Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche)

Untimely Meditations (German: Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen), also translated as Unfashionable Observations and Thoughts Out Of Season) consists of four works by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, started in 1873 and completed in 1876.

The work comprises a collection of four (out of a projected 13) essays concerning the contemporary condition of European, especially German, culture. A fifth essay, published posthumously, had the title "We Philologists", and gave as a "Task for philology: disappearance". Nietzsche here began to discuss the limitations of empirical knowledge, and presented what would appear compressed in later aphorisms. It combines the naivete of The Birth of Tragedy with the beginnings of his more mature polemical style. It was Nietzsche's most humorous work, especially for "David Strauss: the confessor and the writer."

Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen has been one of the more difficult of Nietzsche's titles to be translated into English, with each subsequent translation offering a new variation. Thus: Untimely Meditations (Kaufmann, 1968), Thoughts Out of Season (Ludovici, 1909), Untimely Reflections (Ronald Hayman, 1980), Unmodern Observations (Arrowsmith, 2011) and Inopportune Speculations, Unfashionable Observations or Essays in Sham Smashing (H. L. Mencken, 1908).

Many different plans for the series are found in Nietzsche's notebooks, most of them showing a total of thirteen essays. The titles and subjects vary with each entry, the project conceived to last six years (one essay every six months). A typical outline dated "Autumn 1873" reads as follows:

Nietzsche abandoned the project after completing only four essays, seeming to lose interest after the publication of the third.

"", 1873 ("David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller") attacks David Strauss's "The Old and the New Faith: A Confession" (1871), which Nietzsche holds up as an example of the German thought of the time. He paints Strauss's "New Faith"—scientifically-determined universal mechanism based on the progression of history—as a vulgar reading of history in the service of a degenerate culture, polemically attacking not only the book but also Strauss as a Philistine of pseudo-culture.

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