The Uses and Abuses of History for Life

Dec 25

My preferred way of engaging with books is reconstruction. These notes were created during my reading process to aid my own understanding and not written for the purpose of instruction. With that said, I’ve decided to share these unedited notes on the off chance they are helpful to other readers.

Summary

In the Uses and Abuses of History for Life, Nietzsche is writing to a Germany that is suffering from an excess of history and culture. What appears to be, prima facie, a critique of his contemporary intellectual climate and educational failures is actually a treatise on the fundamental metaphysical substance of life and the foundational epistemic building block of knowledge. Nietzsche’s essay is worth reading because it challenges modernity’s worship of knowledge with such convincing eloquence. Life should not be in service of knowledge, as it is now, but knowledge should be in the service of life.

Three key capacities are necessary to subjugate history and, more generally, knowledge under the needs of life: the suprahistoric capacity to synthesize and unify, the unhistoric capacity to forget and repress, and the historic capacity to record and remember.

First, the individual must set a bound or “horizon” upon his sphere of knowledge by finding a balance between the unhistoric and historic, by forgetting and remembering just the right amount. Forget important information, and you are bound to repeat past failures. Remember too much, and you will be paralyzed with information. Nietzsche comes to the surprising conclusion that life, if it is to be lived in its most vivid and vigorous manner, can only burgeon when it is safe from certain pieces of knowledge. It is the unhistoric drive that represents life. Second, one must synthesize and unify whatever knowledge is in one’s horizon as to make a congruent being. This is done by the suprahistorical capacity under the dictates of the unhistoric, that is to say, under the needs of life.

If a balance is achieved between these capacities, one can adapt and manipulate history for the use of life in three legitimate ways. Monumental history highlights the great figures of the past and invites the presently ambitious to imitate greatness. Antiquarian history emphasizes lineage and helps the currently distraught and lost feel justified in their existence. Lastly, critical history exposes the injustice of the past and helps the oppressed of today with resources to enact change. None of these historiographies is objective by any stretch of the imagination. They are highly subjective selections, highlights, distortions or even untruths but they are made to serve whatever needs life and society has at the moment. Vergil’s Aeneid comes to mind: it was highly fictionalized but served a clear purpose for making life vigorous.

Contemporary historiography, however, is a fourth kind of history: objective history. It is concerned with knowing as much as possible, with collecting all of the facts. It is not produced from a balance of the three capacities but a fetishization of the historic, of remembering.

Nietzsche wants to say that there is no such objectivity. We always select and ignore facts, highlight certain causal chains and deemphasize others. The subject is always there doing the interpretation. What ends up happening, when we try to be objective in our history is that we simply turn ourselves into so impotent and weak characters as to not have any of our own personality reflected in the history we write. We are content calling that “objective” which is merely bland and flavorless. This history ends up an uncontrollable and unsynthesizeable mess. Instead, we should only read history that is interpreted through the lens of great figures. Only he who has made history knows what to preserve in it.

His deeper criticism is that this messy, unsynthesized jumble of historical knowledge has rendered his age ironic, cynical, and disgusted. It is ironic because there is such a great disparity between the knowledgeable interiors and the impotent exteriors. People can pull facts out left and right, but there is no unity in these facts and no congruence from which they can create anything of their own. A culture fascinated with history will leave nothing worthy of history. It is cynical because of Hegel. It would be a sad but noble fate if Germany rightfully recognized itself as a declining heir to the great Greco cultures through antiquarian history. But Hegel flipped this on its head: modernity is now the pinnacle of all history. Furthermore, Hegel suggests that history progresses not by great figures, who are but products of the masses, but of the spirit in the masses themselves. Nietzsche believes that meaningful progress is only made by great individuals who do not grow out of but oppose the movement of the masses. Hegel’s view is a cynical one because it takes away the agency of any actor in history and subjugates it to the spirit. Lastly, this culture, polluted by knowledge and history, is one that must become disgusted of itself because it is impotent. It is so paralyzed by diversity and an abundance in knowledge that it no longer knows how to act, how to live. It will soon see that it will create nothing of importance, and feel disgusted towards itself.

The solution which Nietzsche prescribes is unsurprising: reintroduce the unhistorical capacity of forgetting and the suprahistorical capacity of synthesis. We need to live life not in the pursuit of knowledge but by examining our needs of life and adapting knowledge to satisfy those needs. We may end up more stupid and less knowledgeable by contemporary standards, but that is fine: we will be more filled with life.

Three Relationships with History

Nietzsche introduces us to two types of relationships with history — the historical and the unhistorical — by depicting their most exaggerated caricatures.

The unhistorical caricature is the cow who can barely remember it’s previous thought but is incredibly happy because of it. What is constitutive for happiness is “the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is”. Forgetting is so central to happiness because it enables one to be fully immersed in the present moment: “it conceals nothing and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore never be anything but honest”. This is comparable to the bird of prey that acts without free will and is all the better for it because it did not have to alienate and objectify itself through thought. Its instincts are not repressed with self-control and its experiences are not tainted by overthinking. It just is.

The historical caricature is the man who can never forget and is forced to remember every single detail of all of his experiences all the time. This is not a man who only has the gift of perfect memory but one who is cursed to have this knowledge front and center in his consciousness consistently. Not only would he not have the capacity to be happy, but he also would find it very hard to just live because he would be “condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly dare to raise his finger”. Just as one cannot make any sense from a static screen on TV, even though it is the state at which the most amount of information is encoded, the man who cannot forget is burdened with so much knowledge that he is unable to make sense of the world. Everywhere he sees a meaningless “becoming” that overloads his senses. Unlike the cow, he cannot find any solid, stable “being” from which he can act with full congruence.

The unhistorical — the capacity to forget, repress, delude, distort — is thus necessary for life because it is the only state from which we can act. “We shall thus have to account the capacity to feel to a certain degree unhistorically as being more vital and more fundamental, inasmuch as it constitutes the foundation upon which alone anything sound, healthy and great, anything truly human, can grow. The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the destruction of which it must vanish”. With that said, the historical — the capacity to remember, “think, reflect, compare, distinguish” — is constitutive for what it means to be human because only through it do we improve and progress in a manner that animals do not. “Only through the power of employing the past for the purposes of life and of again introducing into history that which has been done and is gone — did man become man: but with an excess of history man again ceases to exist, and without that envelope of the unhistorical he would never have begun or dared to begin”.

