Nietzsche

 The first Untimely Meditation to be written was “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer.” David Strauss was a theologian and Kantian philosopher who forty years previously had had a tremendous success with his two-volume book The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu), a purportedly “scientific” investigation into Jesus Christ as an historical character. The book was a scandal and a sensation. It was translated into English by George Eliot (whom Nietzsche enjoyed presenting as typical of the British race: sexually peculiar and intellectually slack). The Earl of Shaftesbury condemned it as the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of Hell. When Nietzsche had read Strauss’s book during his school days at Pforta he had written to his sister saying that if he was asked to believe in Jesus as an historical character it was of no interest to him at all, but as a moral teacher, that was a different matter worthy of the deepest investigation. 

Strauss was now nearing seventy. He had recently published a follow-up book, The Old and the New Faith (Der alte und der neue Glaube), which again achieved great popularity. The book fitted the mood of the time by pioneering with almost manic cheerfulness the idea that it was possible to exist in the modern world as a new breed of rationalist Christian, a fundamental contradiction if ever there was one-impossible within the definitions either of rationality or of faith. As Nietzsche observed: if one breaks out of the fundamental idea, the belief in God, one breaks the whole thing to pieces. A revolution in belief requires a revolution in morality, a consequence that appeared to have eluded Strauss in what Nietzsche, with evident enjoyment, crushingly referred to as his “portable oracle for the German philistine.”

And

RETURNING TO BasEL, Nietzsche wrote the second Untimely Meditation, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” which would be published the following year, 1874. Addressing the relation of history and historiography (the writing of history) to life and culture, it pointed out that the German obsession with the past was disabling action in the present. 

The essay distinguished between three uses of history: the antiquarian which seeks to preserve the past, the monumental which seeks to emulate it, and the critical which seeks to liberate the present. All three must be held in a delicate balance to achieve the suprahistorical: an orientation toward eternally valid examples of the past, together with a deliberate forgetting of the past in the interests of the present. 

Nietzsche had been pursuing a concentrated study of the latest books on scientific subjects such as the nature of comets, the history and development of chemistry and physics, the general theory of movement and energy, and the construction of space.? They had led him to return to the hobbyhorse he had been riding through the previous Untimely Meditation on David Strauss: nagging at the great question of science and religion, and excoriating his contemporary theologians for undermining the very faith they professed, by seeking to reconcile the two. It was one of the great questions of the age, and one he would never relinquish. He coined a new word to describe the effect of science: Begriffsbeben (“concept-quake”). “Life itself caves in and grows weak and fearful when the concept-quake caused by science robs man of the foundation of all his rest and security, his belief in the enduring and the eternal. Is life to dominate knowledge and science, or is knowledge to dominate life?”*° To be sure, mankind climbed, or thought he climbed, up to heaven on the sunbeams of scientific truth, but science-heaven was as much a necessary lie as its religious counterpart. Eternal truth belonged no more to science than to religion. Each new scientific discovery had a habit of exposing previous eternal scientific truths as fictions. Truth was pulled into a new shape as the filaments of the spider’s web became stretched and distorted, or even pulled apart altogether. 

The last few pages conclude with advice for the young. To cure them of the malady of history he unsurprisingly recommends that the way to sort out the unruliness of existence is to look to the Greeks, who gradually learned to organize the chaos by following the advice of the Delphic oracle: become what you are.