Last week, with sections 6 and 7 of “The Use and Abuse of History,” we went over some of Nietzsche's major criticisms of historical knowledge: the belief that our own time has some privileged access to justice, and the potential history has for crushing life's necessary illusions. This week we'll move on to section eight, which continues in the same vein, attacking the idea that we moderns are historical latecomers, or epigoni (a Greek term meaning much the same thing, which Nietzsche throws around a lot in this passage). We'll also take a look at section nine–which I have to admit is probably the weakest section in the essay and mostly consists of Nietzsche endlessly criticizing some scholar named Edward von Hartmann.
With section eight, Nietzsche comes to grips with what we could call a Western historical prejudice–the idea that we are latecomers in history. Latecomers not only in the sense that we happen to come after other historical periods in time, but above all because we have a habitual, possibly unconscious belief that the end of history is near. Nietzsche attributes this belief to Christianity–for a couple of thousand years, Western civilization lived under the assumption that Judgment Day was coming any minute. Which would be bad enough, in Nietzsche's view, if the belief that the end is coming died with the Christian religion. But the idea hasn't died–Nietzsche finds plenty of examples in his own time, and there are many enlightened intellectuals in our own day who believe in some version of this idea.
But before we get into that idea, let's talk about why Nietzsche believes the feeling of being historical latecomers is a bad thing. The simplest reason is that if we basically believe the end of everything is near, there's little incentive to create anything new. Nietzsche is always more concerned with greatness than with the average and the everyday–but what spur can there be to greatness when we're convinced everything is going to end soon? There's no point in creating tomorrow's greatness when today may well be the last day of all.
And we can question whether Nietzsche is right that a belief in the end of the world actually threatens the growth of human greatness or not. More than a millennium of Christianity didn't prevent Leonardo from painting the Virgin of the Rocks or Michelangelo from making the Pieta. One of Nietzsche's shortcomings as a thinker is that he never seems quite able to wrap his mind around the fact that not everyone is a neurotic religious fanatic with an impeccable moustache. It seems more likely that the great men of history would either laugh at the idea of being latecomers in history, or else use it as a spur to their action. It's only the masses–whom Nietzsche loudly dismisses–who would really take the idea to heart. And they were never going to do anything great anyway, so what's it matter?
Anyway, in his own time Nietzsche finds the greatest example of this belief in being historical latecomers in the popularity of Hegel and his philosophy. And to give the caricature view of Hegel, a major part of his philosophy is that history reached its end and fulfillment in 1807, just as Hegel himself was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Which, sure, every writer feels that way when they finish writing a book, but most of us don't expect the world to agree with it. And in the case of Hegel, a lot of people–at least people in philosophy departments–agreed with him. So for 50 years or more Hegelian philosophy was the dominant philosophy in the schools, and you had very educated people walking around giving lectures about how history was pretty much over and we were all living in the afterglow.
I'm sure it's not quite as insane as it all sounds and there are sophisticated reasons for all this. But this is the short version, and the long version would take a much more thorough study of Hegel than I'm willing to do.
The point is, a lot of people in Nietzsche's time are going around saying history pretty much ended in 1807 or so. And you may ask how they square that with new developments like the industrial revolution, mass literacy, technological change, waves of civil wars and revolutions, German and Italian unification, imperialism, and America's gradual rise to Great Power status. I'm sure there's a fascinating answer to this question, and I'm eager to hear that answer from anybody who's willing to do a huge amount of Hegelian and Hegel-adjacent reading.
But before we laugh too hard at these nineteenth-century ideas, let's remember we're just as prone to them. In the 1990s, following the fall of the Soviet Union, plenty of scholars and intellectuals were telling us all about the End of History. That we'd finally settled the whole capitalism/communism thing once and for all and every major societal conflict was pretty much decided. There was nothing left to do but for liberal democracy to take a few victory laps. So the belief in the end of history is not just some old-fashioned idea with no relevance to contemporary times.
