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PDF FormatYet it is not precisely he himself who enters into this causality of history. Not, at any rate, he himself as a given, determinate being. He must allow himself to be molded passively by the value in question, allow himself to relive the impulsion from stage to stage: Valuation to action, and back again. Only by experiencing the past in this fashion is he able to extract the desired knowledge. And this mode of time travel allows him to travel very light indeed. He can bring nothing with him, not even himself. He must forget himself in order to make these forays into the past. He must arrive as a sort of primal psychological matter, a formless man, in order to allow some valuation to recreate him into some action. In this way he gains experience of that hidden soul which he seeks. His own soul, in the process, is expanded to include these most remote of experiences: The Dionysian Greek, the Senatorial Roman, the French Revolutionary; all now comprise living spirits and potential ways of judging and feeling in his own being.31
The man of the historical sense swells and discovers himself at all times and in all places. In the most literal sense he comes to comprehend history. Could this be a clue to Nietzsche’s riddle of self-knowledge? The self, in order to know itself, must now also know history? Nietzsche himself suggests that it is.
Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: We require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing.32
A new species of self—perhaps the superman, perhaps only his forebear—has arisen. It enters a world governed by the new relativism of the philosophizing gods. It shifts across history, “wills the past,” and ascends as high as the divine discourse itself. Its growth, the expenditure of energy, is consoled by the Eternal Return, which stands ransom for truth and the unity of the soul.
Many are the things which are new and different in this man of the historical sense, both virtues and vices. A single example, but one with fateful consequences, is his notion of honesty. Previously honesty had been a virtue of simple nature and complex application. It had demanded that one seek out and neutralize all factors leading to an imbalance of judgment. Interest, passion, and habit were poised “to cloud the vision” and cause a lapse of honesty, against which stood the discipline of self-examination. The honest man was active in his attempts to prevent himself and others from being deceived, and as with all virtues, the higher he aimed, the more difficult it became.
Entirely different from this is the honesty of the man of the historical sense:
The more emotions we allow to speak in a given matter, the more different eyes we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, the greater our “objectivity.”33
The new honest man is concerned not with purifying his own perspective in judging, but in amassing as many perspectives as possible. History, through the historical sense, has taught him to collect many emotions and “different eyes.” The more eyes his vision employs, the more emotions his heart experiences, the greater his objectivity, his truth, and his proximity to the philosophy of the gods. Honesty, once the virtue of fidelity to known truth, now places its pretender under a new quantitative demand. The more varied the experience, the greater the honesty. The old qualitative demand of fidelity to the known has meanwhile disappeared, for the sundry eyes and emotions which can be brought to bear in passing judgment will necessarily contradict one another. Each replacement of one perspective with another is an infidelity to the known, so that the breach of the old honesty is itself become the very essence of the new.
But the man of the historical sense need not necessarily become a dilettante as a result. On the contrary, a sublime new type of asceticism is possible to him. This asceticism has its activity in the form of a perpetual striving after new experiences, new emotions, and new perspectives. It renounces cleaving to any one stable perspective as a sin carrying its own punishment. It considers judgment a want of humility, as the quantitative requirements of honesty can never be adequately met. And there is, of course, a monk-like disdain—not for this world as against the afterlife—but for the narrowness of one’s own world compared with the breadth of everyone’s.
As he negotiates so many different standards of judgment the man of the historical sense comes to be “full of secret entrances.” None of the entrances, however, are authentically his, and he comes inevitably to loathe himself. As with the saints of Egypt, his spiritual exercise only intensifies as guilt and shame flow from a mysterious image of sin grown ever larger and more fearful before his eyes. In his habit he may be delicate and fastidious like Proust, volcanic and reactionary like Dostoyevsky, or sublime and frightened like Kafka.
At a certain point in self-knowledge, when other circumstances favoring self-scrutiny are present, it will invariably follow that you find yourself execrable. Every moral standard—however opinion may differ on it—will seem too high. You will see that you are nothing but a rat’s nest of miserable dissimulations. These dissimulated intentions are so squalid that in the course of your self-scrutiny you will not want to ponder them closely but will instead be content to gaze at them from afar. These intentions aren’t all compounded from selfishness. Selfishness seems in comparison an ideal of the good and beautiful. The filth you will find exists for its own sake; you will recognize that you came dripping into the world with this burden and will depart unrecognizable again—or only too recognizable—because of it.34
This is the man of the historical sense, the man Nietzsche saw forming all around him and in the future. From him he drew both despair and a hope in the form of the superman. At this point it is finally possible to return to the riddle of self-knowledge. How does the man of the historical sense approach self-knowledge? How, indeed, do we approach self-knowledge? It is hard to be satisfied with the remark that history is now required in addition to direct self-observation. Nietzsche’s own riddle makes us fear that the true answer could not be so easily forthcoming, or so blithely optimistic.
IX
Self-knowledge was to be a way of bringing the higher culture to defend its aging religion of unsatisfied narcissism and loveless pangs, self-accusation and guilt; a means of dispelling something of the fog and paralyzing uncertainty of modern life. But to ourselves we seemed awkward and critical strangers, unsure in our knowledge and unsure again why.
Modernity set itself to confound self-knowledge. It opened with Nietzsche’s anti-Socratic dictum, “We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for a good reason: How can we ever hope to find what we have never looked for?”35 It closes now with a crisis of identity and disintegration.
Nietzsche’s riddle of self-knowledge has, in truth, already found its answer. The man of the historical sense is dispersed over history, his essence mixed with that of the Greeks, the Romans, and whoever else he has applied himself to know. He has no center. All this stands between him and self-knowledge. But let us grant for a moment that some kind of self-knowledge is possible to him through his study of history. What would be the nature of his gaze, and how would he examine himself? By no other means than the historical sense itself, for the historical sense is his way of knowing. It applies to an individual no less than to world history. That most important individual, himself, far from being an exception, is its finest object. Again:
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.
