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Nietzsche's Ethics of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Peter Berkowitz
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Extract

In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life Nietzsche sets forth prescriptions for placing history in the service of human excellence. Nietzsche's prescriptions are based on a substantive metaphysical doctrine and a definite conception of human needs and capacities. Contrary to the dominant trends in recent scholarship that depict Nietzsche as primarily a teacher of antifoundationalism, historicism, and perspectivism, in his major thematic statement on the matter Nietzsche views history as a means to discover and to display nonhistorical and enduring knowledge about human nature and the rank order of desires, human types, and forms of life. For Nietzsche, the task of the “genuine historian” is nothing less than the transformation of history into poetry in the effort to defend wisdom, to distinguish nobility from baseness, and to establish the love of truth as a resplendent vice and noble faith. Nietzsche's account of the right use of history suggests an underappreciated unity in his writings by raising the possibility that in his several histories Nietzsche wrote from the perspective, and assumed the responsibility, of the genuine historian.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , Winter 1994 , pp. 5 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1994

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References

1. For example, whereas Alexander Nehamas finds in Nietzsche's writings the resources for fashioning a coherent, viable, and attractive model for selfcreation, Martin Heidegger decries the arrogant frame of mind that teaches that the will produces and imposes structure and value on the external world. Whereas Michel Foucault credits Nietzsche with introducing genealogy, a revolutionary and comprehensive form of social inquiry grounded in the assumption that morality and knowledge are, have been, and always will be nothing more than reflections of envy and desire for power, Alasdair MacIntyre, essentially embracing Foucault's characterization of genealogy, concludes that as a method of moral inquiry genealogy is hopelessly irrational. Finally, Mark Warren seeks to rescue what he regards as Nietzsche's central notion, human agency, from what Warren views as Nietzsche's repugnant and extraneous remarks about morality and politics. This stands in sharp contrast to Bruce Detwiler who, proceeding from the premise which he shares with Warren that Nietzsche denies that morality has a rational, natural, or divine basis, argues that Nietzsche's sweeping denial is in fact intimately connected to his recurring accounts of a radically aristocratic political order. See Nehamas, Alexander, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985);Google ScholarHeidegger, Martin, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. Lovett, James (New York: Harper & Row, 1977);Google ScholarFoucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul (New York: Pantheon, 1984);Google ScholarMacIntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990);Google ScholarWarren, Mark, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987);Google Scholar and Detwiler, Bruce, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).Google Scholar

2. References to Nietzsche's works appear in the text. The following abbreviations are used: The Antichrist, trans. Kaufmann, Walter, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kaufmann, Walter (1954; rpt. New York: Viking, 1968), noted as A;Google ScholarBeyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Random House, 1974), noted as BGE;Google ScholarThe Birth of Tragedy, trans. Kaufmann, Walter, in The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner (New York: Random House, 1967), noted as BT;Google ScholarEcce Homo, trans. Kaufmann, Walter, in On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1969), noted as EH;Google ScholarOn the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufmann, Walter, in On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1969), noted as GM;Google ScholarSelected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), noted as L;Google ScholarPhilosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Breazeale, Daniel (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities International Press, 1979), noted as PT;Google ScholarPhilosophy and the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Cowan, Marianne (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1962), noted as PTG;Google Scholar and On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), noted as UD.Google Scholar In a few instances I have made minor adjustments to the translations.

3. See Nehamas, , Nietzsche: Life as Literature, pp. 13–20;Google Scholar and Blondel, , Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Hand, Seán (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 18.Google Scholar

4. Perhaps one cause of Nehamas's and Blondel's failure to see the importance of the genre of history in Nietzsche's writings is the topical and thematic approach they adopt to interpreting his thought. This approach, which passes by Nietzsche's books in favor of fragments drawn from them, has been called into question by a eminent former practitioner of it. Tracy Strong has reached the conclusion that the topical and thematic approach is opposed to the manner in which Nietzsche wished to be read. In the Epilogue to the second edition of his book, Strong looks forward to the day “when we will start reading Nietzsche as he wanted to be read, that is, to read his books as books and not as collections of sayings.” See Strong, Tracy B., Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, Expanded Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, 1988), p. 317.Google Scholar A study of Nietzsche's histories can contribute to Strong's worthy hope.

