On The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life

The final chapter opens with the metaphor of a ship docking after a long voyage. Nietzsche claims that he is guided by “youth” and feels impelled “to protest against the historical education of modern youth” (63). The youthful impulse toward poetry a century before Nietzsche was writing was in Nietzsche’s opinion a flowering not since seen in Germany. In Nietzsche’s Germany, by contrast, the youth are developed to “be useful as soon as possible” (64). Nietzsche asserts that the contemporary belief that “there is no other possibility at all than just our tiresome actuality” (65) is a problematic one.

Nietzsche expounds his position on the contemporary youth further by arguing that the era’s weight of historical education “anaesthetizes and intoxicates” the youth by suppressing the natural. For Nietzsche, nature is the “sole mistress” (65). He chastises the educational system for producing a “crawling brood of botchers and babblers” (65). Faith in the education system is misplaced, nor would Plato’s Republic have worked. Nietzsche’s fellow Germans cannot have a true culture because they lack rootedness in nature, or truth: “first give me life and I will make you a culture from it!” (66).

Returning to the definitions with which he opened his essay, Nietzsche distinguishes once more between the unhistorical and the superhistorical.