On The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life

Look at a field of grazing cattle, Nietzsche writes. They are neither “melancholy nor bored” because they “immediately forget” (13). Humans remember, are aware that we will die, and are “encumbered” by this historical awareness. Happiness is “what binds the living to life” because it motivates us to live (14).Happiness is also contingent upon forgetting:

“[…] whoever cannot settle on the threshold of the moment forgetful of the whole past, whoever is incapable of standing on a point like a goddess of victory without vertigo or fear, will never know what happiness is” (14).

Heraclitus’s principle of constant flux, or becoming, is present in all action: “all acting requires forgetting” (15). The ability to instinctually forget and remember at the right time is integral to “cheerfulness, clear conscience, the carefree deed, faith in the future” (15). Nietzsche concludes “the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture” (15).

The unhistorical is the foundation upon which what is correct and mighty grows. The moment of a great idea or great passion is typically experienced, Nietzsche argues, as a timeless “whirlpool.” If it were possible to share this “unhistorical” perspective in the moment in which a great historical act took place, then this would be a superhistorical standpoint in the sense