Ep. 300: Nietzsche on Relating to History (Part One)

0:07 Mark: Hey, there you are watching the Partially Examined Life live streamed. We're a podcast by some guys who at one point set out doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 300 is something like what is the healthiest attitude we can take toward history? And we read Friedrich Nietzsche's on the Uses and Disadvantage of History for life, published as the second of his Untimely Meditations in 1874. For more information please visit harshlyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, inwardly cultural, outwardly barbaric in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:45 Seth: Hello, this is Seth Paskin greeting the pel nation across the long dark centuries of confusion in Austin, Texas.

0:53 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, reclining in a very leisurely way on the shoulders of giants in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:01 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey, striving to forget at the right time as much as to remember at the right time in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:09 Mark: Welcome everybody.

1:10 Seth: Woohoo.

1:11 Mark: Why have we not done this before? It was the pandemic. Everybody was doing this.

1:15 Dylan: I guess we missed our chance, Mark.

1:18 Seth: Yep.

1:19 Mark: Well, luckily the pandemic stretches out ever on. There's always a reason to not meet in person. The odors, wearing clothing below the waist. There's lots of things that we advantages here. We were looking for some topic that was going to be popular enough, going to be a big enough thing, one of those big figures everybody's heard of and we've done a lot in each of, but we've never done this one in particular. Wes, you found it. What's the story?

1:51 Wes: I think I was reading Kaufman's biography of Nietzsche and there's a certain point where he's quoting from Untimely Meditations and I thought this would be great. We haven't done this and I haven't read it. Actually. It's earlier stuff, right? We've done Birth of Tragedy and On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense and those both precede this. But you know, I call this kind of early work and it's less aphoristic than later stuff that Nietzsche does. And it's except for Genealogy Morals, but more of a coherent essay. So I don't know, I just remember being kind of wowed by whatever it is I saw in Kaufman. Were you guys wowed?

2:34 Dylan: You characterized it as if you like the culture wars, you'll like this. And I think that you're right in that characterization. It's definitely got that op ed, certainly more sophisticated one than that, but sort of that culture warrior kind of thing going on. But Nietzsche's flamboyant writing as usual.

2:55 Wes: I refer to it as a culture war essay in the sense that although Nietzsche, of course, would have abhorred that kind of classification and newspaper writers and people who are, you know, kind of scribes of the moment, that's not what he wants to be doing. But, you know, it is a cultural critique, essentially. And I think, you know, maybe we should start out talking a little bit about what he means by history, because as we'll see going through the essay, it kind of shifts. It means a lot of different things. On the one hand, it just means sort of academic study of history and in particular his own historical discipline, which was philology, classics, basically, before he.

He's already blown up his academic career really at this point, but before he, you know, he finally takes a permanent leave of absence and becomes, you know, the wandering philosopher. But he's also thinking about individual history, memory, which is kind of the way he starts everything out. He's thinking about education and instruction and are formative influences in particular, educational influences, but also cultural influences. And he's critiquing the culture in general. And the critique, of course, is that it's too historical. This is kind of parallel to his critique of morality.

There'll be a lot of parallels here, but the critique of the German culture at that time is that it's too historical. And we can talk about what exactly that means.

4:19 Dylan: The short version, meaning it's too backwards looking and seeing the definitive answers for where we're at, from where we came from, as opposed to a history that enlivens us for living our current selves and for the future. There's a lot more to say about it than that, but I think that we capture a bit of it. His critique is the way in which they're using history.

4:45 Seth: The concept of being untimely, I think, is tied to working against the current of what was popular at the time. And it's not simply the use or misuse of history. But I think he's also being a good Nietzsche pessimist. There was a current of optimism, this idea that I think history is the Wissenschaft, that we could encompass all of experience, all of reality, all of the world in knowledge and bring a scientific approach to it. And there was an optimism at the time around what historical inquiries were capable of providing in conjunction not just with history and, you know, as he came out of philology, but also all of the others, psychology, all these other sciences. So the critique he's bringing is not simply against, let's call it the content or the tenor, but also the tone and the use.

