Nietzsche's View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods

Brobjer, Thomas H.

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 65, Number 2, April 2004, pp.
301-322 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2004.0025

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 Nietzsche’s View of the Value of
Historical Studies and Methods

Thomas H. Brobjer

Nietzsche is generally regarded as a severe and hostile critic of historical

studies, and it is possible that the expression “historical sickness” (historische
Krankheit) was made current through him. This picture of Nietzsche’s view of
the value of historical studies and methods is almost exclusively based on his
early work, the second Untimely Meditation, On the Uses and Disadvantages
of History for Life (1874). In fact almost all general discussions of Nietzsche’s
relation to history are based on this work. In this paper I want to show that this
work is not representative of Nietzsche’s view of the value of historical studies
and methods. In 1875/76, shortly after having written the book, Nietzsche
changed his views on history, and for the rest of his active life his views were
rather different from the ones he had put forward in the second Untimely Medi-
tation. In fact, Nietzsche almost completely ignored this work in his later dis-
cussions of his development and thinking, and a few times he outright rejected
its argument and content. Hereafter I will show that historical studies and meth-
ods were of fundamental importance for Nietzsche’s thinking.
One of the reasons why Nietzsche is such a stimulating philosopher is the
tensions in his thinking. One fundamental tension is the dichotomy between his
affirmation, on the one hand, of life, health, and creativity (which can be re-
garded as a form of existentialism) and on the other hand, of honesty, intellec-
tual integrity, skepticism, of having the courage to see the world as it is, and
thus of truth, knowledge, scholarship, and science. Both of these aspects have
their dangers according to Nietzsche, the former in that it can lead to idealism,
romanticism, and illusions and the latter in that it can lead to nihilism and self-
alienation. This tension goes through all of Nietzsche’s thinking and writing,
but it is also possible to argue that for the early Nietzsche, the center of gravity
is clearly on the first side, for the middle Nietzsche (1876-82) it is on the sec-
ond side, and for the late Nietzsche the sides are fairly well balanced. Thus one

This work has been financially supported by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.

301
Copyright 2004 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

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 302 Thomas H. Brobjer

can use the scheme of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but whether the late
Nietzsche’s thinking, in this respect, should be seen as contradictory or a suc-
cessful synthesis I will leave open. However, my main point is that both sides
of this dichotomy are present in Nietzsche’s thinking throughout.
In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life Nietzsche is not
completely critical of historical studies and methods, but he is severely hostile
to academic, scholarly, and scientific history, which, he argues, depersonalize,
destroy myths, give a false sense of progress and the illusion that we are in a
position to judge earlier periods, and make action more difficult (in direct par-
allel to his critique of Socrates, theoretical men, and science in his previous
book The Birth of Tragedy). His chosen perspective is to side with that which
favors “life.” However, all forms of history are not necessarily dangerous and
destructive. Nietzsche constructs three forms of history that can be conducive
to life: monumental history, antiquarian history, and critical history. The first
favors myths and action and the belief in great men and events. The second can
help to affirm life through an affirmation of one’s roots, traditions, and identity.
The third can be used to liberate those who feel oppressed by tradition. Nietzsche
also suggests remedies for the exaggerated concern with history in the nine-
teenth century, that is, emphasizing the unhistorical and the overhistorical. With
the latter, which is closely akin to the metaphysical, Nietzsche meant that which
transcends history, such as religion and art.
Although On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life has received
massive attention in the twentieth century,1 it received little attention and sym-
pathy even from Nietzsche’s friends and acquaintances,2 and was reviewed

1
Much has been written about On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. See
Joerg Salaquarda’s examination, “Studien zur Zweiten Unzeitgemäßen Betrachtung” in Nietzsche-
Studien, 13 (1984), 1-45. Salaquarda briefly discusses the fact that Nietzsche seems to ignore the
work after he published it, and attempts, to me unsuccessfully, to explain this by means of psy-
chological considerations (rather than due to changes in his views). Most recently in English is
Glenn W. Most, “On the Use and Abuse of Ancient Greece for Life,” in Cultura Tedesca, 20,
Nietzsche, ed. by Sandro Barbera (Rome, 2002), 31-54, in which he places Nietzsche’s work in
its historical context. See also Von Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, ed. D.
Borchmeyer (Frankfurt am Main, 1996). Martin Singelin has in Nietzsche-Studien, 22 (1993),
28-41, discussed Nietzsche’s later views on history “Historie als ‘Versuch das Heraklitische
Werden ... in Zeichen abzukürzen.’ Zeichen und Geschichte in Nietzsches Spätwerk” from a
somewhat postmodern perspective; and Andreas Urs Sommer’s Der Geist der Historie und das
Ende des Christentums (Berlin, 1997). Three other recent books discussing Nietzsche’s relation
to history are Hartmut Schröter, Historische Theorie und Geschichtliches Handeln: Zur Wissen-
schaftskritik Nietzsches (Itzelberg, 1982), Christian Lipperheide, Nietzsches Geschichtsstrategien
(Würzburg, 1999) and Aldo Lanfranconi, Nietzsches historische Philosophie (Stuttgart, 2000).
2
Burckhardt, in his letter of thanks, 25 February 1874, although friendly, really avoids
giving a judgment of the book. Wagner’s and Rohde’s views can perhaps best be seen in their
statements to third persons. Rohde, in a letter to Gersdorff, 18 February 1874, praises the work,
but also states “Denn wie leicht ist es nicht, zu bemerken, daß N[ietzsche] in vielen Punkten
übertreibt.” Wagner summarizes his view to Cosima, who writes it down in her diary, 9 April

65.2brobjer. 302 9/27/04, 11:30 AM

 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 303
only once during the 1870s. Nietzsche himself seems to have had little or no
interest in it after he had published it. There are good reasons to believe that
Nietzsche regarded this work as his least valuable book. Nietzsche hardly ever
refers to the second Untimely Meditation even when he mentions the other
Untimely Meditations either in his books, letters or notebooks.3 The few times
he refers to it, he seems mostly to deny its argument, content, and importance.
One reason why Nietzsche wrote this book was surely (as he also suggests
in the preface to the second edition of the second volume of Human, All Too
Human) that he was torn between his interest and concern for philosophy and
culture and by his heavy teaching load of philology and classical history. Most
semesters he produced and taught three new university courses apart from his
teaching at the “Gymnasium” associated to the university of Basel. Further-
more, his engagement with and close relation to Wagner and his ambitious
cultural project were tempting for him. He contemplated working as an editor
for a Wagnerian journal and for a while even considered leaving the university
to work as a spokesman for Wagner. Such interests and alternatives must some-
times have made working on minor philological details highly frustrating.
Shortly after having written his second Untimely Meditation on history,
during the years 1875 and 1876, Nietzsche went through an intellectual and
emotional crisis and changed fundamental aspects of his Weltanschauung, in-
cluding “breaking” with Schopenhauer, Kant, and Wagner. He then exchanged
his earlier enthusiasm for metaphysics, idealism, pessimism, art, and aesthetics
to a position which was skeptical, free-spirited, placed science above art, and
praised the Enlightenment. It appears not to have been noticed previously that
in section 272 of Human, All Too Human, called “Annual rings of individual
culture,” Nietzsche seems to be describing his own intellectual development:

