Historicism and Its Discontents
Nietzsche On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life
I wrote this long and meandering reflection in the first term of my PhD research, as I attempted to trace certain implications of the medieval, ‘non-dual’ pratyabhijñā (‘recognition’) school of philosophy for the purposes of cross-cultural and contemporary insight. It is therefore not a ‘complete’ set of considerations or arguments, but rather the reflection of an ongoing theoretical and speculative process. Any threads of thought that are left unresolved are therefore surrendered to the open horizon of further inquiry — to be taken up, refined, or refuted as the dialectic of knowledge and ignorance is perpetually negotiated and re-negotiated.
“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 an 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.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life”
In his essay, “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life”, Nietzsche makes one of his infamous provocative claims: history, as it is narrated in the modern world, is a corrupting influence. It restrains what he sees as the ‘force of life’ by overdetermining the horizon of possibility accessible to the human imagination. In his typical brand of colorful prose, Nietzsche describes an over-historicized world that has domesticated the willing and desiring function of human beings, capturing them in a tedious net of historical “thinking, reflecting, comparing, separating, and combining.” The impulse of life he describes as an unhistorical instinct, a forward-oriented directionality characteristic of ‘beasts’ – which, while being initially and instinctively free, is ultimately made impotent by a blinding gaze backward into the deadening logic of an objectivized past.
While Nietzsche does not deny the need for a certain kind of history, he rejects that form of over-historicization that subjugates the capacity for action. Every revolutionary act, every work of the innovative artist, every victory of a person or people, for him, is born in the womb of forgetting; action emerges from the spacious vitality of an unhistorical atmosphere. That condition by means of which radical creativity takes place is characterized by a suspension of knowledge, because knowledge – according to a view he borrows from Goethe – negates life. The scholar and the historian, lost in their retrospective ruminations, shift around endlessly with regards to a future horizon in their debilitating assessment of past knowledge. The person of action forgets historical knowledge so as to liberate their commitment to bringing something new into being.
At the foundation of Nietzsche’s polemical essay is a clear dichotomy established between the historical and the unhistorical, between culture and nature, between knowledge and action, between light and darkness, between the known and the unknown. These dichotomies warn against the paralyzing influence of too much knowledge, which, rather than serving as an emancipatory, life-affirming activity, turns out to be that which strips human beings of their vital nature. History, insofar as it is necessary and useful, he thinks, should serve this vital nature – and be constructed in such a way that it does not over-determine our identity but rather expands the trajectory of it. The structuring narratives of history organize the parameters of experience in a manner that defines and delimits the acceptable range of subjective possibility. The categorical imprints spawned by a backward-looking humanity encourages an obsession with witnessing the past in the present, and of projecting the coordinates of a constructed history onto our current lived experience. So understood, history becomes a tyrant, and life ultimately becomes oppressed by the disenfranchising influence of previously created categories and distinctions.
Like many great philosophers, Nietzsche’s insights – while born in a particular cultural context – bears a truth-value that still resonates to the present day. Indeed, to not see him as so resonant could easily trigger his anti-historicizing argument, for to enclose his insights within a historicizing gaze would defend a picture of knowledge that permits a philosopher’s sphere of influence to extend only as far as the prevailing constructivist ideology of cultural and historical contexts would allow it. From such a perspective, Nietzsche, and indeed all philosophers, become not voices that speak forward but instead become intellectual artifacts surrendered to a doctrine of historical “placing” — where they can then be analyzed, categorized, and studied at arms length. The so-called ‘history of philosophy’ has a tendency to perpetuate the same kind of historicizing attitude that Nietzsche seeks to reject, and therefore to take Nietzsche at his word – to take his thinking seriously as a hypothesis – perhaps requires us to trace the life of his argument in the present.
