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).
Nietzsche's philosophical (if unsystematic) revolt against rationalism, whether defined by Hegel or Aristotle, is a conscious revolt against the Western tendency to position thought in history and to derive a universal significance out of it. When he refers to earlier philosophers or their systems, he is almost uniformly critical. But he appears to derive support and strength from the realm of aesthetics. Commenting on Hegel's view that the rational World Spirit had ...