Men at present begin by entering the realm of culture as children af-

fected religiously, and these sensations are at their liveliest in perhaps
their tenth year, then pass over into feebler forms (pantheism) while at

1874: “Es ist die Schrift eines sehr bedeutenden Menschen .... Sie ist aber noch sehr unreif, alle
Anschaulichkeit fehlt ihr, weil er niemals Beispiele aus der Geschichte gibt and doch viele
Wiederholungen und keine eigentliche Einteilung hat. Diese Schrift is zu schnell erschienen. Ich
weiß niemanden, dem ich sie zur Lektüre geben könnte, weil ihm kein Mensch folgen kann. Die
Grundidee hat Schopenhauer schon ausgesprochen, N. hätte sie viel mehr vom pädagogischen
Standpunkte aus beleuchten sollen.” Rohde’s and Wagner’s words are cited from Richard Frank
Krummel, Nietzsche und der deutsche Geist (Berlin, 1998), Band I, 38f.
3
Nietzsche wrote and published four Untimely Meditations: David Strauss, the Confessor
and the Writer (1873), On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), Schopenhauer
as Educator (1874), and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876). He also wrote extensive notes
during the spring and summer 1875 for a fifth one (then planned as the fourth), entitled “We
Classicists.”

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 304 Thomas H. Brobjer

the same time drawing closer to science; they put God, immortality
and the like quite behind them but fall prey to the charms of a meta-
physical philosophy. At last they find this, too, unbelievable; art, on
the other hand, seems to promise them more and more, so that for a
time metaphysics continues just to survive transformed into art or as a
mood of artistic transfiguration. But the scientific sense grows more
and more imperious and leads the man away to natural science and
history and especially to the most rigorous methods of acquiring knowl-
edge, while art is accorded an ever gentler and more modest signifi-
cance. All this nowadays usually takes place within a man’s first thirty
years. It is the recapitulation of a curriculum at which mankind has
been labouring for perhaps thirty thousand years.4

He even went so far as to write a note in 1877, intended to be included in his

next book, where he rejects his earlier writings.

I want expressly to inform the readers of my earlier writings [i.e., The

Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations] that I have abandoned
the metaphysical-artistic views that fundamentally govern them: they
are pleasant but untenable. He who speaks publicly early is usually
quickly forced to publicly retract his statements.5

At this time, the influences on Nietzsche, and his reading, also changed funda-
mentally. An important cause for this change in his outlook—apart from the
internal changes in his thinking due to his examination of his position while

4
I am quoting from Hollingdale’s translation. That this relates to Nietzsche’s own
development is still more clear in an early draft, Friedrich Nietzsche: Kritische Studienausgabe
ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (15 vols.; 1967ff., 1980), KSA 14, 140f. In this earlier draft
Nietzsche writes in the form of “we” instead of “they,” i.e. the note then began: “We at present
begin ... our ... [etc.].” [KSA is the conventional abbreviation for Friedrich Nietzsche.] Volume
14 is a commentary volume. KSB is the abbreviation for the corresponding eight volumes of
Nietzsche’s letters, by the same editors. These letters have not been translated into English (except
a small selection by Middleton, see below). I refer to Nietzsche’s letter by recipient and date,
which means that they can easily be identified since they are published in chronological order in
KSB. KSA does not contain Nietzsche’s writings before he became a professor in Basel in 1869.
This has been published in Friedrich Nietzsche: Frühe Schriften (Munich, 1933-40, reprinted
1994), 5 volumes, abbreviated BAW (followed by volume and page numbers). These early writings
are now also slowly being published in the bound edition KGW section I (i.e., Friedrich Nietzsche:
Kritische Gesamtausgabe, also initiated by G. Colli and M. Montinari). A concordance between
the pages of the KSA-volumes and the KGW-volumes is included in KSA 15. However, since
the identifying numbers, e.g. 5[171], are the same in both versions, it is generally easy to find
any KSA-reference also in KGW. The translations from Nietzsche’s notes and letters are my own
unless otherwise stated.
5
KSA 8, 23[159], written between the end of 1876 and the summer of 1877.

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 305
writing the later Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen about Schopenhauer and
Wagner—was that Nietzsche began to read and became familiar with the
positivistically and Darwinistically inspired Paul Rée, who was generally much
influenced by British and French thinking and had an intense interest in anthro-
pology and in moral history. However, most of the change seems to have oc-
curred before he read Rée’s writings, in the spring and summer 1875, while
Nietzsche was working on his notes for the unfinished “We Classicists,” i.e.,
on the nineteenth-century concept of history and the relevance of historical
studies and methods for understanding antiquity. Thus it is possible that the
most influential cause of these fundamental changes in his thinking was his
work with historical studies and methods. His next book, Human, All Too Hu-
man (1878), also began with the claim that we must replace metaphysical phi-
losophy with historical philosophy. Already in the first section he contrasts
metaphysical philosophy, with its belief in opposites, to historical philosophy,
“the youngest of all philosophical methods,” which claims that there are no
such opposites but everywhere only gradual change. In the second section he
claims that

A lack of historical sensibility is the original failing of all philoso-

phers. ... Everything, however, has come to be; there are no eternal
facts: just as there are no absolute truths. —From now on therefore,
historical philosophizing will be necessary, and along with it the virtue
of modesty.

