Azure no. 29, Summer 5767 / 2007
The Quest for Self-Knowledge: Where Philosophy Went Wrong
By Jonathan Yudelman
The field has spun out of control on its most important question. How to get it back on track.
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heaped o’er her head!
Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.…
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine:
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! Thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All.
—Alexander Pope, The Dunciad IV1
Modern man both knows and denies that he and his civilization are in crisis. Elevated talk of “The End of History” and “The Problem of Modernity” in the places of learning serves only to make interesting what would otherwise be cause for fear. The academy does not really believe in a crisis. When art, literature, and popular culture convey convulsive excitability or hopelessness, the scholars and pundits distract and calm the public with mantras of self-expression, confessing that neither art nor art criticism really believes in a crisis. On the part of the philosophers, a weary resurgence of the question, “What is truth, anyway?” promises no real conviction, while the “post-” that describes and affixes to all our thinking like a rosy pox is vague enough to be ignored or debated. The silver-haired philosophers do not really believe in the crisis, either.
In a situation where those honored and paid to think, feel, and lead, are so tirelessly satisfied with their work on the problem, it is nearly impossible to defy them all and actually believe in a crisis. But at certain times a fleeting instinct nevertheless overpowers socialized modern man and forces him to do so against his will. The threat of global war and the jarring specter of the appalled fist of hatred driving it give pause to even the most complacent. Nevertheless, the evasion nearly always returns eventually, for it is stubborn, and many things beyond the desire for personal happiness are complicit.
Modern man’s secret dream of freedom is to be an artist in a society of artists creating themselves. Almost nothing has been able to dislodge this ideal, neither its failure in fact nor the political logic which promises that a society in which everyone is an artist will soon enough reveal itself as a society of clowns, and from there will not have far to go in becoming a society of bandits. The identification of freedom with self-creation is so entrenched that to point out its reality is considered an impropriety and the serious thinker is made ashamed of mentioning any gritty specifics. The clinical syndromes and disorders that make children’s minds overload with unassimilated stimuli are not spoken of in the context of “The End of History,” and a blind spot in every promising Unified Crisis Theory likewise exists with regard to the small nations of the despondent who are administered drugs to make life bearable. Disregarding the agitating of moralists, as everyone does, even the humble many, desperate to fix their broken relationships, interest our thinking men only as phenomena unto themselves, as they receive their dubious guidance from our reconstituted family life, our confusion of sex, or our surgical toilette.
These and other symptoms attend the waking life of an age which dreams its freedom in unbridled self-creation. The principal thing which modern man seeks to evade is nevertheless not an unpleasant reality. It is the fact that his dream has for some time now grown macabre. Seeking himself in what he desires to be, man has lost sight of who he is.
The crisis of modernity is at least partly a crisis of identity. It is certain that it affects groups and individuals unequally. Yet no thinking man remains untouched by the spirit of an age in which the word “identity” denotes something as desired as it is lacking. Ours is a generation whose intellectuals deconstruct identity, while in the background their echoes rouse a furious public debate that infects even the simple with a deep philosophical malaise. Thus it is due to a common and shared feeling if today we find ourselves with a disconcerting sympathy for what faced the Roman Empire nearly two thousand years ago.
A hollow sound as of dissolution was heard in the world. Man seemed in a hideous case: Placed between two infinities, he knew neither. He knew not past nor future. All belief was dead; dead the belief in the gods, dead the belief in the republic.2
Rome was another civilization. Those who draw too strong a parallel between its great crisis and ours are in error, but whatever the similarities or differences, it is not so blamable an error as that which evades the thought of our own gathering storm. This, then, is a meditation on modern man and what stands before him.
II
Since modernity gives us a crisis of men, let us imagine an actual man facing the crisis. What is wrong, is wrong in him. The approach to the problem demands simplicity. The object which interests us is modern man in his actual incarnation, not a philosophical one such as could be found, for instance, in many worthy works of scholarship or history. To answer the very basic question, if, and how, modern man is in crisis we will have to sum him up, and then decide “what was rotten and what was fresh.” Not merely refined taste, but especially the modern love of diversity and disinclination to judgment are ill-pleased with a task such as this.
Who are we, nevertheless? The answer does not come easily. No belief, no idea, and no single culture contains us. We know of tendencies, can even make projections to a certain degree, but the essentially modern man will not appear in the mind’s eye. He will not appear because there is no idea of human nature against which to hold him. What is man capable of being? What are his good and evil? By what means does he arrive at these? These questions hang over us unanswered like flags of cultural defeat, or what is worse, they are over-answered and so come to embitter our taste for the pursuit of truth.
