THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON
PART TWO
THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY
SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR
By
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
TRANSLATED BY
ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche
The First Complete and Authorised English Translation
Edited by Dr Oscar Levy
Volume Five
T.N. FOULIS
13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
19O9
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY
SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR
INTRODUCTION.
The two essays translated in this volume form thesecond and third parts of the UnzeitgemässeBetrachtungen. The essay on history was completedin January, that on Schopenhauer in August,1874. Both were written in the few months offeverish activity that Nietzsche could spare fromhis duties as Professor of Classical Philology inBâle.
Nietzsche, who served in an ambulance corps in'71, had seen something of the Franco-German War,and to him it was the “honest German bravery”that had won the day. But to the rest of hiscountrymen it was a victory for German culture aswell; though there were still a few elegancies, afew refinements of manners, that might veneer thenew culture, and in this regard the conqueredmight be allowed the traditional privilege ofconquering the conquerors. Nietzsche answeredroundly, “the German does not yet know themeaning of the word culture,” and in the essay onhistory set himself to show that the so-calledculture was a morass into which the German hadbeen led by a sixth sense he had developed duringthe nineteenth century—the “historical sense”:he had been brought by his spiritual teachers to[Pg x]believe that he was the “crown of the world-process”and that his highest duty lay in surrenderinghimself to it.
With Nietzsche, the historical sense became a“malady from which men suffer,” the world-processan illusion, evolutionary theories a subtle excusefor inactivity. History is for the few not themany, for the man not the youth, for the great notthe small—who are broken and bewildered by it.It is the lesson of remembrance, and few are strongenough to bear that lesson. History has nomeaning except as the servant of life and action:and most of us can only act if we forget. This isthe burden of the first essay; and turning fromhistory to the historian he condemns the “noisylittle fellows” who measure the motives of thegreat men of the past by their own, and use thepast to justify their present.
But who are the men that can use history rightly,and for whom it is a help and not a hindrance tolife? They are the great men of action andthought, the “lonely giants amid the