At least from this time onwards, historical perspective will be an important one
for determining Nietzsche’s views.
Earlier, Nietzsche had worked with historical studies and methods as part
of his work as a professor of classical philology, but, due in part to the influ-
ence of the anti-historical views of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the sort of aes-
thetic idealism to which he then adhered (and regarded as transcending his-
tory), he seems to have made little use of those insights and methods in his
more cultural and philosophical works (primarily the four Untimely Medita-
tions, which are all fairly ahistorical). Subsequently, he began to read a large
number of works in fields such as cultural history, history of religion, anthro-
pology, history of literature, etc.
When we examine how he came to regard On the Uses and Disadvantages
of History for Life after 1874, we can find but very few references to it, and
those that we find are mainly critical and dismissive. Furthermore, Nietzsche
republished and wrote new prefaces for all of his early works, except the Un-
timely Meditations. In a letter to Rohde, dated 19 March 1874, Nietzsche says
that he thinks about how little his former teacher Ritschl will understand of his
work on history. “This lack of understanding will protect him from becoming

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 306 Thomas H. Brobjer

upset, and that is the best of it.” Already this statement can be seen as a reflec-
tion of Nietzsche’s later rejection of the work, for in Ecce Homo, “Why I am so
Clever,” 9, he seems to accept his former teacher as a man of reliable judgment
and refers to him with the words: “Ritschl—I say it with respect—the only
scholar gifted with genius whom I have encountered up to the present day.”
Nietzsche continues the letter to Rohde with a discussion of his first two or
three meditations:

I know that I set about my effusions in a rather dilettantishly immature

way, but my whole concern is first to get rid of all the polemical, nega-
tive stuff in me; I want to sing assiduously the whole scale of my hos-
tile feelings, up and down, really outrageously, so that ‘the vault re-
sounds.’ Later—five years later—I shall chuck all the polemics and
think of a good work. But now my heart is downright congested with
aversion and oppression; so I must expectorate, decently or indecently,
but once and for all.6

Already in the summer of 1875 Nietzsche began to question the value and
content of his earlier writings (The Birth of Tragedy and the first three Un-
timely Meditations), but hoped that they could at least function as something
which could awaken the striving of younger readers.7 In a note from the first
half of 1878, where he discusses his earlier writing, he characterizes the second
Untimely Meditation with the words: “An attempt to close the eyes against the
knowledge we get through history.”8 Nietzsche here clearly rejects his pub-
lished account, in line with his more general statement quoted above.
Shortly thereafter, during the summer of 1878, he wrote, “I became alien-
ated from art, poetry (learnt to misunderstand antiquity) and nature, I almost
lost my good temper. And with that I had the bad conscience of the metaphysi-
cians. / What Bayreuth meant for me [with Bayreuth Nietzsche seems here to
mean his break from Wagner in 1876]. / Escape. / Cold baths. / Art, nature,
mildness returned to me.”9 A year later, in an epigram in a letter to Rée from
September 1879, he explicitly rejected all of his early published writings (The
Birth of Tragedy and the four Untimely Meditations):

On my first five little books.

Once, I thought, the A and O

6
I have here used the translation of Christopher Middleton, in Selected Letters of Friedrich
Nietzsche (Cambridge, 1969, 1996).
7
Letter to Gersdorff, 21 July 1875.
8
KSA 8, 27[34], early-summer 1878: “Versuch die Augen zu schliessen gegen die Erkenntniss
des Historie.”
9
KSA 8, 30[166], summer 1878.

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 307
of my wisdom, was contained in them;
Now, I no longer think so:
only the eternal ah! and oh!
of my youth do I find in them.10

In late 1881 Nietzsche received a letter from a Professor Fincke at the Peabody
Institute in Baltimore, his wife, and her brother, who together had read
Nietzsche’s four Untimely Meditations but nothing else and now wrote to ask
him for the titles of other works he had written. They praised his writing and
style highly, and claimed that after having read him, nothing else seemed good
enough. Nietzsche did not answer for several months, but on 20 March 1882 he
wrote,

Yes, dear Madame, there are still other things by me to read—or better:
You still have everything from me yet to read. I count these untimely
meditations as writings of youth [Jugendschriften]: In them I provi-
sionally settled the account with that which until then had hindered
and helped my life the most, with them I attempted to escape from
some things, by means of severe insults or high praise which is natural
to youth.11

He warned them that his later writing was different in character and would
require all their courage. His words about the Untimely Meditations seem to
mean that he felt that he had left them and the view presented in them behind
(that he no longer regarded them as part of his corpus) and that he now felt that
they were written far too polemically. In the autumn of 1883 Nietzsche ex-
pressed a further strong critique of the basis of his early writings: “Behind my
first period grins the face of Jesuitism: I mean the deliberate holding on to
illusion and the forcible annexation of illusion as the foundation of culture.”12
In his notes from the summer of 1885 Nietzsche discussed all of his earlier
writings—probably in preparation for the writing of new prefaces and the reis-
suing of the books.13 His brief words about On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life are ambivalent and their meaning not obvious. He stated that it
shows “how little I always have cared about truth and—” Nietzsche breaks off
the note in mid-sentence. Since he used the present tense, it may imply that he

10
Letter to Rée, Sept. 1879. Nietzsche also published a revised version of this epigram
under the different title “Jugendschriften” as rhyme 36 of the prelude to The Gay Science (translated
into English by Kaufmann).
11
Letter to Elise Fincke (Peabody Institute, Baltimore), 20 March 1882.
12
KSA 10, 16[23], autumn 1883.
13
See also Nietzsche’s letter to Fritzsch, 29 August 1886, in which he discusses his plans for
these prefaces and new editions.

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 308 Thomas H. Brobjer

now approves of that attitude—but he also stated that it feels as if it were a

hundred years since he wrote it, and that he has learnt new things since then.14
Shortly thereafter, he said that he wrote his four Untimely Meditations as a
young man for young persons.15 During the end of the summer he again re-
turned to the theme and wrote a ten-page note in the form of a preface for the
possible publication of new untimely meditations. The discussion in this long
note is mainly directed at the third and fourth Untimely Meditations about
Schopenhauer and Wagner (which he always regarded as the two most impor-
tant ones), but his critique of them as works of youths or immature works also
applies to On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life:

One honors and despises in younger years like a fool, and uses one’s
most tender and highest feelings for interpreting men and things, which
do not belong to us, as little as we belong to them. Youth is something
falsifying and deceitful. It seems, that the honor and anger which the
youth takes into itself, has no peace and quiet at all until it “has falsi-
fied” men and things in such a manner that it can release its feelings on
them. Later, when one has become stronger, more profound and “more
truthful” one is frightened to discover how little one saw when one
sacrificed at these altars.16

In several other notes from this time Nietzsche discusses his development and
earlier thinking. In some of them he mentioned or alluded to the first, third, and
fourth Untimely Meditations but not to the second one about history. However,
some of his general statements seem to include a critique of his On the Uses
and Disadvantages of History for Life. For example, in a note to a planned
preface to a revised version of Human, All Too Human, he wrote, “It happened
late—I was already past my 30th year—when I noticed what it was that I com-
pletely lacked: that is a sense of justice.”17 Nietzsche had frequently argued that
justice (Gerechtigkeit and Redlichkeit) is closely associated with the ability to
see the world as it is, including its history.18 Immediately thereafter, in an enig-
matic note, Nietzsche wrote: “It is first then that I received an eye for history:

14
KSA 11, 35[48], May-July 1885.
15
KSA 11, 37[5], June-July 1885.
16
KSA 11, 41[2], August-September 1885. It should perhaps be pointed out that Nietzsche
was not positively disposed to youth after 1875/76. Thus the praise of youth at the end of On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life is also something with which the later Nietzsche had
little sympathy. Although Nietzsche’s writings attract youth, for him maturity was a prime virtue.
Nietzsche frequently criticizes youth (and youths) in his letters, and claims that it is obvious that
he does not write for them, see, for example, letter to Overbeck, 13 May 1887.
17
KSA 11, 40[65], August-September 1885.
18
See, e.g., Human, All Too Human, 26 and KSA 9, 11[99].

