Historical thinking, as modern man approaches it, splits him in two. It splits him out of a supposed, essential integration of his nature: thinking and producing. Aristotle would have it that thought and material activity are one and the same, yet the modern man of research sets up his thinking prior to his acting, so says Heidegger.
At its earliest conception history is regarded as a metaphysics: a mapping of how and what makes being. Historical accounts, critiques—whatever the title of the approach—have sought to track and define a nature of man, his progress: man is working towards something. History becomes the project of tracking an evolution rather than witnessing human behavior in particular environs—rather than understanding man as a mode of thinking transpiring in a certain epoch (Collingwood).
Man becomes the object of his own study: the more he exerts his energy on his approach to himself the further he cleaves thinking from material activity by means of intensifying scrutiny on his own said activity. He makes himself a concept, sees how certain behaviors play out, believes he can divine the future by studying the past: he wants to master thinking, but in the process halts his own authentic being. His project is all too human.
It will become apparent that a philosophical approach to history inevitably frames, delineates, or prescribes a metaphysics. History has given one an increasing knowledge of oneself, but the question is to what end. What is one to do with centuries of knowledge and how is one to apply past conditions and experiences to the now. This short and poor essay will chronologically work in reserve using Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Vico to synthesize what might be a viable stance for historical-metaphysical thinking.
Heidegger states that a “metaphysics grounds an age, in that, through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed. This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age.”[1] The phenomenological approach declares that phenomena, things encountered in the world, can only be known if they are represented according to a qualified interpretation. By studying history one arrives at each epoch’s metaphysics and comes to understand how people living under particular sociohistorical conditions interpreted their surroundings, thus their being. Understanding the metaphysical composition of past eras is to objectify history, to cut it off from its living aspect in the present. Can we genuinely perform a metaphysical study without, in some way, objectifying being? Is metaphysics not something to harken as a giver of knowledge but as a way of participating in the world?
Modern man has transmogrified his approach to history by turning methodologies of knowing into a science. His activity is research, he plans and sets up experiments.[2] To experiment “means to represent or conceive the conditions under which a specific series of motions can be made susceptible of being followed in its necessary progression,” and the results of the experiment are anticipated for his research is “grounded upon the projection of a circumscribed object-sphere.”[3] Prior to his own activity, the man of research casts forth the terms that he will locate in his experiments. He wants to gather knowledge about him, he wants his activity in the world to encounter the ‘circumscribed object-sphere’. This attitude sets the world up as a picture where everything belongs to a “system” that is “equipped and prepared for.”[4] The modern world picture means that “matter stands before us exactly as it stands with it for us. ‘To get the picture’ [literally, to put oneself into the picture].”[5] The modern man of research completely severs thinking and material activity. It is apparent that he desires knowledge as he sets frames the world as a picture, predetermining all phenomena. He makes a picture of the world before he enters it; thought drapes the world in concepts and all things are stuffed and weighed down with such knowledge.
It is “knowledge which enfeebles activity” and the historical approach has done nothing but burden man with the weight of his past.[6] History has widened his horizon, has forced him to see everything but himself and from this “infinite horizon he then retreats into himself, into the smallest egoistic region.”[7] Recession from life, forgoing the outside and retreating inwards. Thought concerns itself with what does not concern it so the present moment is caught up in everything but the now. As a result, action either does not commence or moves according to a template, an enframing; what is, is already interpreted, meaning it is thought before it is acted. Man encounters a representation and is not in contact with an immediacy of being here. It is to say that life lags behind itself, tarries along.
Nietzsche warns: “your knowledge does not complete your nature but only kills your own.”[8] When the horizon proceeds beyond and before you, you neglect yourself in the noise. The historical education of today blinds one “in a much too bright, much too sudden, much too changeable light.”[9] It is an issue of too much. Every pathway is lighted, every option already weighed, leading one to ultimately not be able to act for “all acting requires forgetting.”[10]
One must come back to one’s own horizon, to his own being and not be concerned with the infinitely unfolding horizon of the centuries, of other men. It is “only within a horizon” that “every living thing can become healthy, strong and fruitful.”[11] It is not clear if Nietzsche’s horizon is a self-proscribed metaphysical approach to the world or what he calls an “atmosphere.”[12] The atmosphere Nietzsche diagnoses for every living thing is
a mysterious circle of mist: if one robs it of this veil, one condemns a religion, an art, a genius to orbit as a star without an atmosphere: then one should not wonder about its rapidly becomes withered, hard and barren. That is just how it is with all things great indeed, ‘which without some madness ne’er succeed.’[13]
The cosmological metaphor explicates that there must be matter to play with, to come into contact with, in order to collide and create; an atmosphere must be rich and dense with life. It cannot be clear, clarified; it cannot contain knowledge and givens, but must bestow matter upon man so he can come to his own conclusions. It must be “mysterious,” transpire without knowledge. The horizon is “an enveloping madness and “a protective and veiling cloud.”[14] This cloud fuses action and thinking once again and allows man to act in a way that is “unhistorical” for he must situate himself to the present moment; he cannot see in front of him nor behind him.