Despite or because of modern philosophers’ portentous claims, we remain generally at a respectful distance from philosophy and its peculiar passion. Taste and habit dispose modernity more to raw experience than to the pursuit of wisdom. In spite of this, the bitter taste in our mouths for the philosophy of human nature finds itself not in rebellion but largely in harmony with modern philosophy and science. Philosophy, which began with Socrates’ dictum “Know thyself,” is today fallen mostly silent on man and mankind, and from it no answers to questions on human nature are likely, for without an interest in both the singularity and ideal of man’s character, precisely no kind of comparison is possible. It is strangest that, with few exceptions, this slighting of self-knowledge by philosophers is not under consideration by philosophy.
It has not always been so. Philosophy has not always silently abandoned man, but on the contrary had to openly declare itself against self-knowledge before it could be extricated from him. From a quite definite time onward the philosophers became less and less inclined to inquire about themselves. The feeling begins to gain momentum in German philosophy after Kant, but waits for Hegel to bid an imperious riddance to human nature.
Concern with what is called a cognition of human nature, involving the attempt to investigate the peculiarities, passions and foibles of other people, the so-called recesses of the human heart, is equally alien to the philosophy of spirit. Cognition of this kind is of significance only if it presupposes cognition of that which is universal, of man, and hence, essentially of spirit.3
Even a philosopher is entitled to remain agnostic as to the relation between philosophy and life. But when modern man and philosophy combine so happily, as if by design, against a philosophy of human nature, it is hard to see only a great coincidence of events. At least this much cannot be denied, that a philosophical perplexity regarding truth, identity, and human nature has seeped into daily life, so that modern man’s crisis involves a deep if unconsidered philosophical malaise.
What Hegel expresses, however, is only a bad opinion of human nature and its philosophical worth. The causes of his opinion are more clearly seen elsewhere in German philosophy. With Hegel is indeed an early trace of modern man’s condition, or, more precisely, an oracle concerning the unresolivability of his crisis. But it is only in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy that the same disinclination for self-knowledge became a matter for philosophy to consider directly and with urgency.
Nietzsche is our point of departure because he is the first and last of the great philosophers to question his own aversion to self-knowledge. But there are also more general considerations drawing us to him. Hegel’s was a closed system and its optimism no longer reflects our intellectual orientation. Nietzsche, anxious and unsatisfied, is the first of the philosophers to belong fully to modernity. His work provides many of the loose threads of reality which have been pulled by successive generations. In him is found not only our ambivalence for the study of human nature, but also a recognizable form of our dream of freedom. We begin by asking this first and greatest representative of modernity: What of self-knowledge?
III
Nietzsche’s statements on self-knowledge are scattered throughout his writings, recorded in a tone of unusually persistent puzzlement and riddling. A soliloquy deep in the labyrinths of Beyond Good and Evil serves as an introduction.
Will anyone believe me? But I insist on being believed: I have never been good at thinking about myself, and do so only on very rare occasions, only when forced, without any desire to pursue “the matter”…. This whole state of affairs might be the most certain thing I do know about myself. I must have a kind of revulsion against believing anything definite about myself. Could there be a riddle here? Probably; but fortunately not one for my teeth. —Could this reveal what species I belong to?—But not to me: Which is just how I want it to be.4
Not everything in Nietzsche is to be taken at face value. The philosopher contradicts himself, he lies and he riddles. Even so there is much to speak for this particular declaration’s sincerity. Nietzsche is found directly confessing his unrepentant distaste for the pursuit of self-knowledge, and musing that his revulsion is a mysterious sign of something else. The confusion only thickens with the addition of different voices elsewhere in his writing.
Someone else with a more subtle thirst for possession will say to himself, “One should not deceive where one wants to possess”—He becomes irritated and impatient at the thought that a mask of himself rules the hearts of people: “Which is why I have to let myself be known, and above all know myself!”5
Nietzsche insists that the quest for self-knowledge leaves him cold and indifferent. He also lets it be known that the desire to possess, in subtle natures, demands self-knowledge. This contradiction, as will become apparent, forms near the core of his thought and twines about its deepest fabric. It is Nietzsche’s riddle of self-knowledge.
It would not be difficult to conjure up an apparent solution to the riddle.6 Yet what speaks here is manifestly not another of the riddles which Nietzsche sets for his disciples. Rather, it is the central riddle implicit in the philosophy and the man himself. As if by way of confession, a peculiar tone of flat perplexity is never far from any aphorism touching the subject.