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 309
Ranke.”19 It is not clear what this new eye for history meant, but for us it is
relevant that the time he refered to is after the writing of On the Uses and
Disadvantages of History for Life, for he was surely referring to the time when
he read four works by Ranke in 1876 and 1877.20
In a letter to his sister, 15 August 1885, he discussed the possibility of
buying back the unsold copies of his books from his previous publisher
Schmeitzner. However, he was not interested in buying the remaining copies of
The Birth of Tragedy and the four Untimely Meditations. In 1886 Nietzsche
read through his study on history again and made a number of revisions of the
text in his copy of the book in preparation for a possible new edition of all four
Untimely Meditations. In the end he decided against a new edition. His revi-
sions, all in the preface and the first section, about 35 in all, are minor and
merely stylistic. That he gave up so early may signal that he did not find the
book sufficiently interesting and relevant.21 In the first section of the preface to
the second volume of Human, All Too Human, written in September 1886, he
seems still to reject the content of the work: “what I had to say against the
‘historical sickness’ I said as one who had slowly and toilsomely learned to
recover from it and was in no way prepared to give up ‘history’ thereafter be-
cause he had once suffered from it.”22 In the preface to The Case of Wagner
(1888) he wrote, “My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is merely
one of my sicknesses.” It is not altogether unlikely that he also regarded his
early idealistic views on historical studies and methods in the same way as a
sickness.
In 1887 and 1888 Nietzsche made several attempts to get more attention
directed at his books (most successfully by sending them to Georg Brandes).
He briefly summarized his views and development to several persons whom he
hoped would review his corpus. In a typical letter to Karl Knortz, 21 June 1888,
he wrote that the Untimely Meditations are writings of youth [Ju-gendschriften]
and relevant for his development, though not, he seems to imply, for their own
sake. He specifically mentioned the other three meditations but not the second
one on history. To Brandes, 19 February 1888, he also refers to the four Un-
timely Meditations as “first works” and “Juvenilia,” and then discusses the
first, third, and fourth for about a page but says nothing about the second one.23

19
KSA 11, 40[67].
20
In a note from 1875 Nietzsche wrote down that he planned to buy the complete works of
Ranke, KSA 8, 4[1].
21
Nietzsche’s copy of On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life with these revisions
is in the Goethe-Schiller archive in Weimar.
22
Compare also the note KSA 12, 6[4], summer 1886-early 1887, which is very similar, but
in which he had added a parenthesis at the end to prove his point “(Quod demonstratum est—).”
23
“Ein paar Bemerkungen noch: sie beziehen sich auf meine Erstlinge (—die Juvenilia und
Juvenalia). ... Zwischen den ‘unzeitgemäßen Betrachtungen’ und ‘Menschliches, Allzumensch-
liches’ liegt eine Krisis und Häutung.” Compare also his later account, again to Brandes, 10 April
1888.

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 310 Thomas H. Brobjer

Perhaps still more significant is that when Nietzsche read his just pub-
lished The Case of Wagner (1888), which his publisher had just sent to him and
with which his younger friend and assistant Peter Gast had helped him—even
to the extent of Gast’s reading the proofs last (without Nietzsche seeing the
final revisions)—he thanked Gast for his help and added (almost certainly with-
out irony): “That the ‘Untimely Meditations’ are missing in the list of books on
the back cover is really admirable.”24
The only affirmative statement regarding the second Untimely Meditation
that I have found in his published books, notebooks, and letters after 1874 is in
his autobiography Ecce Homo, in which he reviews all of his published books
until then. Here he says:

The second untimely essay (1874) brings to light what is dangerous,

what gnaws at and poisons life, in our way of carrying on science—:
life sick with this unhuman clockwork and mechanism, with the “im-
personality” of the worker, with the false economy of “division of
labour.” The goal gets lost, culture—the means, the modern way of
carrying on science, barbarized. ... In this essay the “historical sense”
of which this century is so proud is recognized for the first time as a
sickness, as a typical sign of decay.25

His more positive statement here may be taken as an affirmative judgment—

especially of a selected reading of the work—at face value. However, it is at
least as likely that the statement, at this late stage, during the last few months
before his mental collapse, indicates that his megalomania had grown to such a
degree that he had problems recognizing or admitting previous “mistakes.”
Furthermore, considering that Nietzsche here is trying to get potential readers
interested in his books, he is likely to emphasize that which he still finds valu-
able in them. Nietzsche affirms that the “historical sense” was in this essay
recognized for the first time as a sickness, but he chooses not to emphasize that
he soon thereafter came also to see it as a necessary requirement for culture and
for an understanding of the world.
Another approach to discovering how Nietzsche regarded his second Un-
timely Meditation is to examine how he used the several concepts and expres-
sions he coined and used in the book. Surprisingly, Nietzsche seems never again

24
Letter to Gast, 16 Sept. 1888. “Beim sorgsamen Durchlesen der Schrift fand ich zwanzig
Gründe mehr, Ihnen dankbar zu sein. Eine ganze Anzahl feiner technisch-buchdruckerischer
Arrangements geht sicher auf Sie zurück. Daß in dem Bücher-Verzeichniß auf der Rückseite die
‘Unzeitgemäßen Betrachtungen’ fehlen, ist geradezu bewunderungswürdig.” Gast seems also to
regard Nietzsche’s statement as written without irony, for he does not comment on it in his next
letter to Nietzsche.
25
Ecce Homo, “Untimely Meditations,” 1.

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 311
after 1874 to use the important concepts monumental, antiquarian, and critical
history, or overhistorical.26 This shows that he did not use his own concepts,
and presumably that he himself was not persuaded by the argument and content
of the book.

