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

Abstract

One of the most striking features of Nietzsche's philosophical writings 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 mythical 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 "Übermensch"). 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 Übermensch." 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 The figures are there from the early ghostlike figure of the "last philosopher" in Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the 1870s (cf. P, § 38), throughout the later post-Zarathustran writings, [End Page 1] 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).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.