5:41 Wes: He's in part thinking right about Hegel, and he spends a good bit of time bashing Hegel in some amusing and eloquent ways. But Hegel kind of innovates a historicist approach to philosophy where history is seen as having a kind of development that is akin to the natural development of an organism, and one that culminates or flowers in Hegel himself, or as Nietzsche puts it in the craniums of Hegelians. So that's part of what's going on here. And it's untimely. You know, he gives us two senses. What is untimely about this one is just that people are very proud of this cultivation of history.

It's an ideal, it's an educational movement. It's an enormous force in Hegelianism. It's something that he says that, you know, his time is rightly proud of. So his meditation is untimely in the sense that it attacks something that's of his time. And the second way in which he says it's untimely is just that his attack is leveraged from a vantage point informed by his familiarity with the classics, the ancient Greeks. So the untimeliness has to do with the target and also with the source.

6:53 Mark: We had an episode a long time ago on Hegel's philosophy of history. And I think it's safe to say that Nietzsche is getting this secondhand at best, that one of the things we commented on about Hegel's philosophy of history was that he had a great man theory. And insofar as Nietzsche acknowledges that, or that has actually persisted into the Hegelians that Nietzsche is directly reacting to. It is a matter of the great man must be. Somebody would have come along. It is historical forces, so we can think about the most famous person influenced by Hegel, Marx, that it is all historical forces.

It doesn't even matter what some particular genius decided to do on some particular day, insofar as there might be imposing some form of this great man theory from Hegel onto Marx, somebody that's going to carry out the revolution. Well, if that person hadn't done it, somebody else would have done it pretty soon. And so you could even say the same with intellectual geniuses, right? If Shakespeare hadn't been Shakespeare, somebody else would have been Shakespeare.

7:57 Wes: Possibly a bunch of monkeys could have been.

8:00 Mark: The times were calling for it. And that's something that Nietzsche has no patience for, that he remains an elitist, that it really is a matter of individual geniuses. You Know, even if they are acting out history, it's better for us not to know that it would dampen them. If they see themselves as merely acting out, you know, the next step in the geist, then they're less likely to do anything. They're more likely to just sit back and watch it happening.

8:28 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, he definitely disagrees with the idea that they're just acting out history. But I think that the better way to characterize it. Than necessarily just a sort of a great man theory of kind of history is he would say that history is made up of the actions of the individuals. They may be great, they may not be great, but it's made up of their own actions and their own living in their own time. And not part of some lawful, like, extension of the actions of the universe over time. It's not progressive in that way. It's built up of those individuals and those individual actions. Not that he isn't elitist as well, but

9:09 Seth: I mean, ultimately, history is an act of people in the present. So when you say that history is made up of the actions of individuals. And isn't there a sense in which we're looking backwards from the perspective of the present to identify what constitutes history? And insofar as we identify history as being the actions of individuals versus. And if you think about history as a science or as an empirical undertaking, you would expect to look at what actually transpired, or at least the recording of what actually transpired. In order to create the narrative of what we call history or what history is from the perspective of the present.

And at least to the extent in which you're not superimposing some kind of Hegelian teleological unfolding of spirit or some other superstructure on top of that, in order to make sense and interpret. There is a sense in which attending to the actions of individuals as you build the historical narrative. Or attending to the records of the acts of the individuals. You could give him some credit for having some fidelity to what actually happened versus adding some kind of interpretive layer on top of it.

10:24 Dylan: I think that's right. I mean, and this is probably where we should start getting a little bit more detailed. But he has these different characteristics of what kinds of history you have and what you're describing. Sounds to me like the part that he calls critical way of looking at history. And that you understand what happened. And there's a kind of unearthing that goes on there. And it made me think a lot about another historical, like word he uses. Which is genealogy. And the Kind of activity that is, he doesn't use that word in this book, but they made me think of that kind of thing. But you also used a word, Seth, of scientific activity, and that's exactly the pejorative he uses against the current activities of German history. It's hamstrung by trying to be too scientific in this activity.

11:08 Wes: And we should say that science, we've said it on Nietzsche episodes before, but science doesn't mean what it means to us, which is usually contemporary natural sciences. It means the field of academic knowledge, work in general. So philology as a science. Right. And the philology of his time was uber scientific. It was focused on looking at the provenance of texts and determining ancient texts and thinking about their accuracy and what was added or subtracted to them over time. There are some very technical aspects to it. And before he wrote the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was already a rock star in his field.

