HickRosenberg NietzscheUntimeliness 1983

Nietzsche and Untimeliness: The "Philosopher of the Future" as the Figure of Disruptive
Wisdom
Author(s): Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg
Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 25 (SPRING 2003), pp. 1-34
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20717799
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Nietzsche and Untimeliness:
The "Philosopher of the Future" as the
Figure of Disruptive Wisdom
Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg
Introduction
ne of the most striking features of Nietzsche's philosophical writings

V^/ is his extensive use of figures or figurative embodiments of various
forms of wisdom, culture, and ways of life. These range from such literary
and historical figures as "Strauss the Confessor" and "Schopenhauer the
Educator" to "great heroic figures" (Napoleon, Caesar, Thucydides), to myth
ical figures such as Apollo and Dionysus, to animal or chimerical figures
(Zarathustra's "serpent and eagle," the "dragon," and the "camel"), to poetic
or even allegorical figures (the "pale criminal," the "Last Man," and, perhaps
most famously, the "?bermensch"). Some have even argued for the presence
of important postcolonial political figures in Nietzsche's writings (e.g., the
figure of "the Black" or "the slave"), while others have urged us to view
Nietzsche himself as a literary figure par excellence and exemplary "test
case" of his own moral perfectionism: "creating and discovering himself in
his own writings as "an ?bermensch."1 Whatever one thinks of these latter
claims, it is undeniable that Nietzsche's writings are full of figures. Indeed,
one is hard pressed to think of any other philosopher who has so extensively
and systematically used literary and poetic figures in his writings. And this
pervasive employment of figures and figurative language is not restricted to
one period in Nietzsche's literary career. The figures are there from the early
ghostlike figure of the "last philosopher" in Nietzsche's unpublished notes
from the 1870s (cf. , ? 38), throughout the later post-Zarathustran writings,
Portions of this article were originally presented at the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy
Consortium Public Issues Forum, Haverford College, Haverford, Pa., November 4, 2000.
The authors would like to thank the panelists and audience for their comments and sug
gestions. A most pervasive debt of gratitude goes to James N. Jordan and Morris
Rabinowitz for their extensive and insightful editorial comments on the entire manu
script. A special thanks also goes to Sarah Yeates for her energetic research efforts.
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 25, 2003

Copyright ? 2003 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.
2 Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg
e.g., in the figure of the "comedians of the ascetic ideal" in the Genealogy
of Morals (1887), or in the transformed figure of "Dionysus" in Twilight of
the Idols (1889).
Yet despite Nietzsche's pervasive employment of innovative figures and
"valuable [figurative] exemplars" (t/M III, ? 6), few commentators have ven
tured to undertake a systematic analysis of just what Nietzsche was trying to
accomplish through his constant use of figures and figurative language.2 This
is surprising given the current debates and controversies regarding how best
to read Nietzsche, e.g., as either a philosopher, a literary critic, or a rhetori
cian.3 Situated, as they are, at the "interface" of philosophy, literature, and
rhetoric, Nietzsche's figures would seem to play an important role in any suc
cessful attempt to illuminate these controversies. Like Plato's picturesque
images and myths, Nietzsche's figures are not just inessential "icing on the
(conceptual) cake," but are part and parcel of one's understanding of his
thoughts and values. The figures are essential for the proper understanding
of the direction and development, both intellectually and affectively, of his
unique philosophical views.
The lack of attention paid to Nietzsche's use of figures is likewise sur
prising given the recent interest in issues of language in Nietzsche's texts.
And yet most commentators who are interested in issues of language in
Nietzsche tend to focus either on interpreting his "multifarious stylings"?
the epigrammatic, the aphoristic, the apothegmatic, and the metaphorical?
or they discuss the many difficulties involved in making sense of Nietzsche's
hyperbolic, seemingly self-contradictory (and self-consciously self-referen
tial) manner of expression. Few have directly addressed the question "Why
figures?" Why the constant emphasis on figurative language and thinking?
Perhaps not surprisingly, those who have addressed this issue have failed to
reach any consensus. Heidegger, for example, makes the intriguing sugges
tion that because the thoughts Nietzsche is grappling with are so hard to bear
(so untimely), "no prior, mediocre human being" can think them [discur
sively, propositionally]... and "that holds for Nietzsche himself. ... Nietzsche
must therefore first create poetically the thinker [figure] of [these thoughts]"
before he can come to terms with them.4 By way of example, Heidegger fur
ther observes that "the communication of the thought most difficult to bear
[i.e., the thought of the eternal return of the same] . . . first of all requires the
poetic creation of the figure who will think this thought [viz., Zarathustra]....
But in such creation [of the figure], the doctrine itself cannot be wholly disre
garded."5 More recently, Peter Berkowitz has made the claim that Nietzsche's
preferred figures of the "?bermensch" the "free spirits," and the "Philosopher
of the Future" function as emblems of a sort?the "identifying mark" of a
new philosophical sobriety, a "free spirited skepticism"?which Nietzsche
hoped would eventually help philosophy break free from traditional (dog
matic) metaphysical thinking.6 Wayne Klein, on the other hand, offers a far
Nietzsche and Untimeliness 3
more general understanding of the Nietzschean figures as simply "that which

possess form" and have "rhetorical" import; in other words, they are literary
forms designed simply to elicit various readings and interpretations on the
part of the reader in order to be understood (thereby, presumably, keeping
the game of interpretation alive). For example, according to Klein, "Apollo
is not merely the god of figuration, he is a figure himself, which, like the very
figures he creates, must be read to be understood."7 By contrast, Daniel Conway
sees Nietzsche's use of figures, especially his "untimely figures," as serving
a far more specific function: viz., offering modern human beings exemplars
of a new kind of political wisdom?one that addresses the "previously unap
proachable question of political legislation: what ought humankind to
become?"* Finally, John Sallis ascribes "a certain attunement to these
[Nietzschean] figures, a certain movement both from them and through them,
an enactment of a certain figurai disclosure" that, he claims, Nietzsche employs
to "reawaken ... such insight into art as the [ancient] Greeks once achieved."9
According to Sallis, what one encounters in Nietzsche's texts is "primarily
a question neither of concepts nor intuitions but rather of figures."10
These examples should suffice to illustrate the diversity of interpretations
regarding Nietzsche's use of figures, in what follows, we shall reexamine the
issue of figuration in Nietzsche's writings. Why the constant reliance on fig
ures (or, alternatively, figurative images and masks)? What does Nietzsche
hope to achieve by repeatedly introducing poetic or representative figures
into his philosophical writings that he could not achieve through the use of
more traditional straightforward discursive thinking and conceptual analy
sis? What is Nietzsche trying to reveal or conceal by invoking such figura
tive exemplars as Apollo, Dionysus, Zarathustra, the "higher men," and the
"philosophers of danger"? What ways of life, understanding, values, or types
of wisdom is Nietzsche commending or excluding? Does each of the figures
embody a different kind of wisdom? Is there a hierarchy among them? Do
some succeed while others fail? More specifically, how do we account for
Nietzsche's self-professed preference for "untimely figures" and "medita
tions" which "act contrary to our time and thereby on our time, and let us
hope, for the benefit of a time to come" (UM II, "Foreword")? What exactly
is it about "our time" that these "untimely" figures are intended to counter
act or disrupt? How (if at all) do they succeed in getting us to "look afresh"
at those aspects of modernity "of which our time is rightly proud," but which
Nietzsche insists are "injurious to it, and a defect or deficiency in it7" (UM
II, "Foreword"). Whether Nietzsche is correct in his disparaging characteri
zation of our modern cultural dilemmas remains an open question. What is
of interest to us in this essay is Nietzsche's innovative use of figures as a
means of challenging the mold of our current cultural horizon and creating
new forms of discourse and disclosure for further philosophical investigation.
Of special concern to us, in this context, is Nietzsche's use of the "untimely
figure" par excellence?the "Philosopher of the Future"?as the representa

tive figure or "exemplary model" of a new kind of wisdom: a disruptive wis
dom (cf. Pf ? 19).
The Use of Figures in Nietzsche's Writings
In the first paragraph of his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872),
Nietzsche observes that the ancient Greeks (whose cultural achievements he
greatly admired) revealed "the profound mysteries of their views... to those
with insight, not admittedly via concepts, but through the penetratingly vivid
figures of their gods (Gestalten ihrer G?tterwelt)!" In an unpublished man
uscript from the same period, the Dionysian World View (1870), Nietzsche
further remarks that "all these [Greek] figures (Gestalten) breathe the tri
umph of existence, and exude a luxuriant vitality . . . and represent an often
overlooked trait of the most profound wisdom" (DWV ? 2). Similarly, in one
of his last published works, the Antichrist (1894), we still find Nietzsche
referring to figures?in this case, the figure of "the redeemer"?as offering
us insight at "an instinct level for how one must live ... for a new way of
life" (AC, ? 33). It seems, then, that throughout his career, Nietzsche was
constantly experimenting with different figurative models in order to gain
insight on how to live, and indeed, how to do philosophy in an age that
Nietzsche regarded as increasingly decadent.11 But why the emphasis on fig
ures as opposed to concepts?12
First and foremost, Nietzsche's preference for figuration has to do with the
(alleged) fact that "we understand figures directly; ail such [figurative] forms
(Formen) speak to us [immediately, intuitively]" (DWV, ? 1). Moreover, "fig
ures convey to us through dreamlike states what, in turn, first engenders rep
resentations," and only later concepts (DWV, ? 2). Likewise, "philosophy is
always invention beyond the limits of our current experience; and in this
sense, it is a continuation of the mythical drive, essentially done in Bildern"
(in images and in figures; P} ? 53).13 Admittedly, it is the role of "the
Philosopher" to come along and try to "replace this figurative thinking with
conceptual thinking" (P, ? 116); but the implication is that figurative think
ing (Bilderdenken) is always already "out there" ahead of what we can cur
rently formulate conceptually and discursively in the prevailing philosophical
language available to us. The poetic and literary figures outstrip, in some
sense, what can be stated (at the present time) propositionally; and subse
quent philosophical reflection on the figures and what they embody gener
ates new concepts and propositions that, in turn, are outstripped by new and
more innovative figures.
Of course we might simply dismiss this predilection for figurative lan
guage and images as a special instance of the early Nietzsche's "Romanticism"

