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.
Symbols & Motifs
Heraclitus and the Unhistorical
Central to Nietzsche’s thinking about the proper function of history is his concept of the unhistorical. Defined in Chapter 1 against the notion of the superhistorical, or omniscient perspective, the unhistorical is the capacity to forget. The ability to “live unhistorically” is determined by the “plastic power” of the agent to discern between the helpful and unhelpful elements of the past.
Here and elsewhere, Nietzsche builds his notion of the unhistorical on the foundation of Heraclitus’s classic theory of constant flux. For Heraclitus, as apparently for Nietzsche, life is flux, and to resist change is at odds with the nature of mankind. All that is great grows from the unhistorical. Nietzsche adds to the Heraclitan theory of the modernist emphasis on subjective experience. Developing on the Heraclitan idea of a river that can’t be stepped in twice, Nietzsche describes the moment of inspiration or passionate love as a timeless “living whirlpool” of simultaneity:“he perceives at all he has never perceived so before, so tangibly near, coloured, full of sound and light as though he were apprehending it with all his senses at once” (16).
Imping his own theories so completely on classical ones is commensurate with Nietzsche’s own notion of great, unhistorical actions. Nietzsche’s unhistorical (whirlpool) differs from Heraclitus’s flux (river) though in ascribing an additional sense of chaos to constant change. Nietzsche writes:
Every living thing needs to be surrounded by an atmosphere, a mysterious circle of mist: if one robs it of this veil, if one condemns a religion, an art, a genius to orbit as a star without an atmosphere: then one should not wonder about its rapidly becoming withered, hard and barren. That is just how it is with all things great indeed, ‘which without some madness ne'er succeed’ (45).
The addition of madness to Heraclitus’s flux theory is critical to dismantling the historicism of Nietzsche’s own time. Historical acts are made in “blindness” (18), so the surfeit of history in the present cannot be the path to greatness.
The Tragic
Nietzsche writes that “blindness and injustice in the soul of each agent [are] the condition of all activity” (17).If all actions are essentially blind, then the Nietzschean man is inherently tragic. Oedipally doomed to actout of blindness, madness, and chaos, Nietzsche’s humans are tragedians, even at their zenith. Though man might strive for progress and attainment, as Nietzsche incites the youth to do in Chapter 10 of his diatribe on history, inherent in this hope is the “forgetting” at which his herd of cattle is so adept in Chapter 1. As “the apex of nature”, it is man’s burden to be aware of his own mortality, and yet unable to escape this destiny:
“[…] he is astonished that his memory so tirelessly runs in circles and is yet too weak and too tired to leap even once out of this circle. It is the most unjust condition in the world, narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to dangers, deaf to warnings, a little living whirlpool in a dead sea of night and forgetting […]” (16).
Though the tragedy of mankind is inescapable for Nietzsche, it can be exacerbated by the stifling of growth, or the stultification that accompanies an overemphasis on history. This idea of repetition is intrinsic to Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy, “an imitation of an action.” Acts therefore that repeat what have come before are for Nietzsche commensurate with the classical definition of tragedy. In Nietzsche’s 1872 publication The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche embraces the primacy of the tragic mode in human life:
A historical phenomenon clearly and completely understood and reduced to an intellectual phenomenon, is for him who has understood it dead: for in it he has understood the mania, the injustice, the blind passion, and in general the whole earthly darkened horizon of that phenomenon, and just in this he has understood its historical power (19).
Related Titles
By Friedrich Nietzsche