He had gotten professorship and was on his way to tenure, I think even before he had written his dissertation, which I think the Birth of Tragedy was essentially the dissertation that blew up his career because he essentially is a writer in that piece, he is an essayist. He is doing exactly the sort of thing that he's arguing you ought to be able to do here, which is to do something really expressive and artistic and speculative and vital, and not just create a tome full of a bunch of footnotes that no one is going to ever read.

12:26 Mark: Practical and forward looking.

12:27 Dylan: Yeah, it should affect things.

12:30 Wes: His work got blasted by critics. It embarrassed a lot of his friends. There's a major criticism by a very famous philologist whose name I'm not going to try and pronounce right now. And he got Wagner to respond to that and another friend to respond to that. But for the most part, people were embarrassed by their. As far as I can tell from my secondary reading, embarrassed. A lot of his friends were embarrassed by this. And he himself never directly responded to that criticism. But obviously it played a role in him. He's about to basically permanently leave academia at this point.

And I see this essay as a indirect response in a way. And of course you could read his whole career in that way as a justification of being Nietzsche. I'm not just going to be a scholar, I'm going to use my enormous education, because that's what he has, right? He has an enormous historical education. But instead of doing something that he was, you know, set to be a rock star at, which is academic, scientific philology, he is going to use it more artistically.

13:34 Mark: So we've been confusing A little bit, as is natural because of the word history in terms of the actual events that's happened and history in terms of historiology, the study of history, which is what historians actually do. They don't make history, they study history. Historiography, historiology is what that secondary source that we're not going to talk about that you recommended to me said that historiography might be about writing history in particular, but the studying history, historiology. Anyway, we probably don't need to use that word too many times tonight, but what I was talking about in terms of Hegel's theory of history, that's an actual theory of history.

Nietzsche doesn't, you know, other than seeing what we've said, you know, seeing the idea of history as a progression just repels him. He's almost 100% concerned with the study of history. What it is to be a historian, to be, as you were saying, Wes, a philologist or any other kind of historian. And he just thinks that it is overrated, that it's like the essay on truth and Lie. That was something that was incomplete. We did an episode on it before, but in that he was critiquing the will to truth. Here he's critiquing the will to scientifically produce history and to focus our lives.

You know, he thinks it's really sunk into the culture, so that Germany sees itself as a very historical people. And you can see ways in which that could go wrong. Right? People are too traditionalist. They're not open to new things. He's definitely on board with that, but his critique is more subtle than that he identifies. Dylan, you mentioned one of them, but three distinct ways of approaching history that we should get into. And each of them serves a need. Each of them is actually good in some ways, but all of them, if overdone or done in the wrong way or done by stupid people who don't know how to do them, ends up being negative for life.

So thus the uses and the disadvantage. I actually had read in that same source that we shouldn't say the uses and abuses because he doesn't actually use a pun like that is in fact the. The uses and disadvantage.

15:43 Wes: Before we get into those types, I just want to say, you know, again, I'm going to repeat my idea that this word history means quite a few different things and it's more than academic history. So, right. What we do when we educate ourselves, right, we're often doing history. Like, if I become an expert in literature, I'm doing literary history or the same Thing with philosophy, what do we do as philosophers? A lot of it involves reading old texts, right. Giving ourselves these historical influences. And then the question is, what are we doing with those influences?

Do we become scholars and experts in the influences or do we use them to do something new, to do something creative? And his argument is for the use of those things for other creative ends and not getting stuck. Although it's not that scholarship isn't useful, but not for all of society to get stuck in that view of the past as being something to be merely dissected. He does have quite a bit of a preamble before he gets into the three types of history. We could.

16:43 Dylan: Section one.

16:45 Wes: Yeah, you know, him touching. It's kind of an amusing beginning to this, him touching on our envy of the animal for being able to live in the moment. Right. Whereas we react, we live with the pressure of the past kind of bearing down on us, which is something that makes us hypocrites because we try to disown it. We have various methods for dealing with the weight of the past. So you can see here already this is not starting with academic history. This is starting with personal history and memory and what it means to be the sort of animal that can have that. As opposed to a cow. Wouldn't it be so great just to be a cow?

17:21 Mark: Yeah. This is why it's not like a newspaper opinion piece. Because he is actually doing philosophy here and reflecting on fundamental human needs and drives and urges. It would be foolish not to read this Intro to section one. Consider the cattle grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today. They leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again. And so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment in its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see.

