Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- Chapter 6 Basel
- Chapter 7 Richard Wagner and the Birth of The Birth of Tragedy
- Chapter 8 War and Aftermath
- Chapter 9 Anal Philology
- Chapter 10 Untimely Meditations
- Chapter 11 Aimez-vous Brahms?
- Chapter 12 Auf Wiedersehen Bayreuth
- Chapter 13 Sorrento
- Chapter 14 Human, All-Too-Human
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Chapter 10 - Untimely Meditations
from PART TWO - The Reluctant Professor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- Chapter 6 Basel
- Chapter 7 Richard Wagner and the Birth of The Birth of Tragedy
- Chapter 8 War and Aftermath
- Chapter 9 Anal Philology
- Chapter 10 Untimely Meditations
- Chapter 11 Aimez-vous Brahms?
- Chapter 12 Auf Wiedersehen Bayreuth
- Chapter 13 Sorrento
- Chapter 14 Human, All-Too-Human
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Nietzsche's 1873 was marked by two tensions. The first was between his role as a professor of classical philology and his ever-increasing absorption in philosophy, between his Beruf [profession] and his Berufung [vocation], as he elegantly describes it. The second was between, on the one hand, his still total commitment to viewing the world from within the ‘Bayreuth Horizon’ (p. 112 above) and to doing whatever he could for the Bayreuth cause and, on the other, his growing need to escape the gigantic shadow cast by Wagner's personality and intellect, to find a place in the sun in which he could grow into his own man. (The composer Peter Cornelius, notwithstanding his absolute devotion to Wagner, experienced exactly the same problem.) The first of these dilemmas he attempted to resolve by teaching and writing about those classical texts which were susceptible to philosophical treatment. Thus, though he would never again, after 1872, publish a book devoted to a classical text, 1873–4 did see a substantial, unpublished study of the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. The second tension he attempted to resolve by, on the one hand, writing furious polemics on Wagner's behalf and at his behest while, on the other, confining his personal interaction with the Wagners to the ‘virtual’ interaction of letters (Cornelius adopted the same strategy), gaining thereby their disappointment and disapproval.
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- Information
- Friedrich NietzscheA Philosophical Biography, pp. 163 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010