At a time of significant social and political upheaval – when the circumstances of the moment seem to require novel solutions and perspectives –, humanity appears destined to repeat itself. It repeats itself not only in the regurgitation of reactionary political projects, but also in the limited imaginative range accessible to those who would oppose them. Humanity seems incapable of dreaming into being alternatives that are not subjugated by the compulsion to catalog contemporary conflicts according to a linear logic of historical continuity. The potency of perceived potential is paralyzed by a picture of a pre-determining past. Insofar as an imaginative vision of the future is operative, it is primarily constrained between divisive discourses of a ‘toxic other’ and nightmare fantasies of collapse, decline, apocalypse, and catastrophe. Both visions, Nietzsche would likely confirm, are symptoms of the incapacitating blindness brought about by a history that serves the dead rather than the living.
Where Nietzsche’s analysis ultimately falls on its own sword, I think, is in assuming too quickly a false dichotomy between knowledge and action. In aligning action with forgetting, he implicitly defends a conception of memory that strips it of creativity. If memory is considered simply the passive recollection and reproduction of the past, then it becomes necessary to subdue memory so as to align with the upsurge of life’s latent creativity. If life is by definition a phenomenon that must empty itself of cultural knowledge and history in order to thrive, then knowledge becomes posited as outside the living that gave it life in the first place. While it might be cathartic to temporarily bracket out all knowledge – to forget in order to create –, one has difficulty seeing how such a prescription would not succumb to a pervasive kind of inverted knowledge that could devolve into a different kind of life-negation. If we purge creativity from our conception of memory, then creativity is perhaps less empowered than it is ignorant. Is such a notion of memory not itself a byproduct of philosophical history? Memory need not be a splash of water that douses creativity’s flame, but rather could be the replenishing oxygen that allows it to burn ever more brightly.
The conception of memory that Nietzsche traffics in is not unique to him. He borrows it from a cultural and historical context that largely understands memory as an immobilizing form of musing on what lies behind us. Like what takes place in the cautionary tale of Black Mirror’s episode, “The Entire History of You”, too much memory breeds nostalgia, which in turn makes the present look pale by comparison. The society in this episode has developed a technology called “the grain”, which is a brain implant that records everything a person sees and hears, allowing them to replay every memory of their lives at any moment they please. This unfettered access to personal memory leads to exactly what Nietzsche fears – the characters hollow out their present by constantly choosing to live in the past. The disappointing and uncomfortable lack of fulfillment encountered in the ‘now’ leads the characters to become memory addicts, replaying over and over in the theatre of their own mind an idealized past more easily enjoyed than the monotonous terrain of their current circumstances. The moral of the story seems to be something altogether Nietzschean: in order to live fully, we must have the capacity to forget. The mediocrity and frustration of an unsatisfying present triggers two possible responses aimed at existential fulfillment: (1) to passively succumb to what is known and remembered, or (2) to actively and creatively push forward toward the dark horizon of an unseen future.
To emancipate ourselves from the straightjacket of Nietzsche’s reductive dichotomy between memory and creativity, it becomes necessary to ask a few clarifying questions. Are memory and creativity truly at odds with each other, mutually exclusive, or is there a conception of memory available philosophically that understands memory to be fundamentally creative? Does the perceived danger of life-negation extend from too much memory, or has the function of memory simply been misunderstood? Are the dystopian characters of Black Mirror victims of memory, or is memory being held hostage to a pervasive cultural fantasy that makes the characters ill-equipped to face the intolerable tension of inevitable boredom and discomfort? Is it memory we’re talking about here, or is it a masquerade of memory? Is memory really analogous to replaying a movie in one’s mind, or is it something else entirely? Is history simply a curated collection of memories to be catalogued and recorded, or is it something else? And if history is something other than congealed memory, then what, after all, is the function of memory?
Another assumption to be challenged in the work of Nietzsche on history is his characterization of knowledge. His implicit epistemological framework reduces knowledge to the accumulation of categories, distinctions, and narrative structures that over-state and over-define the real. Knowledge is like a web of gravity, repressing the creative instincts of an otherwise spontaneously alive humanity. In this view, knowledge is something that encumbers life, and life is a dynamic forward-oriented movement that should not and must not be so encumbered. So characterized, knowledge is then something that must be shirked from the shoulders of individuals, liberating them from the intoxicating numbness of a generalized mediocrity. If the acquisition of knowledge, according to his view, is a plodding, tedious affair – one that recedes from life rather than enables the expansion of it –, then we could say the prescription for a more Nietzschean philosophy is, first, to restrain the archival instincts of a Western historicizing imperative, and, second, to harness language in the service of liberating the imagination.
