The Historical and Its Discontents: Nietzsche and Benjamin against "Historicism" (original) (raw)

Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History

Pólemos, 2013

In the course of the nineteenth century, the new scientific approach to history turned the past into a passive object of knowledge. This approach betrayed a strategy of domination, as it endowed certain interpretations of history with an aura of objectivity, while delegitimizing others as myth. On the contrary, Nietzsche asserted the formative powers of the present, and he argued that the historian had to actively recreate the past and turn it into a meaningful historical narrative. In his view, the meaning of the past depended on the will to transform the present itself. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, other theorists and writers, such as Croce, Péguy, and later Borges, attempted to reconceptualise the relation between the past and the present. Similarly to Nietzsche, they claimed that historians actively recreate and modify the past. This claim was also shared by Benjamin and Foucault, who emphasized the historians' duty to modify the past by seeking to revive subjugated historical knowledges. The aim of this article is to connect the writings of all these authors in a constellation that points to a shared conviction: that history is not objectively given, but constantly recreated and modified in the present.

Friedrich Nietzsche The Use and Abuse of History

"Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity." These are Goethe's words. With them, as with a heartfelt expression of Ceterum censeo [I judge otherwise], our consideration of the worth and the worthlessness of history may begin. For this work is to set down why, in the spirit of Goethe's saying, we must seriously despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we lack what is still most essential to us and because what is superfluous is hostile to what is essential. To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit as necessary as it may be painful.

"Embarkation for Abdera: Historicization in Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation"

Quaderns de filosofia 9.1, 2022

This article develops a novel reading of the threefold division of modes of historicization in Nietzsche's Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. It argues that Nietzsche's stance is closely matched, and indirectly responds, to specific features of the argument for progress in human history that Kant presents in Conflict of the Faculties. Kant had hit upon interest, boredom, publicity, and forgetting as systematic problems for the philosophy of history, and Nietzsche's thought on history takes up these concerns. I argue that Nietzsche's reaction to these Kantian problems prompted him to subtly dissociate historicization and historicity. This manoeuver allowed him to counter the conceptual challenges Kant had established and to align his notions on history with those on ethical normativity in lived life, embracing what he elsewhere rejected as a "moral ontology. " Resumen: Este artículo desarrolla una lectura novedosa de la triple división de los modos de historización en Ventajas e inconvenientes de la historia para la vida de Nietzsche. Se defiende que la postura de Nietzsche está estrechamente emparejada con las características específicas del argumento del progreso en la historia

Nietzsche on the Use and Abuse of History

In this paper, I discuss Nietzsche's essay On the Use and Abuse of History. This is a paper that I presented at the History Seminar Series, Nipissing University, in 2004.

Beyond history? Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno

History is a way the present relates to itself. History mediates the present, and anticipates the future. The relation of past and present in history is a social relation, a relation of society with itself, as a function of change. The proper object of the present is history: the present is historical; it is constituted by history. The present is history; history is the present. As Hegel put it, the “philosophical” approach to history is concerned with the “eternally present:” what in the past was always present. This is a function of modernity. What is at issue is the form of the present in history, or, the form of history in the present. Three writings, by Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno, respectively, reflect upon the specific form of history in capital, and on the possibility of transcending the historicism that emerged in the 19th century, as it continued to inform the 20th: Nietzsche’s 1873 “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life;” Benjamin’s 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History;” and Adorno’s 1942 “Reflections on Class Theory.” Nietzsche’s essay inspired Benjamin’s; Adorno’s followed directly upon Benjamin’s.

Against the Tyranny of History: A Post-modern Sequel

Petr Sláma, New Theologies of the Old Testament and History: The Function of History in Modern Biblical Scholarship, LIT , 2017

A chapter on attempts to present the Old Testament theology in a different way than as religious history. In many respects, these attempts call to mind the time between the wars. However, this does not mean a circular motion. Georg Fohrer, the Amsterdam school, Brevard Childs, Walter Brueggemann, and Rolf Rendtorff are discussed here.