The Use and Abuse of History (1878)
By Friedrich Nietzsche
Forward
"Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing
or immediately enlivening my activity." These are Goethe's words. With them, as
with a heartfelt expression of Ceterum censeo [I judge otherwise], our
consideration of the worth and the worthlessness of history may begin. For this
work is to set down why, in the spirit of Goethe's saying, we must seriously
despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and
history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we lack 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 different from
the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how
elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless 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 wish to use history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of
doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To
bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit
as necessary as it may be painful.
I have tried to describe a feeling which has often enough tormented me. I take my
revenge on this feeling when I expose it to the general public. Perhaps with such a
description someone or other will have 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.
However, most people 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 contemporary tendency
like the reaction just mentioned to make polite pronouncements. Moreover, I
obtain for myself something of even more value to me than respectability: I
become publicly instructed and set straight about our times.
This essay is also out of touch with the times because here I am trying for once to
see as a contemporary disgrace, infirmity, and defect something of which our age
is justifiably proud, its historical culture. For I believe, in fact, that we are all
suffering from a consumptive historical fever and at the very least should
recognize that we are afflicted with it. If Goethe with good reason said that with
our virtues we simultaneously cultivate our faults and if, as everyone knows, a
hypertrophic virtue (as the historical sense of our age appears to me to be) can
serve to destroy a people just as well as a hypertrophic vice, then people may
make allowance for me this once. Also in my defense I should not conceal the fact
that the experiences which aroused these feelings of torment in me I have derived
for the most part from myself and only from others for the purpose of comparison
and that, insofar as I am a student more of ancient times, particularly the Greeks, I
come as a child in these present times to such anachronistic experiences
concerning myself. But I must be allowed to ascribe this much to myself on
account of my profession as a classical philologue, for I would not know what
sense classical philology would have in our age unless it is to be effective by its
inappropriateness for the times, that is, in opposition to the age, thus working on
the age, and, we hope, for the benefit of a coming time.
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Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or
today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from
morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the
peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is