and his somewhat exalted "romantic" view of art and the cultural possibili
ties of art (as opposed to history, science, and even philosophy). For exam
ple, Nietzsche stresses in the "Truth and Lies" essay of 1873 that our original
and most fundamental involvement with the world (our "Urerlebnis") is
essentially an artistic and transforming one in which an exploratory effort is
made to express (via images and figures) what cannot (in his view) be ade
quately expressed in the shared language available to us (except metaphori
cally; cf. TL, ? 1). As Arthur Danto observes, the early Nietzsche has a
tendency to turn the old empiricist view on its head and view the world as a
tabula rasa upon which we as "artistically creating subjects" make our impres
sions. Nietzsche also has a tendency to limit the role of reason (logos) in
order to make room not for faith, but for myth and art.'4 At the very least, he
has a tendency to see an interdependent relation between our mythos (our
images, figures, metaphors) and our logos (reason, concepts, propositions).
In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche stresses that it was the "dreamlike figure"
(Traumerscheinung) who kept appearing to Socrates in his final days, extolling
him to "practice music," which provided Socrates with "the only hint of any
scruple about the limits of logical thought" (BT, ? 14). As is well known,
however, Nietzsche's enthusiasm for the cultural possibilities of romantic art
in general (and Wagnerian art in particular) declined somewhat after the
"Truth and Lies" essay (cf. HAH, ?? 146, 222, and 223); and Nietzsche's
quest in his later works may be described, in part at least, as an effort to show
"how life, philosophy and art can have a deeper, more congenial relationship
to one another" even in the "twilight" and decline of the dominant cultural
role of art, e.g., after the ancient Greeks.15 Yet in the context of this effort,
his enthusiasm for figures did not wane; if anything, he became increasingly
reliant in the later works on new and ever more innovative figurative repre
sentations and "masks" of his own "dangerous" and "untimely" views. In his
words, "that which is most profound always loves masks" and, we might add,
figures (BGE, ? 40). Why?
In part, his predilection for figures and "masks" may be because, accord
ing to Nietzsche, "philosophy has no common denominator: it is sometimes
scientific, and sometimes artistic" (PCP, ? 168); but in its origins, it is based
on what he terms "a metamorphosis of the artistic drive" (PO, ? 4). As Sarah
Kofman observes, "what Bergson would call a fundamental intuition which
to express itself can only use a thousand inadequate conceptual means,"
Nietzsche called "metaphorical language, in other words a carrying over from
a language of [artistic] images to a 'conceptual' language at one further
remove?and hence incapable of expressing it?of the essence of life per
ceived intuitively."16 For example, philosophy, like Greek tragedy, attempts
to deal with difficult issues of human suffering and existence, issues that,
according to Nietzsche, are "related to truth and approximated in our [abstract]
concepts, but occasionally and with great difficulty become vividly con
cretized for us via figures or images (Gestalten)" (DWV, ? 2). The figures,
then, help to provide such a concrete intuitive illustration of certain pecu
liarly "human, all too human" (and possibly difficult to comprehend or accept)
views or possibilities of life; they are a means "for trying to express and fix
this [intuitive] vision" of life.17 Sometimes they do this by imaginatively cre
ating or re-creating relevant experiences for those who have not directly had
them. Like the "mediating figure of the statue" or some other work of art,
the "living figure" Nietzsche presents us with?be it Dionysus, Apollo, the
saint, the martyr, etc.?helps "engender" in the reader certain experiential
states or ways of being in the world (e.g., that of the Dionysian practitioner
or that of the "world-denying" saint). It allows the reader "to experience all
that a soul can encounter when it goes on its journey?participation in other
souls and their destiny, acquisition of the ability to look at the world through
many eyes, and through knowledge of strange and remote things," etc. (UM
IV, ? 7). When we "see clearly before us the figure," that figure in our mind's
eye "demonstrates its life, in movement, tone, word, and action; [it] forces
us to trace a mass of effects back to their cause; [it] requires us to engage its
artistic composition," and consequently, to experiment with the different pos
sibilities it offers (DWV ? 2).18
As Nietzsche once remarked in a letter to Brandes (10 April 1888). "the
person who does not find himself addressed personally by [my] work will
probably have nothing more to do with me."19 The figures, it would seem, are
also designed to offer the reader that "profound personal significance"
Nietzsche evidently attached to his own "dangerous," untimely meditations.
The figures offer the reader "personal embodiments" of certain ways of liv
ing, images of particular human possibilities or particular human persona.
For example, Nietzsche often uses the pre-Socratic philosophers as figurai
embodiments or exemplars of a way of life (and a kind of wisdom) that has
largely disappeared in the modern world, and that he thinks needs to be
revived: viz., an "untimely" or "out of season" way of life that struggles tire
lessly to combat "the taming and restraining influences of. . . contemporary
culture."20 As Nietzsche describes it in his essay "Schopenhauer as Educator,"
the philosopher's job is to "measure, stamp, and weigh things," to establish
"new values'' and "new images of humanity," and to provide his and her con
temporaries with "new images of life" (cf. UM III, ?? 3-4). But according
to Nietzsche, the philosopher best accomplishes this job of educating others,
not through abstract doctrines and treatises?at least not initially?but by
way of personal example, for example, through the "courageous visibility of
the philosophical life" of a Thaies, Anaxagoras, Socrates, or even Schopenhauer
(UM III, ? 3; cf. TAG, ?? 3-4). Nietzsche's figures are thus designed to address
that personal dimension, and to "serve as a [personal] example," so that the
reader can understand his work "as though it were for the [individual reader]
he had written" (UM III, ? 3).
As Nietzsche once described it in a letter to his sister (15 August 1885),
the figures also function as "fishhooks" or "bait" for "attracting and captur
ing the personal attention of the readers he was so desperately trying to
reach."21 In some cases, this "bait" takes the form of "moral exemplars and
models," or "exemplary specimens" of human advancement, for example,
great literary and world historical figures such as Homer, Manu, Thucydides,
Socrates, and Goethe (cf. UM III, ? 2).22 In some cases, he employs figures
of particular saints and martyrs as "exemplary specimens" of faith, piety, sim
plicity, honesty, suffering, self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-denial.23 In
both cases, these "exemplary specimens" embody ways of living or sets of
related practices that remind us of the powers of perfectibility that reside
within each of us by providing us (via the figures) with the "visible epitome"
of such moral perfectionism (UM III, ? 2).
Nietzsche believed that the contemporary world was short on actual exist
ing heroic "models and exemplars." Thus the figures also offer Nietzsche
"brave companions and imaginary free spirits"?in the absence of any actual
existing ones?that help keep him (and his readers) "in good spirits while
surrounded by ills," e.g., the decadence of modern society (see Z, "Prologue";
77, I).24 Such imaginative figures or figurative companions (Zarathustra,
Dionysus, the ?bermensch, the "music practicing Socrates") help Nietzsche
identify himself with a possible future (nondecadent, nonnihilistic) community
?a community of "free spirits," "revaluers," "hyperboreans" (see AC, 1).
Such figurations provide poetic exemplars of emulation for those "who must
come one day"?those "men of the future," those "antinihilists " those "vic
tors over God and nothingness"?and for their epochal "revaluation of val
ues" and attempted (future) enhancement of humanity (see GM II, ? 24).
Figures thus function as imaginative or indirect ways of producing redemp
tive "exemplars and models" in the absence of actual "timely" ones. Put dif
ferently, the figures provide "microincarnations" of Nietzsche's own moral
perfectionism or expressionism since, in his view, the macro level (of polit
ical and cultural institutions) has become "motley" and "decadent" in the
contemporary world, and characterized by nihilistic tendencies. In this sense,
the exemplary figures in Nietzsche's works begin to take on some of the medi
ating role traditionally played by civic and cultural institutions in "healthier"
times (e.g., in ancient Greek Sittlichkeit).15
In light of Nietzsche's later perspectivist claims and his perspectival denial
of transcendent/metaphysical meanings, humankind must, in his view, begin
to create for itself new (nontranscendent, nondogmatic) meanings in order
to secure its own continued (imperiled) existence. Such nontranscendent
meanings Nietzsche hoped to glean, in part at least, from the heroic exploits
of his figurative exemplars and models, e.g., from Zarathustra, or from "the
example supplied by the outward life" of certain ancient Greek and Indian
philosophers (cf. UM III, ? 3). In his view, such exemplary figures help to
test the limits and "plasticity" of the human soul as well as that of our mod
ern cultural horizon.26 From his sometimes "untimely" and "dangerous" fig
urai experiments, humankind can begin to compile a storehouse or repository
of wisdom upon which the evolving species can draw. His figurative embod
iments of perfection (or imperfection, as the case may be) provide an imag
inative resource from which others can begin to derive inspiration and courage.
As he observes in the Untimely Meditations: How completely this courageous
visibility of the philosophical life is currently lacking in Germany! . . . Only
he who has a clear view of the picture of life and existence as a whole can
in turn employ the individual sciences without harm to himself, for without
such a regulatory total picture they are threads that nowhere come to an end
and render our life more confused and labyrinthine" {UM III, ? 3). Nietzsche's
figurative models, from the "pale criminals" and "apostates" to the "conva
lescents" and "higher men," can be seen as an attempt to paint such a "pic
ture of all human life," a picture from which we can "learn the meaning of
[our] own individual lives" {UM III, ? 3). Nietzsche's philosophy thus chal
lenges the reader through the image or figure of life it presents and through
the need it engenders in the reader to learn from that image or figure "the
meaning" of the reader's own individual life.
In this context, Nietzsche's figures can also be seen as offering a partial
answer to the enigmatic question Nietzsche raises in one of his most haunt
ing aphorisms in Ecce Homo: viz, "How can one become what one is?" The
figures aid us?visually, metaphorically, aesthetically?to strive to become
who we really are, our "ownmost selves." In some cases, the figures are specif
ically designed to help reveal those all too conventional elements of one's
character?elements that Nietzsche refers to as "timely," "complacent," "self
satisfied," "decadent," "reactive," and even "resentful." More often than not,
Nietzsche claims, such "timely" elements have been inauthentically grafted
on to one's own "untimeliness" or authenticity by decadent and corrupt insti
tutions at the macro level.27 In Ecce Homo, for example, Nietzsche writes that
"his own becoming is inscribed" in those very figures he depicts in his
Untimely Meditations: for example, in the figure of David Strauss as
"Confessor" and "cultural philistine," or, alternatively, of Montaigne as a fig
ure of "joyful living," or Schopenhauer as a figurai embodiment of educa
tion (cf. EH V, ? 3). In the same work, Nietzsche goes on to say that he first
had to be "many things in many places to become the one thing?or to be
able to attain the one [ownmost] thing." He claims that "he had to be a scholar
too for some time " as well as a "philosophical laborer," before becoming a
"free spirit" (cf. EH V, ? 3). Nietzsche's figures are designed to help him (and
us) confront (imaginatively and personally) those contradictions, inconsis
tencies, and inauthenticities that must be engaged in order for him (and us)
to emerge more fully and authentically. To paraphrase Zarathustra, "what

