MAN IN AND OUTSIDE HISTORY

 

It would have been natural to give a separate entry each to the four separate essays of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäßen. Yet the second essay, presently discussed, is of such major importance in itself that a miniseries of entries will be devoted to this particular work.

The most momentous discussion in Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, which is the second of four separate essays all united under the single title of Untimely Meditations, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, or simply Unzeitgemäßen, as he later calls it in Ecce Homo) is impossible to pinpoint, because his incredibly profound insights follow in swift succession, and all of them are of immense importance to my own thinking, as evidenced by the many references to this fairly short work throughout my thematic sections. Naturally there is no desire on my part to turn this section into a warehouse of all my references to Nietzsche’s wisdom, and it won’t be worth our while to become overly technical here,--- with multiple references to my other entries and sections on every corner. The reader is urged to follow my Nietzsche lines on his own, while in the presently opening ‘series’ of entries devoted to this particular Nietzsche work, I shall be cutting such unwelcome redundancies to the barest minimum.

Is knowledge a boon or a bane to man? It is a boon only when it promotes life, whereas it is a bane when it destroys life, in which case a life-promoting lie is preferable to the life-destroying truth. Thus the idea that knowledge is an end in itself is incompatible with man’s task of living.

Is man a historical animal? If living in history presupposes some kind of objective existence, historical life is a fettered life, an antidote to which is the subjective unhistorical or even superhistorical existence, that is an existence outside history.

Thus it can be said that although man bodily subsists inside history, his essence belongs outside of his body and beyond it. Our existential task is therefore to rise above history and to participate in creating a culture that transcends history, and, in the words of one of my aphorisms, represents the triumph of (unhistorical) permanence over (historical) change.

Such was my meditation over Nietzsche’s Second Betrachtung. Perhaps the reader may better understand now why it is so specially important to me.