And there is no shortage of apocalyptic beliefs out there in today's world. People working in tech have talked about the singularity for decades, and these days it's AI that seems to be the prime candidate for history-breaking change. Climate change and environmental problems seem to be an almost religious concern for certain segments of the population. And there's always the looming threat of nuclear war, which declined for a while as a cause for alarm in the 1990s, but it's still there and may well be our waiting doom. Not to mention that Christianity is proving to have more staying power than Nietzsche gave it credit for, so we have plenty of millenarians of various stripes awaiting Judgment Day on explicitly religious grounds.
Whether we can lay all these trends at the feet of Christianity or not, belief that the end is nigh certainly doesn't seem to have disappeared since the time Nietzsche wrote.
Although I question whether this is really such a cause for concern. Nietzsche seems awfully worried that people won't create anything new or great since they're worried the sky is falling. But if that was true, you'd expect to see some kind of cultural stagnation. But Nietzsche was writing in the nineteenth century–the most dynamic time in history up to that point. There were people born in that century at a time with horse drawn carriages and sailing ships, then dying in a world of locomotives, steam ships, and even early airplanes. If we're really so haunted by the thought of the end of the world, we're certainly not responding to that concern by never creating anything new.
Not to mention the eurocentric flavor of the whole thing. I'm sure Europeans aren't the only ones who run around worrying that the world's about to end.
Which brings us to section nine, far and away the weakest section of the whole essay. It mostly consists of Nietzsche making some guy named Edward von Hartmann into a punching bag and blaming him for everything. Which can make for entertaining reading–I'm sure Edward von Hartmann was a noteworthy figure at the time, but considering that no one in the 21st century knows who he is, this whole section sort of feels like Nietzsche's picking out some random guy on the street and started whaling on him.
And Nietzsche fucking hates this guy too, it's hilarious. Here's a taste, check this out: “It is, as a fact, high time to move forward with the whole battalion of satire and malice against the excesses of the ‘historical sense,’ the wanton love of the world-process at the expense of life and existence, the blind confusion of all perspective.”
From this section, Edward von Hartmann sounds like a perfectly run of the mill nineteenth century scholar saying perfectly run of the mill nineteenth century things. But for some reason Nietzsche has it out for this guy, accusing him of the cynicism of “surrendering to the world-process,” whatever that means. I guess it means von Hartmann is some kind of Hegelian talking about the end of history, which Nietzsche doesn't like for reasons we've already talked about.
Apparently von Hartmann has some thoughts about the laws of history, and Nietzsche goes at him for that. Pretty much, Nietzsche says the whole idea of laws of history is kind of dumb because it depends on statistics. And statistics are dumb because they only tell you about the masses, and the masses aren't worth looking at because if they were worth looking at they wouldn't be the masses, they'd be great men.
Which, first of all, is awesome. Based, Nietzsche. But it's also kind of a bad argument because (unfortunately) the masses really do have an effect on history and it's often necessary to swallow our disgust and at least look at them to figure out why things happen the way they do.
And then there's some stuff about education for the masses, which I guess is another thing Edward von Hartmann was into. And Nietzsche thinks this is a terrible idea, because all the masses have is egoism. But if you educate them they won't stop being egoists, they'll be clever egoists, which is apparently even worse. And for some reason this is going to lead to the masses slaughtering each other. It's not really clear why, and if you squint while you read it, it sort of looks like a prediction of the Holocaust and various communist revolutions. But it really looks more like Nietzsche is getting close to the end of the essay and decided it was time to have a good old-fashioned rant.
When Nietzsche lists the five problems historical knowledge can create for life, you sort of expect him to take each one section by section and explain what's so bad about them. And for a while he does that–there's a lot of good stuff in the middle of the essay about walking encyclopedias and the split between the inner and the outer lives. Even in section eight he's staying on track, talking about the sense of being historical latecomers. But if section nine is supposed to be a discussion of irony and cynicism, it falls unbelievably flat. Instead it comes across as a weird and unfocused rant. The kind of thing that should have been edited out in the drafting process.
Yeah… honestly, that's all I got for section nine. At least now you know to blame Edward von Hartmann if you ever have a problem or are inconvenienced in any way.
And that's where I'm gonna end it. Next week I'm be taking a break from Nietzsche to put up a short story, but the week after that we'll finish up “The Use and Abuse of History.” Till then: don't succumb to the cynicism of surrendering to the world-process.
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