Mention Books During On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
| Original Title: | Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. Zweites Stück) ASIN B0019QFFOA |
| Edition Language: | English |
Relation Concering Books On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
Forward "Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity." These are Goethe's words. With them, as with a heartfelt expression of Ceterum censeo [I judge otherwise], our consideration of the worth and the worthlessness of history may begin. For this work is to set down why, in the spirit of Goethe's saying, we must seriously despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we lack what is still most essential to us and because what is superfluous is hostile to what is essential. To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit as necessary as it may be painful.I have tried to describe a feeling which has often enough tormented me. I take my revenge on this feeling when I expose it to the general public. Perhaps with such a description someone or other will have reason to point out to me that he also knows this particular sensation but that I have not felt it with sufficient purity and naturalness and definitely have not expressed myself with the appropriate certainty and mature experience. Perhaps one or two will respond in this way. However, most people will tell me that this feeling is totally wrong, unnatural, abominable, and absolutely forbidden, that with it, in fact, I have shown myself unworthy of the powerful historical tendency of the times, as it has been, by common knowledge, observed for the past two generations, particularly among the Germans. Whatever the reaction, now that I dare to expose myself with this natural description of my feeling, common decency will be fostered rather than shamed, because I am providing many opportunities for a contemporary tendency like the reaction just mentioned to make polite pronouncements. Moreover, I obtain for myself something of even more value to me than respectability: I become publicly instructed and set straight about our times.
This essay is also out of touch with the times because here I am trying for once to see as a contemporary disgrace, infirmity, and defect something of which our age is justifiably proud, its historical culture. For I believe, in fact, that we are all suffering from a consumptive historical fever and at the very least should recognize that we are afflicted with it. If Goethe with good reason said that with our virtues we simultaneously cultivate our faults and if, as everyone knows, a hypertrophic virtue (as the historical sense of our age appears to me to be) can serve to destroy a people just as well as a hypertrophic vice, then people may make allowance for me this once. Also in my defence I should not conceal the fact that the experiences which aroused these feelings of torment in me I have derived for the most part from myself and only from others for the purpose of comparison and that, insofar as I am a student more of ancient times, particularly the Greeks, I come as a child in these present times to such anachronistic experiences concerning myself....
List About Books On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
| Title | : | On the Use and Abuse of History for Life |
| Author | : | Friedrich Nietzsche |
| Book Format | : | Kindle Edition |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 78 pages |
| Published | : | May 17th 2008 by Oak Grove (first published April 1st 1874) |
| Categories | : | Philosophy. Nonfiction. History. Classics. European Literature. German Literature |
Rating About Books On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
Ratings: 3.96 From 1680 Users | 85 ReviewsAppraise About Books On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
File this under "The wonderful things that happen when brilliant philosophers engage a single question as opposed to trying to describe everything or establish first principles for everything"I would recommend this book to the ones who holds a prejudice obsession over history.
I am returning to this book after a couple years, and, having remembered enjoying it the first time around, was surprised by how little I took to the writing. The concepts he presents for his different kinds of history and their importance are solid reading, and have made re-reading it a worthwhile experience. However, I found myself disappointed by the writing style, which I found devolved from rational argument into tenuously0related tangents, and so found my attention wavered particularly in
I read (or, I at least think I read this: for, honestly, does any one really read anything as an undergraduate?) this in a philosophy of history class. At the time, I only partly knew what was going on (I do remember an insult directed towards Hegel {is it possible to really understand what was going on without having done necessary cultural background reading on Nietzche and his time? This is a work of intellectual criticism as much as it is philosoph}). Now that I'm older, I think I have a
assorted snippets of the book:Criticism of the history curriculum:"[Hegel] implanted in the generation thoroughly leavened by him that admiration for the "power of history" which practically at every moment turns into naked admiration for success and leads to the idolatry of the factual: for which service one has now generally memorized the very mythological, but apart from that quite goof German turn of phrase 'to take the facts into account'. But who once has learned to bend his back and bow
I wanted this book to be an excellent and informative example of one of the outstanding philosophers of all time. I was a bit disappointed. It contained new ideas but seemed too loosely thought out that I couldn't follow the relevance of the arguments to the main thesis. Oh well....
Fantastical book. To use history to serve the living.There's a definition of this point as F. Nietzsche said: ,,Yes, we know only too well the kind of ascendency history can gain; how it can uproot the strongest instincts of youth, passion, courage, unselfishness and love; can cool its feeling for justice, can crush or repress its desire for a slow ripening by the contrary desire to be soon productive, ready and useful; and cast a sick doubt over all honesty and downrightness of feeling. It can
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