CHAPTER 5Untimely Meditations
The spirits of the epoch • Thinking in the workhouse ·
Grand disenchantments · Untimely Meditations * Against
materialism and historidsm · Coups and detoxifications ·
Nietzsche and S timerJ 1IETZSCHE CHERISHED the colossal power of music and
yearned for the return of a tragic oudook on life that would value
Dionysian wisdom over science. However, he found himself in the mid-
dle of an epoch that was celebrating one scientific triumph after another.
Positivism, empiricism, economism, and utilitarian thinking defined the
age. Optimism reigned supreme. Nietzsche indignandy noted that the
founding of the new German empire was widely hailed as a "devastat-
ing blow to all 'pessimistic' philosophizing" (1,364; SE § 4). Nietzsche
pronounced his epoch "open" and "honest," but crude, and "more sub-
missive to any sort of reality and more faithful," privileging theories that
would justify "subjugation to the real."
Nietzsche was aghast at the petty bourgeois, and even pusillanimous,
aspect of this approach to reality. The realism that had predominated
since the middle of the century subjugated itself to the real only in order
to control it more fully and transform it according to its own design.
Nietzsche's subsequent proclamation of a "will to power" was already in
evidence, not in the lofty form of the Übermensch, but in the busy beaver-
like activity of a civilization that applied science to all practical matters.
208