Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Introductionconception of the 'plastic' or creative power of human beings andsocieties to overcome and to transform themselves. As in his earlieruse of Strauss as a rhetorical means for introducing his ownthoughts on the differences between genuine and spurious culture,however, Nietzsche's highly original discussion of the relationshipbetween history (and the study of history) and humanlife is not really dependent upon his choice of this particularpair of contemporary thinkers to illustrate certain points in hisdiscussion.Though the second Untimely Meditation is sometimes read as ablanket rejection of 'historicism', this is far from the truth. WhatNietzsche rejects in neo-Hegelian philosophies of history (such asHartmann's) is not the basic thesis that every aspect and expressionof human life is unavoidably conditioned by history, butrather, the progressive or whiggish consequences that are typicallyalbeit,in Nietzsche's view, quite illicitly - drawn from this thesis. Itis not historicism per se to which he objects in this Meditation, butrather the unexamined teleology that usually accompanies it.'History', of course, can mean either the past itself or the studyor knowledge of the past, and the second Meditation is concernedwith the 'use and disadvantages for life' of history in bothsenses of the term, though, admittedly, Nietzsche does not alwaysbother to make this distinction clear to his readers. Despite thefact that the attention of commentators has generally beenfocused upon his discussion of various approaches to the study ofthe past (and, more narrowly, upon his influential distinctionbetween 'monumental', 'antiquarian' and 'critical' approaches to'history') , a perhaps more important feature of the secondMeditation is precisely the way in which its author seeks simultaneouslyto concede the inescapable historicity of human existenceand to affirm the creative capacity of human beings to overcomethemselves and their past. One of the things that Nietzscheattempts to do in this brief text is thus to begin constructing anew account of our relationship to time in general and to the pastin particular - a project that, by the time of Thus Spoke Zarathustra(1883-5), will come to occupy the very centre of his attention. Inthe language of On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, theproject is to show how human life requires us to adopt both a'historical' and an 'ahistorical' perspective upon ourselves.This recognition of our complex relationship to history and totime clearly has direct and important implications for Nietzsche'sxv