For though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness, what they have. A life neither bored nor painful is precisely what he wants. Yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. So this is a long running theme in Nietzsche is does the burden of being a human, is that not all good, as Aristotle would think? You know, it's our destiny is what distinguishes us from the animals. It is really the point of life for the kinds of creatures that we are is to be reasonable, to think, to reflect.

The more thinking, the more self consciousness the better. And Nietzsche is merely pointing out that's not actually the way we think. That complete Self consciousness is totally paralyzing. Man. What a weight we carry around with us all day.

18:45 Seth: There's an odd issue there where he says he refuses to be like an animal because he says in the next paragraph, a little further down, the animal lives unhistorically. Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great and ever pressure of what is past. It pushes him down or bends him sideways. It encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden. So it's not a question of us refusing to live like animals. The burden of being human is the burden of having a past. It's the burden of that weighing us down and crushing on us in the sense that it forces its way into our consciousness. So I think in some sense he's setting up the stage for saying that the past or history is a fundamental part of being human. And this is obviously something that Heidegger picked up on.

19:36 Wes: But, yeah, it's like thrown ness, right?

19:38 Seth: It's like thrown ness. We can't avoid or escape. We are projected out of the past. And so what Nietzsche is going to say is we have to deal with it. We have to reconcile ourselves to it. And what he's going to complain about is the ways in which, at least in his contemporary situation, people did try to reconcile or deal with the past.

19:58 Wes: There's a great bit about him talking. So it's not only cows who live in the moment, but it's children. So we also. We have some idea of making a transition out of an existence in which we are more connected to the moment and more free of history, our personal history and memory, to something else, to this kind of realization, as he puts it, that existence is fundamentally an imperfect tense, which I love that uninterrupted, has been a thing that lives by negating, consuming and contradicting itself. There he's taking the lingo of becoming in the ancient Greeks, but also in Hegel.

And this idea that temporal transition, you know, being of one moment involves the negation of the previous and pointing to the inherently nihilistic implications of that. So once we get out of the moment, what do we do about them? We have to be able to fight that off in some way. So, you know, one strategy that he mentions is like the cynic, right? The cynic talked a little about. About this time on. The cynic just says, okay, I'm going to be an animal. That's where happiness is.

21:03 Dylan: They live like animals, throw off custom.

21:05 Mark: Is this a mindfulness tract? I didn't think of that beforehand, but

21:10 Wes: sure sounds not A fan of this. He's not a fan of the cynical solution?

21:14 Seth: No, definitely not.

21:16 Mark: I don't think that mindfulness describes the solution as he describes it either. It would be, how do grown ups do this? How can we play like the child? I think that's a thing that we would be more likely to envy than seeing the cow and be like, oh, I wish I was like the cow. But seeing the child like, oh, wow, they're so into that. I would love to be as focused as on that. To know how to play, to really be able to love. This is the kind of thing that humans should know how to do.

21:45 Wes: We know where this is headed, right? It's headed towards art. That's how we retrieve the moment. The mindfulness comment, Mark, is apt because he's going to say, tell us that happiness is the ability to forget, to feel unhistorically. We need that to live. On the other hand, to be human just is to be historical, right? That is in a way our defining feature. It's intimately related to being self conscious.

22:10 Seth: I've been thinking about this in a different context for some time now. And the notion of forgetting or mindfulness, of being present, its strength is in coping. So it's ultimately not going to get to what Nietzsche wants because it's a response that satisfies a certain feeling in the moment. It's something you can do to respond or cope, but it's not ultimately leading to the kind of outcome that he's looking for. It's temporary. So if we're trying to make a connection between mindfulness and cynicism, mindfulness is like the temporary abstention from the things which cause pain and suffering.

You can call it desire, you can call it history, memory, whatever. Cynicism is an attempt to manifest that as a lifestyle, I guess. But ultimately, as Wes said, it's a temporary solution to ultimately a not temporary problem I don't think Nietzsche is trying to avoid. He doesn't want to temporarily suspend the experience of the pain of the past or the pain of experience and desire. He wants to find a way to channel, to fuel it for something willful, creative.