returns, what finally comes home to me," from such an engagement is "my
own self (Z III, 1). Figures such as "the scholars," the "philosophical labor
ers" the "higher men," provide a kind of imaginative "litmus paper" test for
whether or not one can live one's life "joyfully" and "affirmatively" accord
ing to that figurative model. As Nietzsche once observed, "the only genuine
test of any [philosophical] doctrine or critique is whether or not one can live
by it" (UM III, ? 8). What many of his figures reveal, however, is that one can
not. Even the heroic figure of Zarathustra finds that he cannot live in accor
dance with his own ?bermensch ideal, for he is choked with nausea when
confronted with the prospect of the "eternal return," and all that it entails, viz.,
that the "small man" or "herd man" will also recur eternally. The figurative
test of the "eternal return of the same" reveals that even Zarathustra's affir
mative ?bermensch model is based on "ressentiment"?in this case, resent
ment against the "small man"?and hence grounded in the self-same "reactive"
mode of evaluation Zarathustra strives to overcome (cf. II, 11, 20). In a sim
ilar way, the various figures of "the dogmatists," the "philosophical laborers,"
the "higher men," and the "last men" all reveal themselves to be flawed, and
thus incapable of functioning as exemplars embodying "a great stimulus to
life" (cf. 77, IX: 49). Paralleling Kierkegaard's use of pseudonymy which
attempts "to give voice to all the different characters within him," Nietzsche's
goal in his use of figurations is to make his readers and himself aware of their
flaws, not by directly criticizing or refuting them, but by setting them forth in
such a way as to reveal their inconsistencies and absurdities.28
From what we have seen so far, we can conclude the following: all of
Nietzsche's figures, the heroic exemplars as well as the less than heroic ones,
are designed to emphasize, first and foremost, the aesthetic and organiza
tional features of certain types of lives, characters, and cultures. In doing so,
they elicit an immediate and direct aesthetic reaction on the part of the reader.
For example, we respond immediately to a badly organized character's blem
ishes, rather than to the abstract moral quality of that character. Or in the case
of Nietzsche's "courageous exemplars " the pre-Socratic Greek and Indian
philosophers, we react immediately "to their bearing, to what they wore and
ate, and their morals, rather than to what they said or let alone what they
wrote" (UM , ? 3). By stressing aesthetic and organizational features, and
by appealing directly to the aesthetic sensibilities of his readers, Nietzsche's
figures draw you in, address you personally, and make you identify with them,
for better or for worse. For example, we react more strongly, at least at first,
to the figure of the "pale criminal" (e.g., the literary figure of Raskolnikov
in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment) than we do to an abstract sociolog
ical discussion of crime and its causes, or punishment and its effects. A dry
academic discourse or treatise, however important, does not elicit the kind
of personal identification with a certain experience or character the way a
skillfully designed and therefore seductive figure does.
Yet Nietzsche's figures, more often than not, offer a peculiarly disruptive
kind of seduction. They are designed to seduce us into something "untimely"
and "out of season"; they lure us into experiencing the world differently and
thinking differently about the world. They help us to alter or refine our aes
thetic sensibilities, for example, by discouraging us from simply deferring
to those "useless squanderers" or "cultural philistines" who currently preside
over the "catalysis of culture."29 As an aesthetic counterpoint to the current
"timely" decadent figures who dominate our cultural horizon, Nietzsche offers
"untimely" alternative figures. For example, he offers the figures of the "buf
foons," the "comedians," and the "untimely ones," who, in his words, "free
themselves [from the squanderers and philistines] only by farcical caricatures
and ridiculous re-interpretations" (TAG, ? 19). To quote Ian Hacking, Nietzsche
is one of those thinkers who is always "working and living at the edge of our
moral sensibilities," and who is concerned to generate ethical problems for
us that are often not yet experienced by us as problems.30 Nietzsche's treat
ment of these emerging ethical issues is typically cast in terms of "masks,"
irony, contradiction, and especially in terms of "untimely" figures?figures
that are often "self-consuming," disruptive, offensive to some, and charac
terized by a "hammerlike" force that crushes our foundationalist aspirations
and opens up new spaces for thinking and acting.
Nietzsche would hardly agree with Alain de Botton's recent assertion that
philosophical wisdom is just a matter of finding comfort in consoling fig
ures, images, and ideas.31 For Nietzsche, philosophy is not about offering con
solation for frustration and suffering at all; it is about disrupting those
prevailing "timely" human, all too human myths and illusions (especially, as
we shall see, the myths and illusions associated with the ascetic ideal) which
perpetuate that suffering and frustration. As he says, "to make the individual
uncomfortable, chat is my task."32 In this context, Nietzsche's most innova
tive figures, the "Philosopher of the Future," the "music-practicing Socrates,"
etc., are, as Marianne Cowan puts it, "timely by being untimely," for they
help to provide an affirmative, nonascetic, and antinihilistic alternative to our
prevailing cultural idols and societal discontents.33 They help to fashion an
interpretive context in which the suffering, fragmentation, and social malaise
endemic to modern society become meaningful, even transfigured.
Timely and Untimely Figures
Nietzsche was certainly not the first philosopher to make use of figures in
the context of his overall philosophical project. They abound in Plato, and
Hegel (in his Philosophy of Right) gives a famous figure of philosophical
wisdom: the "Owl of Minerva," which, Hegel says, "only begins its flight
Nietzsche and Untimeliness li
with the onset of dusk"34 Having argued that we cannot fully understand the
meaning of world-historical deeds because such meaning always depends
upon a future we cannot foresee; and having warned us that we cannot over
leap our own time any more than we can "jump over Rhodes," Hegel con
cludes that the only self-transparency available to us lies in philosophy, which
"comprehends its own time in thought," and "rejoices in the rational com
prehension" of the historical present. As Hegel expresses it in another image,
philosophical wisdom allows us to see "the rose in the cross of the present"
(PR, "Preface"). But philosophy can "paint its gray on gray" and "reconcile
us to the historical present" only when "a form of life has grown old, and
cannot be rejuvenated, only recognized after the fact" by traditional philo
sophical analysis. As Allen Wood observes, Hegel's views "are not neces
sarily conservative in their import, since they allow for rational action to
actualize the existing social order, reforming it by correcting (as far as we
are able) its (inevitable) contingent flaws and bringing it as fully as possible
into harmony with its rational idea."-5 But they do seem to rule out the pos
sibility of radical change of the "timely" social horizon based on historical
and philosophical reason.
In a surprisingly parallel passage from one of his early essays, Nietzsche
also depicts traditional philosophy and its "unmeasured and indiscriminate
knowledge drive" as always coming on the scene after the fact "as a sign that
a form of [culturali life has grown old" (P, ? 25). Nietzsche does not com
pletely reject this traditional characterization of philosophy; indeed, he later
insists that his own genealogical method prefers the "gray" of conceptual
analysis (GM, "Preface"). But from the early 1870s onward, he also offers
the reader an alternative figure to the "owl" of traditional philosophical wis
dom: the "Philosopher of the Future" (P, ? 59). This figure is variously char
acterized in Nietzsche's writings as "appearing during those times of great
danger," as being "the brakeshoe on the wheel of time," and as always being
"far ahead of [his] time" or "untimely" (P, ? 24). He also claims that this fig
ure "commands and legislates" "the bad conscience of [his] time" (BGE, ??
211-12). Moreover, Nietzsche insists that, to date, "there is no appropriate
category" for such a philosopher (P, ? 53), that he or she is an "anomaly" of
sorts and "unclassifiable" (PCP, ? 173), or atopic in the ancient Greek sense,
meaning "out of place," hence "strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable,
and disconcerting."36 In order to understand him, we must therefore imagine
or re-create "a totally new type of philosopher" as opposed to the "philoso
phers of the present." We must imagine a "philosopher-artist," a "music prac
ticing Socrates," i.e., a philosopher whose activities "are often carried out by
means of metaphor," whose love of wisdom ruptures "commonplaces" and
"completely breaks with the customs and habits" of daily life; a philosopher
whose "selective knowledge drive" is pursued, not for knowledge's sake, but
"in the service of the best possible life," and a philosopher who will "forcibly
wring nihilism from the fabric of modernity" (P, ?? 25-26, 37, 44-53; see
also BT, ? 17 and GM II, ? 24).37 But what accounts for this Nietzschean
emphasis on the "untimely" as opposed to the "timely" figure of wisdom?
Why emphasize the "anomalous," "atopic" character of this "new species"
of philosopher as opposed to what he terms the "stunted" and conventional
character of past and present philosophers? (UM III, ? 3). Why stress the
"disruptive" side of wisdom rather than the conciliatory? Why the "brakeshoe
of time" rather than the "rose in the cross of the present"?38
Nietzsche sees the language of philosophy and traditional conceptual think
ing as always embedded in an "inarticulable" shared background of prac
tices, what Heidegger would later term a "clearing," which contains a concealed
epistemic content or understanding of being within which particular events
become evident, and things and people appear as intelligible. This shared
background of language, customs, habits, and skills, against which objects
and people appear as meaningful and usable, is never itself fully accessible
to philosophical reflection or wholly representable as a system of beliefs and
values. It is more of a historically transmitted "horizon" that we have inher
ited, which we largely take for granted, and which we do not completely con
trol. As Nietzsche puts it, "the philosopher [as well as others] remains caught
in the nets of [the] language" of our "timely" cultural horizon (P, ? 118; cf.
UM IV, ? 5). One of the major difficulties confronting Nietzsche's "untimely"
and "dangerous" meditations is how to think about and question one's own
epistemic, linguistic, and nomothetic horizon. How does one go about open
ing up a space in which to think about that which typically demands no think
ing and which is usually taken for granted by the prevailing culture? How
does one think within a horizon that one wants to open up to critical scrutiny
when the only modality of thought available to undertake this scrutiny is the
very one being put into question? It is at this juncture that Nietzsche's
"untimely" "atopic" figures play an important role in helping us (and
Nietzsche) "twist free" or "recoil away" from the constraining "nets" of our
modern nomothetic horizon, pointing us toward possible ways of thinking
and acting beyond it. But before we examine how this works, we first need
to ask ourselves: Why does Nietzsche feel such an urgent need to "twist free"
of the "timely {zeitgem??) present"?
Nietzsche believes that there is something more than slightly "askew" about
our modern cultural horizon, and he struggles in his various works to artic
ulate this problem. In his earlier works he tends to attribute many of our civ
ilizational discontents to what he calls a "motley" or "modish" culture that
lacks the "unity of style" that characterized earlier "healthy" cultures, such
as ancient Greece (cf. UM I, ? 1; III, ? 6). He is also critical of the "uncul
tured chauvinists" who equate military superiority (e.g., Prussian superior
ity after the Franco-Prussian War) with cultural superiority; and he particularly
singles out those voyeuristic self-satisfied newspaper readers and consumers
of popular culture whom he dubs the Bildungsphilister ("cultural philistines").39

