Nietzsche: History in the Service of Life

For this session, we’ll read Nietzsche’s “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.”

Nietzsche attacks historicism and the “consumption” of the past that enfeebles action. He distinguishes three uses of history—monumental (models for greatness), antiquarian (piety for origins), critical (judging and breaking with the past)—and shows how each turns poisonous when unmoored from present vitality. Life needs forgetting and the unhistorical as much as memory; the criterion is whether history serves life by strengthening the “plastic power” to interpret, incorporate, and transform the past. He condemns scholarly pedantry, museum-culture, and moralized objectivity that produce weak, reactive subjects. The task: curb historical excess, deploy history as an instrument of creation, and restore the conditions for future-making.

The reading can be found here