We have already arrived at the central thrust of Nietzsche’s argument: ”the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people, and of a culture”. But the rest of the essay cautions more of the latter than the former for two reasons. First, Nietzsche writes in and is addressing a German nation which prides itself with the historical. Nietzsche is correcting an imbalance by warning against the dangers of not being able to forget. Second, while the two capacities are equally necessary, the ability to forget is, in some sense, more foundational: “it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting”. As is already evident, Nietzsche’s scope when using the word “history” is much broader than just past events and “life” refers to much more than just civil society. History sometimes means historical events but often refers to knowledge in general. Similarly, life is often used to refer to German civil society but, in it’s broadest sense, refers to the fundamental ontological building block: the “dark insatiable power that thirsts for itself”. Life is the fundamental force in the universe responsible for all creation and destruction. What appears to be a treatise about history and civil society is, at its core, a manifesto to overthrow epistemology (knowledge) and crown metaphysics (life) as the rightful foundation. It aims to find a better balance between these two forces which are represented by the historical and the unhistorical respectively.

There are two primary methods in which this balance is struct: the horizon and the plastic powers. The horizon is a barrier to block out crippling knowledge. It is created by the capacity to forget as well as to remember: the unhistorical and the historical. “That which such a nature cannot subdue it knows how to forget; it no longer exists, the horizon is rounded and closed, and there is nothing left to suggest there are people, passions, teachings, goals lying beyond it“. Of course, the same knowledge that is crippling for one might not be for another depending on one’s plastic powers. “To determine this degree, and therewith the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, a culture is: I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds”. The strength of one’s plastic powers and the distance of one’s horizon is positively correlated: “The stronger the innermost roots of a man’s nature, the more readily will he be able to assimilate and appropriate the things of the past; and the most powerful and tremendous nature would be characterized by the fact that it would know no boundary at all at which the historical sense began to overwhelm it; it would draw to itself and incorporate into itself all the past, its own and that most foreign to it, and as it were transform it into blood.“

The horizon is created by the unhistorical capacity and the historical capacity. Similarly, the unhistorical capacity is also partially responsible for the plastic powers. Only the fundamental force of life can “develop out of oneself in one’s own way … heal wounds … replace what has been lost … recreate broken moulds”. But there is another constitutive capacity responsible for the plastic powers: synthesis. Only through synthesis can one “transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign”. Thus, we must turn towards the third and last relationship with history: the suprahistorical. Just as the historic is defined by remembering and the unhistoric by forgetting, the suprahistorical is defined by its capacity to synthesize.

The suprahistorical ability to synthesize is founded upon a specific form of wisdom, the wisdom to see that history is generated by the unhistoric. That is to say, it is only in the cow-like unhistoric state where one is not thinking about consequences, justice, or anything, does one have the direct access to that immense power of life which alone is strong enough to make history. This wisdom recognizes “the essential condition of all happenings [as the] blindness and injustice in the soul of him who acts”. Nietzsche elaborates:

It is the condition in which one is the least capable of being just; narrow-minded, ungrateful to the past, blind to dangers, deaf to warnings, one is a little vortex of life in a dead sea of darkness and oblivion: and yet this condition — unhistorical, anti-historical through and through — is the womb not only of the unjust but of every just deed too; and no painter will paint his picture, no general achieve his victory, no people attain its freedom without having first desired and striven for it in an unhistorical condition such as that described. As he who acts is, in Goethe’s words, always without a conscience, so is he also always without knowledge; he forgets most things so as to do one thing, he is unjust towards what lies behind him, and he recognizes the rights only of that which is now to come into being and no other rights whatever. Thus he who acts loves his deed infinitely more than it deserves to be loved: and the finest deeds take place in such a superabundance of love that, even if their worth were incalculable in other respects, they must still be unworthy of this love.

The generator of history is a deluded state of obsession that is not necessarily unjust but orthogonal to justice because it simply manifests its being without thinking. This wisdom is foundational to synthesis because: “it enables us to recognize how unaware even the greatest and highest spirits of our human race have been of the chance nature of the form assumed by the eyes through which they see and through which they compel everyone to see — compel, that is, because the intensity of their consciousness is exceptionally great. He who has not grasped this quite definitely and in many instances will be subjugated by the appearance of a powerful spirit who brings to a given form the most impassioned commitment”. The historical man who does not grasp this wisdom is subjugated in awe by great characters — the Napoleons and the Cesars — of history. They reason that the only valid explanation for their greatness must be from some unexplainable “powerful spirit”. How is the historical man supposed to synthesize when his history is driven by mythical figures whose source of power is ineffable? The suprahistorical man knows better: the only reason they are able to compel is because of “the intensity of their consciousness”, how unhistoric they are. And even this disposition is created by “chance”. These great figures become demythologized. History, from the lens of the suprahistoric, is no longer populated by a set of mythical figures, but rather by forces and laws which, by chance, produce these great figures that propel it forward. Through this wisdom, the suprahistorical man “would, indeed, be cured forever of taking history too seriously”. It is this disrespect for history, as the historical man worships it, that enables the suprahistorical man to synthesize, to draw parallels and comparisons between great figures and events that would have seemed both nonsensical and blasphemous to the historical man. The suprahistorical is that which leads “the eye away from becoming[, the domain of the historical man,] towards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternal and stable, towards art and religion”.

By demythologizing history, the suprahistorical is free to examine it and inquire into the most foundational forces within it. It is naturally drawn to synthesize, to see sameness where the historical man sees difference. “The past and the present are one, that is to say, with all their diversity identical in all that is typical and, as the omnipresence of imperishable types, a motionless structure of a value that cannot alter and a significance that is always the same. Just as the hundreds of different languages correspond to the same typically unchanging needs of man, so that he who understood these needs would be unable to learn anything new from any of these languages, so the suprahistorical thinker beholds the history of nations and of individuals from within, clairvoyantly divining the original meaning of the various hieroglyphics and gradually even coming wearily to avoid the endless stream of new signs: for how should the unending superfluity of events not reduce him to satiety, over-satiety and finally to nausea”!

Herein lies the danger of the suprahistorical. If synthesis is overdone, if one sees sameness in too much, wisdom turns to nausea through the hubris that one has seen everything under the sun. Pushed to its extreme: “the viewer from this vantage point could no longer feel any temptation to go on living or to take part in history”. Thus, the unhistorical capacity of action must restrain the suprahistorical capacity of synthesis to produce strong plastic powers, just as the unhistorical capacity of forgetting must limit the historical capacity of remembering for an optimal horizon.

Any healthy organism requires strong plastic powers and an optimal horizon. Nietzsche’s Germany has neither because of its fixation on the historic. The historic drive corrupts the unhistoric force of life and because of this corrupts itself since good history can only manifest by the interpretation of a great figure, from he who is full of life. “For when [the historic force] attains a certain degree of excess, life crumbles and degenerates, and through this degeneration history itself finally degenerates too”. Furthermore, without the unhistoric force of life to balance the suprahistorical force, the latter becomes more and more nauseated.

