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Nietzsche and Schiller: Untimely Aesthetics

Nicholas Martin
Published in print: 1996 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press
October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780198159131 eISBN: 9780191673511 acprof:oso/9780198159131.001.0001
Item type: book

Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragodie and Schiller's Asthetische Briefe

are two texts that make a vital contribution to the history of aesthetic
and cultural theory. This work makes a comparative study of the texts,
bringing a mutually illuminating perspective to bear on them. The
author counters the widespread belief that Nietzsche and Schiller
represent a black-and-white contrast, showing the wide extent of the
early Nietzsche's debt to Schiller's aesthetics, and drawing a picture
of the common aesthetic ground shared by the two writers. The four
key aspects of their aesthetic theories are compared: the diagnoses
of cultural crisis; the historical framework of each theory; the catalytic
function of the Greek experience in both theories; and the metaphysical
and psychological underpinnings by which the theories stand or fall. At
the heart of the study lie the claims of both Nietzsche and Schiller for
the untimeliness of their texts. The author concludes that, whatever
the shortcomings of the texts, they remain outstanding and enduringly
relevant contributions both to aesthetic theory and to our understanding
of what it is to be human.

Conclusion: Postcolonial Agency

Simone Bignall

in Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism

Published in print: 2010 Published Online: Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
September 2012 DOI: 10.3366/
ISBN: 9780748639434 eISBN: 9780748671878 edinburgh/9780748639434.003.0008
Item type: chapter

The book's concluding remarks consider the nature of the relationship

between philosophy and practice, with respect to the question of public
commitment and faith to the social process of transformation. The
future-oriented practice of postcolonisation is enabled by the alternative

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conceptualisation of agency presented here, and indeed, the success of
this work might best be judged by its untimeliness, by the future events
that its concepts invent, express and call forth. However, the concept
of postcolonial agency this book has described achieves actual saliency
only in the practices that materialise it. Concepts of sociability remain
virtual until they are acted through responsible, collective practice; the
postcolonial exists even now, but as a virtual we must labour to make
actual through carefully chosen practices of desire.

Perceptions of Lateness: Goethe, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and

D. H. Lawrence
Michael Bell

in Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in art, literature, and music
Published in print: 2016 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press
October 2016 DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780198704621 eISBN: 9780191821936 acprof:oso/9780198704621.003.0009
Item type: chapter

This chapter compares contrasting conceptions of lateness and style

which have been attributed to Goethe, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, and D.
H. Lawrence. Among writers, Goethe is perhaps the classic instance of a
late style, and Mann consciously emulated him in his own monumental
oeuvre, particularly as it extended into his mythic phase. But modern
or modernist conceptions of time, history, decadence, and mythopoeia
affect the values invested in lateness. Nietzsche had already denounced
the nineteenth-century monumentalizing of Goethe as a national
cultural icon, while his own untimeliness throws a question across the
value of lateness as such. In fact, Goethe had already anticipated the
Nietzschean critique of Bildung with which he nonetheless remains
popularly identified. Meanwhile, the chronically sick Lawrence, who
absorbed Nietzsche and reacted sharply against both Goethe and Mann,
never expected to experience lateness yet had it in some sense thrust
upon him as he approached his death.

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