters are conceived as a series of questions Holub does not engage Nietzsche's own "Homer Question," the inaugural lecture which defines Nietzsche's disciplinary—both philological as well as philosophical—"untimeliness." In consequence, Holub also fails to raise the question of the historical person, a key to a text left out of Holub's reading of Nietzsche's "timely" untimeliness, concerning the hermeneutic representation of the historical Jesus. Thus Nietzsche's first Untimely Meditation, on David Strauss (as confessor and author), articulates the Jesus question as the Homer question relevant for thinking both edification and education (significant for both Strauss and for Schopenhauer) along with the challenges of history (broadly: philology as Nietzsche understood it) for life, to which schematic whole Nietzsche would append Wagner. Holub's book is rich in learning, yet conspicuously has blinders, not least because Holub reads an author who was explicitly concerned with history throughout his thought while leaving aside that same author's specific formation in history. To this same extent, Holub's point of departure betrays a want of hermeneutic "method," to use a convention deriving from both Albrecht Ritschl and (again) Niebuhr as well as Nietzsche's own teacher, Friedrich Ritschl, who praised his student's methodological rigor. Holub also has a chapter on "The Evolution Question," along with "The Cosmological Question," and "The Eugenics Question." He begins it with a discussion of Nietzsche's Übermensch via George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (313), tricked out with reflections on Überwindung and übergehen, nodding to the same Walter Kaufmann everyone mentions, yet excluding reference to Nietzsche's formation in Classics, which might have taken Holub to the literary context Kaufmann references: Lucian's Kataplous, The Downward Journey—a reflection on the underworld for the ancient Greeks, complete with a reflection on the aesthetics of the "higher" human being to match the rhetoric of Nazi eugenics. Darwin fits such a scheme for the sake of superior breeding...