We must proceed through a discussion of the utility of history for life before we can discuss how it can be harmful to life: “That life is in need of the services of history, however, must be grasped as firmly as must the proposition, which is to be demonstrated later, that an excess of history is harmful to the living man.“

Three Uses of History

History is useful to man in three ways, and we must understand these uses as conditional lest they manifest disastrous effects.

Each of the three species of history which exist belongs to a certain soil and a certain climate and only to that: in any other it grows into a devastating weed. If the man who wants to do something great has need of the past at all, he appropriates it by means of monumental history; he, on the other hand, who likes to persist in the familiar and the revered of old, tends the past as an antiquarian historian; and only he who is oppressed by a present need, and who wants to throw off this burden at any cost, has need of critical history, that is to say a history that judges and condemns. Much mischief is caused through the thoughtless transplantation of these plants: the critic without need, the antiquary without piety, the man who recognizes greatness but cannot himself do great things, are such plants, estranged from their mother soil and degenerated into weeds.

Monumental history

Monumental history is for “the man of deeds and power, [for] him who fights a great fight, who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries”. His goal is not his own flourishing but the flourishing of a nation or mankind as a whole. There is a deep optimism and belief in the human condition as he views history as an epic landscape connected by the peaks of great figures. Because he thinks in terms of continuation and lineage he can only be motivated by that which is lasting: fame.

Mostly there is no reward beckoning him on, unless it be fame, that is, the expectation of a place of honour in the temple of history, where he in turn can be a teacher, comforter and admonisher to those who come after him. For the commandment which rules over him is: that which in the past was able to expand the concept ‘man’ and make it more beautiful must exist everlastingly, so as to be able to accomplish this everlastingly. That the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that this chain unites mankind across the millennia like a range of human mountain peaks, that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great — that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in the demand for a monumental history.

The motivation from monumental history comes from the fact that it shows what has been done:

Supposing someone believed that it would require no more than a hundred men educated and actively working in a new spirit to do away with the bogus form of culture which has just now become the fashion in Germany, how greatly it would strengthen him to realize that the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the shoulders of just such a band of a hundred men.

And motivate it must in order to counter the immense resistance met on the monumental path, a path that “leads through human brains“. Other than the man of power and deeds, “everything else that lives cries No. The monumental shall not come into existence — that is the counter-word. Apathetic habit, all that is base and petty, filling every corner of the earth and billowing up around all that is great like a heavy breath of the earth, casts itself across the path that greatness has to tread on its way to immortality and retards, deceives, suffocates and stifles it”.

The contributions of monumental history lie in this ability motivate: it shows that the past is worthy of imitation and that it is possible to be imitated and repeated. To do this it must simplify or ignore the causes altogether and paint history as a series of effects in themselves. This makes the past worthy of imitation because it highlights the great deeds and not the, perhaps less than epic conditions, that created them. This makes the past possible to imitate because it covers the immense set of conditions outside an actor’s control that was necessary for these deeds to come to be.

It will always have to deal in approximations and generalities, in making what is dissimilar look similar; it will always have to diminish the differences of motives and instigations so as to exhibit the effectus monumentally, that is to say as something exemplary and worthy of imitation, at the expense of the causae: so that, since it as far as possible ignores causes, one might with only slight exaggeration call it a collection of effects in themselves’, of events which will produce an effect upon all future ages.

“Monumental history deceives by analogies: with seductive similarities it inspires the courageous to foolhardiness and the inspired to fanaticism”. By removing the varied causes and conditions of the past, it inspires through deception. Thus, it is dangerous if this mode of history is not being balanced out by the other two:

As long as the soul of historiography lies in the great stimuli that a man of power derives from it, as long as the past has to be described as worthy of imitation, as imitable and possible for a second time, it of course incurs the danger of becoming somewhat distorted, beautified and coming close to free poetic invention; there have been ages, indeed, which were quite incapable of distinguishing be tween a monumentalized past and a mythical fiction, because precisely the same stimuli can be derived from the one world as from the other … If, therefore, the monumental mode of regarding history rules over the other modes — I mean over the antiquarian and critical — the past itself suffers harm: whole segments of it are forgotten, despised, and flow away in an uninterrupted colourless flood, and only individual embellished facts rise out of it like islands: the few personalities who are visible at all have something strange and unnatural about them, like the golden hip which the pupils of Pythagoras supposed they saw on their master.

Furthermore, monumental history is devastating not only at the hands of the powerful, as a tool for continued bloodshed and conquest, but it can be even dangerous at the hands of the weak. Out of resentment, the weak turn past monuments into a canon which suppresses current greatness:

For they do not desire to see new greatness emerge: their means of preventing it is to say ‘Behold, greatness already exists!’ In reality, they are as little concerned about this greatness that already exists as they are about that which is emerging: their lives are evidence of this. Monumental history is the masquerade costume in which their hatred of the great and powerful of their own age is disguised as satiated admiration for the great and powerful of past ages, and muflled in which they invert the real meaning of that mode of regarding history into its opposite; whether they are aware of it or not, they act as though their motto were: let the dead bury the living.

Antiquarian history

Antiquarian history is for the man who, unlike the monumental, looks back with a sense of piety towards the past that is rooted from a respect of the present. It serves life in two ways. First, it preserves that which is good from antiquity, it perpetuates the desirable conditions under which one grew up. Second, it makes people feel justified in their existence: “the contentment of the tree in its roots, the happiness of knowing that one is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that one’s existence is thus excused and, indeed, justified — it is this which is today usually designated as the real sense of history”.

To accomplish this, history must again be distorted. In fact, regardless of the type of history, “as long as the study of history serves life and is directed by the vital drives, the past itself suffers”. One’s field of view must be narrowed to significant moments in one’s lineage, and even that is presented in isolation without context. It becomes blindly praised simply because it is “us” with no standard with which we can judge or measure:

The antiquarian sense of a man, a community, a whole people, always possesses an extremely restricted field of vision; most of what exists it does not perceive at all, and the little it does see it sees much too close up and isolated; it cannot relate what it sees to anything else and it therefore accords everything it sees equal importance and therefore to each individual thing too great importance. There is a lack of that discrimination of value and that sense of proportion which would distinguish between the things of the past in a way that would do true justice to them; their measure and proportion is always that accorded them by the backward glance of the antiquarian nation or individual. This always produces one very imminent danger: everything old and past that enters one’s field of vision at all is in the end blandly taken to be equally worthy of reverence, while everything that does not approach this antiquity with reverence, that is to say everything new and evolving, is rejected and persecuted. Thus even the Greeks tolerated the hieratic style in their plastic arts beside the free and great; later, indeed, they did not merely tolerate the elevated nose and the frosty smile but even made a cult of it. When the senses of a people harden in this fashion, when the study of history serves the life of the past in such a way that it undermines continuing and especially higher life, when the historical sense no longer conserves life but mummifies it, then the tree gradually dies unnaturally from the top downwards to the roots — and in the end the roots themselves usually perish too. Antiquarian history itself degenerates from the moment it is no longer animated and inspired by the fresh life of the present. Its piety withers away, the habit of scholarliness continues without it and rotates in egoistic self-satisfaction around its own axis.

