On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life

Overview

This is the second of the four Untimely Meditations, published in 1874 when Nietzsche was twenty-nine and holding a chair in classical philology at Basel. About a hundred pages, nine short sections, and the most accessible sustained argument he ever wrote: there are no aphorisms here, just an essay that starts somewhere and gets somewhere.

The title matters and translations vary. The German is Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, and Nachteil means disadvantage or drawback rather than abuse. The question is not whether history is misused by bad actors. It is whether history, correctly done, is good for the people doing it.

The context is a discipline at its height. German historical scholarship in the 1870s was the most prestigious intellectual enterprise in Europe, the model every other field wanted to copy, and Nietzsche was employed inside it. Hegel had taught a generation that history was reason working itself out, so that to understand your moment historically was to understand it truly. The new Reich, founded three years earlier, was busy furnishing itself with a past.

Nietzsche’s charge is that all of this has produced a culture that knows everything and can do nothing.

The argument

Sections 1 to 3: forgetting, and the three kinds of history. He opens with an image. Cattle in a field are happy because each moment dies for them at once. A person watches enviously, because he cannot forget, and the chain of past moments follows him everywhere.

From this Nietzsche draws his central claim: the unhistorical and the historical are both necessary, and health lies in the proportion. A person needs a horizon, a boundary inside which things matter and beyond which nothing is remembered, and the strength to draw that boundary is what makes action possible. Someone who saw everything and forgot nothing would be paralysed, unable to lift a finger because every act would trail its full context behind it.

He then names three ways history serves life, which is the part of the essay everyone remembers.

Monumental history looks to the great deeds of the past for evidence that greatness is possible, and gives the person who wants to act a model and a spur. Its disease is that it must ignore causes and circumstances to make the past usable, so it deals in analogies that are not true, encourages fanatics, and can be used by the weak to deny that anything new is worth attempting because the great things are already done.

Antiquarian history preserves. It loves what one comes from, the small things, the town, the customs, the inherited conditions of one’s existence, and gives life roots. Its disease is that it reveres everything equally simply because it is old, cannot distinguish what deserves keeping from what does not, and finally blocks new growth: it knows only how to preserve life, never how to generate it.

Critical history breaks. It brings the past before a tribunal, interrogates it and condemns it, and it is necessary because every past contains injustices that a person who wants to live must be able to repudiate. Its danger is that we are ourselves the outcome of the things we condemn, and a person who cuts too deep cuts into his own origin. Nietzsche is careful here: we cannot give ourselves a new first nature, only implant a second one, which is always more fragile.

Sections 4 to 8: the five diseases of the historical sense. The second half is polemic, and the target is the education of German youth.

The first symptom is the split between inside and outside. Modern culture is not a culture at all, but knowledge about culture. The young man has read about every period and belongs to none, and Nietzsche’s image is a snake that has swallowed whole rabbits and lies still in the sun. Nothing he has learned shows in how he lives.

The second is the belief that this age possesses justice more than any other, the conviction that objectivity is the highest virtue and that the historian who judges nothing judges best. Nietzsche denies that the impartial historian is even possible and doubts he would be valuable. Only a person who builds the future has the right to judge the past, and the drive to know without any relation to life is a vanity dressed as a virtue.

The third is that instincts are disrupted: the young learn so much history that their own impulses come to feel accidental and unjustified, so they stop trusting them.

The fourth is the belief that we are latecomers, epigones living at the end of a long story, which Nietzsche identifies with Hegel and calls the most damaging idea available. If history is reason unfolding, then whatever happens is right and the present moment is its summit, an attitude that produces irony toward one’s own existence and then cynicism.

The fifth is that in this condition everything becomes ironic, and a people that can no longer take itself seriously cannot produce anything.

Section 9 and 10: the cure. No prescription, and Nietzsche knows it. What he offers is youth: the capacity to be unhistorical, to draw a horizon, to be unjust enough toward the past to want something of one’s own. He commends the Greeks, who inherited a chaos of foreign forms and organised it around their own needs rather than collecting it, and who learned to organise the chaos by thinking back to their real needs. Health, not scholarship, is the standard.

How to read it

Read sections 1 to 3 closely. The account of forgetting and the three kinds of history is the durable part and it is genuinely useful for thinking about anything, not just about historiography.

Read the rest faster. Sections 4 to 8 are a polemic about German education in 1874, sharp and funny but local, and you will not lose the argument by reading them quickly.

Test the three kinds against yourself. Everyone uses history in all three ways, and the exercise of asking which one you are doing when you cite a precedent, defend a tradition or denounce an inheritance is what the essay is for.

Do not read forgetting as anti-intellectualism. Nietzsche was a professional scholar attacking the effects of scholarship, and his complaint is about proportion. He does not say know less, he says know in a way that changes what you do.

Update the target as you read. The historical culture Nietzsche describes now reaches everyone with a phone: limitless information about every era and controversy, available at once, unrelated to anything the reader will do. Whether his diagnosis transfers is the most interesting question the essay raises.

And note what is already present. The critique of objectivity, the suspicion of disinterested knowledge, the test of every value by whether it strengthens or weakens life: the machinery of the Genealogy is here fifteen years early, in a calmer voice.

Questions it raises

• Is there a quantity of information beyond which a person acts less well rather than better?
• Nietzsche says only the builder of the future may judge the past. Is that a defensible limit on historical inquiry or a licence to distort?
• He calls forgetting a power rather than a lack. What would it mean to exercise it deliberately?
• Monumental, antiquarian, critical: which does your own country’s public memory mostly run on, and what does it cost?
• If we cannot give ourselves a new first nature, how much can a critical reckoning with the past actually change?
• Nietzsche wrote against a culture drowning in books. Does the argument hold, or intensify, in a culture drowning in feeds?