37 pages • 1 hour read
Friedrich NietzscheOn The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1874A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Nietzsche perceives a danger in the historical sense which, if unchecked, can lead to the annihilation of life in the present. Creativity is discouraged in such an atmosphere, because the love and unconditional faith that are required for creation are inhibited by an overemphasis on the achievements of the past. This kind of history is destructive.
Christianity is, for Nietzsche, the example of this notion of annihilating history in action. Becoming unnatural and finally completely historical, the fascination of the church with “minutiae” is evidence for Nietzsche of its deterioration (45). While some contemporary theologians claim that there is a pure core to the religion, Nietzsche argues that the location of the true church is imprecise.
Nietzsche argues everything that is ripening needs “an enveloping madness, such as a protective and veiling cloud”(46). The atmosphere that surrounds the era is of indifference, “not to be excessively astonished by anything, finally to tolerate everything” (46). This, Nietzsche argues, is the consequence of a historical sensibility. If the youth are hastened ever faster to make scientific advances, they themselves will begin to degenerate, and the work will suffer. Scholars should think highly of the “people” for whom they write and are too often “practical pessimists” who lack hope for the future and thus live an “ironical existence” (48).
Chapter 7 Analysis
Interrogating another well-worn philosophical problem, Nietzsche now takes up the definition of the borders of the “true church.” In the post-Enlightenment era in which Nietzsche famously proclaimed “God is dead,” it falls to scholars and scientists, rather than clergymen, to distinguish good from bad, and the “ripe” from the “unripe.” Thus, Nietzsche seeks to define the notoriously-ephemeral borders of the contemporary “true church” in Chapter 7. Nietzsche seems as if he would almost erect a Catholic rood screen between the present and the events of the past when he argues that the overemphasis on history threatens to rob the past of its mystery and “madness,” and that an “atmosphere” is required for all great acts to occur.
The “veil” of madness that surrounds great acts is another typically Romantic idea. Through the application to a mythologized past, and to the mysteries of nature, the movement sought to rebalance the Enlightenment-era focus on the observable world through recourse to a more shadowy mirror. Romantic literature is full of obscurity, which is associated with greatness, profundity, and what is known as “the sublime” in Romantic discourse.
Related Titles
By Friedrich Nietzsche