Nietzsche suggests that the natural quality of antiquarian history to idolize the past without qualification is dangerous because it provides us with no standards of discrimination. The sole measure of value becomes age, and this is antithetical to any form of creation. Once Antiquarian history descends into this past-worship, life itself suffers and along with it. Antiquarian history suffers because there is no longer any vibrancy or hope in the present that is worth justifying. The tree dies unnaturally from the branches. Even when Antiquarian history does not degenerate as such, is still dangerous to life: “for it knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it; it always undervalues that which is becoming because it has no instinct for divining it — as monumental history, for example, has. Thus it hinders any firm resolve to attempt something new, thus it paralyses the man of action who, as one who acts, will and must often some piety or other”.

Critical History

Critical history is for the man who is oppressed by current conditions and seeks a radical breakaway. He judges the past by bringing it to the tribunal and expelling it. “It is not justice which here sits in judgment; it is even less mercy which pronounces the verdict: it is life alone, that dark, driving power that insatiably thirsts for itself. Its sentence is always unmerciful, always unjust, because it has never proceeded out of a pure well of knowledge; but in most cases the sentence would be the same even if it were pronounced by justice itself”. Because it is the unhistoric, the unjust that creates history, all history would be rejected if under the judgement of justice much less the less impartial judgement of life.

In the stead of this rejected history, we impart another disposition and behavior, as if we had originated from a better more just story:

The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate: — always a dangerous attempt because it is so hard to know the limit to denial of the past and because second natures are usually weaker than first.

The danger of this type of history is obvious: we reject too much, our replacements are worse, or we are unable to break away altogether.

Objectivity as Misuse of History

All of the modes of history above can be used and misused, but fundamentally they are all within a framework that sees history in service of life. Misuse represents a mere deviation from this ideal:

That this is the natural relationship of an age, a culture, a nation with its history — evoked by hunger, regulated by the extent of its need, held in bounds by its inherent plastic powers — that knowledge of the past has at all times been desired only in the service of the future and the present and not for the weakening of the present or for depriving a vigorous future of its roots: all this is simple, as the truth is simple, and will at once be obvious even to him who has not had it demonstrated by historical proof.

Modernity has produced, through the demands of science, a fourth mode of history: objective history. It is characterized by a pursuit of history for its own sake or, more accurately, at the expense of life:

And what we see is certainly a star, a gleaming and glorious star interposing itself, the constellation really has been altered — by science, by the demand that history should be a science. Now the demands of life alone no longer reign and exercise constraint on knowledge of the past: now all the frontiers have been torn down and all that has ever been rushes upon mankind. All perspectives have been shifted back to the beginning of all becoming, back into infinity. Such an immense spectacle as the science of universal becoming, history, now displays has never before been seen by any generation; though it displays it, to be sure, with the perilous daring of its motto: fiat veritas, pereat vita (let knowledge flourish, but life perish).

It is not merely the perversion of the three previous modes of history, for it operates under a framework that is orthogonal to life. It’s defining characteristic is that it seeks knowledge for its own sake and thus in an infinite and insatiable manner. The next few sections are devoted to exploring the consequences of objective history:

The oversaturation of an age with history seems to me to be hostile and dangerous to life in five respects: such an excess creates that contrast between inner and outer which we have just discussed, and thereby weakens the personality; it leads an age to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a greater degree than any other age; it disrupts the instincts of a people, and hinders the individual no less than the whole in the attainment of maturity; it implants the belief, harmful at any time, in the old age of mankind, the belief that one is a latecomer and epigone; it leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism: in this mood, however, it develops more and more a prudent practical egoism through which the forces of life are paralyzed and at last destroyed.

Weakened Personality

A consequence of objective history is indigestion: the Germans have too much and incompatible knowledge internally such that they cannot synthesize it. This indigestion leads to “the most characteristic quality of modern man: the remarkable antithesis between an interior which fails to correspond to any exterior and an exterior which fails to correspond to any interior — an antithesis unknown to the peoples of earlier times”. Nietzsche distinguishes between form/exterior/living against content/interior/knowing and argues that there is an uncharacteristic incongruence between the two.

For example, the Germans are one of the most learned people yet they have yet to produce much culture themselves: “it is not a real culture at all but only a kind of knowledge of culture; it has an idea of and feeling for culture but no true cultural achievement emerges from them”. Likewise, he writes in an age where philosophical knowledge is more abundant than ever, yet no one truly embodies the philosophical life: “No one dares venture to fulfill the philosophical law in himself, no one lives philosophically with that simple loyalty that constrained a man of antiquity to bear himself as a Stoic wherever he was, whatever he did, once he had affirmed his loyalty to the Stoa. All modern philosophizing is political and official, limited by governments, churches, academies, customs and the cowardice of men to the appearance of scholarship”.

The incongruence is between a populated inner world of knowledge and non-existent outer world of life which Nietzsche attributes to objective history: “Knowledge, consumed for the greater part without hunger for it and even counter to one’s needs, now no longer acts as an agent for transforming the outside world but remains concealed within a chaotic inner world which modern man describes with a curious pride as his uniquely characteristic inwardness”.

This incongruence occurs because “history can be borne only fry strong personalities, weak ones are utterly extinguished fry it. The reason is that history confuses the feelings and sensibility when these are not strong enough to assess the past by themselves. He who no longer dares to trust himself but involuntarily asks of history ‘How ought I to feel about this?’ finds that his timidity gradually turns him into an actor and that he is playing a role, usually indeed many roles and therefore playing them badly and superficially”. That is to say, using the vocabulary we have already developed, one needs to have a strong enough set of plastic powers before expanding their horizon. Otherwise, people hear too many different voices in history and is unsure which one is right. They then begin role-playing characters which are suggested to them to be ideal. This may not have been a big deal in antiquity where historical knowledge was so limited because it was sought only for life and thus there were very few characters one could embody. But the plethora of characters and virtues brought forth by objective history paralyzes the weak. Thus, “the interior of the Germans can be receptive to an exceptional degree: serious, powerful, profound, and perhaps even richer than that of other nations; but as a whole, it remains weak because all these beautiful threads are not wound together into a powerful knot: so that the visible act is not the act and self-revelation of the totality of this interior but only a feeble or crude attempt on the part of one or other of these threads to pose as being the whole”.

