The Promise and Danger of Great Examples
Essential Reading Path · Reading 4 of 10
Read: §2 of the history essay, in full
Allow: About 40–55 minutes, including the passages, this guide, and a short written response.
Read the complete section headed II beneath The Use and Abuse of History in Adrian Collins’s translation, beginning “The fact that life does need the service of history” and stopping at III. This is Untimely Meditations II §2, not the second section of Schopenhauer as Educator. Follow that essay and section number in your own edition.
“Monumental” here describes a way of using outstanding past achievements as examples. It includes much more than physical monuments. Keep both parts of the title in view: the section explains why this use of history is needed and how it becomes dangerous.
Before you read
A young filmmaker watches a film made decades before she was born. Its inventiveness changes what she believes she could attempt with a camera. Later, someone watches her unfinished work and replies: “Films were better when that director was alive.”
The same achievement has entered two different relationships with the present. For the filmmaker it opens a possibility. For the critic it helps close one. Nietzsche’s account of monumental history turns on that difference.
The previous reading asked how historical knowledge can support action. Section 2 now gives that support a particular form: the example of someone who has already accomplished something difficult.
The main question: How can a great achievement enlarge what we think possible without becoming a model we misuse or an authority we hide behind?
Read §2 once. Mark where Nietzsche first presents monumental history’s benefit, where he explains its necessary simplifications, and where admiration turns into hostility toward living creators.
What to notice
- Three needs before three methods. Nietzsche starts with action, reverence, and suffering. How does each need direct attention toward a different past?
- The move from once to again. What does a previous achievement establish, and what must be neglected to treat it as a repeatable example?
- The hostile admirer. Why might someone who endlessly praises established art resist the appearance of another great work?
Close reading
History answers different needs
Nietzsche begins with three relations to history. Someone acting and struggling needs examples; someone preserving a way of life needs a relation of gratitude and reverence; someone suffering under an inheritance needs the means to judge and break with it. He calls their corresponding approaches monumental, antiquarian, and critical. §2, three needs and three kinds of history
These are ways of relating to a past, rather than three separate periods or shelves of information. A community could approach the same institution as an inspiring achievement, a cherished inheritance, or an arrangement that needs to end. Its present need changes what it looks for.
The first approach occupies this section. Nietzsche’s person of action seeks teachers and encouragement that may be unavailable among contemporaries. The past can loosen the present’s claim to define the limits of possibility.
What happened once can hearten a new attempt
The central benefit is spare: something great existed, so it was possible; that knowledge can encourage the belief that greatness remains possible. Nietzsche imagines achievements forming a chain across time. The surviving work or deed becomes a resource for people its maker never met. §2, the possibility disclosed by an example
Fame then acquires a purpose beyond gratifying its recipient. What survives can console and encourage a later person. Nietzsche’s examples include courage, loving-kindness, and contemplation: action here should not be reduced to military success or constant visible busyness.
Return to the filmmaker. An earlier work may not tell her what to film, but it can dislodge the conviction that her circumstances permit only conventional work. Reading 1’s educator similarly disclosed a possibility without undertaking the learner’s life for them. Monumental history extends that relation across generations.
The example is not a reproducible formula
Nietzsche immediately complicates the encouraging inference. Historical achievements occurred through particular motives and circumstances. For one to guide a new situation, differences have to be softened. A useful resemblance is constructed; the whole event does not simply recur. §2, comparison and neglected differences
His discussion of a Pythagorean recurrence imagines the extraordinary condition under which exact repetition would be possible: the whole constellation of events returning. Read it as a test of literal repeatability in this argument. The section does not establish Nietzsche’s later teaching of eternal recurrence.
