On The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life

Nietzsche now turns to interrogate the contemporary dictum that modern man is more just than earlier ages. Socrates claimed that to believe one has a virtue when one does not is almost insane, and more problematic than the shortcoming itself. Nietzsche praises the virtue of justice and discerns between ego-serving judgment and Last Judgment. Thus, Nietzsche distinguishes between truth, which has its root in justice, and “curiosity, flight from boredom, envy, vanity, play instinct–drives which have nothing at all to do with truth” (38). It is possible for equanimity, in inconsequential judgments, to mask an absence of “strict and great justice” in trickier verdicts; only strength can judge, and where weakness does so, it “makes an actress of justice” (39).

Nietzsche remarks that talented historians are rare, because many judge the past in accordance with prevailing contemporary ideology, and call this objectivity: “the work is to make the past fit the triviality of their time” (40). The term “objectivity” itself may be misleading for precisely this reason. Nor does art present a just picture of history. Nietzsche is skeptical of the defensive claim that history is so complex as to be impenetrable: this is also not an objective position, but a