Objective history not only exposes and exacerbates weak personalities, but weak personalities prefer objective history as opposed to these other modes. The weak are, according to Nietzsche “a race of eunuchs, and to a eunuch one woman is like another, simply a woman, woman in herself, the eternally unapproachable — and it is thus a matter of indifference what they do so long as history itself is kept nice and ‘objective’, bearing in mind that those who want to keep it so are forever incapable of making history themselves”. The objective is better called the “eternally subjectless“, because at this moment knowledge may never again trigger an effect, it may never affect life and action because any history merely stays within the inner content of the weak personality and does not affect its outer form. “Good and right things may be done, as deeds, poetry, music: the hollowed-out cultivated man at once looks beyond the work and asks about the history of its author”. They prefer this history because it relieves them the responsibility from action. Indeed, no action is produced from any history, only critiques which remain in the realm of the internal.

The historical culture of our critics will no longer permit any effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on life and action: their blotting-paper at once goes down even on the blackest writing, and across the most graceful design they smear their thick brush-strokes which are supposed to be regarded as corrections: and once again that is the end of that. But their critical pens never cease to flow, for they have lost control of them and instead of directing them are directed by them. It is precisely in this immoderation of its critical outpourings, in its lack of self-control, in that which the Romans call impotentia, that the modern personality betrays its weakness.

Because this incongruence between form and content, this impotence of action, is primarily from the content itself being indigestible, Nietzsche believes that it is of top priority to resolve the situation by unifying German thought:

I must render aid, that higher unity in the nature and soul of a people must again be created, that breach between inner and outer must again vanish under the hammer-blows of necessity. But what weapons can he employ? What does he have but, again, his pro found insight: propagating it and sowing it with full hands he hopes to implant a need: and out of a vigorous need there will one day arise a vigorous deed. And so as to leave no doubt of the source of my example of that need, that necessity, that perception, let me say expressly that it is for German unity in that highest sense that we strive, and strive more ardently than we do for political reunification, the unity of German spirit and life after the abolition of the antithesis of form and content, of inwardness and convention.

The illusion of Justice

Nietzsche critiques the idea that objective history allows modern historians to be more just.

He first builds suspicion by pointing out that most people who seek objective truth nowadays are not motivated out of justice but rather “a whole host of the most various drives — curiosity, flight from boredom, envy, vanity, the desire for amusement, for example“. How can the truth one seek lead to justice if justice was never the purpose to begin with?

Furthermore, even having the will to justice when seeking truth is not enough, one must be strong enough to judge. “But only superior strength can judge, weakness is obliged to tolerate if it is not to make a hypocritical pretence of strength and turn justice sitting in judgment into an actor“. He elaborates, perhaps with a reference to the disasters of slave morality: “the most terrible sufferings sustained by mankind have proceeded precisely from those possessing he drive to justice but lacking the power of judgment“. The central idea here is that judging without strength tends to be rooted from a drive other than justice such as resentment. And even when it is genuine, the weak judge damages the institution of justice because he can only play the role as an actor.

His critique deepens: to be objective really means to examine the past through current values and therefore reducing it down to the present:

And quite apart also from those wholly thoughtless people who when they write history do so in the naive belief that all the popular views of precisely their own age are the right and just views and that to write in accord with the views of their age is the same thing as being just; a belief in which every religion dwells and about which in the case of religions no further comment is needed. These naive historians call the assessment of the opinions and deeds of the past according to the everyday standards of the present moment ‘objectivity’: it is here they discover the canon of all truth; the task is to adapt the past to contemporary triviality.

Even when the historian evades the trap of cultural subjectivity, the moment of objective observation is actually an act of subjective creation. Facts still require a subject to tie into a comprehensible whole, and it is precisely this synthesis where the subjectivity of the historian seeps through:

And may an illusion not creep into the word objectivity even in its highest interpretation? According to this interpretation, the word means a condition in the historian which permits him to observe an event in all its motivations and consequences so purely that it has no effect at all on his own subjectivity: it is analogous to that aesthetic phenomenon of detachment from personal interest with which a painter sees in a stormy landscape with thunder and lightning, or a rolling sea, only the picture of them within him, the phenomenon of complete absorption in the things themselves: it is a superstition, however, that the picture which these things evoke in a man possessing such a disposition is a true reproduction of the empirical nature of the things themselves. Or is it supposed that at this moment the things as it were engrave, counterfeit, photograph themselves by their own action on a purely passive medium?

This would be mythology, and bad mythology at that: and it is forgotten, moreover, that that moment is precisely the strongest and most spontaneous moment of creation in the depths of the artist, a moment of composition of the highest sort, the outcome of which may be an artistically true painting but cannot be a historically true one. To think of history objectively in this fashion is the silent work of the dramatist; that is to say, to think of all things in relation to all others and to weave the isolated event into the whole: always with the presupposition that if a unity of plan does not already reside in things it must be implanted into them. Thus man spins his web over the past and subdues it, thus he gives expression to his artistic drive but not to his drive towards truth or justice. Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another.

Herein lies Nietzsche’s twofold critique of objectivity’s claim to justice. Not only does the urge towards objectivity have nothing to do with justice, but objectivity itself is a facade, merely radical subjectivity in disguise. To believe that there does exist a connection is “to believe that he to whom a moment of the past means nothing at all is the proper man to describe it“.

He does not lament the fact that we can not reach the objective and instead advises that we merely read history filtered through the lens of the most worthy perspective: that of the “superior man“. For only does he who has created history know what to preserve in it:

If you are to venture to interpret the past you can do so only out of the fullest exertion of the vigour of the present: only when you put forth your noblest qualities in all their strength will you divine what is worth knowing and preserving in the past. Like to like! Otherwise you will draw the past down to you. Do not believe historiography that does not spring from the head of the rarest minds; and you will know the quality of a mind when it is obliged to express something universal or to repeat something universally known: the genuine historian must possess the power to remint the universally known into something never heard of before, and to express the universal so simply and profoundly that the simplicity is lost in the profundity and the profundity in the simplicity … To sum up: history is written by the experienced and superior man. He who has not experienced greater and more exalted things than others will not know how to interpret the great and exalted things of the past. When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it. The extraordinary degree and extent of the influence exercised by Delphi is nowadays explained principally by the fact that the Delphic priests had an exact knowledge of the past; now it would be right to say that only he who constructs the future has a right to judge the past.