23:17 Wes: He really tells us that there's two different solutions. And I'm on page 62 to 63 here. He brings up a metaphor that comes up a lot, which is the idea of are plastic powers. And what he means by that is the ability to incorporate the past as if it were food and to transform it into a part of us. So it's our incorporative power that's important and that power is not infinite. And to the extent that it's finite, we need forgetting. So in other words, we need to be able to draw that horizon that he talks about. Now, if we were infinitely power creatures who could do nothing but incorporate and use the past for creativity, then that would be ideal.

This is like, you know, if we were talking in psychoanalytic parlance, we would say that the solutions are repression and sublimation. And the third thing that it can happen is that the past can be so overwhelming that it can be traumatic. He brings this idea up that we can simply be overwhelmed by the past to the point that our psyches are essentially obliterated by it, that our capacity to cope with it is overcome.

24:27 Mark: One last word about mindfulness. It is mindfulness in the Yoda sense, right? Never your mind on where you are,

24:34 Dylan: what you are doing.

24:35 Mark: You don't want history crowding you in. But on the other hand, mindfulness is a form of self consciousness. The wish here is to have less self consciousness, at least sometimes, right? To be able to forget. So you are not always. If mindfulness, as Seth just described it, there's some negative emotions coming, I'm just going to sit back, I'm going to judge it. I'm not going to let it control me. Whereas Nietzsche actually wants us to. You need something to seize you. You need your instincts. You need to surrender to them in a way. They need to be effectual. So if you're always trying to be mindful and hold it down, then you actually become the kind of monitoring lizard. That is exactly what he's arguing against.

25:14 Seth: I don't know if it's worth me defending myself against that characterization of what I said, so we can move on. But that's not what I was intending.

25:23 Wes: Well, what is the disagreement in a nutshell? I'm not.

25:26 Mark: I didn't know that. I was sharply disagreeing.

25:28 Wes: I didn't know that either. Yeah, all right.

25:30 Seth: Well, in that case, chalk that up to my inability to articulate.

25:34 Mark: I recall, even though I brought it up this time as something Nietzsche was in favor of when I was reading this and thinking he's. That he's anti self consciousness, I specifically thought of mindfulness in that context. So the fact that I brought, you know, it could cut either way. Let's just put it that way. Like most things in this essay, right? Anything used to excess or used in the wrong way. This was a term from secondary literature that a lot of people read Nietzsche as an orienting philosopher, that it's not about stating truths. It's not about getting a picture of the world. It's about getting back on the horse when you've fallen off the horse. Right. That the path to a healthy, full life is a razor's edge.

26:13 Wes: Are you referring to the secondary source? Is that.

26:16 Mark: I'm trying to give credit without giving credit.

26:20 Wes: Sorry. So this is. This is history, Mark. This is exactly what Nietzsche's talking.

26:24 Mark: I just thought it was a useful thought.

26:27 Wes: This is a footnote. You're doing footnotes.

26:29 Mark: This is how we've generally made sense. At least how I've made generally made sense.

26:33 Wes: I'm just joking.

26:33 Mark: Of Nietzsche in the past, as don't look for him to be completely consistent because like an Eastern wise man or whatever he's notorious for. You know, I'm addressing this problem, so you got to do this thing. But if I'm addressing another problem, maybe you got to do this other thing. And that's really the kind of handbook that he's providing with this essay.

26:50 Dylan: I mean, look at the title of it. Right on the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life. And then my opening comment. It was just a quote from him. You should strive to forget at the right time as much as to remember at the right time. So this is just underlining the issue that in all of these cases, it all turns on exercising the different kinds of historical attitude in the right way. And they all have. I think you said it at the beginning, Wes, that you have your antiquarian, your critical and your monumental. And you could use them in the wrong way and the right way.

27:28 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the next step in this argument, this is page 63, is just to say that the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of either an individual, a people, or a culture. And this is a tripartite division that he repeats several times in the essay. So we're thinking on all those different levels at once. He does then go on to argue that the ahistorical is more fundamentally necessary to life than the historical. And why is that? Well, you can't truly act, you know, especially you can't do great things unless you're in the UN historical mode.

Or at least you can't be so overly historical. And why is that? Because he's associating the historical at this point, I think, as Mark pointed out, with thinking and reflecting and being rational and also being moral. And, you know, all of these things we've sort of incorporated into us count for these purposes as historical. And what they do is they make Us inhibited. They make us Hamlet esque. Too much of it. And we have difficulty acting because we can always say, what should I do? What do people do culturally? What have my people done historically?

