reached its zenith in Berlin in his era, Nietzsche writes, "I believe there has been no dangerous turning point in the progress of German culture in this century that has not been made more dangerous by the enormous and still living influence of this Hegelian [i.e., historical-rational] philosophy" (Nietzsche Use and Abuse 51). Elsewhere, however, he adds:
But it is sick, this life that is set free, and must be healed . . . It suffers from the malady which I have spoken of, the malady of history. Excess of history has attacked the plastic power of life that no more understands how to use the past as a means of strength and nourishment . . . It is no marvel that they bear the names of poisons--the antidotes to history are the "unhistorical" and the "superhistorical." By the word "unhistorical" I mean the power, the art, of forgetting and of drawing a limited horizon round oneself. I call the power "super-historical" which turns the eyes from the process of becoming to that which gives existence an eternal and stable character--to art and religion (Nietzsche Use and Abuse 69).
Nietzsche builds The Birth of Tragedy around the metaphorical opposition of Apollo (reason) and Dionysus (passion), and the tension between the excesses of one or the other becomes almost a category of self-regulating thought about history with him. Nietzsche far more laments the damage done by reason than the damage done by passion. According to Barker, Nietzsche felt that Western civilization reflected the negation of passion by reason: "History indeed became the descending arc of a great cycle in which thesis two drives repeatedly fought each other . . . In this way Paul had blunted the message of Jesus, Aquinas had done the same to St. Francis, and so had Calvin to Luther, and European nationalists to Napoleon" (Barker 224). Where Nietzsche discerns the need for history, he seems to contradict his indictment of reasoned treatment of the past. B...