The ability to remint the universally known into the alien represents an uncommon ability to escape from one’s cultural confines. Indeed, Nietzsche promises that if we were to see the world of great men, the primary lesson we would learn is to flee from and defy present culture:

If, on the other hand, you acquire a living knowledge of the history of great men, you will learn from it a supreme commandment: to become mature and to flee from that paralyzing upbringing of the present age which sees its advantage in preventing your growth so as to rule and exploit you to the full while you are still immature. And if you want biographies, do not desire those which bear the legend ‘So-and-So and his age’, but those upon whose title-page there would stand ‘a fighter against his age’. Satiate your soul with Plutarch and when you believe in his heroes dare at the same time to believe in yourself. With a hundred such men — raised in this unmodern way, that is to say, become mature and accustomed to the heroic — the whole noisy sham-culture of our age could now be silenced forever.

The Impossibility of Maturity

Objective history, unlike its three legitimate counterparts, is solely deconstructive and not constructive at all. The critical seeks to construct radical change, the antiquarian constructs a continuation, while the monumental constructs something great. The objective has nothing to offer because objectivity puts knowledge above life by expelling the latter on charges of subjectivity and, in doing so, removes the only force from which we can construct.

The objective is deconstructive because, as we have discussed already, history progresses through the unjust, unhistorical force of life. Thus a mere “objective” recantation is enough to pose as a judgement “historical verification always brings to light so much that is false, crude, inhuman, absurd, violent” because that is how history progresses. This is not even to bring up the critical aura of Nietzsche’s age.

A deconstructive force, without reconstruction, merely destroys because it deconstructs illusion which we need for creation. “All living things require an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty vapor; if they are deprived of this envelope, if a religion, an art, a genius is condemned to revolve as a star without atmosphere, we should no longer be surprised if they quickly wither and grow hard and unfruitful. It is the same with all great things, ‘which never succeed without some illusion’, as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger”. In the final analysis, ‘he who destroys the illusions in himself and others is punished by nature, the cruelest tyrant’.

Some birds are blinded so that they may sing more beautifully; I do not think the men of today sing more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I know they have been blinded. The means, the infamous means used to blind them, however, is too bright, too sudden, too varying light.

What Nietzsche means is that there are some, namely the unhistoric, who are blinded without knowledge but as a result live more fully. The unhistoric has life without knowledge. Of course, there are also those who aren’t blinded, those who have immense wisdom but do not live as vivaciously. The suprahistoric has knowledge without life. But men of today, the historic, are blinded without knowledge and yet they do not live fully either because they are blinded not by darkness but by overwhelming information. The suprahistoric do not live because they are wise and content, the historic do not live because they are lost.

It is because of this blinding amount of knowledge that one must give up all value systems of judgement and finally retreat to stupidity:

We feel that one thing sounds different from another, that one thing produces a different effect from another: increasingly to lose this sense of strangeness, no longer to be very much surprised at anything, finally to be pleased with everything — that is then no doubt called the historical sense, historical culture. To speak without euphemism: the mass of the influx is so great, the strange, barbaric and violent things that press upon the youthful soul do so with such overwhelming power that its only refuge is in an intentional stupidity.

What this leads to is a sense of disgust. It is a disgust that stems from a paralyzing relativism. Because we do not know what to like and dislike, we have no firm reason to pick any point from which we can manifest our being and live fully. We feel as if we are random, arbitrary, and unjustified. Thus, this disgust is primarily a disgust of ourselves:

Where there has been a stronger and more subtle aware ness, another emotion has no doubt also appeared: disgust. The young man has become so homeless and doubts all concepts and all customs. He now knows: every age is different, it does not matter what you are like. In melancholy indifference he lets opinion after opinion pass him by and he understands how Holderlin felt when he read Diogenes Laertius on the lives and teachings of the Greek philosophers: ‘I have again found here what I have often before discovered, that the transitoriness and changeableness of human thoughts and systems strike me as being almost more tragic than the destinies which alone are usually called real.

Passivity

The proliferation of historical culture is the sign that an age considers itself old, a late-comer, an epigone. Because both operate under the assumption that the best is behind us and now it is time to reflect and judge: “there pertains an appropriate senile occupation, that of looking back, of reckoning up, of closing accounts, of seeking consolation through remembering what has been”.

Concealed within this idea that humanity is declining, that all noteworthy events have happened, that now is the time for judgement is the concealed Christian idea that “the end of the world is coming, that we are fearfully awaiting the Last Judgement”. The danger of Christianity is that it claims that we are at to late a stage to do anything, all which is important has happened already. “Austere and profoundly serious reflection on the worthlessness of all that has occurred, on the ripeness of the world for judgment, is dissipated into the skeptical attitude that it is at any rate as well to know about all that has occurred, since it is too late to do anything better“.

A religion which of all the hours of a man’s life holds the last to be the most important, which prophesies an end to all life on earth and condemns all who live to live in the fifth act of a tragedy, may well call forth the profoundest and noblest powers, but it is inimical to all new planting, bold experimentation, free aspiration; it resists all flight into the unknown because it loves and hopes for nothing there: it allows what is becoming to force its way up only with reluctance, and then when the time is ripe it sacrifices it or sets it aside as a seducer to existence, as a liar as to the value of existence.

Nietzsche concedes that Germany is indeed, first and foremost, an heir to the great Classical cultures. And there are four different ways of living in this position.

The first is that we embody the classical world before setting our sights beyond it, in exceeding it. At this point, this urge is distinctively unhistoric.

The second is to be a worthy imitator and heir, to practice antiquarian history well. “The thought of being epigones, which can often be a painful thought, is also capable of evoking great effects and grand hopes for the future in both an individual and in a nation, provided we regard ourselves as the heirs and successors of the astonishing powers of antiquity and see in this our honour and our spur”.

The third is to practice a distorted version of antiquarianism, what I imagine he would’ve labelled the Christian consciousness as. It prioritizes history over life, remembering over living. It is ironic because since they only remember, they cease to live, and their only act of remembering will cease to continue because they do not have enough life to produce heirs of their own who will remember them: “What I do not mean, therefore, is that we should live as pale and stunted late descendants of strong races coldly prolonging their life as antiquarians and gravediggers. Late descendants of that sort do indeed live an ironic existence: annihilation follows at the heels of the limping gait of their life; they shudder at it when they rejoice in the past, for they are embodied memory yet their remembrance is meaningless if they have no heirs. Thus they are seized by the troubled presentiment that their life is an injustice, since there will be no future life to justify it”. The only mode that they believe a life can be justified is to be remembered, yet their lives are distinctively unjust because it is not fruitful enough to be remembered because all it does is remember.

The last and worst is represented by the Hegelian who worships history and overlooks the agency of life so much so that it claims the true driver of history is history itself rather than the great figures within it:

The belief that one is a latecomer of the ages is, in any case, paralyzing and depressing: but it must appear dreadful and devastating when such a belief one day by a bold inversion raises this latecomer to godhood as the true meaning and goal of all previous events, when his miserable condition is equated with a completion of world-history. Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to talk of a ‘world-process’ and to justify their own age as the necessary result of this world-process; such a point of view has set history, insofar as history is ‘the concept that realizes itself’, ‘the dialectics of the spirit of the peoples’ and the ‘world- tribunal’, in place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the sole sovereign power.