He rejects many of the most distinctive features of the political, cultural, and
intellectual landscape of late nineteenth-century European (and especially
German) civilization, criticizing those self-professed heirs of the Enlightenment
who hold peace, quiet, tranquillity, and decorum to be the high point of life
(cf. UM II). Contra the "Hegelians" of his day, he "laments the blind power
of the factual and the tyranny of the actual" (UM II, ? 8), and he bitterly con
demns those who would use "monuments of the past" to block new attempts
at greatness (UM II, ? 2).
In later works, he tends to identify the basic cultural problem as one of
"decadence," claiming that the "sustaining and informing values of humankind
have all been decadence-values."40 Sometimes he identifies this decadence
with corruption, insisting that "the supreme values of mankind . .. [are] val
ues which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, lording under the
holiest of names" (AC, ? 6). More often, however, he understands the deca
dence of modern culture in terms of its inability to generate new life-affirm
ing values.41 "A society unable to produce new positive values is decadent,
and Nietzsche seems to think such decadence is self-evidently the worst thing
that can happen to a society."42 Our "timely" culture, then, is a decadent one
in which, according to Nietzsche, our prevailing values, especially those of
social egalitarianism, have become "weak," "ossified" and "congealed," and
we are now parasitically living off the capital of past accomplishments?
accomplishments that, according to Nietzsche, were always grounded in a
social inegalitarianism, a "rank ordering" of social differences, and a "pathos
of distance" (cf. BGE, ? 260). Whatever one thinks of these claims, we can
see that, in this context, many of Nietzsche's preferred "timely" figures are
figures of decadence?for example, the "tarantulas " who "wreak vengeance
and abuse upon all whose equals we are not" and whose "will to equality
shall henceforth be the name for virtue" ( II, 7); or the "dragon " who says
"all value has long since been created," and hence there is no need for new
values (Z I, 1); or the "cultural philistines," who declare that "all seeking"
after values is at an end (UM I, ? 2). The same holds true for those "timely"
figures of philosophical wisdom, "philosophical laborers" and "scholars,"
who, in Nietzsche's words, "prefer to dwell in gloomy places" and are marked
by "a politely masked contempt" for anything new and contrary to "the old
ways of doing things" (UM III, ? 8).
In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that the main source of our
modern discontents is what he calls "the ascetic ideal." He thinks that Western
culture, ever since the decline of the Greek tragic age, has been dominated
by, and depended upon, moral values associated with Platonism and
Christianity (and their idealization of asceticism). He insists that it has been
so dominated by the ascetic ideal that it will be difficult to wean Western cul
ture away from these values "without a cultural transvaluation of staggering
proportions."43 Why did the ascetic ideal triumph? Simply put, it gave human
suffering a meaning and, according to Nietzsche, any meaning for suffering
is better than none: people would rather "will nothing than not will at all"
(GM III, ? 28). While its overt message may be that this world?the natural
world, our everyday life?has no ultimate value and ought therefore to be
denied in favor of some "other world" or "true world" view (cf. I, 3);
nonetheless, the ascetic ideal still gives us a feeling that there is, after all,
something worth living for?something that can satisfy our psychological
need for a sense of power and effectiveness in life?even if this feeling of
effectiveness is attained through "dishonest" ascetic means of self-denial and
devaluation of the natural world. Nietzsche argues that the "self-contradic
tion" represented by the ascetic ideal is that, in fact, it is a disguised form of
the "will-to-preserve-life" (GM III, ? 13). Its valuation-plus-interpretation
both gives suffering a meaning (the figure of the "ascetic priest" says "we
suffer because we are guilty") and initiates a process of excess "debauchery"
of feelings, a spiral of feelings of guilt, ascetic practices, sense of sin, etc.,
which, temporarily at least, numbs the suffering (GM III, ? 19). For a long
time, the ascetic ideal actually served an essential life-enhancing function: it
helped humanity overcome depression and disgust with life caused by the
constraints of modern urbanization (cf. GM II, ? 16). It gave life meaning,
spurred our willingness to go on, to keep acting and willing. In short, it gave
humankind a feeling of power, a feeling that we could effectively take on
even more suffering and endure it.44 As such, the ascetic ideal "saved the will"
and transformed man into "an interesting animal," characterized by "depth
and intelligence," and "pregnant with a future" (GM I, ? 6 and II, 16). Why
then, according to Nietzsche, did it fail?
It is the idiosyncratic problem of the ascetic ideal that, while it cultivates
truthfulness and introspection (e.g., Christian confession about self and world),
it is "a form of valuation which requires its devotees to make claims and have
beliefs that won't stand up to truthful introspective scrutiny (such as that
moral action arises from altruistic sources)."45 Hence it eventually "dissolves
itself (GM III, ? 27). It dissolves what is "exoteric" in the ideal, namely, the
"other-worldly myths," the comforting illusions, the "lie involved in the belief
in God," while still clinging to the life-denying "esoteric" remnants of the
ideal (GM III, ? 27). "The awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years
of training" in the ascetic ideal is that humanity can no longer get what it
really needs from the ideal?viz., a feeling of power and effectiveness in the
world?except by denying or ignoring the cornerstone of that ideal, the "will
to-truth." One would feel foolish rather than powerful in embracing a life
denying ideal if one's motive for embracing it were to feel better about life.46
Hence the need for an alternative culture-wide ideal.
But this brings us to what Nietzsche claims is "the most terrifying aspect
of the ascetic ideal" (GM III, ? 27). For "when the death of God informs our
lives, when the true world has been abolished with it, [when] loss of faith in
values per se accompanies loss of faith in those values specifically nurtured"
by the ascetic ideal, and when the theological foundations and sanctions for
morality collapse, "only a pervasive sense of ultimate purposelessness, mean
inglessness, remains."47 Thus, humanity is in grave danger from the "harm
fulness" of the ascetic ideal and its inevitable demise (EH III; WP, ?? 2, 3,
12). Simply put, it will be increasingly difficult for people in the modern world
to avoid realizing that traditional moral beliefs (as grounded in the ascetic ideal)
are false; and the dissolution of these beliefs will cause serious social and cul
tural dislocation: the modern world will be increasingly oriented toward "wars
the like of which have never yet been seen on earth," as well as unchecked con
sumption, materialism, pessimism, passive nihilism, and general social malaise
(EH XIV, ? l).48 As Bernd Magnus observes: "The triumph of meaningless
ness, the Absurd, is at the same time the triumph of nihilism. When the high
est values become devalued nihilism is a danger not because there are no other
possible values, but because most of Western humanity knows no other values
than those associated with . . . [the] ascetic ideal."49
Hence, as Nietzsche sees it, there is an urgency to promote an alternative
ideal. However, the vexing problem confronting any attempt to formulate a
"nonascetic" ideal is that the various disciplines of modernity?science, his
tory, art, politics?can be shown, upon genealogical analysis, to be bound up
with the ascetic ideal in complex and subtle ways, it is here that Nietzsche's
most "timely" of timely figures, the "Nay-sayers and outsiders of today," "all
these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, these skeptics . . .
these last idealists of knowledge . . . these free, very free spirits " appear on
the scene to "disclose" or exemplify, in a peculiarly performative way, "what
they themselves cannot see, for they are too close to themselves: viz., that
this [ascetic] ideal is precisely their ideal too" (GM III, ? 24). In a manner
somewhat reminiscent of Hegel's notion of immanent critique, Nietzsche's
"timely" figures all reveal a discrepancy between their performative utter
ances and sayings, on the one hand?for example, their performative denial
of any theological or metaphysical foundations and sanctions for values?
and their effective or practical ways of measuring and justifying these claims,
viz., that they are to be accepted simply "because they are true" What makes
these self-professed timely "opponents of the ascetic ideal, these coun
teridealists" suspect is precisely "the most captious, tender, intangible form
of seduction" of the ascetic ideal: faith in the absolute value of truth, in "truth
for truth's sake" (GM III, ?? 23-24). "That which constrains these men, this
unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself even if as an
unconscious imperative ... it is faith in a metaphysical value, the absolute
value of truth, sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone" (GM III, ? 24).
Through their performative utterances and effective claims to knowledge,
Nietzsche's timely figures all reveal themselves to be flawed in that they are
all still captivated by the ascetic ideal (albeit in disguised forms) and hence
incapable of offering a nonascetic, nonnihilistic alternative to it. For exam
ple, the figure of the "Man of Science"?the reigning "god of modernity"?
can only offer as an alternative ideal the underlying belief in the importance
of "being scientific," coupled with the faith that science alone can redeem
the human condition. His striving after objectivity (i.e., "truth" about the
world as it is "in-itself '; the "lawful and necessary") requires the "Man of
Science" to adopt an attitude of "disinterested" objectifying investigation:
for example, holding himself back from imposing an interpretation on results,
refraining from allowing his interests to play a role in determining the out
come of the investigation, etc. (cf. GS ? 335). This is a case of a (relatively
close) approximation in the cognitive sphere to the ascetic ideal (e.g., direct
ing human energies back against themselves). While this practice has impor
tant uses and is successful in certain contexts, and while Nietzsche has no
objection to science as an activity (see his note entitled "Long Live Physics,"
? 335), what it does not give us is a new "counterideal" to the heretofore
reigning ascetic ideal, that is, a set of positive values for life. And to the extent
that it offers us an "ideal" for life, that of "being scientific for the sake of
being scientific " it is simply the "latest expression" of the ascetic ideal. In
a similar "performative" way, the "pale atheists" reveal themselves to be
flawed in that they condemn the comforting illusions of the theological, meta
physical tradition, but without condemning that which condemns life, viz.,
the values generated by the ascetic ideal and thus, in Nietzsche's view, gen
erated out of a situation of failure.50 Likewise, the "Utopian socialists" and
"free thinkers" disclose themselves to be all-too-bound to the ascetic ideal.
They see this life as valuable only in terms of some unrealized (and proba
bly unrealizable) future state of affairs, such as the Utopian "worker's state,"
which involves sacrifice and self-denial here and now (e.g., embracing the
next "five year" plan, denying oneself the comforts of religious beliefs, and
taking a stand against natural desires and practical inclinations). Even those
"philosophical laborers" and "Wissenschaftler" after "the noble models of
Kant and Hegel" who claim to overcome dogmatic metaphysics still reveal
that they too are held captive by the ascetic ideal. As Nietzsche says, in their
knowledge and thought "affects grow cold, the tempo of life slows down,
dialectics replace instinct, seriousness is imprinted on their faces and ges
tures (seriousness, the most unmistakable sign of a labored metabolism, or a
struggling, laborious life)" (GM III, ? 25; BGE, ? 211).
Nietzsche even goes so far as to suggest that his own preferred figure for
destructuring the traditional moral (ascetic) mode of evaluation, the figure
of "the genealogist," is still characterized by an unconscious collaboration
with the ascetic ideal. For even the "genealogist" reveals that the values which
structure his or her discourse?for example, the desire to get a more honest
account of the origin of values, the drive to provide a truer account of moral
ity than the Christian-ascetic?are the very ones his analysis puts into ques
tion. The timely figure of the "genealogist" exemplifies that he too is char
acterized by "faith" in the overriding value of "truth for truth's sake." As
such, he exemplifies, in a performative way, the continuing presence of the
ascetic ideal in the practice of his own "counter" genealogical method, thus
"exposing the genealogist's own subjective interests and prejudices" and con
suming his own "originary authority."51
So Nietzsche's innovative use of "timely figures" in connection with his own
genealogical analysis discloses, he thinks, a common unifying thread con
necting the strands of our cultural decadence and societal discontents. This is
the unconscious collaboration between the ascetic ideal and the various mod
em disciplines of thought and action. According to Nietzsche, the unquestioned
faith in "truth for truth's sake" remains the moving force behind so much of
modern thought and knowledge. Moreover, the unconscious internalization of
the ascetic ideal (in its various subtle guises) is still the way most contempla
tive people explain and justify themselves, search for meaning, or find value.
Given the grave danger Nietzsche thinks humanity faces vis-?-vis the ascetic
ideal and its pending demise, it is extremely important for him to sketch pos
sible modes of self-overcoming, forms of perspectival knowledge, experimen
tal ways of thinking, that would not be committed, either explicitly or implicitly,
to the ascetic ideal and to the metaphysical tradition in the West that supports
it. But how can one break out of the shell of the prevailing cultural horizon and
open up alternative spaces of discourse and disclosure within which new
nonascetic, nondecadent, and antinihilistic ideals and values can be generated?
How can one go about embodying or exemplifying a modality for thinking
beyond the prevailing modality? Can one successfully represent an aspect or
aspects of a possible counter-ideal that would reconnect our legitimate pursuit
of knowledge and truth to the natural world, knowledge to the senses, truth to
our cognitive interests that are rooted in our practical interests as human beings?
thus removing any excuse for devaluing the natural world, or abstracting knowl
edge and thought from that world? Or alternatively, is it possible for us, while
still embodying the ascetic ideal in complex and subtle ways, to accomplish a
"twisting metamorphosis" or "twisting recoil" away from the ascetic ideal that
would loosen its stranglehold, deflect the advent of a dead-end nihilism, and
provide us with at least an intimation of what may lie beyond our prevailing
(decadent) cultural horizon?
We do not know if Nietzsche is correct in his identification of the "asce
tic ideal" (and its pending demise) as the main source of modernity's prob
lems. Nor do we know if he is correct in his insistence on the urgent need to
commend some alternative (nonascetic) ideal to modernity's attention.
However, a full century of world wars, unchecked consumption in the Western
world, and environmental degradation since Nietzsche predicted the imma
nent demise of the ascetic ideal suggest that he was not wrong. What we are
interested in exploring, in the final section of this essay, is Nietzsche's inno

vative use of the untimely figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" as a means
of parodying and disrupting the prevailing cultural horizon and as a vehicle
for opening up new (nonascetic, nondogmatic) spaces of disclosure.
The Philosopher of the Future as the

