The Uses and Misuses of History: Reflections on Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation

Abstract

Nietzsche distinguishes four kinds of history: “scientific,” “monumental,” “antiquarian,” and “critical.” Scientific history, history as mere information, he claims, harms life. Nineteenth-century culture is so “oversaturated” by information about past and alien cultures that it is succumbing to moral “chaos” which leads to loss of moral confidence and thence to nihilism. Such “chaos” is what the postmodernists call “the postmodern condition,” but Nietzsche shows the “condition” arrived not, as they suppose, in the mid-twentieth century, but almost a century earlier. “Monumental” history is the ethical tradition of a community embodied in its “exemplars” of moral greatness. Antiquarian history is “love” of and “loyalty” to those exemplars. “Critical” history, the critical deconstruction of a former “monument,” enables an ethical tradition to develop and adapt. Collectively, monumental, antiquarian, and critical history benefit “life” by providing a flexible moral framework. Each, however, can be harmful through misuse. Critical history can be especially harmful because it easily metastasizes and “annihilates” not just “a part” of ethical tradition, but all of it. This hastens the arrival of the nihilism that is already threatened by “scientific” history. I argue that contemporary “cancel culture” is just metastasized critical history. That it indeed harms life is shown by the poor mental health of teenage “liberals” compared with that of teenage “conservatives.”