Not only does the Hegelian refuse to recognize that it is merely an heir to greater cultures, but it actually claims that it is the best. What it fails to recognize that any noteworthy accomplishment and development in history is achieved not by acting with it but acting against “the world-process“ which is constituted by the collective will of the weak:

For speak of any virtue you will, of justice, magnanimity, bravery, of the wisdom and sympathy of man — in every case it becomes a virtue through rising against that blind power of the factual and tyranny of the actual and by submitting to laws that are not the laws of the fluctuations of history. It always swims against the tide of history, whether by combating its passions as the most immediate stupid fact of its existence or by dedicating itself to truthfulness as falsehood spins its glittering web around it. If history in general were nothing more than ‘the world-system of passion and error’, mankind would have to read it as Goethe advised his readers to read Werther: as if it called to them ‘be a man and do not follow after me!’ Fortunately, however, it also preserves the memory of the great fighters against history, that is to say against the blind power of the actual, and puts itself in the pillory by exalting precisely these men as the real historical natures who bothered little with the ‘thus it is’ so as to follow ‘thus it shall be’ with a more cheerful pride. Not to bear their race to the grave, but to found a new generation of this race — that is what impels them ceaselessly forward: and even if they themselves are late-born — there is a way of living which will make them forget it — coming generations will know them only as first-born.

From Irony to Cynicism to Disgust

The state of the world is ironic in a sense already discussed: modern consciousness historicizes but does not act, and by not acting, leaves nothing for the future to historicize. The pursuit of history orthogonal to life is self-defeating. The deeper irony, therefore, is the stark contrast between our abundant knowledge and impotent life:

Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are raving! Your knowledge does not perfect nature, it only destroys your own nature. Compare for once the heights of your capacity for knowledge with the depths of your incapacity for action. It is true you climb upon the sunbeams of knowledge up to Heaven, but you also climb down to chaos. Your manner of moving, that of climbing upon knowledge, is your fatality; the ground sinks away from you into the unknown; there is no longer any support for your life, only spider’s threads which every new grasp of knowledge tears apart.

This irony of not being able to act is comforted by the cynicism of Hegel’s world-process: history progresses by forces instead of individual actions which were never needed anyway.

Close beside the pride of modern man there stands his ironic view of himself, his awareness that he has to live in a historicizing, as it were a twilight mood, his fear that his youthful hopes and energy will not survive into the future. Here and there one goes further, into cynicism, and justifies the course of history, indeed the entire evolution of the world, in a manner especially adapted to the use of modern man, according to the cynical canon: as things are they had to be, as men now are they were bound to become, none may resist this inevitability … The pleasant feeling produced by this kind of cynicism is the refuge of him who cannot endure the ironical state; and the last decade has, moreover, made him a present of one of its fairest inventions, a full and rounded phrase to describe this cynicism: it calls his way of living in the fashion of the age and wholly without reflection ‘the total surrender of the personality to the world-process’.

That is to say, the only way the ironic man can justify his impotent existence is to take up the cynical view that history not only does not require individual action but is best pushed forward if we surrender ourselves to the world-process altogether. Therefore, the excess of the historical sense as represented by the idolization of history in Hegel is not coincidental but consciously employed. Objective history — studying history for the sake of history — produces impotent, ironic characters who then demand a cynical view which idolizes objective history. “We shall have to discover a particularly unpleasant fact: that the excesses of the historical sense from which the present day suffers are deliberately furthered, encouraged and — employed”.

History is indeed influenced largely by the masses, Nietzsche does not deny this. What he does reject is the position that legitimizes this force:

Expressed in Christian terms: the Devil is the regent of this world and the lord of success and progress: in all the powers in history he is the actual power, and that is essentially how it will always remain — even though the fact may be painful to the ears of an age accustomed to the idolization of success and power in history. For it is an age that is practised in bestowing new names on things and has even rebaptized the Devil. It is indeed the hour of a great peril: mankind seems near to discovering that the egoism of individuals, groups or the masses has at all times been the lever of the movements of history; at the same time, however, this discovery has caused no perturbation of any kind, but on the contrary, it has now been decreed: egoism shall be our god.

Society views the power of the masses as fruitful whereas Nietzsche views them as corrosive or merely inconsequential. Even though these masses may direct society, true progress and beauty always come at the hands of great figures who are in opposition to the masses:

The masses seem to me to deserve notice in three respects only: first as faded copies of great men produced on poor paper with worn-out plates, then as a force of resistance to great men, finally as instruments in the hands of great men; for the rest, let the Devil and statistics take them!

But under the Hegelian view of history, great figures are not created by opposing the masses but they are merely a product of the masses:

But the kind of history at present universally prized is precisely the kind that takes the great mass-drives for the chief and weightiest facts of history and regards great men as being no more than their clearest expression, as it were bubbles visible on the surface of the flood. Greatness is, under this supposition, the product of the masses, which is to say order is the product of chaos; and it is only natural that in the end the hymn of praise is sung to the masses that produce it.

As a result, we are contended at making the mediocre slightly more cultured instead of producing great figures. Society has been oriented away from the creation of great figures who, in the eyes of Nietzsche, truly advance mankind. This forced mediocrity can only lead to a disgust of our own age. Thus, irony leads to cynicism and finally to disgust:

Berlin businessman of an evening’, in which ‘the age no longer requires genius, because it would mean casting pearls before swine or because the age has advanced beyond the stage appropriate to geniuses to a more important one’ — to a stage of social evolution, that is to say, at which every worker, ‘having a workday which leaves him adequate leisure for intellectual training, leads a comfortable existence’. Rogue of rogues, you give voice to the longings of con temporary mankind: but you likewise know the spectre that will stand at the end of these years of manhood as an outcome of that intellectual training in solid mediocrity — disgust.

Not only is the modern view misguided in what truly improves the world or mankind, but even to ask this question, to optimize for the masses, to think that we can access the goals of mankind or the world, to think that action is only legitimate in so far as it only leads to this goal, to think that there is even such a goal in the first place, is presumptuous. Instead, we should ask what our individual goals are, who we want to be and manifest that out:

To what end the ‘world’ exists, to what end ‘ man kind’ exists, ought not to concern us at all for the moment except as objects of humour: for the presumptuousness of the little human worm is the funniest thing at present on the world’s stage; on the other hand, do ask yourself why you, the individual, exist, and if you can get no other answer try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting before yourself an aim, a goal, a ‘to this end’, an exalted and noble ‘to this end’. Perish in pursuit of this and only this — I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing, animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and the impossible.

