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PDF FormatWhat he does say in the aphorism is certainly interesting enough. The man of the historical sense is a “type of chaos” into whom “the past of every form and way of life… radiates….” His virtues form a list of just those which Nietzsche sought to mold into the superman:
We are unassuming, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-overcoming…. At this point, our instincts are running back everywhere and we ourselves are a type of chaos—. “Spirit,” as I have said, eventually finds this to its own advantage. Because of the half-barbarism in our bodies and desires, we have secret entrances everywhere, like no noble age has ever had…. [But] ‘the historical sense’ practically amounts to a sense and an instinct for everything, a taste and tongue for everything: By which it immediately shows itself to be an ignoble sense….17
The concluding sentence of the aphorism is probably what constitutes Nietzsche’s final literary judgment on the matter.18
Like the rider on a steed snorting to go further onward, we let the reins drop before the infinite, we modern men, we half-barbarians—and we feel supremely happy only when we are in the most—danger.
These, then, are the seductive bits of description given in the aphorism. For our purposes, however, such bits are insufficient and unsatisfying. What begins with the historical sense ends with nineteenth-century man in general, and rather than an explanation of either, there is only a spirited apostrophe for a type of virtue that is both knightly and base, and in the last analysis ignoble. Nietzsche spins new wonders to conceal the old.
Let us attempt to press on where he has failed to do so. The historical sense is an ability to penetrate to the depths of the most disparate incarnations of the human being. People separated from us by time, geography and language are now intelligible to us, and this intelligibility makes manifest all the assumptions and hidden valuations of their souls. This is a sense able to grasp the hierarchy of desires in strange men, even where they themselves had never attempted a similar degree of thoughtful self-penetration.
Such an ability must surely be strongest in a man of powerful imagination, one whose empathetic faculty has been cultivated to an extraordinary degree. Yet for all that, it cannot be mere empathy. Empathy allows us to understand others as they understand themselves, to partake in their emotions or even to desire new ones on their behalf. But empathy did not suddenly become available in the nineteenth century, it does not require the empathizer to be a type of chaos, nor is it a “divinatory instinct” for an utterly new type of knowledge, a sense for things previously unsensed.
The object of empathy is always a real object. For example, one feels the waverings of a man who faces a dilemma. It would be something quite distinct from empathy, however, if one were to experience a dilemma on behalf of a man who himself is aware of no such dilemma, and it would cease entirely to be empathy if one were to experience an emotion, idea, or desire different and perhaps much greater than that experienced by the object of empathy. Yet this is just the promise the historical sense holds out: The ability to penetrate to the inner soul of a people, to grasp the hidden laws governing its desires and actions, “to guess the rank order of the valuations that a people, a society, an individual has lived by.” How, then, is the transition made from mere empathy to this?
At the core of the historical sense are two familiar and philosophically opposed intuitions. The first has come to be termed historicism and teaches that man is molded by history.19 If man is shaped by history, to understand him is to understand his history. Idealism teaches, on the contrary, that it is man, by thinking and acting, that is the sole author of historical reality. It recognizes no reality independent of man’s mind.
Without ever formulating either of these doctrines explicitly, the historical sense accepts them both and operates in the vacuum where they intersect. As such, it is not simply a compromise which would vaguely consider man and his environment as mutually determining. This ageless and obvious truth is not the unique understanding of man and history that the historical sense promises. The purity of the contradiction is maintained. The historical sense is unwilling to relinquish its truth, fruit of Idealism, that the world can be imagined to exist only by first imagining a mind to grasp it (although it is quite willing to replace ‘mind’ with the more robust notion of personality). Neither is it willing to deny the manifest truth that minds and personalities have differed enormously over history, from epoch to epoch, nation to nation, and must therefore be considered as determined from without. History makes the man indeed, but the man must also make reality.20
For the historical sense this contradiction between man as totally determined and no less totally determining is not intolerable, or even perplexing. It is fecund. Two entities, man and world, neither of which may be imagined as possessing independent existence, are nevertheless uniquely responsible for each other’s being. Understanding either one comes to mean understanding their perpetual co-genesis.21 Because neither man nor history can so much as be thought without first positing the Other, the historical sense is a mental ventriloquism. It throws a voice that throws another in turn. It hosts a split monologue in which each voice speaks for its other half. The disarmed logical contradiction is allowed to persist. Man and world are each understood only through the Other, and neither is prior.22
Almost with a single voice, classical philosophy had agreed with common sense in denying the validity of this manner of thinking. The medieval Anselm of Canterbury wrote with eloquent brevity that “the notion that something could exist through that to which it gives existence, is just irrational.”23 Irrational, that is, because it is a notion that leaves thought with no point from which to begin.
The historical sense makes long work of this problem. It is the honed instinct of the metaphysical agnostic, trained originally by German Idealism and freed by the study of history, to annihilate in thought the source of a thought, all the while maintaining the thought. It employs a type of doublethink, a forgetful thought. In order to begin thinking of a man, the historical sense conjures him up through world history and subsequently forgets the derivation. In this way man is granted a temporary and unstable independence as an object of thought.24
This type of thinking navigates an atmosphere of hypothetical existences and discovers the soul of the atmosphere. It is a thinking at home in an unreal universe neither objective nor subjective. Thus is the man of the historical sense “a type of chaos,” thus is the instinct “divinatory,” thus does he love the infinite: The infinite to and fro, forward and backward and inside-out of the great construction of everything upon the foundations of the void.
Nietzsche recognizes that his philosophy owes its vast, unsettling power to the historical sense.25 Of its ontological fallout he is no less aware. In one aphorism, he accuses regular language, common sense, through its “positing” of a subject which carries out an action, of doubling the action:
But no such agent exists; there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, becoming; the “doer” has simply been added to the deed by imagination--the doing is everything. The common man actually doubles the doing by making the lightning flash; he states the same event once as cause and then again as effect….26
Nietzsche’s ontology, if it may be so described, arises from the historical sense where likewise there is no “being” and no subject. Cause and effect are also implicitly denied because their existence requires a causing subject. Yet what is a Genealogy of Morals, it might be asked, if not a vast, artful table of cause and effect? The seeming contradiction between the simultaneous employment and denial of cause and effect is covered over and forgotten in the relentless activity of the historical sense. One cannot stand in a universe without causality, says Nietzsche, but one can soar. Indeed, only thus do the seas of historical becoming offer up their sunken treasures.
