Nietzsche has a deep distrust of universalizing systems.
For him, there's no reason to say that
reason rules the world.
Life is essentially irrational and we couldn't, even if
we wanted to, stand outside of life in order to have a
totalizing view of it that would allow us to create
a philosophical system.
So Nietzsche is the first thinker we've read who has an
extreme distrust of systems.
In "On the Utility and Liability of History for
Life," Nietzsche suggests that his peers have been focusing
way too much on history at the expense of life.
[Regina George:] Why are you so obsessed with me?
History should serve life rather than the
other way around.
So history, for instance, has a limited and yet
important use, but it's not the key to understanding
human existence (as it might've been for Hegel).
Nietzsche suggests that there's a distinction between
the ahistorical, which he associates with forgetting
and with non-human animal life, and the historical,
which is an impulse that humans have developed and
has to do with memory.
So what sets us apart from non-human animals
for Nietzsche is our ability to remember things.
And this means, you know, that we can learn from things, that
we can create civilizations in a much more sort of robust way
than non-human animals can, but it also means that we risk
falling into the historical impulse and forgetting
the ahistorical impulse.
And when we do that, we are not fully living.
And we're sort of letting our bodies, our feelings,
everything that doesn't get captured through
history and reason atrophy.
. Nietzsche has all these jobs at, um, his compatriots.
He talks, for instance, about how his fellow Germans
are walking encyclopedias.
They are inwardly cultivated, but their
knowledge gets them nowhere.
They praise content over form.
They want to just pack in as much knowledge
as they possibly can.
They're obsessed with what Nietzsche calls instruction
versus stimulation.
And he says on page 115, that too much history
poses dangers to life, five dangers in particular.
The first is that too much history weakens the
personality by producing a dichotomy between the
inner and the outer.
In cultivating so much the inner side and
forgetting the outer side,
the human comes to have what Nietzsche calls a
weakened personality.
We're too busy focusing on how we're going to reflect
on our events once they're past to actually experience
them in the present.
Our day-to-day life is watered down by our obsession
with thinking about how it will be recorded, how
it will be remembered.
Ironically, in our obsession with seeking an artful way of
living, we don't live artfully because living artfully
would mean fully investing in our experiences rather than
imagining how they might look from the outside as if they
were a movie or a TV show.
We become shadows of ourselves rather than living
truthfully or authentically.
That first danger is pointed out in section
five of this text.
And in section six, Nietzsche talks about
the second danger of an excess of history for life.
That second danger is that too much history leads us to
think that the present is so much more than the past was.
We tend to think that we are better than people
who lived in the past.
We are more enlightened.
We are more advanced, butNietzsche says,
who are we to judge?
Why should we say that things have gotten better?
Who knows?
Maybe they've stayed the same or gotten worse.
Nietzsche actually suggests here that not
everybody is capable of interpreting the past.
And so he has this logic of some individuals
being superior to others.
This is a very controversial element of Nietzsche's
work, where he basically says only from the highest
power of the present can you interpret the past and not
everybody is cut out for that.
He emphasizes that some people are architects of
the future because they are better able to recognize the
structure of how things are in relation to how they were.
They are not the scholars, but the architects.
The third danger of too much history for life as
articulated in section seven.
And this is the idea that too much history undermines
individual instincts and halts the process of maturation.
So we're usually kind of cooking as humans,
increasingly maturing, but when we focus too much on
memory, when we take a sort of distanced approach from
the present by thinking, how will I remember this?
We actually undermine our instincts and we start to
lose touch with ourselves.
Nietzsche thinks that children and adolescents have a sort
of in touchness that people are encouraged to lose as
they enter society as adults.
So for instance, think about the way that a lot
of teenagers feel ill at ease in the world, right?
They feel out of place.
They feel what Nietzsche describes
on page 135 as nausea.
Nietzsche says that's actually telling us something.
These teenagers are not just out of whack and they need
to be kind of brought into obedience with the status quo.
Their nausea is reflective of the pain and suffering of
human existence, especially under certain social
conditions that emphasize not living, but having, having
all of this knowledge without ever actually using it.
He's particularly worried about the way
that the education process generates this.
