Antiquarian History

Rather than monumentalizing a specific historical event, the antiquarian takes into account all historical events that brought about his or her life, archiving every experience and obsessing over all its details. Also, unlike a monumental historian who considers only a handful of historical events as significant, an antiquarian historian finds each single thing in his life important. The antiquarian historian then reduces and combines the likes of several different aspects of life to a single value, a priceless antique. This narrow field of vision allows every event that is old to be worthy of reverence, through the eyes of the antiquarian historian. By default, any idea that is not considered old is ignored. For this reason alone, antiquarian

The key processes of the critical method are to drag the past before the court of justice, investigate it meticulously, and finally condemn it (pg. 21). Not every part of history is worthy of being emulated; however, all parts of history are condemnable, if chosen to be. Individuals must recognize that the past is not always pure and flawless, but rather that it contains faults, just like everything else, including individuals. And, the only thing that can pass judgment on whether or not the past should be condemned is life. Life is the only mode in which the past can be broken away from the individual, but it takes great power to live. The reason for this is that it is often difficult to accept the facts that living and being unjust are one and the same (pg. 21). Not only is living difficult, destroying a past using life is difficult as well. This is because the pasts of all individuals are so intricately intertwined with who they are as people. All individuals, derived from chain of families, inherit everything that is associated with their chain of families, including all family histories. The only way to combat the seemingly unending pasts is to make the act of criticizing the past as second nature. This second nature must grow into something larger than itself, in order for the first nature to crumble away. This is the ultimate task for a critical historian. However,

However, there are ways in which individuals can compensate for their dreaded fate. They can find an essential balance between the historical and the unhistorical, or as Nietzsche puts it, there is a horizon where “we know how to forget at the right time as well as remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically” (pg. 9). This horizon is attainable for every human being. This horizon is the line that separates the historical from the unhistorical, the light from the dark, and the yin from the