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 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Having outlined the three forms of history, Nietzsche now concludes that every group of people must adopt an approach to history that is sometimes monumental, sometimes antiquarian, and sometimes critical, according to whichever history best serves life.
Nietzsche next turns to consider the modern humans’ souls. The “modern soul” is distinguished for Nietzsche by a superfluity of knowledge. This preponderance of knowledge is “indigestible,” thus producing a dichotomy between surface and depth in both the culture and the individual. A modern individual is contrasted with a Hellenistic one. The Greek would perceive modern culture as overly invested in historical education and encyclopedic.
The superfluity of information is also problematic because it produces an indiscriminateness that can lead to barbarism going undetected. For Nietzsche, modern culture takes place predominantly in the internal world; presumably by this he means the individual rather than the collective world. Nietzsche is critical of the disparity between content and form in the surrounding German culture. He argues that the lack of unity prevents the culture’s full value from being made manifest. There is an urgent “need,” Nietzsche claims, to rebuild the integrity between the inner and the outer in modern culture and life.
Chapter 4 Analysis
The preponderance of knowledge is a feature of modern life which has increased dramatically since Nietzsche’s time, in what is called the “Information Age” of the internet, following the Technological Revolution. Some comparable issues are at stake today that stirred society at the time of the Industrial Revolution, circa this essay’s publication date. Perhaps this makes Nietzsche’s assertion that excess of information leads to division more intriguing. Too much information, according to Nietzsche, results in a division between the information itself and its packaging, which means that the “outside” is especially “barbaric” in contrast with the cultured interior. It is possible that the phenomenon of Fake News is an example of something comparable in contemporary culture.
In the context of the end of the Franco-Prussian War, it’s hardly surprising that Nietzsche, after his long critique of German culture and manners, would advocate for “the unity of the German spirit and life after the annihilation of the opposition of form and content, of inwardness and convention” (32). In his effort to sew up the scattered fragments of Germany in this postwar landscape, Nietzsche looks to spiritual unity, which he says Germans “should strive for more ardently than political reunification” (32).
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