He describes human beings on page 136 as being forced
to work in the factory of scholarship and become a
useful before they are mature.
You can probably think about this with respect to
your own education process.
Right.
The school system, the university system, are set up
to encourage instruction and each us very concerned with
the way that that emphasis on instruction, with sort of
giving people digestible bits of knowledge and filling them
up with this, is actually leading them to be profoundly
distanced from themselves.
The fourth danger of too much history to life,
which comes out in section eight, is the idea that we
are living in the old age of humanity and history.
Right.
We tend to think of a previous golden age and we're sort
of at the end of history.
This idea that there previously was a youth of
humanity, and now we're living in its old age,
presupposes a teleological view of history that Nietzsche
rejects, and he associates it with Christianity, right?
Because Christianity is not only teleological.
It's also eschatological.
It emphasizes this idea that there will be a
second coming of Christ.
And an end of the world.
Nietzsche says here that history is a disguised
theology, and he's very concerned with the way that
having a progressivist view of history involves certain
assumptions that are imported unjustifiably from religion.
He has Hegel in mind here, and he has this kind of job at
Hegel on page 143, where he's like, isn't it kind of ironic
that for Hegel, the apex and culmination of the world
process coincided with his own existence in Berlin, so
he's like, Hegel, you think that you happen to just be
living at the end of history?
Do you think there's any chance that that just
might be some form of presentism, some form of bias?
A bigger issue here is that this notion of
history actually fosters obedience among people,
rather than encouraging them to rebel against
oppressive social structures.
If you think you're living at the end of history and things
are naturally running their course, you don't have a lot
of incentive to change things.
The fifth danger of too much history for life,
which need to talks about in section eight, is
self irony and cynicism.
When we are so obsessed with history at the expense of
life, we tend to get really jaded and he has this great
quote on 147, where he says, "Overproud European
of the 19th century, you are stark, raving, mad.
Your knowledge does not perfect nature, but only
kills your own nature.
Just measure the wealth of your knowledge
against the poverty of your own abilities."
Too much history makes us feel frustrated because we
recognize that there have been great deeds and events in the
past, but we feel powerless to enact them in the present.
We recognize that we are part of the march of history, but
we don't know how, and we don't know how to shape it.
We see ourselves as sort of passive bystanders.
There's a huge contrast between Nietzsche's conception
of history and the one we found in Hegel, obviously in
many respects, but I want to focus on one in particular.
Recall that for Hegel, individuals are sort of
unwitting puppets of the march of reason in history, right?
Whether you're a world historical individual, or
just an average person, you don't know how you're
contributing to world history, but you are in some sense.
And you're contributing to it by virtue of your particular
historical moment, which will then be sublated in a
future historical moment, and so on and so forth.
Nietzsche completely gets rid of that.
And he says, individuals do not further a process.
He talks about this a lot on page 151.
Rather, individuals live timelessly and simultaneously,
and something Nietzsche calls the republic of geniuses.
Geniuses from different periods of time call out
to each other and can form relationships, not like
literally ones, because a lot of them are dead, but
if you live in the present, you can call out to geniuses
from previous times and draw inspiration from them
almost to the point that you are in relation to them.
Nietzsche says that the purpose of history is
to drive these specific individuals to greatness.
The goal of humanity is not to be found in a teleological
end process, but rather in its "highest specimens."
I'm curious what you all think about this, because
it strikes me as quite a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it may be appealing to think
about the individual as being the most important
principle of history.
On the other hand, Nietzsche of course means to say
that only a small number of people are individuals,
he said the masses mean basically nothing to history.
He talks about the vast majority of people as
being virtually meaningless and speaks in very
derogatory terms of them.
So what does Nietzsche trust?
Well, he certainly doesn't trust the march of reason
throughout history.
He certainly doesn't trust systematizing thought.
But he does trust the individual, certain
individuals specifically.
He does trust life, instincts and youth.
He believes that out of those forces come art come beauty.
And that that's the best humans can hope for.
For Nietzsche, history must be transformed
into a work of art.
And individuals do this through what he calls on
page 89, shaping power.
We help create our own realities and
our own histories.
I really look forward to discussing with you in Slack
the three kinds of history that Nietzsche talks about in
this text: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical.