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PDF FormatThere is but one supreme danger for the man of the historical sense. It is loss of self and infinite fractionalization. He is in danger of becoming nothing knowable. He applies the historical sense to himself, and is reflected back onto the knowledge gathered by that same sense. Every part of what he tries to know dissolves into something else. He considers his own development, and it replies with Zeno’s paradox: In the race between his self and its history, as in that of Achilles and the tortoise, the one can never catch the other. He has made a pact with history not unlike Faust’s with the devil, and for the exercise of power over the past has gained a soul full of wormholes.
The riddle of self-knowledge was in fact never a riddle. The historical sense pillages history to enrich the self, granting an unlimited sense of self-expansion. Direct self-examination, meanwhile, has precisely the opposite effect. It dispatches the self back to history, whence it came. For each attribute of a man’s character, it finds only historical episodes, real or imagined. There is no part of the self immune from the annihilative and forgetful agency of the historical sense. At length, the very pursuit of self-knowledge in the man of the historical sense must lead to self-destruction.
The original man of the historical sense was at least in temperament an aristocrat. Passing from an age of pathos to one of bathos, we have had our say in directing and reinventing his sense. Psychoanalysis taught us to mine our souls for buried gods and gave us a death wish. Existentialism removed the need for actual historical knowledge or a grand theater of operation. Literature provided the illusion of a secondary immediacy of life within the philosophizing divinity. Feminist philosophy was successful in undoing the sexual difference, though less successful in reinventing it. Post-colonial philosophy replaced the cultures of the past with those of the present, and it added a strong measure of moralizing. The deconstructionist, high priests of the historical sense, construct a universe of difference and non-being, and live in the sickly-pale image of beauty that the slow eclipse of the historical sense radiates at their elevation. Like all solipsists, they are prophets only to themselves.
The historical sense, spread wide and diluted in our times, finds its home in the myriad competing worldviews of modern culture. Partly because of its lack of true heroes, it is seen as much in the whole as in its parts. In this age of crisis, we can decide neither who we are, nor what we want. Philosophy, which has known many functions in the intellectual government of the world, now in exile hatches plots for our salvation. In her absence the opposing forces gather under many banners, and without banner, against her and her tainted higher culture. From the fading, closing mind of Western civilization comes but incoherent and feeble protest.
There is disintegration lurking about the riddle of self-knowledge, the same to which the man, Friedrich Nietzsche, eventually succumbed. One stricken by its advanced stages degenerates in a twofold manner. In the first place, so far as he is active, he is compelled to a perpetual mental reconstruction of himself—a process well chronicled in modern literature. The tangled causes and effects of his life become short-circuited, and he slides toward premature senility. At the same time, things are no longer experienced in sequence, for every experience is the center of an expanding new world. The constant shifting of his frame of reference exacts a heavy toll as his knowledge and experience suffer steady attrition. He is condemned, with the accumulation of experience, to grow not wiser but younger. His tortuous, involuted paths lead nowhere but to a second childhood of senility.
This disease was present at the onset of modernity. Its glowing embers persist wherever the historical sense leaves its mark on our collective thought and memory. Philosophy’s recovery has been long, and the outcome is uncertain. Our civilization totters mightily and grows unquiet. The horizon darkens imperceptibly much as it did at the close of antiquity. To begin afresh, to know once again what man and the world are, to abandon the historical sense decisively and regain a history—few are ready for the losses in cultural capital this would inflict.
We need identity in order to begin again to feel life. The world around us is simplifying even in its massive complexity, and great things are being lost. This is suffering and a call to decision for a truer kind of freedom. The crisis of our civilization blazes and smolders; let us not wander, year by year, growing old and young under a waning sun.
X
Though Nietzsche and his philosophy belong to a bygone age, still we recognize in the portrait of the man of the historical sense many things which ring true of us today. The lack of center and loss of identity of which our age complains are clearly his own invented torment. His anxious instability resounds in our art and our lives. He resembles us in his tendency to confuse his “I understand” with his “I agree.” Wherever he happens to understand, there he stands—for the moment.
We come more than a century after Nietzsche. We are not precisely ourselves men of the historical sense. We lack something of his ambition, something of his romance. We also lack, in plain English, his sense of history. Our debt to the man of the historical sense is now become something painfully like the debt of the Middle Ages to Greek ideals. We live in its shadow, without ourselves matching it. We have made of it a great casuistry, without rising to its challenge or raising a challenge to it.