Nietzsche has been described and understood as a philosopher, author, poet,

classicist, musician, and literary and cultural critic, but he seems rarely if ever
to have been seen as a historian. I will not in this paper go as far as to classify
him as a historian, but will emphasize the historical aspects of his thinking and
manner of working. Nietzsche was educated as a historian, and he continued
reading and studying historical works during the later parts of his life.
Of Nietzsche’s principal methods and approaches two were of special im-
portance, psychology and history. When Nietzsche in the third section of the
preface to On the Genealogy of Morals discusses his earliest interest in the
question of good and evil, which was then religious and metaphysical, he says
that it was precisely these two approaches which helped him move on: “A cer-
tain amount of historical and philological schooling, together with an inborn
fastidiousness of taste in respect to psychological questions in general, soon
transformed my problem into another one,” that of the mature Nietzsche.27
In July 1862, while a pupil at the boarding school Schulpforta, Nietzsche
wrote in his notebook a sentence that could stand as a motto for his whole
philosophical and cultural endeavor: “I prefer the past to the present; but I
believe in a better future.”28 While at Pforta, or shortly thereafter, between 1862
and 1865, Nietzsche lost his Christian faith. The main reason for this appears to
have been the education of historical criticism that he learned there.29
Nietzsche was professionally and successfully educated as a classical phi-
lologist or, in other words, as a historian. Most of his secondary education at
Schulpforta (1858-64) was geared to this, and the great majority of the 35 uni-

26
The only ones I have found are two references of little relevance to “monumental history”
in 1878, while discussing his own development and earlier views, KSA 8, 27[96] and 28[3], and
one to “ntiquarian history,” in The Gay Science, 83, but then in a more general sense rather than
the one he used in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. I have only found a single
use of the word “overhistorical,” where Nietzsche discusses his earlier writings, KSA 8, 30[166].
27
Nietzsche frequently claimed that what he learned from his classical philological studies
and work were methods, and primary among these were historical criticism and historical
sensibility. To quote one example, in a letter to Overbeck, 13 July 1885, he writes: “Eigentlich
habe ich erst in den letzten 10 Jahren mir Kenntnisse verschafft; von der Philologie her lernte ich
im Grunde nur Methoden.”
28
BAW 2, 68. “Die Vergangenheit ist mir lieber als die Gegenwart; aber ich glaube an eine
bessere Zukunft.”
29
See Jörg Salaquarda, “Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian tradition” in The Cambridge
Companion to Nietzsche,” ed. B. Magnus and K. M. Higgins (Cambridge, 1996), and Thomas H.
Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Changing Relation to Christianity: Nietzsche as Christian, Atheist and
Antichrist,” Nietzsche and the Gods, ed. Weaver Santaniello (New York, 2001), 137-57.

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 312 Thomas H. Brobjer

versity courses he attended were in this field. As a scholar of history Nietzsche

was immensely successful, he published several specialist articles and was of-
fered a professorship in classical studies at the age of 24, and was to remain a
professor until his retirement due to ill health ten years later.
On the other hand Nietzsche had little formal philosophical education. No
philosophy was taught at Pforta. The only philosophy Nietzsche was taught
there was a little Plato in his last year. The only philosophical education he had
was a single course he took during his first year at university at Bonn in 1865
called “A General History of Philosophy.” As a philosopher he was almost
exclusively self-educated, an education which began with his discovery of
Schopenhauer in late 1865 and then of F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism in
1866. Nietzsche’s interests became increasingly more oriented towards phi-
losophy during his time as professor, but he was forced to carry a rather exten-
sive teaching burden in his own field during this time when not afflicted by
periods of illness. The one approach he knew well and could use instinctively
in his philosophical and cultural endeavors were those of historical studies and
methods.
Nietzsche had read all the great historians. He knew the ancient historians,
such as Herodotus, Xenophon, Tacitus, Polybius, and Livy well, and he was
especially fond of, and had taught at the university, the most “modern” one of
them, Thucydides. He had also read most of the “great” modern historians,
such as Mommsen, Niebuhr, Droysen, Burckhardt, Grote, Gibbon, Sybel, and
Ranke, who one or two generations earlier had gone to the same boarding school
as Nietzsche. He had also read many more minor historians.30 However,
Nietzsche’s main interest was not conventional political history but cultural
history and the history of philosophy. In section seven of The Gay Science he
writes, for example, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a
history. Where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of con-
science, of pious respect for tradition, or of cruelty? Even a comparative his-
tory of law or at least of punishment is so far completely lacking.”
For Nietzsche, the reading of anthropology, literary criticism and history,
cultural history, history of law, history of religion, and history of philosophy
was of greatest interest and relevance. Nietzsche’s interest in anthropology and
ethnology increased significantly in 1875/76 (at the time of his break with his
older more idealistic thinking), when he read J. Lubbock’s Die Entstehung der
Zivilisation und der Urzustand des Menschengeschlechtes (1875) and E. B.
Taylor’s Die Anfänge der Cultur (1873), as well as several other related works.
His friend Paul Rée shared and reinforced this interest. Already in 1877 Nietzsche
wrote down in his notebook: “Moral self-observation is now in no way suffi-

30
To mention just a few of them; Brochard, Buckle, Carlyle, Gervinus, Herder, Lobeck,
Michelet, and Treitschke.

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 313
cient, history and knowledge of primitive peoples are necessary if we are to
discover the tangled motives behind our actions.”31 Nietzsche continued to read
works relating to early cultures, primitive cultures, and different non-European
cultures during the 1880s, and it influenced and reinforced the historical and
genealogical tendency of his thinking.32 Closely related to these fields is the
partially overlapping broader field of cultural history, of which Nietzsche read
several works during the 1880s.
Nietzsche possessed ten serious works about the history and philosophy of
law, and he had read several other ones. He read them intensively as can be
seen by the fact that several of the copies of these books in his library are
heavily annotated. Most of this reading occurred in the 1880s. Some of it influ-
enced his writing of On the Genealogy of Morals. Most interesting for us is to
see Nietzsche’s critique of “Rechtwissenschaft” for its lack of historical sense:

Yes, the philosophy of law! That is a discipline [Wissenschaft], which,

like all moral disciplines, has not even reached infancy! One still mis-
understands, even the independent students of law, e.g. the oldest mean-
ing of punishment—one does not know it at all: and as long as the
study of law [Rechtwissenschaft] is not given a new ground to stand
on, namely on history and ethnology, it will remain in unfortunate
struggles about completely false abstractions.33

Those who, based on On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,
think that Nietzsche’s general attitude was one of hostility towards academic,
scholarly, and scientific history, must be surprised at such statements and at his
high praise of the historians Thucydides, Taine, and Burckhardt.34 He continu-
ally praised Thucydides and placed him above Plato, as someone who dared to
see reality as it is.35 He possessed six works by the French historian, philoso-
pher, and critic Hippolyte Taine (two of them contain dog-ears, the other four
are heavily annotated by Nietzsche), had read several other ones, and had cor-
responded with him. He honored him as “the first among living historians,”36
and praised him for his acute use of historical methods, even to the extent that

31
KSA 8, 23[48], end of 1876 to summer 1877.
32
An excellent study of this aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking is Andrea Orsucci’s Orient-
Okzident (Berlin, 1996).
33
KSA 10, 8[13], summer 1883. This note is repeated in KSA 11, 42[8], August-September
1885 (this is possibly due to an editorial mistake). Nietzsche also re-states some of this critique
of “our naive genealogists of law and morals” in Zur Genealogie der Moral, II, 13.
34
This is also true of Nietzsche’s view of Ritschl who, by any count, was a narrow, boring,
and specialist historian, but whom Nietzsche nonetheless appreciated and praised. See Ecce
Homo, “Clever,” 9, quoted above.
35
Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” 2.
36
Beyond Good and Evil, 254 and KSA 11, 38[5], June-July 1885.