While Nietzsche’s critique carries a polemical force, its character and coordinates are ultimately reducible to the fabric of a particular philosophical language-game. As already suggested, to conceive memory as a faculty of mind that absents creativity is not a necessary, but rather a contingent conception. A conception of memory so constituted fails to account for the creative emission involved in every re-production of a memory. An approach to memory that imagines it as a kind of passive replay of past perception will fail to acknowledge the upsurge of novelty that shapes memory not as a mere television re-run of awareness but as a reorienting gesture of the imagination. The epistemological assumptions latent in Nietzsche’s essay depict knowledge as a kind of halting contraction – one that has relinquished a connection to the pulsating vivacity of the expansively new. The remedy he offers is to cultivate a kind of discernment about when to perceive historically and when unhistorically. Nietzsche writes,
Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come—all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically.
It is clear from the above quote that the relevant distinction to be made is not one between knowledge and action, because it is through a ‘dependence on certain facts’ that one is able to ‘draw a line’ between the historical and the unhistorical. Such an aesthetic cultivation of one’s discernment or judgment is not a gesture outside knowledge, but one that arises from a certain relationship to it. The kind of knowledge posited here includes, embraces, and motivates action, rather than serving as an obstacle to it.
Nietzsche’s emphasis in the above quote on what he sees as necessary existential conditions of ‘cheerfulness’, ‘good conscience’, ‘trust, and ‘joyful action’ points to the significance of temperament not only for philosophers, but for indeed anyone who is interested in liberating their capacity for action. The need for a form of philosophical praxis that involves and includes a consideration of how emotions are both engendered by and engendering of both knowledge and action is implicitly defended in Nietzsche’s reflections. Rather than a reasoning that has been divorced from affect and the terrain of human emotions, reasoning depends upon and indeed always implies the impetus of an affective register that structures and organizes the framework of possible knowledge. The conception of reason often associated with the Western tradition is one that sees the operation of reason as negating or transcending the passions of the body. In a kind of renunciatory gesture, the body is distrusted as a ‘meat tube of piss and shit’ that must be mastered and subjugated so that it cannot corrupt the otherwise purified domain of human reason.
The Positions of the Pratyabhijñā
The above extended reflection on one essay by a German philosopher from the 19th century may at first appear tangential to a project focused on an Indian philosophical tradition that was at its height between the 9th and 11th centuries in medieval Kashmir. But the reflection is intended to illustrate a larger philosophical objective: to situate the pratyabhijñā philosophy as a world philosophy that can illuminate, clarify, and in some instances critique the arguments and positions of philosophers from sometimes radically different historical contexts. This process of construction, reconstruction, and re-appropriation has long been a practice accepted as worthwhile within the discourses of academic (and indeed non-academic) philosophy. Philosophers interact with previous philosophers and their ideas in a way that, more often than not, assumes the continuing vitality and significance of this previous work for contemporary philosophy. In other words, philosophy is, in part, a commentarial enterprise. With each new philosophical reader, a previous philosopher is reimagined and his or her contributions re-intepreted and re-envisioned for the purposes of clarifying a response to certain seemingly perennial philosophical questions or problems.
The academic philosophical container that currently delimits a range of canonical philosophers permitted within the scope of philosophical discussion and debate reflects a historical bias toward European thinkers. A simplified defense of this circumstance is often predicated upon the word ‘philosophy’ itself. As the English equivalent of the Ancient Greek word ‘philo-sophia’, the tradition of philosophy is itself imagined as a specifically Western one that, due to its connection to the philosophical forefathers of figures like Plato and Aristotle, should be understood as a uniquely European intellectual discourse that is inevitably confused by projecting it onto non-Western traditions. This eurocentric position with regards to philosophy also is inversely articulated by some Indian apologists and their defenders, where spokespersons for Indian thought seek to reject characterizing the intellectual life of India as ‘philosophy’ precisely because it narrows the field of Indian thinking and reduces it to the priorities and preoccupations of Western thought. What is left intact by both of these visions of incommensurability is the pervasive mythology of an East-West divide, where both traditions are seen as ultimately diluted, misunderstood, and even disenfranchised by bringing them into conversation with each other.
