Analysis of untimely meditations from Nietzsche’s letters: indicative of an aesthetic and educational perspective

Abstract

Between the years 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche wrote four books which He called Untimely Meditations: David Strauss, the confessor and thewriter; Onthe Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life; Schopenhauer as educator and Wagner in Bayreuth. In them, the philosophe restablishes a criticism in favor of a high culture, whose classics from Ancient Greece and Rome and Germanyit self are the educational means presented as a counter point. The adversaryis the gregarious conception of culture, in force in the 19 th century, which, according to Nietzsche, had the utilitarian interests of the State as them main form of organizing life. This [the State] sucked up all creative forces, such as youth education, scientific interests, reducing everyone to the yoke of business. It was the period when Germany won the Franco-Prussian war and sought to structureit self politically, but, Nietzsche perceives several pitfalls present in this process, such as the danger of culture becoming a servant of politics. This concern also appears in their correspondence, written between the years 1850 and 1888, in them, we also see thought as "instruments of combat" against social decay.