On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

20 USD

Date

2018

Category

Philosophy

Description

"We wish to serve history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and valuing it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is now every bit as necessary as it may be painful." ... Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (in the original German, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben), written in 1874 as part of his second “Untimely Meditation,” has been read not only as an essay on the crisis of historical culture, but also as a rather timely reaction “to a crisis within the political culture of the new German nation state after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.”

According to some scholars, this close relationship between politics and history is the focal point for Nietzsche’s historical critique of modernity. His criticism is in the recognition “that the power of the past to enforce its claims on the future always forms a threat to the project of modernism”; essentially, Nietzsche’s argument–that history is required for life–is itself a danger to modernity. In the same sense, according to literary critic Paul de Man, Nietzsche’s essay is clearly modernist as its “description of the contradictory relationship between history and modernity captures the essence of literature and perhaps the modern predicament per se."

Excerpt

With the smallest as with the greatest happiness, however, there is always one thing which makes it happiness: being able to forget or, to epress it in a more learned fashion, the capacity to live unhistorically while it endures. 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, and worse yet, will neve4r do anything to make others happy. Takes as an extreme example a man who posesses no trace of the power to forget, who is condemned everywhere to see becoming: such. one no longer believes in his own existene, no longer believes in himself; he sees everyhing flow apart in mobile points and loses himself in the stream of becoming: he will, like the true pupil of Heraclitus, hardly dare in the end to lift a finger. All acting requires forgetting, as not only light but also darkness is required by all organisms. A man who wanted to feel everything historially would resemble someone forced to refrain from sleeping, or an animal expected to lie only from ruminating and ever repeated ruminating. So: it is possible to live with almost no memories, even to live happily as the animal shows; but wihout forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all. Or. to say it more simply yet: there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people, or a culture.