THE UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1873–76) are some of Nietzsche's most neglected works. They have attracted the attentions of translators less often than most of his other, more celebrated books — Walter Kaufmann, the doyen of postwar American Nietzsche translators, never got round to translating them, and he goes so far as to suggest that they merit translating last of all. They have attracted relatively little scholarly interest, too, and are omitted from the canon established by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins in their Reading Nietzsche, while the term “untimeliness” has routinely been passed over in Nietzsche dictionaries. The Untimely Meditations have indeed become unfashionable (as the title of one of the English translations has it), although they represent some of the most impassioned statements of a number of Nietzsche's early philosophical positions.

Biographical and Intellectual Context

The period in which Nietzsche wrote the Untimely Meditations was a relatively stable and happy one in his personal life, even if he was periodically racked by debilitating illness. They are a product of the decade (1869–79) when he held down his “day job” as Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in northern Switzerland, and they reflect the high-water mark in his crucially formative relationship with Richard Wagner.