5. For example, in the Preface to his Genealogy, Nietzsche stresses that his chief ambition is to determine the value of morality and that this requires “an actual history of morality,” that is the discovery of “what is documented, what can actually be confirmed, and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind” (GM Preface 5, 6, 7). Although, in his Genealogy, he reaches substantial conclusions about the value of morality, Nietzsche does not provide anything resembling the almost conventional kind of history of morality that he promises to supply. Nevertheless Michel Foucault, fastening on what Nietzsche says and ignoring what Nietzsche does, declares that “Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary.” See Foucault, M., “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 76.Google Scholar In fact, the inspiring portrait of the genealogist as the exemplary scholar that Foucault draws is nonsense: if genealogy consists in the careful gathering of vast source material and patient attention to detail as Foucault says it does, then Nietzsche is no genealogist. For Nietzsche's genealogy is not gray. Inasmuch as Nietzsche reduces the whole complex and multifarious moral past of mankind to two competing moralities, it is closer to the truth to say that in practice Nietzsche's genealogy is painted in black and white. Nor is Nietzsche's genealogy meticulous. Inasmuch as Nietzsche names no names, dates no events, and shows scant concern for variations, anomalies, and details, it would be more adequate to call his genealogy inspired guess work, suggestive speculation, or a likely tale. And Nietzsche's genealogy, strikingly devoid of empirical evidence or scholarly apparatus, is anything but patiently documentary. Foucault obscures the character of Nietzsche's genealogy—in particular the tension between Nietzsche's rhetoric about, and his practice of, genealogy—by taking Nietzsche's rhetoric at face value and ignoring his practice.

6. Goethe's Faust is an example of one who suffers from the scholarly obsession with historical knowledge. Faust's colleague Wagner is an example of a man who does not know that he is afflicted (Goethe's, Faust, Part 1:354–429, and 522–602).Google Scholar

7. See also “The Struggle between Science and Wisdom,” in PT, p. 127, and PTG1.

8. A preference Nietzsche embraces in BT 7,9; BGE 39; GM II and III 24–27; and A Preface.

9. “The question of the degree to which life requires the service of history at all, however, is one of the supreme questions and concerns in regard to the health of a man, a people or a culture” (UD 1, p.67).

10. In the Preface to Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks Nietzsche emphasizes that the reason for studying ancient philosophy is “to bring to light what we must ever love and honor and what no subsequent enlightenment can take away: great individual human beings” (PTG Preface, p. 24).

11. Plato's Republic 443c–445b, also 592b.

12. Nietzsche uses a related verb, “umzuprägen” to describe the characteristic activity of the genuine historian (UD 6, p. 94).

13. See also UD 8, p. 103: “the thought of being epigones, which can often be a painful thought, is also capable of evoking great effects and grand hopes for the future in both an individual and in a nation, provided we regard ourselves as the heirs and successors of the astonishing powers of antiquity and see in this our honor and our spur.”

14. Hobbes, too, for all his rhetoric about science and system, invokes the injunction “Read thyself” as the primary basis for moral and political knowledge. See Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction.

15. This important question will never arise if one infers from a narrow range of Nietzsche's utterances that Nietzsche rejected the very idea of self-knowledge in the Socratic sense. This is what Alexander Nehamas does. He flatly asserts that Nietzsche rejected self-knowledge as Socrates understood it because “Nietzsche denies that in Socrates' sense there is either a self that can be known or a knowledge that can capture it” (Nehamas, , Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 26).Google Scholar Sometimes, of course, Nietzsche does deny the possibility of Socratic self-knowledge. Not less frequently, however, Nietzsche affirms its reality and its centrality to human excellence. Nehamas fails to investigate the perspective that accounts for both Nietzsche's denial and his affirmation of Socratic self-knowledge. Arbitrarily focusing on one side of Nietzsche's thought or a single perspective within it, Nehamas puffs up the part and presents it as the whole.

16. Again, it is instructive to compare Nietzsche with Hobbes who insists that reading the universal features of human passion from a close examination of one's own passions is harder than learning any language or science. Leviathan, Introduction.

17. See TI “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” 51; EH Preface 4; EH III 1, 4 and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” 6; letter to Overbeck (received on 11 February 1883), and letter to Knortz, , 21 June 1888, in L, pp. 207, 299.Google Scholar