Nietzsche's Ethics of History

Abstract

In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life Nietzsche sets forth prescriptions for placing history in the service of human excellence. Nietzsche's prescriptions are based on a substantive metaphysical doctrine and a definite conception of human needs and capacities. Contrary to the dominant trends in recent scholarship that depict Nietzsche as primarily a teacher of antifoundationalism, historicism, and perspectivism, in his major thematic statement on the matter Nietzsche views history as a means to discover and to display nonhistorical and enduring knowledge about human nature and the rank order of desires, human types, and forms of life. For Nietzsche, the task of the “genuine historian” is nothing less than the transformation of history into poetry in the effort to defend wisdom, to distinguish nobility from baseness, and to establish the love of truth as a resplendent vice and noble faith. Nietzsche's account of the right use of history suggests an underappreciated unity in his writings by raising the possibility that in his several histories Nietzsche wrote from the perspective, and assumed the responsibility, of the genuine historian.