“We Philologists,” a Draft of an Untimely Meditation

The fragments, notes, and unpublished writings of the early 1870s are indications of Nietzsche’s creativity at the same time as an on-going uncertainty about the future of anything to be read by an unknown public, on topics more compelling than philological ones, as well as the more immediate relationship to his life as a teacher in a university. In the notes he makes for “We Philologists,” which were originally intended as a possible draft for a multi-part work that would become a shorter Untimely Meditations, there are a number of topics of interest since they continue and build on the development of his philosophy at the same time as his engagement with his pedagogy for students. The unpublished “We Philologists” is another of the writings of the time that gives us an intimate sense of himself and his ideas—biography and philology at odds with each other and for reasons he analyzes, psychologically, in this one aptly named writing. The repetition of the “we,” in a later section of Beyond Good and Evil, is not a chance event and recalls an experience when he had to make a choice about being part of a community or being on his own, the hermit of culture he identified with the ancient Greeks or modern in the sense being defined in his lifetime.