On The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life

“Superfluous excess is the enemy of the necessary.”

Nietzsche is clear at the opening of his discourse that the value of history may be judged by its pertinence to life. He contextualizes his analysis in the contemporary German superfluity of historical education and scholarship. Nietzsche asserts that his role as a philologist is to critique the assumptions of his age in order to positively influence its growth.

“Man says ‘I remember’ and envies the animal which immediately forgets.”

Memory is used by Nietzsche to differentiate human beings from animals, and therefore is a defining characteristic of mankind. Humans, insofar as they remember, stand in opposition to nature, which is envisioned as a bucolic herd of cows in a field, and is inherently “unhistorical.” Since by Nietzsche’s reasoning memory prevents man from truly living in the moment, and afflicts him or her with ruminations on the past and awareness of mortality, history for Nietzsche is intrinsic to the fundamental philosophical questions.

“[O]nly through the power to use the past for life and to refashion what has happened into history, does man become man.”

For Nietzsche, the capacity of mankind to negotiate both the historical (remembered) and unhistorical (imminent) is essential to its thriving. Nietzsche later elaborates on the difficulties of jurisprudence in Chapter 6, and argues that the ability to forget, or the unhistorical, is essential to any great act. This capacity to forget appropriately constitutes the “plastic power” of the human agent (67).

“The best deeds occur in such an exuberance of love that of this love, at least, they must be unworthy even if their value is otherwise immeasurably great.”

Nietzsche draws the example of falling in love (a “contra-historical” occurrence) to illustrate his point that both historical and unhistorical states are required in any successful action. The paradox, then, is that history is made of great acts, resulting from unhistorical motivations, or moments of forgetting. Thus, all actions are for Nietzsche inherently blind.

“History, conceived of as pure science and become sovereign, would constitute a kind of final closing out of the accounts of life for mankind.”

In his valuation of history only for its contribution to life, Nietzsche rejects the conception of history as comprehensible and instead isolates the value of history precisely in its unknowability. The “historical power” of an event is thus precisely located in its blindness and incomprehensibility. This notion of life as change dates back to Heraclitus and appears in the thought of major philosophers. Nietzsche’s essay is distinguished by its project of reconciling history with the unhistorical.

“Fame is more than the most delicious morsel of our self love […] it is a protest against the change of generations and transitoriness.”

In contrast with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche defines fame as a continuity of epoch-defining acts. He envisions these monolithic moments as giants who call to each other “across the bleak intervals of ages […] undisturbed by the wantonly noisy dwarves who creep beneath them” (58). Fame had a substantially different meaning for Nietzsche than it does for us today. It is figured in this essay as the reverberation of great acts through time.

“That this is the natural relation of an age, a culture, a people to history—brought on by hunger, regulated by the degree of need, held within limits by the inherent plastic power—that knowledge of the past is at all times desired only in the service of the future and the present.”

Nietzsche’s conception of history is a plastic, or mutable one, which shifts in response to the prevailing societal need. Nietzsche’s conception of power is the proper combination of historical and the unhistorical. The combination of the two, of remembering and forgetting, shapes great acts. This is the “plasticity” that Nietzsche is talking about: the ability to change and shape the course of history through well-judged action.

“The people that can be called cultured must in reality be a living unity and not fall apart so miserably into an inside and an outside, a content and a form.”

In our internet-immersed age, Nietzsche’s claim that prevalence of information can erode society’s ability to discriminate is especially apposite. Nietzsche argues that only with integrity can true culture flower, and growth occur. His argument that the superfluity of information threatens the integrity of society is also especially relevant to the information age, in which society is facing new challenges to its sense of unity, and new kinds of confusion at its borders.

“Modern man suffers from a weakened personality.”

Nietzsche argues that society has overindulged in knowledge and thus grown disaffected, complacent and diffuse. He uses the register of gluttonous consumption to figure society as a fattened gourmand:“a new stimulant for the weary palates; greedy for history” (27). More clueless than a child, he says, society has lost its instinct. A “strong” personality for Nietzsche appears to be one with the ability to defy the mores of the moment, and judge with discernment.

“Only through this sincerity will the distress, the inner misery of modern man reach the light of day and the timidly hidden convention and masquerade can then be replaced by art and religion as true helpers, together to plant a culture which is adequate to true needs and not, like contemporary general education, only teach to lie to oneself about these needs and thus to become a walking lie.”

The insincerity of modern society is problematic for Nietzsche. He figures the contemporary society as artificial, and out of step with nature. Nietzsche’s “walking lie” here clearly informed another seminal modernist text, Henri Bergson’s An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), in which Bergson describes the essence of the comic as rigidity and repetition, and in opposition to life’s perpetual movement.

