And in this way my thesis is to be understood and considered: “only strong personalities can endure history, the weak are extinguished by it.”
Sections four and five of “The Use and Abuse of History” begin the real heart of the essay: the description of the potential dangers of an excess of history. In the previous sections Nietzsche went over the uses of history for life: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical types of history. But with section four, and especially with section five, he begins to diagnose the problems that come with historical knowledge. What emerges from this discussion begins to look like a critique of modernity–which may be even more relevant to our time than it was to Nietzsche's.
It's important to note that although Nietzsche focuses on “history” in this essay, much of what he says applies to knowledge in general. The first problem he addresses makes this clear: that historical knowledge creates a rift in the individual.
Modern education creates individuals who contain vast swathes of information that never come out in action. Someone may know all there is to know about art history, but end up working in an office answering telephones all day, and that sort of thing. Nietzsche identifies this divide between the inner and the outer life as the source of many of our modern maladies. In a scathing passage, Nietzsche calls us moderns “walking encyclopedias,” full of facts and knowledge, but without any means of applying that knowledge to the world.
And this isn't simply a matter of academic studies. In Nietzsche's time, and to a lesser extent in ours, newspapers were printed every day, inundating the populace with a lot of facts that have nothing to do with anything they could conceivably do. Today, with radio, television, podcasts, niche internet blogs, social media, forums, fandoms, schools, universities, and a hundred thousand other outlets vying for our attention… the problem has only grown more acute.
But is this really such a problem? Sure, it might hurt your heart a little bit to have a mind full of German Romanticism while you're selling insurance. But isn't that just life?
By Nietzsche's lights, no. It's not just life, and it's been different in the past. A bit typically, he asks us to consider a modern person suddenly transported to ancient Greece. According to Nietzsche, the first thing that would strike the modem person about the Greeks is just how uneducated they all are. And maybe this is more of Nietzsche the philologist idealizing the Greeks, but he says this simple fact is the real condemnation of us moderns.
The ancient Greek may not be educated in the modern sense, but what he knows is relevant to his life, his reality, and his instincts. The real problem with all this modern knowledge and with this split between the inner and the outer–the whole walking encyclopedia thing–is that it means moderns like us are split off from the instincts. The problem is with a lack of connection between what's inside us and the way we act in the world.
Although I have to wonder if it's ever really been any different. Nietzsche likes to idealize the ancient Greeks, but when he does so one always suspects he tacitly has in mind Aeschylus penning his plays, the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae, or Pericles giving the funeral oration. What he says about the unity between the inner and the outer life may well be true about a certain set of well to do Greeks–the great men who have all his sympathy. And in this respect it's hard to read Nietzsche's criticisms of modernity as anything other than the proverbial nostalgia for past greatness. Nietzsche might not like Bismarck because he's German and because he's still alive, but Bismarck was every bit the statesman Pericles was. Nietzsche's critique seems to go too far in both directions, applying too much greatness to the past and too little to the present.
The typical ancient Greek was not Pericles or Aeschylus. The typical Greek was a slave or small time farmer, who may not have been subjected to the evils of modern education, but certainly didn't have the vast scope to act on instinct that Nietzsche suggests here.
And there's a certain romantic indefiniteness about the way Nietzsche talks about instinct here. The great modern evil is supposed to be the way we're alienated from our instincts–another way of expressing this fissure between the inner and the outer lives. But while Nietzsche (perhaps rightly) scorns the way modern people preen themselves on their rich inner lives, the instincts they are alienated from go undefined. While Nietzsche may give legitimate critiques of the state of the modern individual, there's little sign here of what a better alternative would look like, or why it would be better.
As we move on from section four to section five, Nietzsche specifies five specific ways in which the study of history can become dangerous to life:
Weakening the personality by creating a divide between the inner and the outer.
Causing people to believe that their time has a monopoly on justice.
Loss of instinct, leading to a kind of infantilization on the individual and collective level.
A growing belief that our time is late in history, that we are latecomers to the story.
Growth of irony and cynicism, of which cynicism is the worse evil.
With section five, the main focus is still on the first point: the divide between the inner and the outer lives. And it's here that Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations may prove even more untimely in our times than in his. To illustrate what he means here, Nietzsche takes the example of the decline of the Roman empire. He makes the sweeping claim that Rome began to fall as soon as it began to consider the diversity of the various peoples it had to rule over.
