"Nietzsche, Critical History, and 'das Pathos der Richtertum.'" Revue Internationale de Philosophie vol. 54, no. 211 (2000): 57-76. (original) (raw)

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.

Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche's "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" (1874)

Detailed notes on Nietzsche's "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life", one of his Untimely Meditations. The notes systematically cover the various elements of Nietzsche's argument and provide reflections on the pertinence of Nietzsche's argument for us today: for example, is an excess of history a problem for us in the 21st century as it was for Nietzsche in the 19th century? or, can the notion of a historical study that stifles possibilities for creation in the present help us understand the limits of a slavish veneration of the "Western Canon" today?

"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

The Nietzsche’s Reflection on History: Historical Sense and Nihilism

Open Journal of Philosophy, 2018

The present article aims to investigate the narratives considerations of Nietzsche's history, based on his writings in which the critique of historical culture is revealed from its lack of historical sense and his nihilist state, establishing a close relationship between the two themes, making the understanding of the second magnify its critical position.

Nietzsche's Project of Reevaluation

Critique in German Philosophy: From Kant to Critical Theory (Acosta López and McQuillan Eds), 2020

Whether Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of morality is best understood as an internal or as an external critique remains a matter of controversy. On the internalist interpretation (Ridley, Owen, Merrick ), the genealogical enterprise takes as its starting point the perspective being criticized, gradually revealing it to be untenable ‘from within.’ On the externalist interpretation (Leiter, and arguably Geuss, Williams, and Janaway ), this constraint is lifted; the starting point of the critique need not be the perspective being criticized, but may be that of someone who already suspects the latter to be untenable. According to a common objection to ‘external critique’ interpretations, the limited-scope objection, since an external critique to a value-system could only work on an audience whose members were predisposed to abandon that system of values, ‘external critique’ interpretations impose a severe limitation on the transformative potential of Nietzsche’s project. ‘Internal critique’ interpretations, by contrast, can seem hard to reconcile with the polemical character of On the Genealogy of Morality (which lends the book its subtitle, Eine Streitschrift) and with Nietzsche’s frequent remarks to the effect his works were addressing a particular, ‘higher,’ kind of individual. The overarching goal in this paper is to call into question the usefulness of the ‘internal-external’ or ‘immanent-transcendent’ dichotomy for understanding Nietzsche’s genealogical critique. I argue that the apparent usefulness of the distinction between external and internal critiques when approaching Nietzsche’s works rests on the assumption that any critique of values must itself be grounded on values that function as evaluative-critical standards. If the assumption is right, then one of two things, either the values that are deployed as standards coincide with those that are the target of critique, in which case the critique is internal, or they are not (etc.). Thus the assumption is liable to render us forgetful of a third possibility, that of a critical strategy that does not work by deploying (internal or external) values as standards of critical assessment, but by revealing something about the nature of value, and more precisely about the origin of any individual’s commitments to their values. On the view that I defend, one of the crucial steps of Nietzsche’s genealogical method is to bring his reader to realize that any individual’s commitment to their values is expressive of and rooted in their commitment to preserve their way of life. Realizing this does not require that the reader abandon their own values. But it does require that they acknowledge that were they committed to a relevantly different way of life, they would subscribe to different values. And this, in turn, suffices to bring about a transformation in their understanding of and relationship to those commitments through the further realization that it is ultimately always up to them to undertake the project of taking distance from and ‘re-evaluating’ those values.

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.”