 The first of these attacks David Strauss, whose popular six-edition book, The Old and the New Faith: A Confession (1871) encapsulated for Nietzsche the general cultural atmosphere in Germany. Responding to Strauss’s advocacy of a “new faith” grounded upon a scientifically-determined universal mechanism—one, however, lubricated by the optimistic, “soothing oil” of historical progress—Nietzsche criticizes Strauss’s view as a vulgar and dismal sign of cultural degeneracy. Nietzsche’s friend, Overbeck, in his contemporaneous writings, also adopted a critical attitude towards Strauss. The second “untimely meditation” surveys alternative ways to write history, and discusses how these ways could contribute to a society’s health. Here Nietzsche claims that the principle of “life” is a more pressing and higher concern than that of “knowledge,” and that the quest for knowledge should serve the interests of life. This parallels how, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had looked at art through the perspective of life and foreshadows Nietzsche’s hallmark theme of “life-affirmation” in his later works.