Monumental history emphasizes the impressive result while thinning out its causes. The fact that a work succeeded once cannot establish that copying its visible features will produce the same result. The filmmaker needs to distinguish a newly disclosed possibility from a recipe whose conditions she has not examined. §2, effects and their causes
Inspiration can become a false analogy
When monumental history dominates, much of the past disappears from view. Nietzsche imagines bright islands of selected fact above a dark river of neglected material. The exceptional figures become almost superhuman; their resemblance to legend increases. §2, the islands of fact and false analogy
This is more than an omission in a textbook. The simplified past returns as permission for present action. Someone imagines themselves another great founder or liberator, ignores what differs, and interprets resistance as proof that the great struggle has begun.
Nietzsche names rashness and fanaticism among the dangers. He also imagines a gifted scoundrel making use of such examples. The power to inspire therefore supplies no assurance about the purpose inspired. To assess an analogy, ask what it highlights, what it leaves out, and which action those omissions make seem reasonable.
The dead can be used against the living
A different danger arises when inactive admirers wield the past against present creation. They know how to praise established work and treat that familiarity as the authority to dismiss what has yet to establish itself. Art’s previous achievements become obstacles to another achievement. §2, established art and living creators
For these admirers, the standard that a work must already have lasting influence sets an impossible entrance requirement. A new work cannot arrive with centuries of reception behind it. Their reverence effectively ensures that no newcomer can qualify.
Nietzsche closes by returning each historical approach to the need that makes it fruitful. Monumental history should encourage creation; when it supplies a comfortable vantage point from which to reject every attempt, its relation to life has reversed. The test concerns what the admiration enables, not simply the intensity with which an old name is praised. §2, admiration as disguise and history’s proper conditions
A difficulty
How do we distinguish a living possibility from a bad new work?
Nietzsche attacks the spectator who uses established greatness to obstruct a creator. But suspicion of spectators cannot establish the value of every person who claims to be creating something important. An artist can mistake justified criticism for hostility to greatness.
The problem is sharper because Nietzsche distrusts aesthetic judgment by numerical majority. He denies the crowd an automatic authority, yet this section gives no impartial procedure for recognizing the creator whose work deserves support. His claims about hidden hostility are also difficult to prove in a particular critic.
Try a narrower test: does a criticism explain what a work attempts and where it fails, or does it dismiss the attempt because the past has already supplied everything worth making? The distinction identifies an obstruction without promising an infallible judgment of quality. Nietzsche’s argument is most useful here when it opens that inquiry.
Check your understanding
Answer each question before opening the suggested response.
What does monumental history offer someone attempting something difficult?
It supplies examples that weaken the belief that greatness is impossible and offers teachers or encouragement beyond the present. A past achievement establishes that a certain human possibility has existed. It does not guarantee the success of a new attempt or provide all the conditions needed to repeat the earlier result.
Why does Nietzsche connect monumental history with distortion?
To make different events comparable, it compresses their particular motives and circumstances, emphasizing impressive effects. When this method dominates, neglected histories vanish and striking examples approach legend. The same simplification that makes an example inspiring can make the analogy misleading.
How can admiration for art become hostility to art?
Someone can use established works as an exclusive standard whose authority depends on their already being established. Contemporary work is then dismissed before it can develop or earn recognition. Nietzsche’s charge concerns admiration used to block creation; it does not establish that every negative judgment of new work is dishonest.
Writing prompt
Choose a past achievement that makes a present attempt seem possible. Write 150–200 words answering: How can this example encourage someone without misleading them?
Identify the possibility it discloses and one important difference between its circumstances and the present. Explain how ignoring that difference could produce a bad decision. Then describe a way to learn from the example without requiring the new attempt to resemble it in every respect.
Connect your answer to Nietzsche’s distinction between an impressive effect and its causes. A successful response preserves the example’s power to encourage while giving the comparison a definite limit.
Continue
The next session turns to the past we preserve and the past we need to challenge. Ask how attachment to an inheritance can coexist with the power to judge it.
Reading 5: What Should We Preserve—and What Must We Leave Behind? →
A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised .
Preferred edition: R. J. Hollingdale, edited by Daniel Breazeale. About the editions and free texts.