Corpus · Untimely Meditations

Why We Need to Forget

Essential Reading Path · Reading 3 of 10

Read: The Preface and §1 of the history essay, in full
Allow: About 50–65 minutes, including the passages, this guide, and a short written response.

Open the history essay: Preface

Open §1: memory and forgetting

Read the Preface and the complete section headed I beneath The Use and Abuse of History in Adrian Collins’s translation, stopping at II. The §1 link lands at the end of the Preface, just above I; begin that section with “Consider the herds that are feeding yonder.” This is the second meditation, often titled On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. It is separate from the volume’s editorial Introduction and from Schopenhauer as Educator, which restarts the numbering later.

In another edition, follow Untimely Meditations II, Preface and §1. The free text’s “super-historical” is often translated “suprahistorical.” Read it carefully alongside “historical” and “unhistorical”: the three terms describe different relations to the past. This is a substantial assignment; you can pause after the discussion of the horizon in §1.

Before you read

Imagine a musician who has practiced a difficult passage for weeks. Onstage, she hears yesterday’s mistakes in advance of every note. Remembering what went wrong helped her practice; now the same memory interrupts the phrase she knows how to play.

That familiar difficulty opens Nietzsche’s much larger question. What relation to the past makes living and acting possible? Knowledge can orient us, but it can also become something we endlessly consult while postponing the deed it was supposed to support.

The previous reading questioned a society’s satisfaction with its culture. Here Nietzsche examines another source of cultural pride: historical learning. His target includes his own profession, classical scholarship. The Preface presents the problem as one he has encountered in himself.

The main question: How can we give the past enough authority to teach us without letting it overwhelm the present?

Read the Preface and §1 once. Follow the changes in scale: animal and person, individual and people, memory and historical scholarship. The connections among them form part of Nietzsche’s argument; they are not automatically equivalent.

What to notice

1. The animal we envy but will not become. Why does Nietzsche begin with a happiness that the human observer would not actually choose?
2. The horizon and the power to assimilate. How can a boundary make action possible, and what determines how much past a person or culture can absorb?
3. Two refusals to repeat a life. The historical and super-historical people both answer no to living their past years again. Why do their answers lead in different directions?

Close reading

Ask what the learning does

The Preface opens with Goethe’s objection to instruction that fails to quicken activity. Nietzsche turns that objection into a test of historical culture. Do its achievements nourish ways of living, or does learning provide an impressive occupation through which people avoid their responsibilities? Preface, history and action

He expressly says that we need history. The dispute concerns its purpose and degree. A society can develop an admired capacity so extensively that it damages other capacities it needs. Calling historical culture an illness therefore challenges the inference that more of an acknowledged good must always be better.

For Nietzsche, an untimely scholar can use an older culture to question the present for the sake of a future. History already has a positive role inside his criticism of historical excess. The task is to understand what makes that role fruitful.

The herd reveals a human problem

The grazing animals inhabit the moment; the observer carries what has happened into what is happening. Nietzsche imagines a leaf returning from the book of time to the person’s lap. A past experience can reappear without our choosing it, altering a later moment. §1, the herd and the returning leaf

Treat this scene as a philosophical contrast, not a scientific account of animal memory. It isolates the human burden of remembering. The observer envies the animals’ ease but refuses to exchange human existence for theirs. Forgetfulness promises relief while threatening something we also value.

The contrast then becomes an argument about action. Someone who experienced everything only as endless change would lose the stable purposes needed to begin. Even justified action requires concentrating on something and allowing much else to recede. The claim concerns attention and commitment, not simply the erasure of stored facts.

A horizon should support growth

Nietzsche calls the ability to take in and transform the past “plastic power.” His images are organic: healing, repairing, digesting, turning what is foreign into nourishment. An experience becomes part of a living capacity rather than remaining an undigested burden. §1, plastic power and the horizon

The horizon marks the range within which a person or culture can act coherently. A stronger capacity for assimilation can bear a wider range of history. There is no single quantity of knowledge that everyone should retain or discard.

He also warns against being too enclosed in one’s own view to enter another’s. A horizon is therefore not a warrant for permanent isolation. His explicit conclusion is that both historical and unhistorical capacities are necessary. The difficult task is judging their relation in a particular life.

Commitment contains a partial view

The person seized by love or an idea supplies Nietzsche’s next example. Attention changes its distribution; some things become intensely present while others scarcely register. He calls this condition narrow and unjust, then argues that it has enabled admirable deeds as well as harmful ones. §1, passion and the conditions of action

An artist cannot give every possible project equal attention while completing a particular picture. Yet the necessity of selection does not establish that every selection is defensible. Nietzsche makes the unsettling claim that valuable action grows from a condition that complete, detached understanding might dissolve.

Our musician illustrates one part of that problem: she must trust a practiced phrase sufficiently to play it. Political action involves other people and greater consequences. The example helps explain concentration; it does not excuse ignoring objections to a harmful purpose.

Wisdom can also bring life to a halt

The historical person looks back in order to move forward. Past disappointment can feed hope that the next years will be better. The super-historical person, by contrast, sees recurrent types and enduring significance beneath changing events. Further history seems unable to supply a fundamentally new answer. §1, historical and super-historical outlooks

This second outlook is different from the herd’s absorption in the moment. It results from an interpretation of history that claims to see through the promise of further development. Nietzsche associates its extreme form with weariness and withdrawal.

He chooses a life capable of going forward, even while conceding that its commitments may fall short of the other standpoint’s wisdom. His closing demand is that historical study serve a living purpose, such as the formation of a culture. What that service can look like is the subject of the next two readings. §1, life and historical knowledge

A difficulty

Who gets to decide that remembering has become excessive?

A person responsible for harm might welcome the instruction to leave the past behind. Those still living with its consequences may need acknowledgment, evidence, and repair. Applying one measure of forgetting to both parties would conceal the difference between their positions.

Nietzsche’s own account is uncomfortable here: he observes that some people recover a quiet conscience even after their own spiteful actions. Resilience therefore cannot, by itself, certify a good relation to the past.

Keep action-enabling forgetting distinct from suppressing accountability. This distinction is a question we are putting to the argument, not a complete rule Nietzsche supplies in §1. In §3, he will say that life sometimes needs the destruction of forgetfulness so that inherited injustice can be judged. Ask what that later requirement will have to add to the horizon described here.

Check your understanding

Answer each question before opening the suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 150–200 words answering: What would it mean to remember a failure well enough to act again?

Use a specific, modest example: a performance, a difficult conversation, or an abandoned project. Explain what must be retained, what should stop occupying the center of attention, and what ability would show that the experience has been assimilated. Connect your answer to Nietzsche’s horizon or plastic power.

End by naming one obligation that moving forward would not cancel. A successful response distinguishes using the past from continually replaying it, without treating a fresh start as evidence that every consequence has been repaired.

Continue

Nietzsche now distinguishes different uses of history. We begin with the great examples that can encourage someone to act—and can also make action seem impossible.

Reading 4: The Promise and Danger of Great Examples →

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 8, 2026.
Preferred edition: R. J. Hollingdale, edited by Daniel Breazeale. About the editions and free texts.

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