Epigoni: Forgetting for Life

The Value of the Unhistorical Cow against Ennui

I have been suspicious of curiosity for many years now. This is one of my villainous thoughts, as I call it with my siblings: the only people, aside from Audrey, who know—apart from all delicious appearance—that I am a stupendous, stellar example of an evil man. Indeed, my siblings are quite aware that I will hide in my room while they play boardgames in the kitchen, and then I’ll slither out, sit on the table, make a loud, annoying noise to attract attention, and say something like, “Morality is a fiction meant to inhibit the powers of the strong and artificially inflate the capacities of the weak.” And my little brother Adam will go—with the tone of someone lightly bonking their puppy with a rolled-up newspaper to admonish them for chewing on the sofa—“No! Bad Nietzsche! Bad! Villain!”

I’m either that or I’m a sweet, little boy. As John Mulaney’s psychiatrist once told him, “Half of you is this really nice guy who wants to do the right thing and be a good person, and the other half of you is a gorilla whose sole purpose in life is to destroy the first half.”¹ I also have a nefarious, violent gorilla inside of me next to the sweet boy: but, I’ve been a good mediator, so they get along, or make compromises. 

Antoine Jacquard (d. 1652): “Time.” https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.48276.html

The compromise I am working out between the gorilla and the boy now is what the value of curiosity is. Indeed, as a recent debate with Audrey revealed, I’m not even sure I know what curiosity means. Initially, I was considering it to refer to the phenomenon where we study things for their own sake, and no other. This would mean that curiosity essentially involves a collector’s instinct for facts of a niche kind. So, I was taking the archetypical example of the curious person to be the nerd of some kind. Like the nerd about trains, who knows every little gear and feature of locomotives from centuries ago—their particular histories, where they are now, what routes they go on, and so on. As in, I took it that curiosity is that psychological proclivity where humans sought out facts or stories about something out of mere fascination, private pleasure, and for the sake of the facts and stories themselves. I am fine with this, in the liberal sense of, “to each their own.” But, it aroused some kind of contempt in me when considered as a value to be promoted, that we should all be this type of “curious.”

One can now see the mustache-twirling villainy of this train of thought: walking into libraries, seeing posters in kids sections that say “Foster your child’s curiosity!”, tearing them down and crumpling them up, dashing the poster beneath my boots. Stealing a child’s trainset, and throwing it in the bin, “What is this for? What is it’s purpose, little girl!?!?!?” 

From my 11th set in the Sticky Note Anthology.

However, in the next breath, I really am rather curious, or perhaps a better word would be inquisitive. But it is an inquisitiveness that has been read as parasitic a lot of my life (until I took some philosophy classes). Teachers and church leaders found it parasitic because there is an unmitigated philosophizing and curiosity that finds its best example in the kid incessantly asking “Why?”

“Why is the sun so bright?” “But why is it a big ball of fire?” “But why is it there in the first place?”

Kids pick up that things are some way because of other things, and that you can generally figure out more by asking about it. Kids are really the best philosophers and scientists at this age because they are unrelenting in seeking the foundations of things.² The problem is, of course, that teachers and parents stop the inquiring at some point. (And, of course they do, because we are not eternal beings of infinite knowledge.)³ Most figures of authority in a child’s life play the part of the Socratic interlocutor who suddenly has an appointment they are about to miss just as Socrates’ questions are getting to the heart of things: “Well, Socrates, I would love to talk about why rainbows are made up of so many pretty colors, but I really have to get to the dentist…” 

In this sense of curious, I’m insatiably curious, and it has led to a lot of discontent for me. I’ve never felt like I’ve really known anything. Most of the time in school, people teach you things without telling you why you are learning it or what underlies the facts. So, if you are learning how to multiply, they don’t tell the kids why, or, to what end, you are multiplying, and they don’t tell you exactly what multiplication is. Same for history. Why are we learning about Columbus, or the building of the railroads, or the Alamo, or World War II? Better yet, why aren’t we interrogating these events further? Their conditions? Their relation to my life right now? I never felt like I had a grasp on anything. Rather, I realized early on that they were training the dull part of the intellect—the droll capacity—that is, that part and capacity that allows us to memorize some pattern and excrete it at will. They wanted me to get good at learning how to churn out what they had printed on their answer sheets. Fine, I thought, I’ll do that for them, and then go home and play video games ‘till my eyes bleed.

