Nietzsche's Treatment of History

The purpose of this research is to examine the treatment of history as a philosophical and cultural discipline by Friedrich Nietzsche. The plan of the research will be to set forth the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of Nietzsche's view of history and then to discuss the impact that Nietzsche as a philosopher of history may have had on subsequent treatments of historical investigation and upon the attitudes of the culture as a whole toward the process and fruits of the historical discipline. As Adrian Collins has noted, "a radical confusion between philology, poetry, history, and philosophy is typical of [Nietzsche's] writing" (Collins vii).

A fierce intensity of activity appears to characterize the climate of German intellectual and creative endeavor throughout its record, both as it has occurred and as others have assessed its occurrence. Intensity may be discerned in the life of Nietzsche. He was born in 1844, and died in 1900, having been judged insane for the last eleven years of his life. But in his creative period Nietzsche formulated philosophical and aesthetic theories which were to exercise profound influence on later generations of Western civilization. Collins refers to Nietzsche's "volcano of ideas" (Collins vii), hardly systematic in their presentation but nonetheless (or for that very reason) strongly in the same tradition of romanticism that is defined by what Kenneth Clark refers to as a "consciousness of the sublime" (Clark 307).

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ionalism it implies--is the key to understanding his vision of the Superman. A self-satisfaction that Marxists might call bourgeois is, for Nietzsche, dangerous because it stifles development and inquiry and freedom. As Barker describes it, citing Nietzsche in his commentary, The ordinary man tries to preserve the life he has. He is satisfied with the progress mankind has made; "'We have discovered happiness,' say the Ultimate Men and blink." But the exceptional man recognizes the will to power--which is properly the will to hope and create--and gives it freedom. He raises himself above other mortals and knows that, though God is dead, his own faith in a higher existence lives on. He is now something to be accomplished, he has now become, by his strength, his own destiny (Barker 233). This is a type of man who is independent, even solitary, yet for that reason able to reach beyond present circumstances and create his own context of hope. The Superman is thus Prometheus and not Zeus. For Prometheus assumes risk in a way that Zeus, as an Ultimate Man/God, never can. Nor is he necessarily a jack-booted conformist to somebody's distorted notion of World Spirit. In this regard, Barker observes, "The beast in man is thus

Category: Philosophy - N