37 pages • 1 hour read
Friedrich NietzscheOn The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1874A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
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 Barthold Georg Niebuhr uses the term.
However, it is not possible to hold such a perspective, because historical actions are taken blindly. According to Nietzsche, this is definitive: “Blindness and injustice in the soul of each agent [is] the condition of all activity” (18). If history is made in blindness, then history from the superhistorical standpoint is “dead.” History in service to life is “unhistorical,” and Nietzsche asks to what extent life requires the service of history.
Chapter 1 Analysis
In Chapter 1, Nietzsche establishes some of the premises of his argument and defines some of its key terms. One such term is the “superhistorical,” which Nietzsche takes from Niebuhr, but not before discrediting Niebuhr’s definition and appropriating the term for his own use. For example, take this facetious reading of Niebuhr, which implies that the omniscience with which contemporary historians claim to view history is impracticable: “[…] the superhistorical thinker illuminates all history of peoples and individuals from within, clairvoyantly guesses the original significance of the different hieroglyphs” (18).
The notion of the “unhistorical” is also important in the opening chapter, and Nietzsche uses it to further dismantle the notion of the superhistorical propounded by Niebuhr. In contrast with Niebuhr’s omniscient superhistorical, Nietzsche asserts that the great moments of history occur in blindness. Thus, even from a superhistorical perspective, or the most illuminating investigation, they remain essentially “dead.” In opposition to the prevailing investment of contemporary society in the social utility of historical education, Nietzsche claims that the fullest understanding of history is an awareness of the particular kind of blindness involved in its making.
Nietzsche calls the ability to forget in a moment of action the “plastic power” of a human being. Like Heraclitan flux, this plasticity is figured as transformative and potentially regenerative, “assimilating everything past and alien, to heal wounds” (15). If history is fixed because it is past, then the unhistorical is mutable. Nietzsche will elaborate on the significance of this “plastic power” in the later chapters of the essay, in which he discusses the uses of history in service to life.
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