The unhistorical act that transpires within this atmosphere is a “bright lightening flash of light [that] occurs within that encircling cloud of mist.”[15] It must be noted that the glorious deeds and peoples in history should not be idolized but should be conceived as “effects in themselves” of a monumental energy.[16] Monumental peoples are to signify possibilities of acting in the world. Unhistorical action “resembles an enveloping atmosphere in which alone life is generated only to disappear with the destruction of this atmosphere.”[17] The destructive nature of this action categorizes it as something against stability, and one might claim that the operative of history is stabilize an idea of being. But, an unhistorical action accounts for happiness, where happiness is not a trite feeling, but a condition where the living thing is in contact with its genuine functioning. Happiness is defined as “being able to forget, to express it in a more learned fashion, the capacity to live unhistorically while it endures.”[18] Happiness appears as thinking and acting in absolute harmony.
The opposite of knowledge is ignorance and Vico states that “by its nature, the human mind is indeterminate; hence, when man is sunk in ignorance, he makes himself the measure of the universe.”[19] When the world is unknowable, man with his limited, let’s say, horizon, uses himself, his environment to parse out reality. The earliest people possessed “poetic wisdom” and not “knowledge.” Their poetics was a metaphysics and the poetic faculty was innate, arising from their “vigorous sensations and vivid imaginations.”[20] The first people were ignorant and thus wondered at phenomena, endowing the unknown with “substantial being based on their own ideas.”[21]
The first people were like “children,” the world was merely an extension of their bodies.[22] It must be concluded that the first peoples projected their own minds onto the world, acting and thinking at the same time, “for when man understands, he extends his mind to comprehend things; but when he does not understand, he makes them out of himself, and by transforming himself, becomes them.”[23] Emphasis on the word, ‘transform’, when the world is not known the mind seeks to transform it in order to bring it closer, so the being can live in it. If thought is laden and busy with knowledge it will project what’s been given. But, if the mind is ignorant, or enshrouded in a dark atmosphere, it will be forced to create, forgoing any rubric.
The difference between the ancient, early Greeks is that they “apprehend” the world where modern man “represents” it.[24] Heidegger claims that “Greek man must gather and save, catch up and preserve, what opens itself in its openness, and he must remain exposed to all its sundering confusions. Greek man is as one who apprehends that which is, and this is why in the age of the Greeks the world cannot become picture.”[25] The world for the Greek man, according to Heidegger, was one of immediacy, apprehension requires immersion in one’s environment, it is an activation of the senses; it is a living way of knowing and learning. Thinking and acting are harmonious. Representation provides “what is present at hand before oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm.”[26] Representation forces the world into a specific relationship, thinking appears prior to being, and it might not even be one’s own thought but a picture according to some other.
The cure to history, to the burden of knowledge, is to become like a child once again. Redemption, for Nietzsche, will be given from “the realm of youth” with its instincts of “fire, obstinacy, self-forgetting and love”[27] Fire: violent activity, obstinacy: one’s own horizon, self-forgetting: the cloud, the absence of knowledge, and love: the urgency of one’s one life. One has to figure out how to be in a way where thinking and acting are coalesced as it appears to be the suggested and essential nature of any living thing, yet we are fortunately blessed with self-awareness and consciousness that cleaves us from this activity. Modern, philosophical history sets up man as a specimen to be deciphered, but man is the vessel for thinking and becoming. Any discussion of metaphysics in this realm seems to be beside the point of being; scrutiny on man’s thought and how he is separates thinking and activity, where he therefore cannot participate in his being, but is slotted into a conception of what he is. The issue at hand is knowledge and the way to dissolve the burden is to enter a childlike state of bliss—which is nothing but the direct connection of the mind and the body to one’s environment and the production of ideas in the now. This production is a part of a historical process that defines how beings existed, so the need emerges as a question: how does one approach ‘history’ without solidifying any past, present, or future movement?
[1] Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, Perennial, 2013): 115.
[2] Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 121
[3] Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 121; 123
[4] Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 129
[5] Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 129
[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1980): 7.
[7] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 57
[8] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 50
[9] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 41
[10] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 10
[11] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 10
[12] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 41
[13] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 41
[14] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 41
[15] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 11
[16] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 17
[17] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 11
[18] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 9
[19] Giambattista Vico, New Science (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001): 75
[20] Vico, New Science, 145
[21] Vico, New Science, 145
[22] Vico, New Science, 89
[23] Vico, New Science, 160
[24] Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 131
[25] Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 131
[26] Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 131
[27] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 58
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