Sticky Note Anthology, Day 10 (SNA 10). Cried myself laughing at my desk doing the middle two. I think I’ll just post some of these every new post, heh. Why not? Also, for the uninitiated:

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Friedrich Nietzsche was also pissed off with this lack of youthfulness in education and science; this icy discursiveness that amasses “knowledge without reference to consequence,” or, “in plain terms, that comes to nothing” (35). In his essay “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” he attends to questions that are in the neighborhood of my curious concerns (my concerns about the curious). He asks of life and knowledge: which takes priority? And he answers that “life is the higher and dominating power" because knowledge presupposes life and it is meant to protect and preserve our lives (70). But there is a detached, graying, and cold kind of knowledge that he is harshly critical of the whole essay—objective history, without any aim toward the future or life. So, Nietzsche examines the many ways we can study history, the ends of these methods, and the value (if any) of a objective, scientific approach to history that exists simply for the sake of accruing facts.

Nietzsche claims that relating to history—and to the past, in general (this, importantly, includes our personal past)—is something that we must do as the kinds of things that we are. He says many men envy the likes of cows and children, that aren’t aware of the many pasts behind them, the many futures ahead. We’re stuck with the knowledge of the past and of the impending future, and the question is how we’re supposed to harness that fact to promote life, health, and a great, artistic culture. We can make use of the past for life, for Nietzsche, in three healthy ways.

First, we can use the past for our present goals and actions. This goal is marked by the method of monumental history. Second, we can relate to our predecessors with respect and gratitude for the part they played in who we are now. This goal corresponds to the antiquarian need in historical study. Finally, we may look to the past for consolation in our suffering and to meet our “desire for deliverance” (12). This maps onto what he calls the critical method in dissecting the past.

Monuments and Heroes: The Man of Action

If you are an athlete, artist, writer, statesman, leader, or pretty much anyone who has a daunting and big responsibility in front of you, then you could use some good examples: role models and praiseworthy predecessors. In other words, the person who has concrete and difficult goals ahead of them, which requires great and risky action, can look to the past for advice and consolation. The knowledge gained is that “the great thing existed and was therefore possible, and so may be possible again” (14).

He says this type of history requires falsification of the facts, or the very least a quite liberal interpretation of them. If looking to the past in this way is going to be encouraging, we have to ignore the many differences in our situation when compared with our predecessor’s. The man of action who looks to the past for examples is more akin to a myth-maker, for he passes over the “unimportant” parts. (Unimportant meaning “inconducive to his goals, life, culture, power,” etc.) Indeed, it may even require misunderstanding the person or culture or event you are looking to for inspiration. If you are trying to start a revolution, and you look to the French for help, you will have to translate it into your circumstance; in any translation effort, meaning will drag, then leap, away from the source.

Antique Preservation: Reverence for Inheritance

Some are grateful by nature and look to their parents, neighborhood, and culture with reverence, with “love and trust” (17). She wants to preserve history because she respects the form of life that her predecessors have allowed to exist on earth: it is beautiful and worth propagating. But, not only does the antiquarian respect his inheritance, he attempts to “reproduce the conditions of his own upbringing.” In a powerfully illustrative passage, Nietzsche puts it like this:

The history of his town becomes the history of himself; he looks on the walls, the turreted gate, the town council, the fair, as an illustrated diary of his youth, and sees himself in it all—his strength, industry, desire, reason, faults, and follies. ‘Here one could live,’ he says, ‘as one can live here now—and will go on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be uprooted in the night.

The soul of the many persons past—of their customs and ways of life—become like gemstones amplifying his own soul. In another metaphor, Nietzsche compares the antiquarian method to the “feeling of the tree that clings to its roots,” for the tree is happy knowing that its growth is not random, but is an inheritance. This outlook “does not merely justify but crowns the present.” But this, once more, involves a passing over of many facts of the past, for a tree “feels its roots better than it can see them.” The tree only feels the world as a heap of things that hinder or help it: and looking to the past in this way will require that you miss a lot.