Of course, what is undoubtedly true about the history of philosophy is that it is ongoing, and canonical figures are continuously added to the bibliography of philosophical references. As new contemporary thinkers enter the conversation and develop innovative and paradigm-shifting perspectives, the list of possible philosophers embraced within the tradition of commentarial and secondary literature expands. As recently as the 20th and 21st centuries, we welcomed into Western philosophical considerations the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, Sartre, Quine, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Deleuze, Gademer, Bergson, Searle, Sellars, Brandom, Husserl, Rawls, Whitehead, and so many others. Indeed, the practice of philosophy is one that remains radically open to the contributions of novel thinkers. In some instances, these thinkers consider themselves ‘Spinozists’, ‘Hegelians’, ‘Platonists’ – positioning their work as footnotes or commentaries to their chosen ‘philosophical guru’, even while imaginatively re-negotiating and creatively re-working some of their foundational concepts. The degree to which these students take an interest in contextualizing the original arguments of their philosopher is wildly variable. For instance, Deleuze’s monographs on Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Bacon are often criticized for being less accurate assessments of any one of these philosophers, and more Deleuzian adaptations and re-appropriations of these thinkers that serve the commitments of Deleuze’s philosophical project rather than the ‘history of philosophy.’ This criticism, lodged broadly at philosophers and theorists from the so-called ‘continental’ tradition, betrays a tension, I think, between the ‘history of philosophy’ and a certain picture of the purpose of philosophy as a living intellectual enterprise. We will return to this distinction below.
While the embrace of new philosophers and their innovative contributions is a well-accepted tendency of philosophical activity, the embrace of ancient philosophers as active voices within the tradition of philosophy (broadly-conceived) is less frequent. But this, of course, has not always been the case. While the 14th century might feel like the far-distant past at this point, it was during this period – referred to historically as the Renaissance – that the ancient Greek philosophers were embraced as bastions of Western intellectual culture. This embrace of a certain collection of ancient philosophers gave rise to the humanities and classical liberal education more broadly. As the canonical figures of the Western philosophical tradition began to congeal and concretize into a tradition, that original spirit of curiosity capable of expanding the cultural coordinates of ancient philosophical thought began to ossify. While today’s prevailing cultural attitude toward figures of the past is one that partially reflects Nietzsche’s distrust of history as the conservative curtailing of a vital progressive impulse, there was clearly a life-affirming disposition at the root of the Renaissances’ cultural instinct. After all, renaissance means ‘rebirth’, and the period that bears its name could be considered a radical reorientation of cultural influences and socio-political forces that emerged from (and to some degree purged itself of) the violent excesses and religious domination of the Middle Ages. History at this particular moment was not an obstacle to life, but rather a creatively-reimagined cultural memory that spurred into being new thinking, new art, and thus new forms of life.
If an archeological dig in modern Greece revealed previously-unknown contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle – revealing voices and perspectives that broadened the field of Ancient Greek philosophy –, it is not difficult to imagine the significance this impact would have on the contemporary philosophical imagination. Even some academic philosophers who restrict their scope of investigation to figures of the last couple of centuries would likely be captivated by such a development, and patiently wait for the translations from philologists and translators so as to discover what wisdom lies latent in these ‘new’ ancient texts. Perhaps it would be an intellectual news event not dissimilar to the discovery of the ‘dead sea scrolls.’ And yet, if you take out the requirement that these texts be born from the soil of Ancient Greece, anyone aware of Indology’s contributions would note that this circumstance is already happening on a massive scale with regards to the philosophical texts of India. If philologists, Indologists, and even some philosophers are aware of this, then why has this ongoing philosophical discovery not taken more of the philosophical world by storm? Why has the ivory tower tradition of philosophy continued to be so circumscribed by a canonical corpus of European thinkers?