Untimely Figure of Disruptive Wisdom
As we saw in the last section, Nietzsche's "timely" figures are designed to

disclose, in a performative way, what Nietzsche sees as the institutionally
inscribed evidence of the unchallenged cultural dominance of the ascetic
ideal. They also highlight, he thinks, the need for an alternative nonascetic
ideal. Nietzsche in general prefers to leave the formulation of this ideal to
his much heralded "new species of philosophers"?the "philosophers of the
future"?whose task it will be to formulate counter-ideals for life which are
"life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, and even species-culti
vating" (BGE, ? 4). These "philosophers of the future," Nietzsche tells us,
will have to redeem us "not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also
from that which is bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to noth
ing, nihilism" (GM III, ? 24). But how? Nietzsche's conceptual attempts to
articulate some actual content for this counter-ideal are vague. For example,
he talks in terms of "renaturalizing the ascetic ideal" (WP, ? 915), as well as
"wedding [its] bad conscience to all unnatural inclinations" (GM II, ? 24).
He also suggests reinterpreting "objectivity" as an ideal in terms of becom
ing "master over the Pro and Contra of one's affects"?meaning, presum
ably, that one should allow as many different affects and perspectives on a
thing to arise as possible, and engage as many of these affects and perspec
tives as possible. At the same time, all should be subordinated to some over
all project or ideal (but without any dogmatic commitment to the "objectivity"
of values or to a "real" or "true" worldview). But these disappointingly sparse
remarks fail to provide a "serious" solution to the problems he raises. So
where to now? "Where is the will that might express an opposing ideal?"
(GM III, ? 23).
Though Nietzsche hints that his "untimely" figures "supply" the best avail
able strategy to date for weaning us away from the ascetic ideal, if we look
again at those most "timely" of timely figures?the "mere free spirits"?we
see that the discrepancy between their performative utterances and their prac
tice reveals a flaw that is significant in this context. For these "free, very free
spirits" in whom "the intellectual conscience dwells and is incarnate today"
still exemplify a decided lack of "courage" in their conscience: they lack the
courage to disclose to themselves that the ascetic ideal, which they profess
to deny, "is still their ideal too, they themselves embody it today ... for they
still have faith in truth" (GM III, ? 24). "Take care, philosophers and friends
of wisdom, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering for truth 's sake (BGE,
? 25). In a performative way, the timely figure of the "mere free spirit" helps
to cultivate the "courage of conscience" as a requisite feature of "genuine
wisdom" by exemplifying the lack of such courage. This, in turn, helps bring
to light what would still be required of those "genuine" free spirits and "true
philosophers": namely, the courage to pursue truth "for life's sake," to rec
ognize that "their knowing is creating, their creating is a legislation, their
will to truth is?will to power" (BGE, ?? 205, 21 1).52 But again, why use fig
ures rather than propositions to convey this idea?
One suggestion is that Nietzsche employs figures as the preferred mode of
presentation of his "untimely" and "dangerous" ideas in order to avoid one of
the most common traps of the ascetic ideal?viz., the trap of "dogmatism," or
in other words, the trap of accepting an ideal or doctrine as having an absolute,
fixed, nonperspectival claim to value "simply because it is true." One of
Nietzsche's most commonly expressed fears is that his own "untimely medi
tations" will come to be valued not as "a great stimulus to life" but simply
"for truth's sake": "Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts.
. .. You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear,
to become truths" (BGE, ? 296). Thus he employs poetic figures to convey
his "untimely" message so that both the mode of presentation, as well as the
content being presented, will exemplify the very novelty and "courage of con
science" he exhorts his "true philosophers" or "philosophers of the future" to
pursue. So, again, the effect of the poetic figure is to make the reader ask, not
dogmatically, "Does Nietzsche get it right?" but rather, "Who do I become,
and what do I do, as a result of trying to understand the figure9"'
Another possible suggestion here is that the use of "solemn pomp-and
virtue names" such as "courage" and "conscience," as well as other "moral"
terms, to characterize the alternative values and ideals of the "philosophers
of the future" is itself suspect, and thus inadequate to the task at hand, sim
ply because such terms have already been corrupted "by common [or dog
matic] usage" (cf. BGE, ?? 295, 230).34 Moral terms and "pomp-and-virtue
names" generated in the situation of experience of failure (e.g., the demise
of the ascetic ideal) are themselves, according to Nietzsche, a form of "coun
ternature" (cf. 77, V). So just as the ancient Greeks needed to appeal first to
mythical figures (e.g., Apollo and Dionysus) in order to "heal the wound of
existence" in the "tragic age" (BT, ? 7); and just as the "ascetic ideal" needed
to employ its own mythology (e.g., the passion and resurrection story; the
promise of heaven and hell) in order to succeed in overcoming "the will to
nothingness" in the early modern age; so too Nietzsche thinks his own trans
valuative attempts to formulate nonascetic counterideals for a late-modern

age will first have to appeal to alternative myths and figures in order to be
accepted and understood. Perhaps this is why his most dangerous and exper
imental ideas are always articulated by untimely and disruptive figures. For
example, it is the disruptive figure of the "Madman in the Marketplace" who
first announces the "death of God" as well as "the night continually closing
in on us" (i.e., the nihilism to follow the collapse of the ascetic ideal; see GS
? 125). More important, it is the disruptive and untimely figure of the cold
"Demon" who "steals after you in your loneliest of loneliness" to proclaim
what Nietzsche says is "the basic idea of Zarathustra" and, hence, a possi
ble competitor to the ascetic ideal, viz., the doctrine of "eternal recurrence"
(see C5? 341; EH IX):
This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more
and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably
small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succes
sion and sequence. . . . Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your
teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a
tremendous moment when you would have answered him "You are a god and
never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession
of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in
each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times
more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well dis
posed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more
fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (GS ? 341)
Here, Nietzsche employs a disruptive figure, the demon, to articulate an

"untimely" nonascetic myth, the myth of the recurrence cosmology, in order
to facilitate the eventual acceptance of an alternative practical nonascetic doc
trine for life. His disruptive figures help him to postulate a possible alterna
tive nonascetic ideal for those future postmoral humans (who can perhaps
dispense with the myth) in order to help them become the kind of people who
would consider the demon's message "divine." The untimely myth of the
recurrence cosmology provides a disruptive strategy of sorts for finding intrin
sic value in life itself, that is, for valuing the process of living as an end in
itself and not merely as a means to an end beyond the process.55 It provides
a way to formulate a figurative test of one's underlying attitude toward life.
The demon asks us to take the willingness to relive one's (figurative) recur
ring life as a measure of the affirmation of one's actual nonrecurring life. The
transformative effect of accepting the demon's "crushing" message is that
those people who possess the "courage of conscience" to "joyfully react to
it" will not be tempted to disesteem life by contrasting it with something eter
nal, unalterable, suprahistorical, or intrinsically good, i.e., some "true world"
Nietzsche and Untimel?ness 21
or "afterworldly" view. Likewise, by having the myth of eternal recurrence

promoted by a disruptive, self-consuming figure, Nietzsche can commend a
possible nonascetic competitor ideal to universal attention in a way that is
nondogmatic and open-ended. Both the presentation as well as the content
of the commended alternative ideal would accord with Zarathustra's trans
valuative question, "This is my way; but where is yours?" (Z III, 11). The
figure of the demon challenges us to "learn the meaning of [our] own indi
vidual lives" from the general "picture of life" presented by the recurrence
myth (cf. UM III, ? 3). He invites each of us to consider what would be the
transformative effects in our own lives of accepting the ideal of affirming
eternal recurrence. What would this require of us? What kind of life would
it entail? The demon cannot tell us; we must discover it ourselves. We must
become, in Zarathustra's words, "our own judge and law-giver" (Z I, 17). The
ideal of recurrence does not tell us beforehand what our alternative values
should be, only that whatever they are, they should always be rooted in grat
itude and service to life rather than resentment against it. To be a possible
alternative to the ascetic ideal, it would admittedly have to supply some gen
eral content, namely, do whatever is necessary to affirm eternal recurrence;
for example, overcome the oppression of your present situation if it prevents
you from getting a sufficient sense of power and effectiveness in relation to
life except by devaluing life.56 But the implementation of the ideal would
always be particularistic, contextual, nondogmatic, and open-ended.
Finally, Nietzsche uses untimely figures to mount a challenge to the hege
mony of the ascetic ideal, in part, because he believes that any alternative
counter-ideal that he might promulgate conceptually would necessarily "out
strip the diminished faculties of [his] late-modern readers" who cannot, as
yet, escape the "nets" of their decadent cultural horizon, "indeed, by the time
receptive audiences finally arrive on the scene, this supposed counter-ideal
may be entirely otiose" or even obsolete.57 As a consequence, Nietzsche claims
to delegate "the installation of an alternative ideal to his mysterious succes
sors": the "philosophers of the future."58 Ostensibly at least, he resigns him
self to the subterranean task of "endogenous disruption" from within the
closed system of the ascetic ideal?parodying it, "arousing mistrust of it,"
loosening its stranglehold, and implementing experimental strategies for both
challenging it and surviving the "twilight of the idols." He tends to count
himself and his "friends" among that "first generation of fighters and dragon
slayers" who will "suffer both from the sickness as well as the antidotes" of
the ascetic ideal (UM II, ? 10). On the whole, Nietzsche characterizes his
role in the struggle as one of raising questions not acceptable to the estab
lished order and not easily integrable into that order: using "hammers" to
smash "commonplaces" regarding history and culture (cf. UM II, ? 1); using
"stern discipline" in order to "combat our inborn heritage and implant in
ourselves new habits, a new instinct, a second nature so that our first [deca
dent] nature withers away (UM II, ? 3); and using "weapons of humor" to
generate a "lost sense of strangeness," surprise, and "ironic self-awareness"
that may one day turn "history" and "knowledge" against itself and lead to a
"new hunger" that transforms the outside world (cf. UM I, ? 2; II, ? 8). But
Nietzsche typically defers the "commanding and legislating" of positive alter
natives to the ascetic ideal to the "philosophers of the future" (cf. BGE, ? 211).
Not surprisingly, commentators have never reached consensus on the iden
tity of these mysterious successors. Many tend to equate the figure of the
"Philosopher of the Future" with that of Zarathustra's "?bermensch" who
will "preside over the long-awaited completion of the human species," but
about whom Zarathustra claims "there has never yet been one" ( II, 4).59 In
an attempt to shed some light on this issue, we turn to a particularly reveal
ing passage in Nietzsche's fourth "Untimely Meditation":
The figures which an artist creates, while not the artist himself, are nonethe
less a succession of forms upon which he has bestowed his love and which
tell us something about the artist himself. Just consider Rienz, the Flying
Dutchman and Senta, Tannh?user and Elizabeth, Lohengrin and Elsa, Tristan
and Marke . .. here we stand before a development in the innermost recesses
of Wagner's own soul.. . . Schiller's figures, from the Robbers to Wallenstein
and Tell, go through a course of ennoblement and likewise express something
of the development of their creator. {UM IV, ? 2)
So too, we suggest, Nietzsche's figure of the "Philosopher of the Future"

