“The Use and Abuse of History for Life” begins its preface with a quote from Goethe: “I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.” The entire essay can be seen as an extended mediation on this idea as it relates to history in particular: that knowledge in itself has no value, and that what matters about the study of history is its value for life.
The essay is one of Nietzsche's early works, with all the exuberance, glaring flaws, and tentativeness of a young writer first defining the problems that will in turn define his career. “The Use and Abuse of History” is written while Nietzsche is still a professor of philology at the University of Basel. Published in 1874, it's the second of four essays that will eventually make up the volume called Untimely Meditations.
“The Use and Abuse of History” begins with an opposition between what Nietzsche calls the historical and the unhistorical. And the historical is more than the academic study of history or knowing that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It's the whole mental furniture of human beings when they're aware of themselves as mortal beings existing in time. It's the fact that I know I'm going to die. It's the fact that I carry the ghosts of my past experiences around with me every day and call them memory. It's the way I notice patterns in the way things happen and am not surprised if I see them repeating themselves.
The historical also includes my ideas about what human destiny is, or what I might think the decline of the Roman empire has to say about current events in my country. The total effect of the historical is to create a certain tone of human experience: wherever I go, whatever I do, I always drag the past behind me. I'm always haunted by what came before. It's for this reason that Nietzsche calls human experience, in a wonderful phrase, “an imperfect tense that never becomes the present.”
We're always thinking about what happened yesterday, or what might happen tomorrow, or daydreaming about some distant past where we convince ourselves we were really happy. We're never really present. This moment is only the bridge that both connects and separates past and future, nothing more.
That's the historical. The first contrast Nietzsche makes to reveal the unhistorical is the animal. The first section of the essay begins: “Consider the herds that feed yonder.” Those cows in the field over there. For them, there's no yesterday and there's no tomorrow. For them, there's not even five minutes ago or five minutes from now. There's no millennia of human exploitation of the cow race, just as there's no campaign for the extension of UN Human Rights protections to include bovines. There's just the warm sun, the comforting presence of the herd, and the field full of tasty grass.
The animal simply exists in the present, haunted neither by the past nor the future.
Now, is that really what life is like for an animal? Maybe. And I think we do really feel some envy toward the animals for precisely this kind of thing. That robin in the branches with no thought for anything but the song, or the stray cat sunning itself on the sidewalk when I leave for work. Without a plan for tomorrow, without the self-recriminations of yesterday. We see the same thing in children, says Nietzsche, and what's delightful in children is largely the extent to which they are not yet historical.
For various reasons we'll get into later, Nietzsche believes there's a conflict between our historical consciousness and our ability to act–particularly our ability to create anything new. The first and simplest reason has to do with the academic study of history itself, which has taken a scientific turn in Nietzsche's time. It's around the mid-nineteenth century that (mostly) German historians define the methods for the academic study of history–which persist to the present day.
It reminds me of the meme you'll see sometimes: the one where the modern historian goes on for a whole paragraph about how it's not possible to know for certain how many troops were at this battle, or exactly what so-and-so said to such-and-such in a secret meeting. And then the ancient historian simply says, “It was revealed to me in a dream.” That's the kind of thing Nietzsche is getting at when he talks about history becoming scientific.
Now, Nietzsche is not anti-science. But he has problems with this approach to history, some of which come up here. The simplest thing is that any analytical study deadens the thing you're studying. And that's something we can argue about–it's the poet’s perennial complaint that analyzing the workings of a flower kills it and dulls our wonder at its beauty. There's a type of person who sees this as obviously true (I'm one of them), and there's a type of person who sees it as obviously false.
Simply put, taking history as an object of knowledge turns history into a set of dead facts. Which turns the historian into the kind of person who views the living world as a set of dead facts. Nietzsche finds many other pitfalls of historical knowledge, but this is enough for now: taken in itself, knowledge of history saps and deadens our ability to imagine and create the new. If it is to be creative, history must serve life in some way: thus “The Use and Abuse of History for Life.”
Leaving aside the academic study of history, Nietzsche finds that historical consciousness itself impedes our ability to take action. If the child is the unhistorical in human beings, Nietzsche contrasts this by imagining a figure who is entirely historical. A man who can never forget anything, who analytically experiences the world as a set of inert processes of becoming. It reminds me of Funes from the short story by Borges, and it ends in much the same place: a figure wholly dominated by memory, unable to act, unable even to really live.