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 314 Thomas H. Brobjer

he more or less broke with his friend Rohde when he criticized Taine.37 And
Jacob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague and acquaintance in Basel, remained
for Nietzsche throughout his life an exemplary scholar and human being. He
also, in 1871, attended Burckhardt’s lectures on history in Basel, with much
appreciation.
One of the constants in Nietzsche’s thinking after 1875 is his critique of
“being” and attraction to “becoming.” He frequently praises Heraclitus and
with him claims that everything is in eternal change and nothing remains un-
changed. With such a view it is not surprising, as we have seen above, that he
often emphasized a belief in and a need for historical studies and methods. In
the period 1880-82 Nietzsche frequently used and strongly emphasized the
expression “passion for knowledge” and history was one of the prime sorts of
knowledge to which he referred.38 When Nietzsche, after having left the uni-
versity, began his nomadic period with less easy access to libraries, he wrote to
his sister and asked her to inform him if she, while reading the Revue des deux
mondes, encountered any strong recommendations of historical or philosophi-
cal books.39 At this time Nietzsche also defended the new sense of history which
had begun in alliance with romanticism but developed far beyond it:

And strange: it is precisely the spirits the Germans so eloquently con-

jured up which have in the long run most thwarted the intentions of
their conjurers—after appearing for a time as ancillaries of the spirit of
obscurantism and reaction, the study of history, understanding the ori-
gins and evolutions, empathy for the past, newly aroused passion for
feeling and knowledge one day assumed a new nature and now fly on
the broadest wings above and beyond their former conjurers as new
and stronger genii of that very Enlightenment against which they were
first conjured up. This Enlightenment we must now carry further for-
ward. (Dawn, 197)

In 1885 Nietzsche summarized the things and movements which had prepared
and formed him. Two of the six things he mentions are the Greeks and the
historical sense.40 In Beyond Good and Evil he again emphasizes history as the
prerequisite for a more skeptical and manly relation to the world:

Thanks to the indomitably strong and tough masculinity of the great

German philologists and critical historians [in an early version Nietzsche

37
See Nietzsche’s letters to Rohde, 12th, 19th and 23rd of May and 11th November 1887.
38
For an extensive discussion of this theme in Nietzsche’s thinking, see Marco Brusotti, Die
Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis (Berlin, 1997).
39
Letter to mother and sister, 21 April 1880.
40
KSA 11, 42[6], August-September 1885. “Meine Vorbereiter ... der historische Sinn.”

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 315
listed: Lessing, Herder, Kant, F. A. Wolf, Niebuhr] ... there became
established, gradually and in spite of all the romanticism in music and
philosophy, a new scepticism decisively predominated: whether as in-
trepidity of eye, as bravery and sternness of dissecting hand, or as tena-
cious will for perilous voyages of discovery, for North Pole expedi-
tions of the spirit beneath desolate and dangerous skies. There may be
good reason for warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians to cross
themselves before precisely this spirit. (Beyond Good and Evil, 209)

In a note at the end of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals he suggests
that philosophical faculties should promote “historical studies of morality.”41
In The Antichrist he emphasizes the enormous value, which the Greeks and
Romans bestowed on mankind by learning to read methodically, constituting
one of the essential aspects of classical philology and history (i.e., to see the
world as it is) which was lost during the Middle Ages:

The whole labour of the ancient world in vain: I have no word to ex-
press my feelings at something so dreadful. ... Every prerequisite for
an erudite culture, all the scientific methods were already there, the
great, the incomparable art of reading well had already been estab-
lished—the prerequisite for a cultural tradition ... —the sense for facts,
the last developed and most valuable of all the senses, had its schools
and its tradition already centuries old! Is this understood? Everything
essential for setting to work had been devised—methods, one must
repeat ten times, are the essential, as well as being the most difficult, as
well as being that which has habit and laziness against it longest. (The
Antichrist, 59)

One of the main points of On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life was to argue that the modern German preoccupation with history was a
form of illness, which he termed historical sickness. He seems afterwards to
have found the term too polemical and used it very sparingly.42 Nonetheless,
the late Nietzsche (1882-88) did not completely reject the view that a concern
with history could be like a sickness. Already in Dawn (1881) he wrote:

and since there are always innumerable vain people, the danger that
lies in the study of history as soon as it gets the upperhand of an entire
41
On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 17 (note).
42
He referred to the concept four times while discussing his own earlier writing and devel-
opment—the first section of the preface to the second volume of Human, All Too Human (i.e., to
Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow), KSA 8, 27[66], KSA 8,
30[166] and KSA 12, 6[4]—but these do not necessarily signify a continual belief in the diagno-
sis.

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 316 Thomas H. Brobjer

age is indeed not small: too much energy is thrown away on all pos-
sible resurrections from the dead. Perhaps the whole movement of ro-
manticism can best be understood from this point of view. (Dawn, 159)

In two notes from early 1884 he seems to suggest that contemporary Europeans
suffer from this affliction,43 and in several other notes and published statements
he seems to still feel that a too great concern with history can be an illness,
although not using that specific expression.44
An important concept for Nietzsche is “historische Sinn,” “a sense of his-
tory,” “historical sense,” or “historical sensibility.” He used it and related con-
cepts extensively in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, and in
notes to that work, and then almost exclusively as a negative concept, closely
related to his expression “historical sickness.” Thereafter, during the period
1875-81, he used it very rarely but then as a positive concept, relating to doing
justice to reality and to acquiring a better understanding of the world.45 From
The Gay Science (1882) he again begins to use the expression more frequently,
now mostly in a positive and affirmative sense, but he also frequently points
out how it can be dangerous, destructive, and that it shows a lack of character
and good manners.

When I contemplate the present age with the eyes of some remote age,
I can find nothing more remarkable in present-day humanity than its
distinctive virtue and disease which goes by the name of “the historical
sense.” This is the beginning of something altogether new and strange
in history: If this seed should be given a few centuries and more, it
might ultimately become a marvellous growth with an equally marvel-
lous scent that might make our old earth more agreeable to live on. We
of the present day are only just beginning to form the chain of a very
powerful future feeling, link for link—we hardly know what we are
doing. It almost seems to us as if it were not a matter of a new feeling
but rather a decrease in all old feelings; the historical sense is still so
poor and cold, and many people are attacked by it as by a frost and
made still poorer and colder. (The Gay Science, 337)46

The longest discussion of historical sense during the late period is in Be-
yond Good and Evil, 224: “The historical sense (or the capacity for quickly
guessing the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a

43
KSA 11, 25[121 and 163].
44
See, for example, The Gay Science, 337 (quoted below).
45
Nietzsche used the expression “sense of history” only in Human, All Too Human, 2, and
in two notes, KSA 9, 4[101] and 15[17].
46
Kaufmann’s translation. Compare also section 83 and notes KSA 9, 11[99] and 12[76].

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 317
society, a human being has lived; the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relations be-
tween these valuations, for the relation of the authority of values to the author-
ity of active forces).”47 Here Nietzsche’s view of historical sense as both posi-
tive and negative is still present, but he also goes on to emphasize that it is an
ignoble or plebeian virtue since it requires that one must leave one’s own views
and values to understand those of others. In the notes from this period the ex-
pression “historical sense” occurs fairly frequently, sometimes negatively as-
sociated with romanticism and a desire for the exotic.48 But he can also go so
far in his affirmation of it as to claim that “the historical view and tactfulness”
is the true and only virtue, which German scholarship of the nineteenth century
possesses which places it above all older scholarship.49 Occasionally Nietzsche
seems even to want to sharpen the historical sense, as when he questions how it
is possible, in spite of the fact that we possess historical sense, that so much of
religious dogma is still being taken seriously,50 when he claims that the Ger-
mans, with their historical sense, ought to have been protected against the con-
temporary political stupidities, such as nationalism and antisemitism.51
Especially in the late Nietzsche’s writings one frequently encounters ques-
tions and topics about which Nietzsche seems to be arguing both that it is of
positive and negative value. This is, for example, true, except for historical
sense, for culture, power, science, truth, and pessimism. Not frequently, this
has led to the view that Nietzsche is inconsistent. At other times, commentators
have ignored one side and argued, for example, that he is negative to high
culture (as in the discussion of his relation to Cesare Borgia), or positive to
power or negative to truth and science. Such simplifications distort our under-
standing of Nietzsche’s thinking. An interpretation which keeps both the affir-
mative and critical sense is almost always better. In our case, an understanding
that the late Nietzsche regarded historical sense as a more or less necessary (but
not sufficient) requirement for a profound knowledge of culture, but which
also notes that this necessary ingredient can be dangerous and detrimental.
That Nietzsche, in opposition to his earlier view, regarded historical sense
or sensibility and knowledge of history as important, even necessary, after the
mid-1870s, is perhaps most clearly visible in his frequent critique of philoso-
phers and some historians for lacking precisely this sense. In a note from 1885
he affirmed that he and perhaps other contemporary philosophers differs from
most earlier philosophers in that they possess a historical sense.

47
Kaufmann’s translation. Compare KSA 11, 26[424] and 35[2].
48
For example, in KSA 11, 34[180] and KSA 12, 9[3].
49
KSA 11, 35[34], May-July 1885.
50
The Antichrist, 37.
51
The Gay Science, 377.

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 318 Thomas H. Brobjer

What separates us from Kant, as well as from Plato and Leibnitz: we

believe in becoming alone, also regarding intellectual matters, we are
completely historical [wir sind historisch durch und durch] this is the
great change ... Heraclitus’ and Empedocles’ manner of thinking is re-
vived.52

Already in Human, All Too Human (1878) Nietzsche had claimed that “a lack
of historical sensibility is the original failing of all philosophers,” and this is a
claim that he repeated many times thereafter. In his notebook from the sum-
mer-autumn 1884 he listed three things which philosophers have lacked so far,
and first among them is “historical sense,”53 and later in the same notebook he
repeats: “The historical sense: Plato and all of philosophy has no understand-
ing of it.”54 In the summer 1885 he wrote:

That which most fundamentally separates us from all Platonic and

Leibnitzian ways of thinking, that is: we do not believe in any eternal
concepts, eternal values, eternal forms, eternal souls: and philosophy,
in so far as it is scholarship and not lawgiving, means for us only the
widest extension of the concept history.55

Finally, in Twilight of the Idols he again criticized philosophers for lacking a

historical sense:

You ask me about the idiosyncrasies of philosophers? ... There is their

lack of historical sense, their hatred even of the idea of becoming, their
Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honor when they
dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni—when they make a mummy of it.56

The critique of a lack of historical sense is with equal severity directed at histo-
rians of morality. In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche
claimed that he wants to present new facts about the history of morality, and in
the first essay he wrote, concerning previous historians of morality, that

52
KSA 11, 34[73], April-June 1885. Nietzsche’s note is broken off in the middle of the last
sentence: “Even Kant had not transcended the contradictio in adjecto ‘pure spirit’: we, however,
—.”
53
KSA 11, 26[100]: “What have the philosophers been lacking a) historical sense.” The
other two things listed are knowledge of physiology and a goal for the future.
54
KSA 11, 26[393]. See also, KSA 12, 7[20]: “The morality of philosophers from Socrates
onwards is a sort of Don Quixotery ... complete lack of historical sense.”
55
KSA 11, 38[14].
56
Twilight of the Idols, “Reason” in Philosophy, 1. Immediately thereafter, in section 2,
Nietzsche praises Heraclitus and his rejection of being.

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 319
it is, unhappily, certain that the historical spirit itself is lacking in them,
that precisely all the good spirits of history itself have left them in the
lurch! As is the hallowed custom with philosophers, the thinking of all
of them is by nature unhistorical; there is no doubt about that.57

In an earlier note Nietzsche had stated the same claim and given a sort of expla-
nation why this was so: “Most philosophers of morality only repeat the con-
temporary ruling order of rank of values; on the one hand [this is due to] a lack
of historical sense, on the other hand are they themselves ruled over by the
morality.”58
Many individual philosophers and historians are also criticized for not un-
derstanding history and historical methods: Plato,59 Schopenhauer,60 Kant,61
Rée,62 Leibniz,63 Bentham and other utilitarians,64 and the cultural historians
Lecky and Draper.65
Nietzsche even goes so far as to claim to regard the whole of philosophy as
a form of history. “Philosophy, the way I alone regard it, as the most general
form of history, as an attempt to somehow describe and abbreviate in symbols
the Heraclitian becoming.”66 Although the late Nietzsche regarded historical
sense as being potentially both valuable and destructive, he seems to have re-
garded it as necessary for higher forms of modern culture. Philosophers who
lacked a sense of history could not hope for Nietzsche’s sympathy and agree-
ment.

