On the Dangers of Antiquarian Investigations: Nietzsche, the Excesses of History, and the Power of Forgetting (original) (raw)

Nietzsche's Untimely Antidote to the Science of History

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Life-Affirmation: Experimenting with Art & Science to Transfigure Humankind, 2024

In this essay, I first consider how Nietzsche wishes the prescription he announces in HL—the second of his Untimely Meditations—to be understood with a view to his evolving sense of the relationship between art, science, and life. Though HL is typically situated as an “early” work, I complicate that placement by showing how HL does not, like its usual companions in the category, suffer from too romantic an orientation to the past, and thus to art. On the contrary, HL is a threshold text that—though it betrays similar worries about science as The Birth of Tragedy (BT) with which it is often grouped— nonetheless anticipates Nietzsche’s more critical position on science to return on the nether side of his free-spirit experimental period sans the sentimentalism with which he retrospectively charges his early writings. Finally, once we are in a position to take Nietzsche’s 1874 analysis seriously, then we can seriously consider the poisonous postmodern fruit born of the modern tree. I conclude by speculating on connections between Nietzsche’s insights and contemporary forms of what I call “memorial torture.”

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.

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.

Nietzsche, Philology, and Genealogy

The aim of this essay is to reintroduce the readers of the Journal of the Georgia Philological Association to Friedrich Nietzsche the philologist and, more substantively, to explain the nature of Nietzsche’s philologically-inspired analytic. To that end, I sketch several overlapping lines of influence on Nietzsche’s thinking. These influences include French aristocratic genealogists, the Scholastic academic tradition, Hegelian historicism, British progressive moral historians, and finally, Darwin. The discussion begins by examining the French genealogists who sought, amidst the groans of a social and intellectual transition from the feudal to the Enlightenment, to justify and protect their existing privilege by reclaiming the established tradition of drawing lines of descent. The story picks up a century and a half or so later, when genealogy was used once again: this time by progressive, utilitarian moral historians. What is especially noteworthy of these thinkers is that they although endeavored to put genealogy to a rather different use, they retained both the narrative structure and many of the metaphysical presuppositions of the old system, including universal forms and the existence of a predetermined moral order. It is explained that these thinkers were influenced by Hegel’s (1802) pre-Darwin speculation regarding historical evolution and that his ideas are a key representative of the then-ongoing shift from a worldview ordered by immutable forms and universal laws to one that embraced change and epiphenomenal novelty. To close, differences between Darwin’s and Hegel’s thoughts on evolution are discussed, as well as their relation to Nietzsche’s thoughts on historical analysis. As these influential views are examined, comparisons, contrasts, and other connections to Nietzsche’s philologically-inspired approach are woven in.

Friedrich Nietzsche in Basel: An apology for classical studies

Educational Philosophy and Theory , 2018

Alongside his work as a professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche reflected on the value of classical studies in contemporary nineteenth-century society, starting with a selfanalysis of his own classical training and position as a philologist and teacher. Contrary to his well-known aversion to classical philology, a science conceived as being an end in itself, aimed at mere erudite complacency, I highlight Nietzsche's defence of the system of Classical studies, and of the education of young people through the works of the ancient Greek and Roman period. Such an apology 'redeems' , in a sense, the discipline, and justifies its role and continued relevance in our present-day society.