“[…] only strong personalities can endure history; the weak are completely extinguished by it.”

The reason Nietzsche gives for this bold statement in Chapter 5 is that the individual who does not trust themselves will look outward to history for validation and understanding and become an actor. This statement is closely tied with Important Quote #10, which together form the crux of Nietzsche’s argument against history. It is also literally true that in Nietzsche’s conception, those who are incapable of great acts will not attain fame and will be forgotten. The weak will be the “noisy dwarves” that separate the looming giants of history. In this sense the weak are not only unactualized but obstructive to great acts.

“[…] the most terrible sufferings have come upon man precisely from a drive to justice which lacks power of judgment.”

The reason Nietzsche gives for this bold statement in Chapter 5 is that the individual who does not trust themselves will look outward to history for validation and understanding and become an actor. This statement is closely tied with Important Quote #10, which together form the crux of Nietzsche’s argument against history. It is also literally true that in Nietzsche’s conception, those who are incapable of great acts will not attain fame and will be forgotten. The weak will be the “noisy dwarves” that separate the looming giants of history. In this sense the weak are not only unactualized but obstructive to great acts.

“[…] the most terrible sufferings have come upon man precisely from a drive to justice which lacks power of judgment.”

Nietzsche argues that not only is the pursuit of truth in its purity rare, but that corrupted, this same impulse is disastrous. He claims that it requires both will and power to judge correctly, along with a commitment to “pure knowledge, without consequences.” This statement of Nietzsche’s illuminates many of the greatest atrocities committed by mankind. For Nietzsche, judgment is not simply an ability but a power, which confers godlike status on the upright judge, who is able to transcend their ego.

“Only from the standpoint of the highest strength of the present may you interpret the past.”

Nietzsche argues that those who lack the objectivity of the artist and the power of the impartial judge should not set themselves above previous generations in a position of judgment. Much like the last guests arriving at a banquet desiring the best seats, he says, this position of judgment must be earned, and is not a right. This statement of Nietzsche’s also critiques his contemporaries’ fixation on historical awareness as a means of informing judgment in the present. Nietzsche inverts the situation, claiming that only the most just can read history accurately, and that rather than treating history as a source of justice, we should engage in a “hopeful striving” for greatness (38).

“Form an image for yourselves to which the future ought to correspond and forget the superstition that you are epigoni […] become ripe and flee from that paralyzing educational constraint of our age, which sees its advantage in preventing your becoming ripe, in order to rule and exploit you unripe ones.”

Epigoni, or the followers and imitators of artists and philosophers, are the subject of numerous classical works, including Sophocles’s tragedy by the same name. In the play, the epigoni are the sons of Thebes’s failed conquerors, who perpetuate the violence by replicating their fathers’ actions. Maturity, therefore, in contrast to these senseless sons, is what is required of the modern man for Nietzsche. Ripeness is defined by freedom from paralysis and a stance antithetical to the doctrines of one’s own age. Through challenging contemporary mores, the future is built by these “superior” (43) individuals.

“Only with love, however, only surrounded by the shadow of the illusion of love, can man create, that is, only with an unconditional faith in something perfect and righteous. Each man who is forced no longer to love unconditionally has had the root of his strength cut off: he must wither, that is, become dishonest.”

Nietzsche argues that the historically-oriented judgment of the present hinders progress by hampering the illusion of the dream of progress from taking root. Creativity cannot survive in an atmosphere that is overly saturated with monumental or antiquarian history, to use Nietzsche’s terms. This is somewhat paradoxical in relation to his comments in Chapter 6 about the superiority and maturity of the truly historical individual, who is here defined in terms more usually associated with innocence (“unconditional faith”). It is clear here, as elsewhere in the essay, that Nietzsche is striving to set forth a well-balanced argument.

“Does not this paralyzing belief in an already withering mankind rather harbor the misunderstanding, inherited from the Middle Ages, of a Christian theological conception, the thought that the end of the world is near, of the fearfully expected judgement?”

In Chapter 8, Nietzsche draws out the influence of Christian doctrine, via Hegel, on the historical emphasis of his era. Modernity may have been stripped of its focus on mainstream organized religion, but the religiosity remains, and has been transferred to history. This is his main critique of the emphatic historicity of his time and the stimulus for this essay. Nietzsche argues that “man is tied to the memento mori”, and that this focus on the past is detrimental to the new. Memorialization was a prominent feature of literature and art as well as politics in the face of an inscrutable modernity.

“Or is it not selflessness when historical man permits himself to be drained to the point of becoming an objective looking glass? Is it not generosity to renounce all authority in heaven and on earth by worshiping authority as such in every authority?” 