conveys a similar self-referential reverberation. Like Nietzsche himself, the
philosophers of the future are always "forward-looking." They are concerned
first and foremost with "announcing the emergence of a new way of philos
ophizing," an open-ended, performative way that would be constituted and
defined in and through the very activity of the philosophical experimenta
tion.60 In this context, the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" calls to
mind certain aspects of the old Aristotelian notion of "phronesis" or "prac
tical wisdom," i.e., a philosophical activity that is neither completely arbi
trary nor thoroughly rule-governed, but always oriented toward "responding
to the peculiarities of the given situation" and always directed at uncovering
"just what the situation requires" of each of us.61 As Nietzsche writes, "What
a [genuine] philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot be taught:
one must "know" it from experience?or else one should have the pride not
to know it" (BGE, ? 213). The philosophers of the future are the ones who
will be constantly looking forward, defining and redefining themselves in
and through the immanent critiques and self-consuming parodies provided
by the figurative exemplars they experiment with.
Second, as Alexander Nehamas observes, the figure of the Philosopher of
the Future "need not necessarily be interpreted in the obvious chronological
sense" in which they have typically been interpreted by most of Nietzsche's
readers. "A philosophy of the future need not be a philosophy that is com
posed in the future. It can also well be a philosophy that concerns the future *1
Thus the implied answer to Nietzsche's own rhetorical question?'Are there
such philosophers today? ... Must there not be such philosophers?"?is yes:
they are the very philosophers who are engaged in the forward-looking fig
urative self-experimentations Nietzsche himself is engaged in {BGE, ?211).
As such, they share in many of the "goals and highest aims" of Zarathustra's
promised (but never realized) ?bermensch. For example, they share in his
"free-spirited skepticism," his experimentalism; they too have learned to say
"no" to a decadent age; they too speak frankly (in the Greek sense of par
rhesia) without the sanction of the community (or "herd").63 However, they
do not share in Zarathustra's reactive resentment against the "small men" or
the "herd men," or against those who fail to live up to the ?bermensch's dog
matically stated goals and drives. While challenging the status quo, they do
not devalue or denigrate it; instead they strive to transfigure it. While recog
nizing (with an ironic self-awareness) that they suffer from many of the same
flaws they fight against, the philosophers of the future adopt forward-look
ing strategies of resistance that disrupt and recoil from within the closed sys
tem of the ascetic ideal, contributing, gradually, to its self-overcoming. As
such, they share many of the same qualities as that of Nietzsche's "Nay-say
ers and outsiders": the mere "free spirits," the honest, traditional atheists,"
etc. They avoid much of what the "free spirits" and "free thinkers" avoid, but
they do not misinterpret this avoidance ascetically or dogmatically in a way
that devalues life (cf. GM III, ? 10; BGE, ? 44).
This brings us to a third point: the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future"
is the untimely figure who refuses to be a dogmatist. As opposed to such dog
matic timely figures as "the mole and the dwarf who say, Good for all, Evil
for all" (Z III, 11), the philosophers of the future "legislate and command"
for themselves without assuming dogmatically that they are legislating for
all. As Nehamas says, "The philosophers of the future cannot engage in the
creation of a new [dogmatic] table of values that will hold [universally] for
all people and that will 'enhance' everyone."64 However, contra Nehamas's
claim, they must somehow commend or propose alternative nonascetic ideals
to humanity's attention. They must do so by employing experimental figu
rative exemplars that reveal or unearth discrepancies, for example, between
performance and practice, which critique and even consume themselves imma
nently, and that disclose a metaphorical "picture of human life" (e.g., that of
the "eternal return of the same," or that of the "will-to-power") from which
the individual is invited "to learn the meaning of an individual life" in all of
its diversity and manifoldness (cf. BGE, ?? 215, 224), The philosophers of
the future are thus the ones who must exemplify in their philosophical
performances the very open-ended, nondogmatic, nonascetic values they
commend. This is why, for example, they must leave it up to the individual
readers to decide whether and how to respond to the demon's "universal"

message of recurrence. In this way, Nietzsche's untimely figure of the
"Philosopher of the Future" helps the reader both confront and overcome the
commonly held (culture-wide, ascetic) belief that there must be something like
absolute, final "fixed" truth about one's self and one's world, but without at the
same time falling into a nihilistic ascetic devaluation of self and world.
This brings us to our fourth point: the untimely figure of the "Philosopher
of the Future" is a peculiarly self-consuming figure. To paraphrase Higgins
and Magnus, it exhibits the paradoxical quality of a poetic figure catachre
sis; that is to say, it is both something literal and figurative and neither lit
eral nor figurative at the same time. It is a literary figure that both encourages
literal interpretation by constantly offering us alternative suggestions for pos
sible ways of living, and yet it constantly undermines these by its own figu
rative self-parodies and immanent self critiques.65 It is thus a figure whose
usefulness lies precisely in its resistance to reification or reduction to some
thing fixed, absolute, final, or traditional. Like Nietzsche himself, the figure
of the "Philosopher of the Future" continuously questions and disrupts the
"commonplace" by keeping in play the tension between our "fixed" tradi
tional concepts and literal interpretations, on the one hand, and our more
"fluid" myths and metaphors, on the other; and this tension between the lit
eral and the figurative is essential, in Nietzsche's view, for helping to inte
grate art and knowledge into new cultural forms that may someday deflect
the advent of nihilism and make our lives tolerable again.66 The philosopher
of the future accomplishes this by employing figures from various domains
to draw upon the diversity of human experience and by implementing imma
nent critiques and figurative self-parodies. In doing so, the philosopher of
the future interprets the text of the world open-endedly, without closure. On
the other hand, however, the philosopher of the future is himself or herself
an experimental untimely figure, subject to precisely the same immanent
destructuring as the other figurative exemplars he or she employs. In this
sense, it is hard to see how a philosopher of the future could ever be fully
realized in a straightforward literal sense. Rather, like the figure of the ?ber
mensch, the image of the Eternal Recurrence, or the very figure of Zarathustra,
the philosopher of the future is neither literal truth nor illusion but, instead,
something like "the salient forms of imagery figuring centrally in myths."67
As Richard Schacht observes:
Their "truth" or justification is a matter of their [educational] value as a means

of enabling us to come to understand something important about life and the
world that they do not literally describe or designate. [E.g.] Nietzsche does
not tell us things about Zarathustra, and have Zarathustra proclaim and "teach"
things about the ?bermensch and the Eternal Recurrence, in order to have us
"learn" them. Rather, he does so in the course of . . . his effort to prompt us to
the sort of response that may foster and further the enhancement of our lives.6"
Like other mythical figures (e.g., Apollo and Dionysus) that have the power
to shape our ways of thinking and feeling but which are misunderstood if
subjected to an all-too-literal true/false dichotomy, so too the figure of the
"Philosopher of the Future" is best understood as a means to our education
and development. It is a figure that prompts us to the sort of response that
may further the education of our lives, for example, by cultivating in us a
sensibility capable of passing the Demon's "recurrence test." The philoso
pher of the future, like Zarathustra and the ?bermensch, is best interpreted
as a figurative device in the context of Nietzsche's educational project (or
Bildungsproze?) of transforming our sensibilities, rather than literalistically.
As Nietzsche sees it, figures are necessary for education; but rather than fix
upon them, we are to use them as an aid in reaching the developmental point
at which we can, perhaps, go on without them, or at least go on with new,
fresh, and more innovative figures.
The philosopher of the future, then, is best viewed as an "untimely" figu
rative model for reeducating and forming (in the sense of bilden) our aspi
rations for enhancing life, rather than providing us with literal doctrinal
information to be learned or adopted. The philosopher of the future provides
posterity with a figurative exemplar capable of performing the kind of edu
cational function Nietzsche had discussed earlier in his essay on Schopenhauer,
and which he claims Schopenhauer as an exemplary "figure" of the "educa
tor" (Erzieher) had provided for him, viz., a stimulus for drawing us outward
(erziehen) and upward toward "becoming who we are." In a decadent age,
Nietzsche insists, "we have to be lifted up?but who are they who will lift
us?" (UM III, ? 5). The educational figure of the "Philosopher of the Future"
does so by evoking an alternative form of a truly human "future humanity"?
a "new image and ideal of the free spirit"?healthy and vital enough "to be
enduringly useful to the world and creative and spiritualized enough to jus
tify it."69 At the same time, however, those (like Nietzsche) who educate them
selves by working their way toward this "new image" of the free spirit they
themselves are becoming?while providing others with exemplars and "vis
ible epitomes" for moving in that direction?count as being "philosophers
of the future" because of their experimentalism, radical disillusionment,
uncompromising truthfulness, and unqualified life affirmation.
Nietzsche, of course, denies that he himself or any of his readers has yet
attained this goal. Rather, he insists that they must first educate themselves
(e.g., via the figurative experimentations and Bildungsproze? depicted in
Zarathustra), drawing themselves "out and beyond" what they and the world
already are toward what they might become. Yet it is the idiosyncratic fea
ture of the philosopher of the future that who or what he or she is, is not given
antecedently to the figurative self-experimentations in question. Thus like
Nietzsche, the philosophers of the future must construct themselves out of
the figurative exemplars they themselves are experimenting with, This is the
"new kind of philosophy" practiced by the "new kind of philosopher."70 Thus

the figure of the "Philosopher of the Future" is the exemplary figure of Nietzsche
himself who constantly re-creates and discovers himself as an exemplar of the
kind of philosopher he hopes to become, and who he hopes others will pick up
on. But what kind of philosopher is this? What kind of exemplar?
This brings us to our final point about the philosopher of the future.
According to Nietzsche, "their enemy was ever the ideal of today," and as
such they will ever appear "as disagreeable fools in questionable masks,"
"vivisecting the virtues of their time" (BGE, ? 212). There is an ironic self
awareness in the presentation of Nietzsche's "untimely" figure of the
"Philosopher of the Future" which reflects Nietzsche's own recognition that
he himself remains implicated in the very cultural predicaments he criticizes,
that even he cannot step outside his culture. And if Nietzsche is correct in
arguing that the "ascetic ideal" is a central part of modernity?and if he is
correct in further claiming that humanity is in grave danger from this ideal,
and that even his own genealogical attempts to make us aware of this fact
and to put this ideal in doubt remain tainted by this very ideal?then what
remains to be done about it?
Anticipating Heidegger's notion of encouraging "marginal practices" that
help prepare the way for a new cultural paradigm, Nietzsche's response is to
explore different ways of thinking and being within the "nets" of modern life;
for example, experimenting with heretofore unexplored configurations of
agency (via untimely figures such as the "Demon" or the "Madman), or using
Zarathustrian irony, parodies, grotesqueries, and especially humor to turn that
which oppresses us (namely, the remnants of the ascetic ideal) to our own
strategic advantage.71 In this sense, the "Philosopher of the Future" stands as
a figurative substitute for the modern world?intended for a humanity in the
process of transition, teetering on the abyss of nihilism, ready to be weaned
away from the prevailing myths (of the ascetic ideal), but not mature enough
to do without those myths. The "Philosopher of the Future," as an untimely
figure catachresis, is designed to engender a new enthusiasm for life in a tran
sitional age and to provide its own antidote to ensure that this enthusiasm
does not congeal into a new kind of dogmatism.72 How does Nietzsche ensure
this? By using comedy and absurdity to combat "the spirit of gravity" in a
decadent age (cf. IV, 17). Another way to put this is to say that the figure
of the "Philosopher of the Future" is a comic substitute or stand-in?a "come
dian of the ascetic ideal"?who generates laughter at what others (including
the mere "free spirits") take to be serious, and who embodies a lightness of
being that, in Nietzsche's view, provides the only antidote to date to the advent
of nihilism. As Zarathustra says, "the courage [of conscience] that puts ghosts
Nietzsche and Unti v u es s 27
to flight creates goblins for itself: courage wants to laugh" ( I, 7).

