The Use And Abuse Of History :: essays research papers

The Use and Abuse of History            By Friedrich Nietzsche anterior "Incidentally, I despise boththing which merely instructs me with come to the fore increasing or immediately invigorate my activity." These are Goethes words. With them, as with a heartfelt expression of Ceterum censeo I judge otherwise, our contemplation of the worth and the worthlessness of history may begin. For this work is to set big m hotshoty why, in the spirit of Goethes saying, we must seriously despise instruction without vitality, cognition which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of noesis and a luxury, because we lose 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 incompatible from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of k straightledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look waste on our coarse and g raceless 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 conjure to use history only insofar as it serves living. But thither is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To mystify this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit as necessary as it may be painful. I bewilder tried to describe a feeling which has often full tormented me. I take my revenge on this feeling when I expose it to the general public. Perhaps with such a description soulfulness or other willing turn over reason to point out to me that he also knows this particular sensation but that I have not felt it with sufficient purity and naturalness and definitely have not expressed myself with the appropriate certainty and mature experience. Perhaps one or two will respond in this way. How ever, most great deal will tell me that this feeling is totally wrong, unnatural, abominable, and absolutely forbidden, that with it, in fact, I have shown myself unworthy of the powerful historical tendency of the times, as it has been, by common knowledge, observed for the past two generations, particularly among the Germans. Whatever the reaction, now that I dare to expose myself with this natural description of my feeling, common decency will be fostered rather than shamed, because I am providing many opportunities for a modern-day tendency like the reaction just mentioned to make polite pronouncements.