So the first way we overcome memory's impediments to action is through something we might be inclined to see as a defect: forgetting. Normally we think of forgetting as something inconvenient: you might smack yourself on the forehead if you forget your special lady's birthday, for example. At the very least we think of forgetting as something negative–in the sense that by forgetting something we're not remembering it.
But here Nietzsche proposes something radical, which he'll go on to flesh out in his later work: forgetting as a positive quality, as a faculty in the service of life. “Forgetfulness is a property of all action; just as not only light but darkness is bound up with the life of every organism,” as he puts it in this section. There's a kind of forgetfulness that serves us in any action. We might call optimism a kind of forgetting–in order to have the courage to act at all, we have to be able to forget the countless ways our action can go wrong.
To put it in more contemporary terms, the historical consciousness is always overthinking. It's so obsessed with analyzing the life out of everything that it can never actually do anything. Forgetting is what swoops in, tells you, “It's stupid to go on wondering does she really love me,” and actually lets you lean in and kiss her.
But forgetting is not the only force that breaks down the objectivity of the historical consciousness and so makes it possible to act. There's also passion, which Nietzsche interprets pretty broadly here: “What deeds could man ever have done if he had not been enveloped in the dust-cloud of the unhistorical? Or, to leave metaphors and take a concrete example, imagine a man swayed and driven by a strong passion, whether for a woman or a theory. His world is quite altered.”
There's a certain warping of reality that happens when we're really enamored with a theory, let's say. It's no longer a matter of browsing the encyclopedia and swiping left on Marxism or anarcho-syndicalism. We're not out to satisfy our curiosity with quantum theory and dabbling with relativity to pass the time. We want our beloved doctrine to absorb us into itself, we want to relish its complexities and contradictions. We want to see it reflected in everything and see the world through the eyes of our pet theory.
A true Marxist runs around doing communist things, saying all kinds of commie stuff, and is perfectly willing to die for the revolution. A true Christian wants to take up the cross. For a believer, for a fanatic, for a lover, this theory, this cause, this woman, is never just a theory, just a cause, just a woman. It's something wholly unique and precious against the background of eternity.
Which isn't exactly a clear-eyed and rational appraisal of objective reality. But that's precisely Nietzsche's point: people who go on their clear-eyed and rational appraisals of reality never take any radically new action. To take an example Nietzsche's fond of toying with: if he hadn't been a little crazy, Martin Luther would never have taken on the Catholic Church and said, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
There's a kind of one-sidedness about all this, in loving one thing passionately at the expense of the rest of the universe. Nietzsche writes most scathingly of this aspect of the artist, the lover, the man of action: “His whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness.”
And yet, without this excessive quality, without this violence against objectivity–no enterprises of great pitch and moment would ever begin. Thirteen minor colonies on the edge of an untapped continent would never become a great nation. No face would ever launch a thousand ships, or even a dozen ships.
As an aside, what I love most in Nietzsche is his thoughts on art and artists. Right wingers who are into Nietzsche play up the macho angle and make the Übermensch out to be some kind of proto-bodybuilder. Left wingers reject all the cool stuff and focus on the analysis of power. What they leave out is his humor, his poetry, and his playfulness. Along with the aesthetic interests of a man whose first book was an analysis of Greek drama, for Pete's sake!
I mention this because among the other excessive loves Nietzsche discusses here, there is the artist’s love for the work. The artist is always too near to the work, too attached to it to judge it objectively: “So he loves his work infinitely more than it deserves to be loved; and the best works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.”
But what else, besides forgetfulness and excessive love, might break the chains of the historical consciousness? Nietzsche closes the section out with some musings on what he calls the superhistorical man. And to tell you the truth, the more I look at this passage, the more it looks like you can see Schopenhauer’s lingering influence on the young Nietzsche at work. This superhistorical man is a most un-Nietzschian figure.
He's pretty much a guy who's been through the deadlock of the historical consciousness, the forgetting, and the passion, and has come to see the ultimate futility and one-sidedness of all action. He kind of seems like some enlightened sage up on the mountain, not actually doing anything but seeming so wise, much serene, very content. In short: very lame, do not recommend. And don't you worry, Nietzsche will come to the same conclusion in a few years too.
So that's where Nietzsche ends this section, and that's where I'll wrap up this post. Next week we'll move on to sections 2 and 3, where Nietzsche gets into the specific uses of history for life. In particular, the three types of history: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Everybody have a good week and you in particular: have a great week.
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