Salvation as Suspicion: Critique as Deliverance

But something might strike some of you in these two methods. The monumental appears nastily false in that it is severely individual, honing in on a single person, event, or cultural moment—even for all that great action it may produce. And the antiquarian appears crudely false in that no culture is without blemish—even for all that noble rebuilding and communal rearing that may come in its wake. The third method is the critical, and it unveils these illusions, looks right into the inky eye of the past, and sees a long board of jagged nails: slavery, domination, malice, wanton power, and every manner of injustice. The past does not produce noble examples, and past cultures are not worth preserving. Nietzsche puts the critical theorists M.O. as so: “Man must have the strength to break up the past, and apply it, too, in order to live. He must bring the past to the bar of judgement, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn it” (20 and 21). For every “past is worth condemning.” For it is not justice, but “human power and human weakness” and life’s insatiable desire to perpetuate itself that governs history.

When such injustices become “obvious—a monopoly, a caste, a dynasty, for example—the thing deserves to fall,” the people will tear it down (21). But he admits there is a great danger in this way of proceeding. Namely, that we come from these pasts. We are the “resultant of their errors, passions, and crimes; it is impossible to shake off this chain. Though we condemn the errors and think we have escaped them, we cannot escape the fact that we spring from them” (21). Destroy. Act. But do so with an aim to rebuild. Do not neglect the other un(historical) methods: that one can look back for examples and worthy things (as false as this might be) to build a better future.

Justice as Judgement: Perspective as Inevitable

Throughout the essay, Nietzsche lampoons the dual-headed, limping old-age of modern culture: the ironical and the cynical outlooks: as the result of an educational system and culture that views itself as the end of all ages, as epigoni. As Nietzsche is wont to do, he spins an intriguing—if probably dubious—mythological account and genealogy of our current plight.⁴ He says that the Medieval obsession with the end-times and eschaton—that this life is a flimsy stepping stone on the way to the true finality—was merely transformed into the Hegelian flavored idea that our current age is the end of history, the complete package, the slimiest slice in the epoch pizza box. Nietzsche claims that a religion that considers the last moment to be the most important, and that “has prophesied the end of earthly life…may call forth the subtlest and noblest powers of man.” But, it will also be an “enemy to all new planting.” This type of thinking will oppose “all flight into the unknown because it has no life or hope there itself” (49). The problem with that is that now all of the past has become an inert thing, useless to pick at, except in order to accumulate evidence that progress has reached its zenith. The other problem is that now the future—in the sense of hope for greater heights—is blotted out. We made it to the end: now it’s just time to scoot along the same road until it ends.⁵

He says that in this condition, we have lost all sense of historical justice. If we simply build up a dragon’s hoard of “knowledge,” but refuse to turn it into wisdom, into action, then we are not acting justly, for Nietzsche. Justice requires judgement. Justice requires that we make decisions about what is good and bad for us and for the future of the world. The facts don’t betray rich soil, a narrative and direction, on their own. We must pulse into the past with an eye toward a noble future, otherwise, the past is infertile dirt.

Furthermore, justice is not objective. The objective historian, purportedly, “sees the procession of motive and consequence too clearly for it to have an effect on his own personality” (37). He calls this out as a superstition, that the object of study could show its own truth by its “own activity.” People describe the person “who is not affected at all by some particular moment in the past as the right man to describe it” (39). Nietzsche suggests that if you are going to do history, one must do so only when you are “straining the noblest qualities you have to their highest power,” and only then “will you find out what is greatest in the past, most worth knowing and reserving.” Otherwise, “you will draw the past to your own level” (40). If you have no goal, no purpose, and only weakness, then the history you will dredge up will be lifeless, too.

