On The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life

Central to Nietzsche’s thinking about the proper function of history is his concept of the unhistorical. Defined in Chapter 1 against the notion of the superhistorical, or omniscient perspective, the unhistorical is the capacity to forget. The ability to “live unhistorically” is determined by the “plastic power” of the agent to discern between the helpful and unhelpful elements of the past.

Here and elsewhere, Nietzsche builds his notion of the unhistorical on the foundation of Heraclitus’s classic theory of constant flux. For Heraclitus, as apparently for Nietzsche, life is flux, and to resist change is at odds with the nature of mankind. All that is great grows from the unhistorical. Nietzsche adds to the Heraclitan theory of the modernist emphasis on subjective experience. Developing on the Heraclitan idea of a river that can’t be stepped in twice, Nietzsche describes the moment of inspiration or passionate love as a timeless “living whirlpool” of simultaneity:“he perceives at all he has never perceived so before, so tangibly near, coloured, full of sound and light as though he were apprehending it with all his senses at once” (16).

Imping his own theories so completely on classical ones is commensurate with Nietzsche’s own notion of great, unhistorical actions.