The Nietzschean Premise of Eliot’s Historical Sense

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Abstract No critical concept has been more readily associated with the critical writings of T. S. Eliot than tradition, yet the reception of his views in this regard is one of misprision. The paper demonstrates that Eliot’s equally misunderstood notion of historical sense is compatible with, even derives from, Nietzsche’s understanding of the term, as both authors reject the substantialist idea of tradition in favour of the functional one. Since the latter rules out both an eternal essence of the object and a timeless point of view of the observer, the consequences of this genealogy, as a rule neglected or simply ignored by Eliot’s critics, for his concept of tradition in particular, and history in general, are of decisive import.