On The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life

Having outlined the three forms of history, Nietzsche now concludes that every group of people must adopt an approach to history that is sometimes monumental, sometimes antiquarian, and sometimes critical, according to whichever history best serves life.

Nietzsche next turns to consider the modern humans’ souls. The “modern soul” is distinguished for Nietzsche by a superfluity of knowledge. This preponderance of knowledge is “indigestible,” thus producing a dichotomy between surface and depth in both the culture and the individual. A modern individual is contrasted with a Hellenistic one. The Greek would perceive modern culture as overly invested in historical education and encyclopedic.

The superfluity of information is also problematic because it produces an indiscriminateness that can lead to barbarism going undetected. For Nietzsche, modern culture takes place predominantly in the internal world; presumably by this he means the individual rather than the collective world. Nietzsche is critical of the disparity between content and form in the surrounding German culture. He argues that the lack of unity prevents the culture’s full value from being made manifest. There is an urgent “need,” Nietzsche claims, to rebuild the integrity between the inner and the outer in modern culture and life.