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Life presents us with many fascinating and exciting things, such as seeing the Pyramids (or going to a play, or sitting next to someone interesting at dinner, or reading a biography …)
But too often the experience does not really stick. We enjoy it, but it does not change us. It does not have a deep or lasting effect. Normally we don’t mind too much – this is the very familiar pattern of life. But maybe we should mind more. Nietzsche suggests that we should take these opportunities very seriously. And he thinks that we don’t get the best out of them because we don’t ask a key question: what is this experience for – what actually do we want from it, where do we think it should contribute to our lives?
He looks at the whole topic of history and asks what is history for. It feels like a very odd question. We don’t normally ask such a basic question about grand things like history. We usually reserve it for simpler encounters: looking at the dashboard of someone’s car and asking ‘what’s that button for?’
The fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of history hurts it; this will be proved later. History is necessary to the living man in relation to three different areas: his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance.
These three relations answer to the three kinds of history – so far as they can be distinguished – the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical.
History is necessary above all to the man of action and power who fights a great fight and needs examples, teachers and comforters; he cannot find them among his contemporaries. It was necessary in this sense to poet, philosopher and playwright Friedrich Schiller; for our time is so evil, Goethe says, that the poet meets no nature that will profit him among living men. The ancient Greek historian Polybius is thinking of the active man when he calls political history the true preparation for governing a state: it is the great teacher that shows us how to bear steadfastly the reverses of fortune, by reminding us of what others have suffered. Whoever has learned to recognize this meaning in history must hate to see curious tourists and laborious beetle-hunters climbing up the great pyramids of antiquity. He does not wish to meet the idler who is rushing through the picture-galleries of the past for a new distraction or sensation, where he himself is looking for instruction and encouragement. To avoid being troubled by the weak and hopeless idlers, and those whose apparent activity is merely neurotic, he looks behind him and stays his course towards the goal in order to breathe. His goal perhaps is his own, but often it is the nation’s, or humanity’s at large: he avoids quietism, and uses history as a weapon against it. For the most part he has no hope of reward except fame, which means the expectation of a niche in the temple of history, where he in his turn may be the consoler and counsellor of posterity. For he sees that what has once been able to extend the conception ‘man’ and give it a fairer content – and better meaning – must ever exist for the same purpose and task.
The great moments in the individual battle to enrich the nature of humanity form a chain, a high road for humanity through the ages, and the highest points of those vanished moments are yet great and living for men; and this is the fundamental idea of the belief in humanity, that finds a voice in the demand for a ‘monumental history’.
But the fiercest battle is fought around the demand for greatness to be eternal. Every other living thing cries no. ‘Away with the monuments,’ is the watchword. Dull custom fills all the chambers of the world with its meanness, and rises in thick vapour around anything that is great, barring its way to immortality, blinding and stifling it. And the way passes through mortal brains! Through the brains of sick and short-lived beasts that ever rise to the surface to breathe, and painfully keep off annihilation for a little space. For they wish but one thing: to live at any cost. Who would ever dream of any ‘monumental history’ – the hard torch-race that alone gives life to greatness – among them? And yet there are always men awakening, who are strengthened and made happy by gazing on past greatness, as though man’s life were a lordly thing; and the fairest fruit of this bitter tree is the knowledge that there was once a man who walked sternly and proudly through this world, another who had pity and loving-kindness, another who lived in contemplation – but all leaving one truth behind them, that his life is the fairest who thinks least about immediate advantage in life. The common man snatches greedily at this little span, with tragic earnestness, but they, on their way to monumental history and immortality, knew how to greet it with Olympic laughter, or at least with a lofty scorn, and they went down to their graves in irony – for what had they to bury? Only what they had always treated as dross, refuse and vanity, and which now falls into its true home of oblivion, after being so long the sport of their contempt.
One thing will live-the sign-manual of their inmost being, the rare flash of light, the deed, the creation – because posterity cannot do without it. In this spiritualized form fame is something more than ‘the sweetest morsel for our egoism’ – in Schopenhauer’s phrase – it is the belief in the oneness and continuity of the great in every age, and a protest against the change and decay of generations.