There's no clear explanation of why this should lead Rome to fall, and the majority of the section focuses more on modern hypocrisy than on the fall of Rome. One suspects that Nietzsche's thought here is that the wide range of peoples Rome ruled created a similar divide between thought and action–that it led Romans to become hypocritical. This idea is certainly at odds with a number of modern orthodoxies, although given the focus on hypocrisy in the rest of the section, it may have a certain amount of sense. The thought here seems to be that Romans became less distinctly Roman simply by virtue of presiding over the peoples of the Mediterranean. That hypocrisy sidles in when every administrator or man out to make a career has to speak to one group this way, and to another group another way.
Being a practicing academic, Nietzsche sees the practice of philosophy as a particular well of hypocrisy. Or if not outright hypocrisy, at least what passes for philosophy in the 1870s is not the same thing Plato or Socrates would have understood by that word. Philosophy has been safely domesticated for more than a century by the time Nietzsche writes this essay. In his time, as in ours, the philosopher is generally a processor at a university–chasing tenure, teaching classes, publishing or perishing. Philosophy is the professor's profession, it's something done for a paycheck, safely part of the establishment, or at most a dissident tolerated for amusement’s sake.
Nietzsche's main criticism of modern philosophy is that it's primarily done to serve the state. Which is a strange thing to say, possibly reflective of his writing at the time of the Kaisers. Or it could be a genealogical argument: since most philosophers are working at state-funded universities, it follows that they're working for the state whether they like it or not.
There are many passages in this essay where Nietzsche comes across as writing for himself. One can't help but remember he's still working for the University of Basel as he's writing this essay and these passages comparing the modern academic philosopher unfavorably with the ancient philosopher. In the ancient world, philosophy was a way of life–something that demanded the whole human being, not just teaching time, office hours, and the occasional publication. Men like Plato and Aristotle not only theorized about the nature of the good and the ideal state, but also had real influence over the rulers of actual states. It's easy to imagine Nietzsche as the young professor of philology itching to live a more philosophical life.
These observations about philosophy are only a symptom of the greater problem, which according to Nietzsche is an ever-growing split between the inner and the outer lives. He doesn't explicitly call this hypocrisy, instead saying that people appear in the world under predefined roles, rather than in their own personalities–this person is a poet, this one is a political activist, and this one is a TikTok celebrity.
Nietzsche makes a number of pointed criticisms of this kind of role-playing, especially near the end of the section where he talks about critics. But, while the ostensible argument is that these things are happening as a result of too much (or the wrong kind of) training in history… there really isn't much argument for this point. There may be a lot of alienation in modernity and our society may be fake, but it's hard to see how a change of history textbook is going to change that.
Which is really one of the problems with “The Use and Abuse of History” as a whole. There are brilliant moments and intriguing thoughts throughout, but it's hard to believe that the things Nietzsche criticizes are really the results of an excess of historical knowledge. Or if they are results of an excess of historical knowledge, they're only limited to that select number of scholars who are as well-educated as Nietzsche.
I'll give you an example. Nietzsche makes a few comments on the way wars in his day aren't even over yet before the story has been told and retold so many times no one really knows what happened. And this is a real phenomenon–just look at the use of propaganda in twentieth-century wars of you want an example. But it's simply not credible to view these things as a result of too much historical knowledge. These are phenomena of newspapers, speed of travel, or mass communications, not too much history. There is a genuine problem here, and historians of recent events are often complaining about the difficulties in drawing a coherent narrative from an excess of information and conflicting viewpoints. But it takes a strange and rarefied view of things to say an excess of historical knowledge is at the root of all this.
That being said, there's a lot of merit in Nietzsche's argument that something in modern society creates a split in the individual, and that this split leads people to play pre-packaged roles. The logical endpoint of his criticisms about how modern people have become walking encyclopedias is a kind of hypocrisy. I think otherwise than I say or act, which is the precise formula of hypocrisy. Modern people generally go along to get along, failing to express their personalities because they have to make a career, because someone might get upset, or simply from a lack of confidence born of the habit of not expressing their personality.
Something lurks at the bottom of this tendency. It's hard to know if it's a uniquely modern phenomenon–there were hypocrites in the past, throughout history, and probably in prehistoric times as well. But it may be that there is something uniquely modern in today's hypocrisy, and it may well be connected to an explosion in information, if not too much history.
Whether it's unique to the modern world or not, there are forces in the modern world that lead people to erase themselves. Pretend to be someone else. Put on a mask. Near the end of the fifth section of “The Use and Abuse of History,” Nietzsche expresses this in his stark terms: “And in this way my thesis is to be understood and considered: ‘only strong personalities can endure history, the weak are extinguished by it.’”
Comentários