It has been our cruel and necessary duty to drag the man of the historical sense through history, to watch him shrivel away and assume our own likeness. And as we escort him through history in our imaginations, we must deprive him, firstly, of the Eternal Return. The Eternal Return, it is likely, did not outlast even Nietzsche. With it goes all hope of truth and of the integrity of the soul. Its loss also removes his joyful “willing of the past.” He still “becomes” endlessly but no more becomes the great heroes of history; an idea which at any rate must now strike us as quaint. His “becoming” cries out for meaning. “Becoming” demands a trajectory, an aim. In all the nations men of the historical sense took solace in a philosophizing divinity. There, fickle in their myths and with varying degrees of piety and fulfillment, they found their gods and learned to sacrifice to them.
One in Germany, thinking to finish Nietzsche’s work, proclaimed that the greatest, the authentic of all man’s possible “becomings” is death. Just so, the man of the historical sense became, for a while in Germany, he who is to death.
What was this world behind it [the song], which his intuitive scruples told him was a world of forbidden love?It was death.36
In France, where spirits most longed for release, it was first declared that man is simply all his possibilities. It was a happier time. But with the gradual muffling of the philosophizing of the gods by war-swept irony (that Wagnerian cacophony!), man’s dance of possibilities was stranded without music. Even the French were subsequently forced to admit that man is absurd. Man is the absurd animal, they said, and made a theater of lament.
Finally, man grew so tired of himself and his absurdity that he began to grow weary even of his angst, which was replaced gradually by a certain overwhelmed apathy. It was from this last transformation that he emerged post-modern. It was then that he turned into us—the truthless pilgrim.
[On] an endless, unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all.37
And if some new manner of man were to approach our truthless pilgrim as he wanders nowhere, someone, it may be, with less knowledge, less depth of soul, less subtlety for discerning the “potential”; someone not quite the “half-barbarian” of the nineteenth century, but resembling the fuller barbarian of the twenty-first—if he should say to the truthless pilgrim: “You have no Soul!” If that should happen, would the truthless pilgrim, shamed to the marrow by the verity of the accusation, have courage enough to begin again?
Jonathan Yudelman is a student of Jewish thought and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Notes
1. Alexander Pope, Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1951), p. 449.
2. Ascribed to the Italian philosopher and politician Giuseppe Mazzini, 1805-1872.
3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ed. and trans. Michael John Petry (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978), p. 3.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 169-170.
5. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 83.
6. Let us assume that the desire to gain possession—possession here meaning love, control, and mastery: nothing short of the constituent elements of the will-to-power—requires us to know and reveal ourselves. If so, cannot our lies, too, be vehicles of self-revelation? Nietzsche’s riddle could then be seen as another irony engineered by the man who so admired Socrates’ irony. His point would be that precisely the lie expresses something of the liar which strict truth would stutter to speak.
7. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 60.
8. Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1955), p. 344.
9. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 175-176.
10. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 176.
11. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 176. Emphasis added.
12. The idea can perhaps be pictured as follows. If a unit of measurement, the meter, for instance, were to change its length from time to time, nothing could measure that change besides another unit of measurement. The new unit of length would then become the absolute and unchanging standard. If, on the other hand, there is no absolute unit of length beyond the meter, changes in the length of the meter have no meaning as there is no possibility of discovering them.
13. Following Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s tradition of progressive and educative revelation.
14. The historical sense is not merely a sense of history, which certainly did not arise only in the nineteenth century. Rather, it signifies a new way of thinking and feeling whose original, though by no means exclusive, object is history. Here I draw passing attention to Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose philosophy of history contains an early Romantic expression of the historical sense as the art of conceptualizing history empathetically.
15. From Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 114-116: “The historical sense (or the ability quickly to guess the rank order of the valuations that a people, a society, an individual has lived by, the “divinatory instinct” for the connections between these valuations, for the relationship between the authority of values and the authority of effective forces): this historical sense that we Europeans claim as our distinguishing characteristic comes to us as a result of that enchanting and crazy half-barbarism into which Europe has been plunged through the democratic mixing of the classes and races—only the nineteenth century sees this sense as its sixth sense. Thanks to this mixture, the past of every form and way of life, of cultures that used to lie side by side or on top of each other, radiates into us, we “modern souls.” At this point, our instincts are running back everywhere and we ourselves are a type of chaos—. “Spirit,” as I have said, eventually finds that this is 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, and, above all, access to the labyrinths of unfinished cultures and to every half-barbarism that has ever existed on earth. And since the most considerable part of human culture to date has been just such half-barbarism, the “historical sense” practically amounts to a sense and instinct for everything, a taste and tongue for everything: By which it immediately shows itself to be an ignoble sense…. Perhaps our great virtue of historical sense is necessarily opposed to good taste, at least to the very best taste, and it is only poorly and haltingly, only with effort that we are able to reproduce in ourselves the trivial as well as the greatest serendipities and transformations of human life as they light up every now and then: Those moments and marvels when a great force stands voluntarily still in front of the boundless and limitless…. Moderation is foreign to us, let us admit this to ourselves; our thrill is precisely the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. 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.”
16. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 176.
17. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 115.
18. The charge of ignominy aside, the concluding sentence of the aphorism comes close to describing Oswald Spengler’s Faustian man, said by him to characterize the spirit of Western civilization.
19. That is, the history of what has happened to him; the history of his passive formation by circumstance.
20. It is perhaps Nietzsche’s systematic neutrality with regard to the dispute between realism and idealism, and his partial acceptance of the arguments of both parties, expressed in part 1 of Beyond Good and Evil and elsewhere, which lead him to build a new philosophy upon the historical sense, being a certain fact of experience in his eyes. Consider, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Reginald John Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996), p. 15: “Metaphysical world.—It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.”
21. This paradox is clearly of a different nature than the dualism which forms the basis of Kant’s philosophy. In that philosophy the object is a combined result of mind and thing-in-itself, or world, but mind remains of a constant and unique nature.
22. The historical sense is the main ingredient in that weak broth served up by the contemporary philosopher under the moniker “the Other.”
23. Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, eds. Brian Davies and Gillian Evans (Oxford: Oxford, 1998), p. 13.
24. At this point it is possible to notice by way of digression that Einstein’s theory of relativity belongs to the new relativism rather than the old, and that by extension it belongs to the historical sense. The definition of “simultaneity” in that theory is given “the perception of two events at once.” In order to prove that events which are simultaneous for one perceiver are not so for another, it is demonstrated that two events seen as simultaneous by a stationary man will not be so perceived by a moving man. However, in order to speak of the same two events at all—those which are assumed, be both simultaneous and unsimultaneous—it is nevertheless necessary to assume that they occur at one time. If their time is set by their perception and they become different events, four in total. Therefore, in setting the experiment, only one time for the events was considered, on which all further calculations were based. There is a logically illicit simultaneity prior to the one defined.—That forgetful thought has been handled by the annihilative agency of the historical sense. The resulting description of the universe as “finite and unbounded” is also analogous to the Eternal Return.
25. “Family failing of philosophers.—All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of the historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers….” Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 12-13.
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1956), p. 179.
27. The philosophizing gods solve the problem of groundless thought by positing a real existence from which to derive both man and world. Later philosophy does so by inventing various entities which have ontological priority to man and world, e.g., Hurserl’s phenomena, Heidegger’s Dasein, Freud’s complexes, Jung’s archetypes, Foucault’s episteme, Sartre’s mauvais foi, Marx’s class consciousness, Derrida’s “differance,” Wittgenstein’s language games, etc. Here, too, are the distant origins of today’s subjectless philosophies and phenomenologies of the “Other.”
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 69.
29. This is what brings Heidegger, commenting on Nietzsche and the formation of his own philosophy, to define value as a “point-of-view.” This is also the definition inherited by the “conceptual framework” of modern philosophy, which like “valuation” both follows from man, and precedes his conceptualization. Value is a “point of view” which somehow brings both the viewer and the viewed into existence.
30. This is probably the meaning of Nietzsche’s exhortations to “will the past.” In reliving the past through the historical sense, there can be no opportunity for decision or choice, but a type of willing does remain in setting the level of energy expended in affirming or denying the experience. To “will the past” is to apply the historical sense with gusto.
31. Earlier, I considered the idea that the Eternal Return was born of the desire to find the last means of preserving truth from the new relativism of the historical sense. Here, it seems just as likely that that same Eternal Return was born to preserve the integrity and immortality of the self. The scattered self of the historical sense, strewn across the universe and all time-past, and finding itself everywhere in known history—how could it have a unity of parts, if those parts were perpetually ceasing to be? If the soul is to be one, if it is to be eternal, so too must all its parts. The only way for all these details of the world (of which the self, it seems, is composed) to approach eternity and integrity is the Eternal Return.
32. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 267-268.
33. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, p. 255.
34. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1948), p. 330. Emphasis added.
35. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, p. 149.
36. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 642.
37. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 198-199.