An issue that has been resolved stops mattering to us. —What did that god who counseled, “Know thyself!” really mean? Was it perhaps: “Stop letting anything matter to you! Become objective!”—And Socrates?—And the “scientific man”?7
What complicates matters is that this riddle of self-knowledge belongs not to any philosopher, but to a philosopher tormented, above all other things, precisely by a sudden and unbearable presentiment of self-knowledge. Standing “beyond good and evil” requires knowing what exactly one’s good and evil were. “Self-overcoming” is an idea which could hardly occur to a man without any very clear idea who he is. The man who believes he has killed his God cannot escape also being the man who believes his God was all along a part of himself. This is the same Nietzsche that, according to Sigmund Freud, “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.”8
The riddle stands thus: Self-knowledge is not to be pursued, cannot be pursued, even as everything seems to demand it. Modernity’s struggles with identity are versions of this riddle. When Nietzsche, a master of self-knowledge, turns first in conscious bewilderment and then in disgust from self-examination, it is not arbitrary. After him, many others and much of philosophy will follow. The riddle of self-knowledge is at the foundation of a new tradition pressing onward through his existentialist disciples. In Heidegger, Sartre, and their followers, for instance, the true self will appear (or disappear) as something unknowable; something perpetually receding, or merely potential. But a potential self that creates the personal past was not what we sought. We sought modern man, mind and soul, flesh and blood.
IV
The riddle of self-knowledge reflects the confusion of a modernity struggling to “find itself.” A solution to this riddle can never come from the man occupied in looking for himself: Such a man is himself the riddle. Nietzsche, however, is an exception. He experiences the riddle in terms of the wish to be lost to himself. What for us is an affliction, for him was an end. In the prophetic tangle of philosophy and poetry that marks his work, there are no doubt many roads leading back to the riddle and its causes. Ours will be paved by the cunning of proverbial wisdom according to which “to know a man is to know his God.”
Nietzsche is usually remembered as the man who declared that God is dead, but he speaks also of other gods who are quite alive and lively enough to engage in debate. More than once he states simply and emphatically that “the gods philosophize.”9 His meaning, though not immediately clear, can be deciphered. The gods, philosophizing or not, are the highest intelligent powers in or above the world. They are also responsible for the world, whether as creators or as overseers, and are the final authority on matters of truth. Philosophy, on the other hand, is a search and an interminable contention over truth. A man’s philosophy may change precisely while the world remains the same, for it matters little to the world whether it be grasped or merely groped. But should the gods’ truth change, then the world would have little choice but to follow suit.
“The gods philosophize” means truth changes, and it changes by virtue of philosophizing. No wonder, then, that this proclamation is “something that might arouse mistrust precisely among philosophers….”10 And when Nietzsche says of his idea that it “seems to me like something new and not without its dangers,” tragic tones of understatement are heard.11 But is all this not genuinely mad caprice? What is meant by picturing gods as striving against one another toward uncertain issue and dragging the world along with them? For Nietzsche, at least, the idea is neither arbitrary nor fanciful. He states that it is “a conclusion I have been drawn to many times.” For him, at least, it carries the allure of necessity which all great philosophical ideas, true or false, must possess.
The idea is that truth changes. We are accustomed to the claim that all truth is relative, and might therefore be tempted to assimilate Nietzsche’s philosophizing gods, and their changing truth, into that more familiar idea. The two are far from the same, however. Classical relativism claims, in one form or another, that human perspectives differ essentially and says further that there are no means for deciding on an absolute perspective beyond them. Accordingly, truth at any given place and time is relative to some individual man. The truth of the philosophizing gods is something else entirely. It is a changing absolute.
It is not by chance that the idea is expressed in a metaphor, for a changing absolute is a classical absurdity which even modern philosophers hesitate to admit. If the standard of measure for all things were to change, there would be no means of measuring that change, except another standard of measure which was indeed absolute.12 If an absolute changes, provided only it be a true absolute, that change can have no meaning nor can it even so much as be detected, for if the measure of truth changes, truth changes with it. Previous truths are lost for all eternity.
Classical relativism was prepared to make peace with this fact. According to it “man is the measure of all things,” and since no man has the ability to remain exactly the same from one moment to the next, even personal truths must fade eternally in a slowly evaporating trail. Classical relativism was thus in the broadest sense anti-philosophical. In contrast, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the changing absolute permits him to raise philosophy to an unprecedented state of exaltation. Truth, rather than sinking into the abyss of relativism, is lifted by an ingenious stratagem into a higher eternity. This is accomplished by means of the Eternal Return, Nietzsche’s doctrine that reality has and will repeat itself forever.
