An Untimely Meditation on How to Write an Effective Blog (The Nietzsche Birthday Post 2021)

 

"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].    

 

In Memory of My Father

John S. Hall (1912-2000) 

On June 6th my thoughts turn to my father, who died on this date seventeen years ago.

Here he is looking quite dapper at the end of the War, in October 1945, still a relatively young man in his early-thirties, though doubtless this was regarded as mature middle-age back then.

Fuck knows what he's thinking about - if anything.

Perhaps my mother, who would have been nineteen when this picture was taken; a picture he signed on the back and gave to her, so he must have been relatively pleased with the likeness. Possibly it was taken on his birthday, though I don't know that any more than I know where the photo was taken or by whom.       

One presumes it was taken in Newcastle, his hometown. For he and my mother only moved south, to London, after they were married in 1948. But, again, I can't say for sure. As far as I'm aware, my family history isn't full of dark secrets. But it lacks transparency and documentation and my father hardly ever spoke about his past - which is a shame, as, by the time I was born, that was the greater part of his life.

Having said that, I've always been grateful not to be overburdened with memories and free from extended family ties; to feel neither love nor loyalty to any relatives or ancestors. I think never having met any of my grandparents, for example, helped me as a philosopher to feel untimely and experience something of the joy of orphans who gain through loss.

But still, it's nice to recall my father at least once a year and thereby allow a little sentimentality to creep into this blog as a counter-theoretical form of discourse which, as Barthes says, is a necessary transgression that serves to prevent writing from becoming too puritanical (i.e. lacking in the warmth and softness of feeling that is often responsible for the pleasure of the text).