Nietzsche hopes that one day history will once again be restored to the history of individuals, because, he argues, the goal of humanity is not that everyone may flourish, but to produce the best individuals possible.

The time will come when one will prudently refrain from all constructions of the world-process or even of the history of man; a time when one will regard not the masses but individuals, who form a kind of bridge across the turbulent stream of becoming. These individuals do not carry forward any kind of process but live contemporaneously with one another; thanks to history, which permits such a collaboration, they live as that republic of genius of which Schopenhauer once spoke; one giant calls to another across the desert intervals of time and, undisturbed by the excited chattering dwarfs who creep about beneath them, the exalted spirit-dialogue goes on. It is the task of history to be the mediator between them and thus, again and again, to inspire and lend the strength for the production of the great man. No, the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars.

The biggest problem now is that this excess history corrupts ones with the most capacity for life: the youth. By expanding the horizon beyond what their plastic powers can tame, they merely shrink back into the comfort of a small egoistic enclosure:

it can even deprive youth of its fairest privilege, of its power to implant in itself the belief in a great idea and then let it grow to an even greater one. A certain excess of history can do all this, w.e have seen it do it: and it does it by continually shifting horizons and removing a protective atmosphere and thus preventing man from feeling and acting unhistorically. From an infinite horizon he then returns to himself, to the smallest egoistic enclosure, and there he must grow withered and dry: probably he attains to cleverness, never to wisdom.

In summary, Nietzsche’s critique of the Hegelian conception of history is twofold. First, Hegel correctly identifies the influence of the masses but incorrectly legitimizes this “world-process”. Meaningful progress has always come at the hands of a few great figures who are in opposition to history. Second, the very idea that we can identify and ought to pursue some end goal of the world or mankind betrays how much undue importance we are giving to the masses. Instead, we should merely develop ourselves as individuals to the fullest.

Towards a Cure

The current system of education teaches us knowledge and facts about greatness and beauty before we ever experience it ourselves. It is as if they thought we could learn just by reading biographies:

The uniform canon is that the young man has to start with a knowledge of culture, not even with a knowledge of life and even less with life and experience itself. And this knowledge of culture is instilled into the youth in the form of historical knowledge; that is to say, his head is crammed with a tremendous number of ideas derived from a highly indirect knowledge of past ages and peoples, not from direct observation of life. His desire to experience something himself and to feel evolving within him a coherent living complex of experiences of his own — such a desire is confused and as it were made drunk by the illusory promise that it is possible to sum up in oneself the highest and most noteworthy experiences of former ages, and precisely the greatest of former ages, in a few years. It is exactly the same crazy method as that which leads our young painters into picture-galleries instead of into the workshop of a master and before all into the unique workshop of the unique master, nature. As though one could appropriate the arts and sciences of past times, the actual yield of their life’ s experience, by taking a fleeting stroll through the gallery of history! As though life itself were not a craft which must be learned from the ground up and practised remorselessly if it is not to eventuate in mere babblers and bunglers!

The solution must begin with the youth, for it is only they who have not been fully corrupted by this form of education:

That an education with this goal and this result is an anti-natural one is apprehensible only to one who has not yet been fully processed by it; it is apprehensible only to the instinct of youth, for youth still possesses that instinct of nature which remains intact until artificially and forcibly shattered by this education.

What the youth need to do is to be freed from this excess of history through the suprahistorical and unhistoric urges: “Now, one must not be surprised to find that it is called by the names of poisons: the antidote to the historical is called — the unhistorical and the suprahistorical. And with these names, we return to the beginning of our reflections and to its meditative calm”. These are recognized as poisons or a deformation by contemporary society because science does not want to forget and is thus antagonistic to the unhistoric. It also only deals with facts and is thus suspicious of the synthetic drive of the suprahistorical:

With the word ‘the unhistorical’ I designate the art and power of forgetting and of enclosing oneself within a bounded horizon; I call ‘suprahistorical’ the powers which lead the eye away from becoming towards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternal and stable, towards art and religion. Science — for it is science which would here speak of poisons — sees in these two forces hostile forces: for science considers the only right and true way of regarding things, that is to say, the only scientific way, as being that which sees everywhere things that have been, things historical, and nowhere things that are, things eternal; it likewise lives in a profound antagonism towards the eternalizing powers of art and religion, for it hates forgetting, which is the death of knowledge, and seeks to abolish all limitations of horizon and launch mankind upon an infinite and unbounded sea of light whose light is knowledge of all becoming.

We must go back to a position where life dominates knowledge because if knowledge dominates life and stifles it, it also stifles the basis for its own existence:

Is life to dominate knowledge and science, or is knowledge to dominate life? Which of these two forces is the higher and more decisive? There can be no doubt: life is the higher, the dominating force, for knowledge which annihilated life would have annihilated itself with it. Knowledge presupposes life and thus has in the preservation of life the same interest as any creature has in its own continued existence.

The first generation of youth that pursues this will suffer from both the sickness of the historic as well as the antidotes of the unhistoric and suprahistoric. That is to say, they will need to experiment with the latter which is not without its own trappings. But the youth will be nursing themselves back to life where “they will be sufficiently healthy again to study history and, to the ends of life, to employ the past in its three senses, namely monumental or antiquarian or critical. At that point they will be more ignorant than the ‘cultivated’ people of this present, for they will have unlearned many things and even have lost all desire so much as to glance at that which these cultivated people want to know most of all; from the point of view of these cultivated people, their distinguishing marks are precisely their ‘unculture’, their indifference and reserve towards much that is of high repute, even towards much that is good. Hut at this end-point of their cure they will have become human again and have ceased to be merely aggregates of humanlike qualities — that is something! That is some thing to hope for! Do your hearts not laugh when you hope, you hopeful young people”.

The most immediate steps are to start examining and living from our visceral needs of life rather than the commands of knowledge:

And how can we attain that goal? you will ask. At the beginning of a journey towards that goal, the god of Delphi cries to you his oracle: ‘Know yourself.’ It is a hard saying: for that god ‘conceals nothing and says nothing, but only indicates, as Heraclitus has said. What does he indicate to you? There were centuries during which the Greeks found themselves faced by a danger similar to that which faces us: the danger of being overwhelmed by what was past and foreign, of perishing through ‘history’. They never lived in proud inviolability: their ‘culture’ was, rather, for a long time a chaos of foreign, Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, Egyptian forms and ideas, and their religion truly a battle of all the gods of the East: somewhat as ‘German culture’ and religion is now a struggling chaos of all the West and of all past ages. And yet, thanks to that Apollonian oracle, Hellenic culture was no mere aggregate. The Greeks gradually learned to organize the chaos by following the Delphic teaching and thinking back to themselves, that is, to their real needs, and letting their pseudo-needs die out.

Johnathan Bi