How Did Nietzsche's View Of History

Nietzsche didn’t look to history as means of finding truth like Hegel. Hegel saw the study of history itself as a means - or the means - of finding Truth, but Nietzsche rejected idealist notions such as using “History” with a capital h to find “Truth” with a capital t. In fact, he went the other way around and applied his philosophical beliefs to history. Even so, Nietzsche’s view on history is an important component to understanding his thought.

Despite living in time with strong German nationalism (which started after the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck), Nietzsche was critical of the past in many ways too. In The Birth of Tragedy he considered every Western philosopher since Socrates to “be a sign of collapse, exhaustion,

It also extended towards morality. In the first essay On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche details two forms of morality. In the first essay, Nietzsche states that these moralities even have linguistic roots in some languages in where words like “nobility” were related to words like “good” and “common” to words like “bad”. Nietzsche claimed that at some point in the history, the selfless “slave morality” of the commoners was at odds with the glory-seeking “master morality” of nobles. In what was almost of one of the earliest documented uses of the term sheeple, Nietzsche described this supposed historical battle of philosophies when he said “that the lambs are upset about the great predatory birds is not strange, but the fact that these large birds of prey snatch away small lambs provides no reason for holding anything against them… To demand from strength that it does not express itself as strength, that it does not consist of a will to overpower, a will to throw down, a will to rule, a thirst for enemies and opposition and triumphs, is just as unreasonable as to demand from weakness that it express itself as strength.” Since he doesn’t go into detail about when and where this struggle took place, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that this was mere conjecture on Nietzsche’s

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggests that the genesis of civilization was from a large, pack-like group of proto-humans that Oedipally deposed the alpha male, and “by overpowering the father, the sons had discovered that several men united can be stronger than a single man. The totemic stage of culture is founded upon the restrictions that the band were obliged to impose on one another in order to maintain the new system. These taboos were the first right or law.” Freud says that this story helps understand that things like incest can only be taboo if incest is (secretly) desired. It is made clear that this “primal horde” story is merely speculation to help explain how civilization is the renouncement of desire and that it shouldn’t be taken as a literal historical