What is right, what is wrong? I think he'll say at some point, right. To truly act is always to act without a conscience.

28:44 Mark: And it's all been done. I would think would be the most debilitating of all. Like, why even bother?

28:50 Wes: Yep.

28:50 Seth: All right.

28:50 Mark: Can we get the three types out? Are we to that point?

28:55 Wes: I'll just say what we're skipping over. And I think we do need to skip over it for the purposes of time. You know, he'll talk a little bit about the super historical.

29:01 Mark: Yeah, let's come back to that.

29:02 Wes: We can come back because that's an

29:04 Mark: antidote that he talks about at the end.

29:07 Wes: And so, yeah, section two, where he's pivoting off this idea that life needs the services of history. Right. So he's been criticizing history, but actually if life can maintain control, then history can actually serve it. So he's going to go over these three different types of history. Monumental, antiquarian and critical. He's going to tell us the ways in which they can be good. He's then going to tell us for each one the ways in which they can be bad in excess.

29:32 Mark: All right, who wants to start with monumental? Seth, you, monumental man. You. Do you want to start us?

29:39 Wes: I thought you were going to end that with a different word.

29:43 Seth: I would prefer not to.

29:45 Mark: So timid. Are you intimidated by the figures of the past?

29:48 Seth: I am intimidated by the figures of the past as well as the figures of the present who are here watching us live.

29:56 Wes: Dylan, do you want to give it

29:57 Seth: a dust heap on Facebook has shared with us that they're monumental, antiquarian and critical.

30:02 Dylan: Well, those are the three types. And we were going to talk about monumental first.

30:06 Wes: Did I say something else?

30:08 Seth: No.

30:08 Wes: See that we can't look at the comments.

30:09 Dylan: Yes.

30:10 Mark: We got to wait till the end to look at the comments.

30:12 Wes: Create enormous increase the level of self doubt to heretofore unforeseen levels.

30:20 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, monumental is the focus on the continuity of greatness for all the ages. Right. So history in the sense of continuing greatness.

30:30 Wes: So we look to past great deeds and great human beings as models, as teachers, as sources of comfort. They're sources of comfort because they help us avoid resignation.

30:41 Seth: Right.

30:42 Wes: They tell us that other people have suffered and persisted through suffering against incredible odds to do incredible things. And the imperative at work here is to Perpetuate greatness. That's what monumental history is for, and that's what it says we must do. We must try to emulate these great figures of the past. What that is opposed by is the mere struggle to survive, right? Just to cope with our petty needs. It's our animality. And that's what monumental history wants us to overcome in excess. Its drawbacks are it can distort history. Right?

It relies on generalization. It leaves out details. It's creating kind of a poetic, nice picture of things for us to emulate. It's especially harmful, as if it just rules over the antiquarian and the critical. And above all. And I think this is the big thing, it can lead to fanaticism and war, and it can really do harm in the hands of men of power. And I think Putin is a good example of this right now. So Nietzsche, and this is. You know, often he's criticized for this elitism and this focus on great human beings and their past deeds and war and this and that.

But he seems to be very conscious of the fact that monumental history can be abused for the sake of fanaticism and violence.

31:57 Dylan: There's a nice quote on 71 about this. Monumental history deceives by analogies with seductive similarities. It inspires the courageous to foolhardiness and the inspired to fanaticism. And when we go on to think of this kind of history in the hands and heads of gifted egoists and visionary scoundrels, then we see empires destroyed, princes murdered, wars and revolutions launched, and the number of historical effects in themselves, that is to say, effects without sufficient cause, again, augmented this whole thing about effects without causes.

32:30 Mark: It's about identified causes and talking about this before that, even if it is the case that societies only change because of pressures that maybe an astute sociologist or a professor of history could predict, could chart the course of the monumental ignores that. The monumental just says, sees the effects, sees the. Napoleon was a great man and he did all this stuff. And that is the thing that is remembered. It's not. And the conditions were right for someone like Napoleon, and if it hadn't been him, it would be somebody else.

32:59 Wes: Right? It doesn't want to reduce Napoleon to his particular influences or to being a function of the social conditions of the time or any of that stuff.