One speculative answer to this question perhaps returns us to our opening reflections on Neitzsche’s critique of history. When history becomes over-determined and when academic knowledge becomes contracted, then intellectual vitality can become hijacked by a hegemonic status quo. With regards to our contemporary moment, the obstacles to a vitalized philosophical imagination seem predicated on hyper-specialization, historicism, and a particular politics of knowledge. Let us first address the latter by discussing how departments of philosophy have responded to the critiques of euro-centrism.
Over the last several decades, philosophy departments have come under fire for precisely the lack of non-Western inclusion that we have discussed above. In response, departments have approached the problem by enacting what can only be described as a form of identity politics. According to this view, some philosophy departments that previously held positions for specialists in German Idealism, Phenomenology, Analytic Philosophy, Existentialism, Political Philosophy, and so on, are attempting to resolve the privileging of Western conversations by hiring specialists in Indian Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, and various forms of Indigenous Philosophy. In short, the problem is cast as a matter of representation. By funding positions that represent non-Western philosophical traditions, philosophy departments are attempting to counteract the philosophical assumption that ‘philosophy’ is a tradition primarily of the West. Whether or not the philosophical arguments of the traditions these academics represent are brought into conversation with other Western thinkers or arguments is not the intended aim, although an implicit defense of that aim may be that, by broadening students’ access to non-Western traditions, a department creates the foundation by means of which such conversations and connections can be made.
In philosophy departments where philosophical education has been codified into categories of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and aesthetics, the inclusion of, for example, an Indian philosopher in such a department, often assumes that what is acceptable from the broader scope of Indian thought as philosophy will necessarily speak through these aforementioned categories. The issue isn’t that the traditions of Indian philosophy don’t have significant contributions that can be made to these conversations, but rather that the philosophical table has already been set. The arguments of non-Western thinkers may bring rich and rewarding insights into existing debates, but the norms of philosophical praxis are presupposed. The culture of academic philosophy may be questioned, but its dominant structures remain unchanged by an encounter with paradigms of thinking that extend beyond them. Where such ‘excesses’ of thought cannot be contained within the acceptable parameters of philosophical discourse, they are designated as ‘non-philosophical’ and deemed more appropriate for some other intellectual enterprise exterior to the orthodoxies of academic philosophy.
The matter of integrating Western and non-Western philosophies under a banner simply of ‘philosophy’ is further complicated by the historicizing gaze of modern philology and Indology. Philologists and Indologists are primarily concerned with the historical and contextual situatedness of the texts they study. This is, of course, altogether necessary as an academic discipline, because if we do not have accurate translations that seek to make sense of them within their original intellectual and cultural framework, we can easily distort and misunderstand the texts, projecting onto them our own philosophical desires and intellectual fantasies. Because ancient texts often contain references to concepts and ideas that are altogether alien to our contemporary context and cultural commitments, the work of historical and philological analysis can help to convey the originality of ideas that are as yet beyond our cultural and philosophical lexicon. Insofar as there is a problem here, it is not that philologists will be philologists, but that philologists are often not philosophers, and the academic gap between Indology and philosophy is one being sutured by very few contemporary scholars. It doesn’t help, of course, that many philologists are contemptuous toward the hermeneutic playfulness often characteristic of many philosophers – exacerbating a disciplinary othering that doesn’t serve a possible renaissance of academic philosophy.
So, on the one hand, we have an academic philosophy that is overly-rooted in its own tradition and canon, and, on the other, we have a philological tradition that is interested in philosophical arguments primarily up to – but not beyond – the historical and cultural context in which they were articulated. The former attempts to absorb Indian philosophy into its existing philosophical architecture, while the latter sees any attempt to expand away from the minutiae of historical and textual analysis as a departure from serious academic work. One has codified what it is to do philosophy, and the other has codified what it is to do textual history. Both operate on the basis of an implicit – and often unconscious – intellectual value system that says more about the accumulation and coagulation of an academic habitus than it does any alignment with the virtue of a liberated intellectual creativity.