What is the use to the modern man of this ‘monumental’ contemplation of the past, this preoccupation with the rare and classic? It is the knowledge that the great thing existed and was therefore possible, and so may be possible again. He is heartened on his way; for his doubt in weaker moments, whether his desire be not for the impossible, is struck aside.
Suppose one believes that no more than a hundred men, brought up in the new spirit, efficient and productive, were needed to give the death-blow to the present fashion of education in Germany; he will gather strength from the remembrance that the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the shoulders of such another band of a hundred men. And yet if we really wish to learn something from an example, how vague and elusive do we find the comparison! If it is to give us strength, many of the differences must be neglected, the individuality of the past forced into a general formula and all the sharp angles broken off for the sake of correspondence.
As long as the soul of history is found in the great impulse that it gives to a powerful spirit, as long as the past is principally used as a model for imitation, it is always in danger of being a little altered and touched up, and brought nearer to fiction. So as to speak more powerfully to us. Sometimes there is no possible distinction between a ‘monumental’ past and a mythical romance, as the same motives for action can be gathered from the one world as the other. If this monumental method of surveying the past dominates the others – the antiquarian and the critical, which I shall shortly describe – the past itself suffers wrong.
(On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, 1874)
The key question is: what do we need from the things we encounter? What are we trying to do with them? Nietzsche is a great fighter in the war on randomness.
It’s not that our purposes always have to be tremendously elevated. The point is that we need to have some view of what we want. Nietzsche is getting us to see how often we drift idly around the important and great things that we encounter. We don’t ask much of them. We don’t ask them to guide our lives, or inspire us, or comfort us. We consider them interesting – and then don’t imagine that they have anything important to say to us about ourselves.
Secondly, history is necessary to the man of conservative and reverent nature, who looks back to the origins of his existence with love and trust; through it, he gives thanks for life. He is careful to preserve what survives from ancient days, and will reproduce the conditions of his own upbringing for those who come after him; thus he does life a service. The possession of his ancestors’ furniture changes its meaning in his soul: for his soul is rather possessed by it. All that is small and limited, mouldy and obsolete, gains a worth and inviolability of its own from the conservative and reverent soul of the antiquary migrating into it, and building a secret nest there. The history of his town becomes the history of himself; he looks on the walls, the turreted gate, the town council, the fair, as an illustrated diary of his youth, and sees himself in it all – his strength, industry, desire, reason, faults and follies. ‘Here one could live,’ he says, ‘as one can live here now – and will go on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be uprooted in the night.’ And so, with his ‘we’, he surveys the marvellous individual life of the past and identifies himself with the spirit of the house, the family and the city. He greets the soul of his people from afar as his own, across the dim and troubled centuries.
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But the greatest value of this antiquarian spirit of reverence lies in the simple emotions of pleasure and content that it lends to the drab, rough, even painful circumstances of a nation’s or individual’s life: the celebrated historian Niebuhr confesses that he could live happily on a moor among free peasants with a history, and would never feel the want of art. How could history serve life better than by anchoring the less gifted types of people to the homes and customs of their ancestors, and keeping them from ranging far afield in search of better, to find only struggle and competition? The influence that ties men down to the same companions and circumstances, to the daily round of toil, to their bare mountainside – seems to be selfish and unreasonable: but it is a healthy unreason and of profit to the community; as everyone knows who has clearly realized the terrible consequences of mere desire for migration and adventure – perhaps in whole peoples – or who watches the destiny of a nation that has lost confidence in its earlier days, and is given up to a restless cosmopolitanism and an unceasing desire for novelty. The feeling of the tree that clings to its roots, the happiness of knowing one’s growth to be not merely arbitrary and fortuitous, but the inheritance, the fruit and blossom of a past, that does not merely justify but crown the present – this is what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical sense.
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There is always the danger (in this approach) that whatever happens to be ancient will be regarded as equally venerable, and everything that is left out of this respect for antiquity, like a new spirit, will be rejected as an enemy. The Greeks themselves admitted the archaic style of plastic art by the side of the freer and greater style; and later, did not merely tolerate the pointed nose and the cold mouth, but made them even a canon of taste. If the judgement of a people harden in this way, and history’s service to the past life be to undermine a further and higher life; if the historical sense no longer preserve life, but mummify it: then the tree dies, unnaturally, from the top downwards, and at last the roots themselves wither.