33:08 Mark: Yeah. This great man view of history, one of the quotes here on 68, that the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that this chain unites mankind across the millennia like a range of human mountain peaks, that the Summit of such long ago moment shall be for me still living bright and great. That is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in demand for a monumental history. So whether or not actually it's true that individual great people are the ones who change history, this is at least an image that works for us. Right. All history is going to be constructive. We're never just going to deliver up the data. We're always synthesizing in some way. And so looking at history in this way provides a continuity that is inspiring.

33:55 Dylan: Yeah, if you're doing it right, it

33:57 Wes: can be inspiring in good ways and bad ways. But go ahead, Seth.

34:00 Seth: I got the impression, and I could be wrong, that the monumentalist approach to history is. Let me go back to the text here. It's an interpretation that explicitly is contrasting the past to the present. And I thought that what I understood was that it was an unfavorable comparison to the present. So it's the job of the monumentalist is to lionize or grab those elements of the past which indicate exceptionalism in order to be able to construct a narrative which indicates that such things are not possible today or such things are not happening today. Is that a misreading?

34:44 Wes: I think so, because I think, you know, he spends a bit of a section saying monumental history is to. Supposed to convince us that those things are possible.

34:53 Dylan: Right.

34:53 Wes: It's a consolation in that sense.

34:55 Mark: It's supposed to. I think Seth is just pointing out the bad way that a lot of people take it. But I guess that's a good question. Is there something inherent in making monuments that says the present is crap by comparison?

35:08 Seth: Yeah, because if the present was all that, you'd be building monuments to the present and not to the past.

35:14 Wes: Well, that gets at the second way in which monumental history can be harmful. And that's what he says. It's in the hands of the indolent. This is page 71, 72, which is to say monumental history can be used by inartistic natures to suppress strong artistic spirits in their own age and say, contemporary art sucks, man, everything. You know, I don't get it. Why can't you paint, right? You know, look at all the past. Great stuff. So you establish a canon, you say, look at all this great stuff in the past, and nothing in the present can live up to that. And for Nietzsche, that's really just cloaks and all out hatred of greatness in general. The idea is actually to get rid of it entirely and cloak that in admiration for the greatness of the past. You Know, to ward off any present greatness, future greatness, let the dead bury the living, so to speak. But go ahead.

36:08 Seth: A monument is literally the ossification of some kind of ideal of the past. It's concretizing and memorializing in some kind of fixed form. There's no such thing as a monument that changes. Right. It becomes a sedimentary, like recognition of something in the past. And then you come and you have to pay homage to it.

36:31 Wes: It becomes a tool of the critic. Yeah, a bludgeon.

36:35 Mark: I'm just thinking about when we were. People were arguing about, can we take the Civil War, the Confederate monuments down? And it was, well, you should keep it up because it's a piece of history. And it was pointed out that, no, actually these things were put up as a political act, like a century after the fact by Daughters of the Confederacy or whatever the groups were. So it was an actual. A will to power. It was a power grab. So monumenting is not necessarily sedimentation in terms of the great thing is happening and then it freezes in sediment, like. No, it's an actual activity by the people making the monument.

37:09 Seth: It's an act of the historian. It's not something that happens in the moment, it's something that happens afterwards.

37:15 Wes: Like the use of the word monument as a verb. Monumenting. You did say that, right? I didn't imagine him.

37:21 Mark: I think it might have been an accident.

37:23 Wes: I don't know. That's great.

37:25 Seth: We'll have to rewind the tale of the tape.

37:29 Mark: Little things about the good ways in which this works. So somebody who embraces monumentalism. They are reflecting on man being a glorious thing, a thing exhibiting mercy and helpfulness. All of them, however, leaving behind them a single teaching that he lives best, who has no respect for existence. So Wes mentioned, you know, that the enemy of this is mere survival. And so there is something about, at least something that is romanticized as risking your life, putting yourself completely into the cause. That is what causes great things to happen.

It's not playing it safe and trying to make everybody happy. So it's hard to see how. I mean, yes, you could be self destructive in the way that you were saying, or. Or not even self destructive, destructive of other things. By throwing yourself like this is an invitation to fanaticism. But for the most part, he adds this regard death with Olympian laughter, or at least with sublime mockery. Often these great people descended to their grave with an ironic smile for what was there left of them to bury only the dross, refuse, vanity, animality that had always Weighed them down, that was now consigned to oblivion after having for so long been the object of their contempt.