In line with his famous statement ‘God is dead”, in this quotation Nietzsche espouses one of the key tenets of modernism: its atheism. While modern society might imagine itself as post-theological, Nietzsche claims, we have found new theologies in which we believe perhaps more unquestioningly. The wealth of scholarship on the past has a petrifying effect on the present, which in its uncertainty clings to all forms of authority. This outward looking attitude is part of the weakness that Nietzsche is talking about when he discerns between weakness and strength in Important Quote#12.

“[…] history always inculcates: ‘once upon a time,’ the moral: ‘you ought not’ or ‘you ought not to have.’ So history becomes a compendium of actual immorality.”

One of the most surprising pronouncements in Nietzsche’s essay is his attack on the prevailing tendency to deify the events of history. He argues that the loss of religion in the western world transferred religious feelings to history. History is figured here and in the previous citation as a despotic leader, to which a culture unwaveringly submits.

“Modern man, that great garden spider in the node of the world web.”

As though foreseeing the creation of the world wide web more than a hundred years after this essay was published, Nietzsche imagines modern man as a spider sitting at the center of a web of “gossamer threads” of knowledge. Yet this superfluity of knowledge entails the “fragmentation and fraying of all foundations” and a “dissolution into an ever flowing and becoming.” The information age has only amplified the effects of excess information that troubled Nietzsche, and we still find ourselves at the center of this web of information. It is unclear in Nietzsche’s metaphor whether man is imprisoned by his web, becoming ensnared in it like a fly, or whether the web of information is a useful hunting aid that enables and furthers life. Arguably, we are still in the same position today.

“[…] the so wittily invented inspirational font of the unconscious and glowing in an apocalyptic light […].”

Nietzsche further contextualizes the position of modern man by arguing that it is precisely this information overload which is the bedrock for the notion of the unconscious. We are familiar with the term today via Sigmund Freud, but Nietzsche here cites Hartmann’s influential 1869 publication Philosophie des Unbewussten. The accumulation of untapped knowledge creates by default an unconscious and prevents the full resources of either from being tapped. The formation of the unconscious also has the effect of splitting the individual and the society. The ominousness of the image is due to its invocation of a feeling of alienation. Nietzsche could not have predicted the alterity we now experience in the digital age, but the apocalyptic feeling engendered by a superfluity of information is still with us today.

“The devil […] is the real power in all historical power […] let egoism be our God.”

Nietzsche brings his tirade against his emphatically-historical era home with this striking metaphor, which he anticipates will “ring quite painfully in the ears” of such an age. Rejecting the Enlightenment emphasis on the temporal and observable world, Nietzsche champions a more Early Modern concept of worldly vanity. Since great acts occur for Nietzsche in an “atmosphere” and a moment of forgetting and disorientation, history cannot be deified in the way that his contemporaries would like. Marx’s 1867 publication, Das Kapital, similarly pointed out the inconsistencies in capitalism, which, Marx argues, entails the exploitation of labor for profit.

“One knows after all what history is capable of, owing to a certain preponderance one knows it only too well: of uprooting the strongest instincts of youth: fire, obstinacy, self-forgetting and love, of dampening the heat of its sense of justice, of suppressing or repressing its desire to ripen slowly with the counter-desire to be done quickly, to be useful quickly, to be fruitful quickly, of infecting honesty and boldness of feeling with doubt; it is even capable of defrauding youth of its fairest privilege, of its strength to plant within itself a great thought with brimful confidence and to let it grow out of itself into an even greater one.”

It is to the youth that Nietzsche looks in this essay to carry the torch of hope for the future, and whom he hopes to defend from the crushing weight of excessive history. The awareness of the great deeds of the past oppresses new life. Education is for Nietzsche a form of enslavement in the sense that the historical education so prized in his era prohibited the growth of the culture in gradual and faltering efforts. Nietzsche figures the youth and German culture as a ripening acorn, which is disregarded because it is not yet an oak tree (45).

“[…] it suffers, so far as we are principally concerned here, from the historical malady. The excess of history has attacked the plastic powers of life […] the unhistorical and the superhistorical are the natural antidotes to the stifling of life by history, to the historical malady.”

In this conclusive passage, Nietzsche returns to the primary tools that he has identified in the course of the essay to preserve life from the mortifying effect of too much history: the unhistorical, or capacity to forget, and the superhistorical, or the eternal. The first is found in nature, and the second in art and religion.

Overreliance on history is a sickness, Nietzsche argues, that plagues contemporary society. As though afflicting life with rigor mortis, history has suppressed the discriminatory abilities of society, its “plastic power” to refashion the past for the purposes of the present.