Antiquarian history degenerates from the moment that it no longer gives a soul and inspiration to the fresh life of the present. The spring of piety is dried up, but the learned habit persists without it and revolves complacently round its own centre. The horrid spectacle is seen of the mad collector raking over all the dust-heaps of the past. He breathes a mouldy air; the antiquarian habit may degrade a considerable talent, a real spiritual need in him, to a mere insatiable curiosity for everything old: he often sinks so low as to be satisfied with any food, and greedily devour all the scraps that fall from the bibliographical table.
(On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, 1874)
The danger here is that while the piety may wither away, the attitude of scholarly devotion – the preoccupation with every little detail – will continue – in which case the effort no longer serves any good living purpose. It is no longer something that makes us larger and stronger. Instead it becomes a retreat from life; a preoccupation that gets in the way of us working out what we actually care about and want and need.
Are you oppressed by a present trouble, which you need history to help you throw off?
Man must have the strength to break up the past; and apply it too, in order to live. He must bring the past to the bar of judgement, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn it. Every past is worth condemning: this is the rule in mortal affairs, which always contain a large measure of human power and human weakness. It is not justice that sits in judgement here; nor mercy that proclaims the verdict; but only the dim, driving force that insatiably desires – itself. Its sentence is always unmerciful, always unjust, as it never flows from a pure fountain of knowledge: though it would generally turn out the same, if Justice herself delivered it. ‘For everything that is born is worthy of being destroyed: better were it then that nothing should be born.’ It requires great strength to be able to live and forget how far life and injustice are one. Luther himself once said that the world only arose by an oversight of God; if he had ever dreamed of heavy artillery he would never have created it. The same life that needs forgetfulness, needs sometimes its destruction; for should the injustice of something ever become obvious – a monopoly, a caste, a dynasty for example – the thing deserves to fall. Its past is critically examined, the knife put to its roots, and all the ‘pieties’ are grimly trodden underfoot.
For as we are merely the result of previous generations we are also the result of their errors, passions, and crimes: it is impossible to shake off this chain. Though we condemn the errors and think we have escaped them, we cannot escape the fact that we spring from them. At best, it comes to a conflict between our innate, inherited nature and our knowledge, between a stern, new discipline and an ancient tradition; and we plant a new way of life, a new instinct, a second nature, that withers the first.
(On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, 1874)
The danger here is that we may wield the terrible condemning power of critical history to no great effect. As Nietzsche sees it, this ought to be the opening move in the creation of a new and better order of things. We cast off the past in order to bring in something genuinely better – and because we have an urgent need of doing this. But we can become slaves of a critical habit. We look at the past and condemn, not because we have any great need to do so, not because this really is crucial in creating the future we want, but because we have no particular sense of what we want from the past and we condemn it as a kind of prejudicial sport – much as bigots condemn anything that is unfamiliar or alien to them.
This is how history can serve life. Every man and nation needs a certain knowledge of the past, whether it be through monumental, antiquarian or critical history, according to his objects, powers and necessities. The need is not that of the mere thinkers who only look on at life, or the few who desire knowledge and can only be satisfied with knowledge; but it has always a reference to the purpose of life, and is under its absolute rule and direction. This is the natural relation of an age, a culture and a people to history; hunger is its source, necessity its norm, the inner plastic power assigns its limits. The knowledge of the past is only desired for the service of the future and the present, not to weaken the present or undermine a living future.
(On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, 1874)
Nietzsche wants us to think of history as a kind of therapy, as offering us help to become the kind of people we want to be. But we have to diagnose our own needs before we can seek out the right kind of help.
Are you trying to undertake a great task with which you need help – help to remain cheerful and confident in the face of great difficulties? Are you by nature a pious person? Do you revere and love certain things in the past because they seem to be part of yourself?
We should pay a great deal more attention to purpose than we normally do. We tend not to ask: What is my visit to the Pyramids (or the Eiffel Tower, or the Tate Modern) actually for? That is, what true need of mine does it serve? It’s not enough to say: ‘I want to see these things with my own eyes,’ or ‘It’s on my bucket list,’ or ‘It’s famous.’ These ‘reasons’ do not latch onto genuine needs. Nietzsche is asking us to regard our lives as more precious – our attention and devotion are commodities that are in short supply, valuable resources that should not be wasted.