Alternatively, the philosophers of the future will often appear in the guise of
the figure of the "musical Socrates" Nietzsche discussed early on in the Birth
of Tragedy, viz., the figure who can integrate (comic) art and knowledge into
a form that will make life tolerable again. Like Socrates, they will appear as
buffoons (and ugly, impudent, disagreeable ones at that), raising what appear
to be silly questions about what everyone else thinks they know. Like the fig
ure of Socrates, they will be "ambiguous, troubling, and strangely discon
certing."73 They will deploy their figurative experimentations and self-parodies
to make us laugh at that which everyone else takes to be serious; but like
Socrates, they will also use these figurative devices to get us both to take the
right things seriously, and to see them for what they are. They will do what
Nietzsche himself does in the section of the fourth book of Zarathustra enti
tled "On the Higher Man": put in question via self-parody their own most
cherished ideals?in this case, Nietzsche's long-standing ideal of the "higher
type of humanity" or the "highest exemplars" (which he subjects in book IV
to a good-natured lampooning through a "comic procession" of "higher"
types, culminating in the "ass festival" and "drunken song"; see IV, 18-20).
By using such self-parodic figurai devices in this way, the philosophers of
the future (in their musical-socratic guise), counter our human-all-too-human
tendency to take Nietzsche's own images and ideas seriously in the wrong
way (viz., as having a dogmatic cognitive content to be learned), and enable
us to take them seriously in the right way (viz., as reconfiguring and open
ing-up spaces for alternative human possibilities).74
As practitioners of a new musical-socratic "comic" art form, the philoso
phers of the future help generate anomalies about the modern world by mak
ing us laugh at what we take seriously, making us see that many of these
"serious" aspects are contingent and not necessary aspects of life, and thus
are aspects in need of transformation (since they are making trouble for life).
Through their experimental figurative critiques and self-parodies, they evoke
the promise of alternative human possibilities?different ways of thinking
and acting that enhance life, while simultaneously undermining these sug
gestions from within (via laughter and self-irony) so that we do not take them
seriously in the wrong way as specific truths and dogmas to be embraced, in
this way, the philosophers of the future, while remaining bound to the asce
tic ideal in complex and subtle ways, disrupt or "punch holes" in it, twist and
recoil away from it, and thus prepare the stage for a possible future nonascetic,
nonnihilistic paradigm shift in modern life. In Zarathustra's words, they cre
ate "the chaos in themselves" and in others which makes it possible for human
ity "to give birth to a dancing star" and to avoid the impending tragedy of
"the last man" (Z, "Prologue").
Conclusion
Nietzsche was acutely aware of the fact that humans cannot step outside their
cultural horizon at will. To deflect the dangers implicit in, for example, the
advent of nihilism, Nietzsche evokes the untimely disruptive figure of the
philosopher of the future who, as the "comedian" and "musical-Socrates,"
makes us laugh at what we take to be so serious about life: our "regimes of
truth," our ascetic devaluations of the natural world, etc. As untimely atopic
figures who make us laugh at our "holiest of holies," the philosophers of the
future disrupt our commonplaces, and by disrupting, teach us how to open
up spaces for rethinking our ways of being and acting in the world, and to
revaluate our basic aspirations and sensibilities. Paraphrasing Diogenes,
Nietzsche asks, "How can any [philosopher] be considered great who has not
yet disrupted and disturbed anyone? And indeed, this ought to be the epitaph
of our current university philosophy: it disrupted no one" (UM III, ? 8). By
disrupting us, these untimely atopic philosophers of the future evoke the
promise of alternate forms of humanity, new ways of valuing the earth and
one's life on it, thus drawing us "out and up" toward becoming who we are.
Why should anyone voluntarily wish for their life to be so disrupted? What
exactly is to be gained by accepting the "disruptive wisdom" that Nietzsche's
untimely atopic philosophers of the future dispense? Why is this disruption
valuable or desirable? Nietzsche's answer: we need disruptive wisdom because
we are all "in danger of being cheated out of [ourselves]," cheated out of our
authenticity (UM III, ? 4). Nietzsche believes that the vast majority of human
beings are all too caught up in the common, everyday deployment of things:
those "human arrangements" that "distract our thoughts" so that we "cease
to be aware of life" (UM III, ? 4). Thus if I am to "remain my own," and fash
ion an authentic life for myself, then according to Nietzsche I must first
"renounce everything I once reverenced," renouncing even "reverence itself
(HAH, "Preface," ? 6). I must be disrupted from my unthinking commitment
to those human, all too human "arrangements" that distract and distance me
from myself. Only by being disrupted can I eventually transform those "taken
for granted" structures that previously determined me; and only then can I
become, in Nietzsche's words, "master over [myself], master also over [my]
virtues." "Formerly they were your masters; but they must become only your
instruments" (HAH, "Preface," ? 6).
Nietzsche recognizes that, as well as great promise, there is also great dan
ger in this disruptive education. The great danger is that of being "wounded"
in the "deepest and most sacred part of [one's] being" by having taken away
those vital "commonplaces" that heretofore gave one's life meaning (UM III,
? 3). And if one cannot deal with this loss (and the subsequent anxiety it
Nietzsche and ti e . i ne ss 29
engenders) by finding creative antidotes and alternatives, then one may wind
up in the position Nietzsche attributes to the poet Heinrich von Kleist fol
lowing his encounter with Kant's critical philosophy: namely, it disrupted his
feelings of certainty about the world, disturbed his sense of belonging, his
commitment to transcendent truths, etc.?thus generating a "crisis situation,"
which culminated in his suicidal nihilism (UM III, ? 3). (Perhaps this is why
in those two key disruptive sections of the Gay Science where the "death of
God" and the "greatest weight" of the eternal return are discussed, Nietzsche
employs the negative and even dangerous figures of the "Madman" and the
"Demon" to express these untimely ideas.) On the other hand, the great prom
ise of these untimely figures (and the disruptions they cause) is that they gen
erate a kind of wisdom by awakening us from our dogmatic slumber in the
commonplace, and by making available to us new ways of thinking about
ourselves and the world; that they reeducate our aspirations and sensibilities
by asking such questions as "What is it like to think about the world and one
self without God?" or "What is it like to think about the world and oneself
within the framework of the demon's message?" In forcing us to encounter
such disturbing questions, the untimely figures disrupt our inherited "first
nature" (the way of life we were previously deployed in) for the purpose of
overcoming it?giving us "insight into [our] wants and miseries, into [our]
limitedness, so as then to learn the nature of the antidotes and consolations"
(UM III, ? 3). Being forced to face up to one's own misery and limitedness
is always disturbing and untimely, but it is also the beginning of the process
of the creation of a new way of life and self. Disruptive figures and the wis
dom they impart help liberate, stimulate, and inspire us to experiment with
new ways of thinking and valuing, all of which contribute, Nietzsche says,
to the reconstituting of oneself as a transformed "second nature " The philoso
phers of the future, as untimely figures of disruption, educate us ( in the sense
of "paideia" or Bildung) in the possibility of transforming our character, and
thus generating a new way of life. They are positive figures of education for
late modern humanity, figurative exemplars with admirable traits to be emu
lated (as Nietzsche claims Goethe, Schopenhauer, and even Wagner were for
him). Or better still, like Socrates and even Nietzsche himself, they are the
ones who, in the process of disrupting commonplaces and experimenting with
generating an untimely life of their own, constitute themselves as self-styled
figurative exemplars of disruptive wisdom for others?exemplars from whom
others are eventually led to question their lives and urged "to learn the mean
ing of [their] own lives . . . and to comprehend from [them] the hieroglyph
ics of a more universal life" (UM III, ? 3).
Note on Texts and Citations
For Nietzsche's works, we have used the S?mtliche Werke. Kritische

Studienausgabe in 15 B?nden, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1999). However, we have generally followed the standard trans
lations of Nietzsche listed below, and the alterations we have made are usu
ally minor ones. A list of abbreviations and corresponding texts follows.
AC = Der Antichrist (The Antichrist). Translated by Walter Kaufmann in The

Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Penguin, 1982.
BGE = Jenseits von Gut und B?se (Beyond Good and Evil). Translated by
Walter Kaufmann in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Random
House, 1968.
BT = Der Geburt der Trag?die (The Birth of Tragedy). Translated by Walter
Kaufmann in Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
DWV = Die dionysische Weltanschauung (The Dionysiac World View).
Translated by Ronald Speirs in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
EH = Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche.
GM = Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals). Translated
by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche.
GS = Die fr?hliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science). Translated by Walter
Kaufmann. New York: Random House (Vintage), 1974.
HAH = Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All-Too-Human). Translated
by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
= Der Philosoph. Betrachtungen ?ber den Kampf von Kunst und Erkenntnis
("The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and
Knowledge"). Translated by Daniel Breazeaie in Truth and Philosophy:
Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the I870's. Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979.
PCP = Der Philosoph als Arzt der Kultur ("The Philosopher as Cultural
Physician"). Translated by Daniel Breazeaie in Truth and Philosophy.
PO = "Additional Plans and Outlines" (Summer of 1872). Translated by
Daniel Breazeaie in Truth and Philosophy.
TAG = Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen (Philosophy in
the Tragic Age of the Greeks). Translated by Marianne Cowan.
Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1962.
TL = "?ber Wahrheit und L?ge im aussermoralischen Sinne" ("Truth and
Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense"). Translated by Daniel Breazeaie in
Truth and Philosophy.
TI = G?tzen-D?mmerung (Twilight of the Idols). Translated by Walter

Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche.
UM = Unzeitgem??e Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations). Translated by
R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
WP = Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power). Translated by Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Viking, 1968.
= Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Translated by Walter
Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche.
Queens College/City University of New York
Notes
1. See Sander L. Gilman, "The Figure of the Black in the Thought of Hegel and Nietzsche,"
German Quarterly 65, no. 2 (March 1980), 141-58. See also Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the
Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 51; and Alexander Nehamas, Life as Literature
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
2. One commentator who does focus on the figurai dimension of Nietzsche's thought is
Paul de Man. Yet in his influential book, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1979), de Man concludes that, in works such as the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche
is "curiously ambivalent with regard to the main figures of [his] own discourse" (94).
3. For example, Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading claims that Nietzsche's work "strad
dles the two activities of the human intellect that are both the closest and the most impenetra
ble to each other?literature and philosophy" (103). Two more recent contributions to this debate
have been made by Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (New York: The Guilford
Press, 1999), and Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche's Case:
Philosophy as/and Literature (New York: Routledge, 1993).
4. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), vol.
II, 30.
5. ibid., 34.
6. See Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immor?list (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 13-14, 16-17. While their reasons differ, both Heidegger and Berkowitz
agree in their conclusion that Nietzsche's ingenious attempts to overcome the metaphysical tra
dition of Western philosophy ultimately fail.
7. Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1997). 102-6.
8. Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 2-3.
9. John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 16-17.
10. Here we should note that Sallis is one of the few commentators who comes close to
understanding the figures as we do, namely, as educational devices designed to generate certain
experiences that could not be generated by cognitive means alone. As we shall argue, the fig
ures make perceptible "to those today capable of insight (den Einsichten)" certain disruptive
experiences that the reader would otherwise not have; and in doing so, the figures help bring
about a profound transformation of the way in which life and the world are regarded, both exis
tentially and evaluatively. See Sallis, Crossings, 14-16, 26.
11. If Berkowitz is correct in claiming that "Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the most philosoph
ical of Nietzsche's works because it displays most vividly the kind of life demanded by the
supreme form of truthfulness about morality" (129), then it is important to note that it is also
the work that contains the greatest number of diverse and remarkable kinds of Nietzschean fig
ures from beginning to end.
12. A more concise account of what we mean by "figures" would be helpful at this juncture.
However, the various German words that Nietzsche uses (e.g., Gestalten, Gebilde, Erscheinungen,
and Figuren), and that are commonly translated as "figures" or "figurai," range widely in mean
ing. Sometimes they are apparently intended to mean "image" or "image-type"; sometimes "char
acter" or "persona '; sometimes "form" or "appearance"; sometimes "pseudonym" or
"mouthpiece"; sometimes "trope" or "ideal"; and sometimes "mask" or "disguise." These mean
ings are not mutually exclusive or inconsistent; for all these "synonyms" are conceptually related,
and all revolve around the "literary" center of Nietzsche's writings. Still, a more precise and
narrow definition for these terms proves somewhat difficult to articulate. In light of these con
siderations, we have concluded that the translation that makes the most sense in the contexts
that we are concerned to explore in this essay is the one used by both Walter Kaufmann and
Ronald Speirs, e.g., at BT, ? 1, namely, "figures." In our view, this translation is especially appro
priate for capturing the unique function that many of Nietzsche's "Gestalten" or "Gebilde"
play in dispensing a "disruptive wisdom" that is not readily available from more traditional
approaches to philosophy. Nietzsche's "figures" exemplify, embody, or are emblematic of cer
tain experiences, certain ways of being in the world that cannot be easily conceptualized within
the prevailing matrix of concepts currently available. As we shall argue, Nietzsche's "figures"
offer his readers personal embodiments or exemplary models that challenge, provoke, stimu
late, and inspire for purposes of education. In some cases, Nietzsche's "figures" help generate
in his readers new forms of experience that push them beyond their normal, everyday pre
sumptions and presuppositions. By relying on these "figures," Nietzsche is able to acquaint his
readers with "untimely" perspectives from which the received wisdom of the day can be called
into question.
13. Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 30-34.
14. See Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press,
1980), 36-67.
15. This passage from Nietzsche's 1875 notes is quoted from Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich
Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 119. In sec
tions 222 and 223 of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche speaks of living in the "evening twi
light of art" and of the artist as a "glorious relic." He also claims that "the scientific man is the
further evolution of the artist." Yet as Thiele notes, in Nietzsche's final years of work "the con
cept of the 'philosopher-artist' continued to occupy his thoughts {WP 419). In its broadest terms,
the reason for the coupling of philosophy and art is straightforward. Philosophy is the most spir
itual will to power, not because will finds its highest realization in philosophical thought or writ
ing, but because it finds its highest incarnation in the philosopher himself. The philosopher is
his own experiment in living, in the enhancement and sublimation of the will to power. He is,
in effect, his own artistic creation: The product of the philosopher is his life (first of all, before
his works). That is his work of art'" (119).
16. Sarah Kofman, "Accessories {Ecce Homo, 'Why I write Such Good Books,' The
Untimelies,' 3)," in Nietzsche: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Sedgwick (Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1995), 146-47.
17. See ibid., 146.
18. "Though a child of the present time," Nietzsche claims that he was nonetheless able to
"acquire untimely experiences" by "drawing on the experiences of others" from earlier times,
especially via the "Hellenic" myths and figures (see UM II, "Foreword").
19. Cited from Daniel Breazeale's "Introduction" to R. J. Hollingdale's translation of
Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxiv.
20. See Marianne Cowan, "Introduction" to Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the
Greeks, trans. M. Cowan (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1962), 11-12. In this sense, Nietzsche
uses figures, e.g., the figures of the pre-Socratic philosophers, as an educational means for rein
venting and rediscovering a past understanding of philosophy and philosophical wisdom as a

"way of life."
21. See Breazeale's "Introduction," xxiv.
22. Also see Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 2; 10-13.
23. Nietzsche is often quite positive toward the ascetic practices of particular saints and mar
tyrs (and even of particular artists and philosophers), especially insofar as such practices embody
an important dimension of self-discipline and self-mastery (cf. GM III, ?? 5, 9, 12). However,
as we shall argue, one of the most important things Nietzsche's "untimely" figures are designed
to disrupt is the "idealization" of asceticism.
24. See also Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 32-33; 47.
25. See ibid., 48-50.
26. See ibid., 17-20.
27. See Breazeaie, "Introduction " xlvii; see also Nehamas, Life as Literature, 193-95.
28. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1995), 150.
29. See Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 51.
30. Ian Hacking, "Our Fellow Animals," The New York Review of Books (June 29, 2000), 22.
31. See Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: Pantheon, 2000).
32. Note from 1875. Cited from The Portahle Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), 50.
33. Cowan, "Introduction," 12.
34. G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1970), "Preface" Hereafter abbreviated as "PR."
35. See Allen Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 232.
36. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 158.
37. Also see Daniel Conway, "Comedians of the Ascetic Ideal," The Politics of Irony: Essays
in Self-Betrayal, ed. Daniel Conway and John Seery (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 83-89;
and Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 56-60, 147-58.
38. Here we should note that Nietzsche's notion of "untimeliness" parallels, in many ways,
Hadot's understanding of the ancient Greek notion of atopia, or the "strangeness" of the philoso
pher in the human world. According to Hadot, "One does not know how to classify him, for he
is neither a sage nor a man like other men. He knows that the normal, natural state of men should
be wisdom, for wisdom is nothing more than the vision of things as they are , . . and wisdom is
also nothing more than the mode of being and living that should correspond to this vision. But
the philosopher also knows that this wisdom is an ideal state, almost inaccessible. For such a
man, daily life, as it is organized and lived by other men, must necessarily appear abnormal,
like a state of madness, unconsciousness, and ignorance of reality. And nonetheless he must live
this life everyday, in this world in which he feels himself a stranger and in which others per
ceive him to be one as well. And it is precisely in this daily life that he must seek to attain that
way of life which is utterly foreign to the everyday world. The result is a perpetual conflict
between the philosopher's effort to see things as they are from the standpoint of universal nature
and the conventional vision of things underlying human society, a conflict between the life one
should live and the customs and conventions of daily life. This conflict can never be totally
resolved" (58).
39. See Breazeale's "Introduction" to Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, xiii.
40. See Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy." in Nietzsche as Affirmative
Thinker (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 45.
41. See Raymond Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 56 and 174.
42. See ibid., 174.
43. See Magnus, "Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy," 51.
44. As Conway observes, "Under the aegis of the ascetic ideal, we have learned to experi
ment with ourselves and to exploit the plasticity of the human soul," "Comedians of the Ascetic
Ideal," 87.
45. Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History, 21.
46. See Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 184-87, 191-92, 234.
47. Magnus, "Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy," 51.
48. See Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History, 178.
49. Magnus, "Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy," 51.
50. Among other things, Nietzsche has in mind Feurerbach's attempt to save Christian ethics
by abandoning or naturalizing its "transcendent" metaphysics.
51. See Conway, "Comedians of the Ascetic Ideal," 78.
52. Elsewhere, Nietzsche singles out the "courage of conscience," the courage "to discover
and endure spirit-crushing truths," as a "practical necessity" and defining (Nietzschean) virtue
for the attainment of "genuine wisdom" (cf. BGE, ?? 5, 42-44; see also Berkowitz, Nietzsche,
241). Such wisdom consists, in part, in the ability to disrupt and even reverse commonly held
perspectives "at will" (EH I, ? 1). Today's "free spirits" lack the requisite "courage of con
science," and hence lack the requisite wisdom needed to formulate life-enhancing values, because
they still cling to "the most terrifying aspect of the ascetic ideal," viz., the "will to truth," the
desire for "truth for truth's sake" (cf. GM III, ? 23).
53. See the interview with Alexander Nehamas entitled "On the Philosophical Life," in The
Harvard Review of Philosophy 8 (Spring 2000): 31.
54. See Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 257.
55. See Clark, 232-33; 282-83.
56. Ibid., 284-85.
57. See Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 104.
58. Ibid.
59. Cf. Harold Alderman, Nietzsche's Gift (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977).
60. Cf. Alexander Nehamas, "Who Are the Philosophers of the Future? A Reading of Beyond
Good and Evil," Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 52-53.
61. See Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 15-16.
62. Nehamas, "A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil," 58.
63. Cf. Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 13-14.
64. Nehamas, "A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil," 57.
65. According to Magnus and Higgins, a self-consuming figure, character, or concept is one
that "requires as a condition of its intelligibility (or even possibility) the very contrastas] it wishes
to set aside or would have us set aside." See their "Introduction" to The Cambridge Companion
to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 7.
66. See Raymond Geuss, "Introduction" to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xii.
67. See Richard Schacht, "Zarathustra/Zarar/ms/ra as Educator," Nietzsche: A Critical Reader,
ed. Peter Sedgwick (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 232.
68. Ibid., 232.
69. See ibid., 226-28.
70. See ibid., "A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil," 51.
71. See Conway; Nietzsche and the Political, 137,141.
72. See "Zarathustra/Zarar?wsira," 233-39.
73. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 148.
74. See "Zarathustra/Zara/?wjfra," 240, 246.

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Nietzsche and Untimeliness: The "Philosopher of the Future" as the Figure of Disruptive

Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg

ne of the most striking features of Nietzsche's philosophical writings

Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 25, 2003

more general understanding of the Nietzschean figures as simply "that which

figure" par excellence?the "Philosopher of the Future"?as the representa

The Use of Figures in Nietzsche's Writings

guage and images as a special instance of the early Nietzsche's "Romanticism"

to emerge more fully and authentically. To paraphrase Zarathustra, "what

Timely and Untimely Figures

of popular culture whom he dubs the Bildungsphilister ("cultural philistines").39

interested in exploring, in the final section of this essay, is Nietzsche's inno

The Philosopher of the Future as the

As we saw in the last section, Nietzsche's "timely" figures are designed to

valuative attempts to formulate nonascetic counterideals for a late-modern

Here, Nietzsche employs a disruptive figure, the demon, to articulate an

or "afterworldly" view. Likewise, by having the myth of eternal recurrence

So too, we suggest, Nietzsche's figure of the "Philosopher of the Future"

readers to decide whether and how to respond to the demon's "universal"

Their "truth" or justification is a matter of their [educational] value as a means

"new kind of philosophy" practiced by the "new kind of philosopher."70 Thus

to flight creates goblins for itself: courage wants to laugh" ( I, 7).

Note on Texts and Citations

For Nietzsche's works, we have used the S?mtliche Werke. Kritische

AC = Der Antichrist (The Antichrist). Translated by Walter Kaufmann in The

TI = G?tzen-D?mmerung (Twilight of the Idols). Translated by Walter

venting and rediscovering a past understanding of philosophy and philosophical wisdom as a

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