This actually sounds like Plato to me, you know, on immortality, the life of the philosopher.

38:46 Wes: It's a way to do something more than be an animal focused on survival. I mean, it would take a long time. You know, we could get into a discussion of what that means and why that is. It's more about the thumetic part of the soul or the recognition function and the meaning conferring nature of that. So this is one way we try to get meaning out of existence. It's not just about pleasure, it's about greatness.

39:13 Mark: Yeah, he has a couple of nice quotes about fame here. First he says it's the expectation of a place of honor in the temple of history, where he in turn can be a teacher, comforter and admonisher to those who come after him. And later he says fame is the belief in the solidarity and continuity of the greatness of all ages and a protest against the passing away of generations and the transitoriness of things. So sort of a rage against the dying of the light. But interestingly, you know, we were saying that maybe art is the answer. But if you think of art as creating an artwork and leaving it out there and saying, this is my mark, this is my monument, you know, that's very different than the.

I don't want to be overly self conscious. I want to be completely consumed in the creative process. I want to live as a creative person. I want to have that mindfulness. Clearly they're related. But the idea, you know, I think if you were completely self consistent in that I want to live in the present and stuff, then you do not care about leaving a monument. Like there's something that is connected with greatness to that. But even in itself that might be, or maybe it should be sort of a vice for Nietzsche.

40:17 Wes: Yeah, it's a very complicated issue. Right. Because it can be motivating the idea of greatness, but it can also be debilitating. A lot of people aren't creative because just the pressure of trying to live up to something or the pressure of their ambitions is crippling. So to what extent do we allow thumos to function, you know, and the desire for recognition to function? I don't think we can get rid of it entirely. And yet we have to moderate it. And that's what makes it such a difficult issue. This is the type of thing that gets lots of people into therapy, keeps me in my trade.

40:50 Seth: Since we've introduced this notion of thumos. It's a question of how does the individual in the present connect their thumotic inclinations or desires to an attachment to the past? Think about this. I'd ask the people who are listening to us now, or you all, like, have you gone to the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. or the Lincoln Memorial? And the question is, what is that relationship between you and the monument insofar as it represents some kind of recognition of past greatness? Is there a sense of connectedness? Is there a way in which you can channel your experience of being in front of the monument?

In a way. And I think for Nietzsche, if it's a worship or a fetishization or a sense in which there's a false consciousness because you get a better sense of self by virtue of being close or having some kind of tangential connection versus connecting with it in a way that in turn drives you to do things for your own sense of recognition, propelled, using Heideggerian terms, propelled out of the past. I think there's a way in which your reaction to this or the way in which you utilize it for the present could be positive, but as an activity itself, I think he thinks in general it's relatively negative because of the way that people don't do that.

Does that make sense?

42:15 Wes: He gives us the positives and the negatives. I didn't get a good sense of whether he thinks it's more negative on the whole or more positive. Maybe you might be right about that, because he certainly he thinks that people's aversion to novelty and contemporary art, for instance, are explained by the monumental, and fanaticism and violence are explained by the monumental, and there's no shortage of that. But I don't think Nietzsche thinks we can do away with the need to aspire to the greatness of people in the past. Later on in the essay he'll use this metaphor of a dialogue, a republic of genius, and also like a bridge composed of great individuals across the river of becoming. The only way to overcome becoming and establish being is through this cross generational dialogue of greats, let's say.

43:06 Seth: But yeah, yeah, no, it can't simply be a question of we were great once, so we must be great now. There has to be more of a dialectical interchange between the present and the past.

43:18 Wes: It's always about striving, right? One of the big objections to the Hegelian vision is just that, hey, history is fixed and determined. There's an inevitable development, the flowers and the process of blooming and what's going to happen is going to happen in a way. I don't need to strive. I just let myself be carried along by the forces of history. And if I'm a genius, it's going to just happen of its own accord if I apply that to my own personal life. On Nietzsche's view, you have to think in agonistic terms to go back to an ancient Greek idea and a Platonic Socratic idea in particular. You have to be thinking competitively in order to fully reach one's potential.

44:01 Mark: And that was the halfway point in our live show. So we're going to wrap up part one here. Supporters, you will find part two already in your podcast feed. Thanks for listening. So long.