"It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, being necessarily a man of tomorrow
and the day after tomorrow,
has always found himself and had to find himself in contradiction to his today ..." [1]
Adam, who wishes to start a blog, writes to ask what makes a really effective post: 'Is it the personality of the writer alone that determines this?'
No: the effectiveness of a post has nothing to do with the personalty, the biography, or
the psychology of the one who is said to have authored it - any more than it
consists in allowing the reader to recognise themselves in the text.
It's how untimely the post is in itself that counts and, ultimately, the strength of a text "is measured by the extent to which it refutes its creator - i.e., grounds something altogether different than that on which its creator himself stood and had to stand" [2].
That's why D. H. Lawrence was right to advise that we trust the tale and not the teller of the tale, although he's mistaken to say that the text merely tells us the truth of the present [3]. For at its best - which is to say at its most Unzeitgemässe - great writing of all description occupies an anomalous and ambivalent position in time, often speaking of and to a readership to come [4].
Haunted by the past, perturbed by the present, the untimely blogger projects their work into the future like an arrow, affirming that Greater Day which is not simply our tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow [übermorgen] which belongs to the distant stranger [5].
Notes
[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §212, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 2003).
[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings VI', 34, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 318.
[3] See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14.
[4] Nietzsche famously makes an appeal to posterity and often likes to describe himself (and his philosophy) as untimely; i.e., "acting counter to our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come". See the Foreword to 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 60.
Readers who are interested in this topic might also like to see Duncan Large's excellent essay, 'On "Untimeliness": Temporal Structures in Nietzsche, Or "The Day After Tomorrow Belongs To Me"', Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 8, Autumn 1994, (Penn State University Press), pp. 33-53. Click here to read on JSTOR.
As Large rightly points out, affirmation of the future - in all its openness and possibility - is, for Nietzsche, the mark of a true philosopher; whilst, on the other hand, insistence on a perpetual present with no sense of futurity (only progress) is a sign of cultural decadence.
[5] Or, as Duncan Large describes it in the above essay, "the radically other time of the Übermensch, situated beyond a hiatus of qualitative temporal difference" [p. 49].
