Print
PDF FormatThroughout Nietzsche’s writings the great destructive and constructive powers of the historical sense are in evidence. We have considered how it projects a theology which wakens the sleeping gods to a new life of philosophy. Here it is possible to see the origin of the philosophizing gods again in a fresh light. Not only are they discovered by means of the historical sense, the philosophizing gods also solve the dilemma of man and world history by being the imaginary existence from which to derive either. At each beingless point of intersection between man and history, a new creating god is born.
The gods serve to still Nietzsche’s convulsive thinking and make it comprehensible. Later philosophy will employ precisely the same artifice by inventing entities that have ontological priority over both man and world. Sometimes revealed and sometimes concealed, many are the gods of modern philosophy presiding over an act of mutual creation between the world and man.27 The historical sense leads compellingly to numinosity, though after Nietzsche this becomes philosophy’s dark secret.
VII
Nietzsche penned a treatise on the use of the historical sense containing a dire warning about a “historical malady” brought about in his time by an excess of historical learning, undermining and destroying “the plastic power of life that no more understands how to use the past as a means of strength and nourishment.” Against it he counsels an art of historical forgetfulness in the service of life and the noble deed.28 The ultimate failure of his art to control the disease, a failure in both theory and practice, springs from his misapprehension of the sense which, in applying, he was so unparalleled a master.
Forgetfulness, both of man and of history, was always an essential component of the historical sense. It has long proven itself capable of thriving in the absence of excesses of scientific history, and even in the very dearth of history. The historical sense is not so much a philosophy as it is a way of thinking, and as a way of thinking is concerned as much with cosmology as with history. This is perhaps why, nameless and invisible, its animating breath is able to live on in mostly unhistorical modern thought.
We have until now been following the historical sense’s heavy footprints in the primordial void, but only an anatomy of the historical sense in action can put flesh on this wandering spirit. Let us first briefly consider the related matter of value. “These are my values,” we often say without noticing we mean not “these things have worth for me,” but rather “through these things everything assumes its worth for me.” Nietzsche speaks often of “value” and “valuation.” As with us, the meaning of these terms is not exhausted by a subjective or objective judgment of existing things. Much of modern philosophy has taken pains to emphasize that values are also connected somehow with our conceptualization of the world. Whether the value be God or health, it is understood as that through which we form conceptual judgment. The sum-total of our values, the radical (and entirely imaginary) totality of everything through which we judge would have to encompass both ourselves and the world. Thus must Nietzsche be understood. He speaks of “valuation” as a world-creating activity, what in the diluted language of later philosophy comes to be called the emergence of a “conceptual framework.”29
The historical sense, with its forgetful thought, was defined by Nietzsche as “the ability quickly to guess the rank order of the valuations that a people, a society, an individual has lived by.” Because it operates with extreme rapidity, “instinctually,” it is difficult to describe. Any description will require us to slow thought to the speed of words in the manner of logicians, and will unavoidably involve a reduction of the true mental activity involved. Nevertheless, to make the attempt is necessary.
We take, for example, the total valuation of a particular man and annihilate the man in thought. The valuation remains as an entity, a world conceptualized, which can in turn explain the formation of another man, different from the first. This second man will not be some aeterna veritas with the valuation superadded, but its outgrowth: It creates him and into its world he is born.
This second man is the conditioned result of the world conceptualized which was derived though the annihilation in thought of the man who first valued and created it. The second man is himself liable to create a new valuation, to conceptualize the world afresh. But this can occur only after the world which created him has been annihilated in thought, so as to free him to be a man. And so on ad infinitum. It matters little whether the men in question make up a people over history, or are merely stages in the life of a single man. The historical sense proceeds by degrees from man to the world conceptualized and back again to man. It is necessary, at each stage, to forget that thought which gave rise to it.
Failure to discard the preceding rung on the ladder of cause and effect invites a paralyzing absurdity, previously described as the contradiction between idealism and historicism. If valuation is a predicate of man, man must precede it as subject, and it cannot form him. If, on the other hand, man is the predicate of a valuation, he is determined and cannot create new value. And lastly, if man is both the subject and predicate of valuation, then there are no longer any means for distinguishing him from the evolving value itself; he is reduced to an unreal existence, any arbitrary pause in a sea of transmogrifying valuation and conception.
Moving from one historical known to another, from Socrates to Alexander, from Nietzsche to Hitler, the historical sense mines history’s marrow. The “rank order of the valuations” a man has lived by as well as “the connections between these valuations” are discovered. An imaginary mental pivot embedded in the events of history allows us to consider either the man or his world, but not both, as real. Jumping back and forth rapidly as we follow the course of known history, knowledge of the world-made-man and the man-made-world merge into a single insight, into a host of creating gods or a “rank order of valuations.” Hegel, who ascribes all alteration in valuation to a single telos, describes just this in his famous phrase the “cunning of reason.” We, more Nietzschean and somewhat humbled in the passage of time, speak of “cultural perspectives.”
The ontology of the historical sense denied “being” and, by extension, cause and effect. A few philosophers have been tempted to retaliate by denying the historical sense. But as we have seen, the historical sense is not really a denial of subject, not a true abandonment of cause and effect, and not really a thought of the unthinkable. The historical sense is a peculiar mental gymnastics quite within the bounds of thought.
VIII
The aim of solving the riddle of self-knowledge has proceeded some distance already. It began with the philosophizing gods and the new relativism they imply. The origin of the new relativism was sought in the historical sense. The historical sense appeared as an infinite march of simultaneous discovery and forgetfulness. Having started farthest from man, it is now finally possible to return to him, for we have not yet asked what becomes of the self which is endowed with the historical sense.
The broken chain of cause and effect by which the historical sense moves from valuation to man, man to valuation, is not a purely logical chain of cause and effect. It does not possess its own laws, as do the cause and effect of the physical universe. At each point in the chain there is a certain psychological calculus to be determined, which could not have been determined beforehand. It is here that imagination and empathy become essential, for at each stage the man of the historical sense must himself relive and re-act the process of creation of value (man to valuation) and creation by value (valuation to man). Without the thinker’s personal entrance into the revolution of cause and effect, man and value would never “touch” each other, and things would remain at a standstill. No insight would be gained, and he, however well versed in the relevant history, would lack the “divinatory instinct” that is the hallmark of the historical sense.30