57
On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 2. Nietzsche continues the critique in the fourth section
where he claims that earlier genealogists of morality completely lack historical instincts. Com-
pare also, “Nothing is more miserable than the literature on morality in present-day Europe ... no
new thought, not even a real history of what has previously been thought,” KSA 11, 35[34].
58
KSA 11, 35[5], May-July 1885. Compare also “Complete lack of a history of moral
evaluations by the philosophers,” KSA 10, 8[15]. See also The Gay Science, 345, KSA 12, 2[167]
and Beyond Good and Evil, 260.
59
KSA 11, 26[393] and KSA 11, 34[73].
60
Beyond Good and Evil, 204 and KSA 12, 2[188].
61
Kant regarded the moral law as ahistorical and unchanging. For Nietzsche this is obvi-
ously false and he criticizes Kant for lacking a sense of history and for falsifying his own psy-
chology (Beyond Good and Evil, 191 and The Will to Power, 254, 271, 95, 382 and 424). See also
KSA 11, 34[73], April-June 1885.
62
The beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals, KSA 10, 16[15], KSA 11, 35[34] and in
letter to Overbeck, early December 1885.
63
KSA 11, 34[73], April-June 1885.
64
In several references to Bentham, Nietzsche emphasizes that he followed in the footsteps
of Helvétius and that he had a bad sense of history. This is, for example, done in the notes KSA
11, 34[239] and KSA 11, 35[34].
65
Letter to Overbeck, 24 March 1887. “Lecky habe ich selbst in Besitz: aber solchen
Engländern fehlt ‘der historische Sinn’ und auch noch einiges Andre. Das Gleiche gilt von dem
sehr gelesenen und übersetzten Amerikaner Draper.” Nietzsche had earlier carefully read several
works about cultural history by these two scholars.
66
KSA 11, 36[27], June-July 1885. Compare also KSA 11, 38[14], quoted above.

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 320 Thomas H. Brobjer

The historical character of Nietzsche’s thinking is for example evident in

his perspectivism, his critique of free will, his view of ethics, and his project of
a revaluation of all values. His view of truth and knowledge as perspectival is a
fairly natural view for a historian, who sees how the same phenomena can be
interpreted and taught differently in different epochs. Nietzsche frequently re-
jected the concept of free will. One way for him to justify this was to use his-
torical arguments, that is to show that the Greeks had no concept of free will,
and that the concept was introduced by St. Augustine and the early Christians
in their need to justify accountability. Nietzsche continually criticized morals
from a historical perspective, which allows him to show that morality has not
always been what it is today. This was first done in the chapter “On the History
of Moral Sensations” in Human, All Too Human (1878), continued more inten-
sively in Dawn (1881) and is apparent throughout On the Genealogy of Mor-
als.
Nietzsche’s project during the last four years of his active life, the revalua-
tion of all values, has frequently been interpreted and understood in a very
ahistorical manner as an attempt at creating new values ex nihilo. Contrary to
this, I will show that even in Nietzsche’s own view this project was to a large
extent historical. In a note from the summer of 1885 Nietzsche not only admits
that his project is based on historical knowledge, but he also gives credit to the
historians who helped make knowledge of this alternative culture and these
different values available and possible:

To prepare a reversal of values for a certain strong kind of man of the

highest spirituality and strength of will and to this end slowly and cau-
tiously to unfetter a host of instincts now kept in check and calumni-
ated—whoever reflects on this becomes one of us, the free spirits— ...
To us, it seems to me, belong ... thirdly and finally all those critics and
historians who courageously carry forward the happily-begun discov-
ery of the world of antiquity—it is the work of the new Columbus, the
German spirit (for we still stand at the beginning of this conquest). For
in the world of antiquity there reigned a different, more lordly morality
than today.67

In the very last section of Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche states that revaluation
was conceived in the context of his understanding of Greek thinking. In the
penultimate section of The Antichrist, we are presented with perhaps the clearest
expression of what the revaluation of all values means and to what a large
extent it was based on historical parallels. Nietzsche claims here that a second
67
KSA 11, 37[8], June-July 1885. This note has also been published as Will to Power, 957.
I have quoted Kaufmann’s translation of this work. With the expression “the new Columbus, the
German spirit,” Nietzsche seems to mean historical sense.

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 Nietzsche and Historical Studies 321
revaluation already has been attempted and for a time succeeded but in the end
failed:

what the Renaissance was? The revaluation of Christian values, the

attempt, undertaken with every expedient, with every instinct, with
genius of every kind, to bring about the victory of the opposing values,
the noble values. ... Up till now this has been the only great war, there
has been no more decisive questioning than that conducted by the Re-
naissance—my question is its question—: ... to set the noble values on
the throne, which is to say to set them into the instincts, the deepest
needs and desires of him who sits thereon ... Christianity would thereby
have been abolished! —What happened? ... Luther restored the Church:
he attacked it. ... The Renaissance—an event without meaning, a great
in vain! —68

When he claims that “my question is its question” he refers to the Renaissance
revaluation of Christian values into essentially ancient values. Already in 1883
Nietzsche had empathized that a historical and developmental approach was
necessary to be able to overcome present values.69
At the end of his review of The Birth of Tragedy in Ecce Homo, without
using the word revaluation, Nietzsche clearly refers to a revival of Greek val-
ues: “Everything in this essay is prophetic: the proximity of the return of the
Greek spirit, the necessity for counter Alexanders to retie the Gordian knot of
Greek culture after it had been untied.” In the sixth section of his review of
Human, All Too Human in Ecce Homo he states that the revaluation is equiva-
lent to or a consequence of historical knowledge and hence rejects “utopian”
interpretations. Finally, the importance of history for the revaluation, and more
concretely, what Nietzsche seeks in history, is expressed in a note from the first
half of 1888: “I sought in history the beginning of the construction of reverse
ideals (the concepts ‘pagan,’ ‘classical,’ ‘noble’ newly discovered and ex-
pounded—).”70
I have argued that On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life is not
representative of Nietzsche’s views of history generally, and that historical stud-
ies and methods were much more important to him than has been recognized.
Nietzsche later ignored and criticized his second Untimely Meditation on his-
tory, and although he continued to regard a too strongly emphasized sense of
history as dangerous, he also regarded historical studies and methods as neces-
sary for culture. Nietzsche himself extensively used historical studies, perspec-

68
The Antichrist, 61. Compare also Ecce Homo, “Wagner,” 2, where this view is repeated.
69
KSA 10, 16[14].
70
KSA 13, 16[32].

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 322 Thomas H. Brobjer

tives, and methods. It follows from my investigation that it is a serious mistake

to discuss the second Untimely Meditation as if it represented Nietzsche’s gen-
eral view on history. Instead of the great interest that this work has attracted, it
seems to me as if studies of Nietzsche’s view and use of history after 1876 is of
much greater use, interest, and relevance.

Uppsala University.

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