Nietzsche’s Culture War

This chapter argues that the Untimely Meditations constitute “Nietzsche’s Culture War” because they present his alternative to the culture war [Kulturkampf] that Otto von Bismarck waged in Germany in the late nineteenth century. Nietzsche saw Bismarck’s vision for German culture as symptomatic of the broader degeneration of modern culture, and he openly avowed his intention to oppose this vision in public lectures and private letters. This chapter also argues that the Untimely Meditations present a unified and coherent philosophic narrative, and that the unity of this narrative is not apparent unless the four essays that comprise the book are read in the context of one another and placed in dialogue. This chapter concludes by tracing the compositional history of the book, and addressing why Nietzsche said it deserved the “greatest attention” for understanding his philosophic development.

This chapter argues that Nietzsche’s critical essay on David Strauss’s last book, The Old and New Faith, is his first sustained attempt at a critique of contemporary culture and modern science. It also argues that the essay presents an early version of the human type called “the last man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but who is called the “cultivated philistine” in the essay on Strauss. Looking back on the essay in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche said that it should not be read as a direct attack on Strauss because Strauss was used merely as a “magnifying glass […] to make visible a general but creeping and elusive [cultural] crisis.” The chapter concludes that Nietzsche took aim at Strauss because Strauss was a pseudo-genius who the Germans mistakenly hailed as a true cultural genius, and because Strauss’s scientific manner of thinking enervated the German spirit.

The third chapter of the book argues that Nietzsche’s indictment of scientific and philosophic history is a continuation of the critique of modern culture and education he began in his essay on David Strauss. This chapter explains why Nietzsche thinks history and historiography properly used can promote a culture that enhances life, and shows why he thinks there is an antithesis between knowledge and life that must be managed by history and culture. When Nietzsche’s descriptions of the three modes of history featured in the essay (monumental, antiquarian, and critical) are read in the context of his broader critique of German historicism, the historical sickness he diagnoses in the Germans manifests itself as a distinctively antiquarian sickness. This chapter concludes that Nietzsche thinks the antiquarian degeneration of modern German culture can be cured by a generous application of monumental history, which promotes the active and noble virtues his time lacks.

Once Nietzsche completes his critique of modern culture in the first two Untimely Meditations, he begins the positive task of renewing modern culture in the last two by composing monumental histories of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. The fourth chapter of the book argues that these “histories” use the lives of past and present geniuses as canvases upon which ideal portraits of the culture-creating geniuses of the future are painted. In his later writings, Nietzsche admitted that the Meditations on Schopenhauer and Wagner were not about the men named in their titles, but were instead images of himself and the thinker he hoped one day to become. The fourth chapter also argues that the creative philosophic genius ostensibly presented under Schopenhauer’s name stands in contrast to the pseudo-genius David Strauss. For Nietzsche, philosophy was a partly creative enterprise, and philosophic creativity could influence culture by reshaping human nature through thought.