How do we ameliorate this condition of historical injustice? We must become (partly) unhistorical. Nietzsche claims that “we must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember” because each is “equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture” (8). We must learn to forget in order to bring about new futures. Otherwise, our various pasts will just hold us back. Anyone who has contemplated history (even recent history) and felt that a better world is impossible, or has holed up in their room ruminating day after day on the same event, knows how debilitating the past can be. The past will either anchor us, or allow us to surge forward. And sometimes, we must throw it off entirely to step forth.

But, not only can the past consume the present, it can consume the future. If you think that the unfeeling wheel of history is going to sort out all of the world’s current yearning needs and not a person, then you are sorely mistaken, Nietzsche scorns. So, we must unlearn our education and act dumbly: and this uncanny youth, in it’s forgetting, also cleanses itself of irony, of cynicism, of “it’ll sort itself out,” and of the myriad dregs of memory that keep you from doing what you need to do. Adding in purposeful forgetfulness into our history: by seeking monuments for action; reverence for what is worth preserving; and to uncover the wild, wanton murder, arbitrariness, and cruelty of every past: will enable us to spring forward.

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Nietzsche exclaims that the “world must go forward, the ideal condition cannot be won by dreaming, it must be fought and wrestled for, and the way to redemption lies only through joyousness, the way to redemption from that dull, owlish seriousness” (59). So, much like the parent or the Socratic interlocutor, it is often not ignorance, spite, or anger that leads to inquiry being shut down, but that tired, weary reality of time, and time’s old dog—ever our companion, too—Drowsiness. But Drowsiness slumps along by our side to remind us that we should not always question, always seek, always beg for “Why?” but lay down, close our eyes, and restore ourselves for tomorrow. For tomorrow, there is a bright “Why?” in the sky that will rise, as it tends to do, in the east.

Thanks for reading,

Nicholas

P.P.S (Poem Post-Script)

Confucius weeps

everyone is mighty pent-up and

set on being a superhero,

and riddled with guilt to boot, for

they are not succeeding.

I fear me, Aristotle, and Confucius

are the only fellows now who

think that is a distraction.

(And they’re dead! Sorta.)

We should rather be concerned with

being good and dignified people

with a salted dash of reverence and

a sugared scoop of wit.

I fear that we all want to save the

world precisely because

we are not good

and

we don’t know how to live a good life.

I fear that we put justice beside

big words like “Global” and “All”

because we are afraid of

confronting each other—our neighbors—

with simple kindness and generosity.

And so we contribute more every day to the

ethical off-sourcing,

and we drift from one another;

not realizing that our desire for a

savior

(or for us to take up that dusty mantle

and be the hero ourselves)

is the belated sigh of our goodness

rotting,

of the courage to simply

reach out to who is near

withering.

1. https://youtube.com/shorts/kyOcnD69cVE?si=brxPXv70Ky3RPsPB

2. There is some aphorism, I think from Nietzsche, that goes something like this: “Man invented God so that he could finally stop asking ‘Why?’” Indeed, this has always seemed to me to illuminate a part of my envy for the religious: they have a peace, for many of them have settled the questions of ethics, politics, metaphysics, and even most of aesthetics and epistemology with reference to some unshakeable ultimate. God as the ultimate “why” unleashes you upon the world to simply get up to the daily woes and joys of perfunctory life. Note, so does a turning away from the question altogether, if one sufficiently drowns it out with pleasures: the lower-case “g” god of perpetual hedonism. It is precisely in not accepting God or in embracing hedonism that sets one sailing upon that vast, dark, and empty sea of “Why?”

3. Do consult one of Louie’s best bits.

4. Though, in fairness to him, he actually says that he is just suggesting it and one has a right to be skeptical of his claim. He even says that it would be good if people turned history against itself, and studied stuff like that rigorously. Why Nietzsche left that good-hearted skepticism latent (not gone, but latent) in On the Genealogy of Morality, with its blond beasts and tribal guilt, I don’t know…

5. I have been passing over—in true unhistorical fashion—many interesting tirades he goes on. And it’s worth footnoting that the ironical dude, the cynical man, and the “we are at the end of history” guy, are distinct, but generally caught up in the same objective, flimsy modern fuck-up.