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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.
Themes
Hegelian Philosophy
In one way, it’s meaningless to say that Nietzsche’s essay has Hegelian influences, since Hegel sits over modern thought and especially German philosophy in an almost godlike role, a role that echoes in his own ideas. Nietzsche writes that “[t]his history, understood in a Hegelian way, has contemptuously been called the sojourn of God on earth” (52).The influence of Hegel’s concept of spirit or “mind” is so profound it informed every aspect of the Germany in which Nietzsche lived.
Hegel was a staunch supporter of the constitutional monarchy of Prussia, the source of the contention and discontent that in Nietzsche’s view posed a hindrance to the cultural integrity of the German people. It is almost possible to replace the word “history” in the title of Nietzsche’s essay with “Hegel.” At the risk of being annihilated by the influence of Hegel, Nietzsche has to carve some space between he and his philosophical father by bypassing Hegel altogether and appealing directly to a classical thinker of whom Hegel wrote: Heraclitus.
The Hegelianism of Nietzsche’s essay is undeniable, and the now-obscure contenders Nietzsche summons (like Hartmann and Niebuhr) appear almost like stooges for Nietzsche’s contention with Hegel. The opening scuffle with Niebuhr over the feasibility of a “superhistorical” (or omniscient) perspective seems also to be a rebuttal of Nietzsche’s absolute idealism, or the notion that being is comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole. Nietzsche’s argument for the incomprehensibility of history in the moment of its making shows his awareness of Hegel. Or, take Nietzsche’s dispute with Hartmann over the latter’s concept of a “world process.” The concept of “world process” is another inheritance from Hegel, whose philosophy places the emphasis on change, as opposed to stasis. Nietzsche’s frustration with the reverence paid to history is echoed in his attitude to Hegelianism:
I believe that there has been no dangerous change or turn in the German education of this century which has not become more dangerous through the enormous influence, continuing to the present moment, of this philosophy, the Hegelian (52).
Historians and the German Nation State
Nietzsche was writing in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. His arguments about a culture in crisis and the contradictory relationship between history and politics must be read in this context. The freshly-formed nation was in a process of self-definition when Nietzsche was writing his tract about the function of history in 1874. The culture sought archetypal precedents in history to an extreme degree. Ramler and Wackernagel, whom Nietzsche mentions, were just the tip of the iceberg in a tidal wave of nationalist German historians.
Friedrich Dahlmann (1785-1860) was another such influential proponent of history whose retellings of the English and French revolutions paved the way for histories by Heinrich von Treitschke, Theodor Mommsen, and Heinrich von Sybel.
Dahlmann’s student, Treitscheke, published History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century in 1879. The text mythologized the role of Prussia in reuniting the German nation state.
Mommsen made significant contributions to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a thorough catalogue of thoroughly-edited primary sources supporting the study of German history from the end of the Roman Empire through to 1500. Sybel wrote about German history in the Middle Ages, the French Revolution, and the German empire. Nor was Sybel without political interests. He sat on the 1850 Erfurt parliament, established a Historical Seminar in Munich with the patronage of King Maximilian II of Bavaria, and became secretary of the Historical Commission.
This saturation of historical study that concerns Nietzsche was objectively valid in one sense: despite the efforts of a multitude of scholars and politicians, history had still failed to unite the country in a shared identity. In one of best-known university lectures on politics, Treitschke stated “for many centuries it had been our tragedy that no one knew where Germany ends.” Large sections of the population still opposed unification, holding fast to their nation-state identity. The question of the German nation looms very large in the background of Nietzsche’s urgent call for a “truth-in-need."
Modernism
Many of Nietzsche’s arguments rail against the modernity in which he found himself. Nietzsche’s claim that life needs history directly opposes modernist theory, which is primarily concerned with emancipating modernity from outdated forms. Yet Nietzsche’s reckoning with the proper role of history and the paradoxical relationship between history and life is a decidedly modernist project. The modernist agenda is especially palpably in the tussle in Chapter 6 about discernment, in which Nietzsche is especially mistrustful of there being a possibility of “objectivity.” Writing history is difficult, Nietzsche says, because all things are couched in the prevailing ideologies of their time. It is this tussle, the very project of making new and “truth-in-need,” which Nietzsche is at pains to advocate, with which modernism concerns itself.
Nietzsche’s essay on the function of history is also modernist in its focus on temporality. The notion that history and civilization are inherently progressive came under fire from a range of modernists of the period. Schopenhauer’s 1819 The World as Will and Representation called into question the optimism that had accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (On the Origin of Species was published in 1859) told a story about progress in the field of biology. Yet Karl Marx penned his equally-influential Das Kapital in 1867, shining a light on the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Nietzsche’s essay is one of a series of meditations on subjective-versus clock-time, and the idea of recalibrating our relationship with time to reveal the essence of the modern.
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