The eternity which is filled out by the repetition of a finite reality is a realm in which an absolute may change without being utterly lost, because all the forms of the changing absolute are also preserved. The recurrence transplants all change and the temporal world into eternity. It had been Hegel’s great ambition to preserve those truths, once considered absolutes, which the passage of time had falsified.13 To do so, he posited a moving absolute toward which all history aims by dialectical stages. Nietzsche’s incredulous genius was not able to offer him the comfort of this particular faith in a universal progress that saves the truths of the past by swallowing them up in the Absolute Truth to come. All that was left to him was the Eternal Return and the sort of peace and quiet which hover above a realm of endless struggle. Nietzsche’s comfort was not the progress of history, in which he disbelieved, but an eternity holding the Complete Collected Works of all the gods’ philosophizing.
Starting from gods who philosophize, the changing nature of truth is a necessary conclusion, and the Eternal Return serves as ballast against a riotous Kingdom of Heaven. Taken together, they are the outline of a complete system which answers to the classical theologies of religion in many respects, but which is essentially new and altered. What emerges around Nietzsche’s philosophizing gods is more than a new system, it is a new religiosity marked by a new type of god. With it lies a tortured path to him and his riddle of self-knowledge. For even though this man can never be wholly known, something of him surely speaks in the object of his ironic worship: The philosophizing host of heaven.
V
The matter at hand is Nietzsche’s conclusion that the gods philosophize, a conclusion he says pressed itself upon him often. What was it that drew the philosopher to this? What logic or experience lent it philosophical force? Here, the answer may precede its proof, for there is testimony of only one thing in all the annals of Nietzsche’s spiritual autobiography which could have fertilized his mind for the new relativism. The historical sense, or the nineteenth century’s “sixth sense,” is Nietzsche’s name for that thing, and perhaps it is a fitting name for all that fascinates and repels in his vision.14 There is a brief attempt at its definition:
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….15
This is the historical sense in a few words. It is an ability, says Nietzsche, to guess quickly at the valuations a people has lived by, at the “relationship between the authority of values and the authority of effective forces.” Translated into more familiar language this refers to the relationship between the dominant cultural values, or the inner history of a period (“the authority of values”), and the acts of its men (“the authority of effective forces”). It is a mobile sense for the soul of people, above and beyond, perhaps, even what they know of themselves.
Nietzsche believed that the gods philosophize. In order to penetrate a divine dialectic, one would have to be able to guess at the nature of the gods’ philosophizing from the manifold circumstances of the world. In other words, from the known and intelligible world, it would have to be possible to divine the “rank order of valuations” embodied in the philosophy of the gods. The transition from the historical sense as described in the aphorism to the conclusion that truth changes is a mere shifting of the dependent variable. Rather than inferring from men to their secret or cultural souls, the inference is from those same newly discovered souls to a posture of divine philosophy able to grant them meaning. When men are seen to act, the historical sense suggests the soul in which their action is wrought, e.g., the soul of Athenian or Roman man. But once those world-souls have been made intelligible, it is able to build again on its gains and guess what must be the philosophical assumptions of a universe thus populated. The object of knowledge is equally the gods as seen by the Greeks and the Greeks as seen by the gods.
Though much in Hegel makes similar claims, Nietzsche liberates the historical sense to infinite applicability. He arrives at an entirely new species of relativism, a relativism made possible by the historical sense and based on neither sense perception nor the individual man. Instead, the new relativism of the historical sense is based on superhuman agencies, entities whose very existence is obscure. “The gods philosophize,” says Nietzsche, and adds, “I have been told that you do not like believing in God and gods these days.”16 The gods have been rediscovered by means of their changing truth. They philosophize, therefore they are.
And these freshly discovered gods have a much more stubborn claim to existence than is first apparent. The greater part of our philosophy approaches truth and reality by means of changing divine forces: ‘Cultural,’ ‘linguistic,’ ‘historical,’ and ‘psychological’--gods, indeed, in everything but name. Nietzsche’s polytheistic relativism, separated from his idiosyncrasies, is nothing short of a fundamental ontological point of departure for modern thought.
In all places the historical sense and its gods serve as the demarcation of modernity. They are a cornerstone of our received thought. While in later thinkers the divine relativism never again reaches the same plastic virtuosity it has in Nietzsche, neither is it ever again absent. With it, we move a step closer to the riddle of self-knowledge, and to the core of modern philosophy.
VI
The historical sense is the soil of a once new species of relativism, now grown unobtrusively familiar. What is the true nature of the “sixth sense” which, much distinguished from the canonical five, is able to resurrect gods and arrive at a changing absolute? The historical sense is a faculty which appears at a particular juncture of history. It is the nineteenth century which considers it a sixth sense, and its origin, according to Nietzsche, is the “democratic mixing of the classes and races.” This explanation, though likely not without its truth, is very far indeed from putting the matter to rest. Can Nietzsche have forgotten to ask how an individual comes to possess the historical sense?
What 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.
Throughout 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
Yet 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.
There 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.