Nietzsche's On the Use and Abuse of History for Life - Preface: History and food as means to life
(Preface to "Use and Abuse of History for Life) History and food as means to life
We may eat for fuel or for pleasure. Depending on one’s predominant attitude towards food, two distinct bodies emerge: (i) one is healthy, muscular and vigorous, (ii) the other sickly, weak and slow. In the first case, the person eats in order to live. They understand that food is a means to building a better body and leading a better life. In the second case, the person misunderstands food. They act as though food is not a means to an end, i.e. life. They either live to eat or hardly eat. In both cases they do not recognise the proper place of food in relation to life. In both cases such persons more or less malnourish themselves.
From the get go, Nietzsche wants us to place history in the same conceptual framework as food. He claims that much like food, history carries the capacity to nourish life and enliven our activity. Yet, at the same time, he asks us to adopt an “eat for fuel” attitute towards it, as opposed to a “gorge yourself” attitude or an “eat sparsely” attitude. In other words, Nietzsche wants us to focus on the quality of the history “meat” and not its quantity.
This, the philosopher does during a time in which many educated people find it fashionable to greedily gorge themselves with whatever historical knowledge they can lay their hands on. Such scholars inevitably proceed to evacuate their mind’s bowel by publishing tomes of their so called “philosophies of history”. These are filled with pompous universalisms, historical “truths” and other sophisms which fill our minds with dangerous toxins and free radicals. These poison our enthusiam towards life and occlude our active participation in it.
“How much can be learnt from history has long been a matter of speculation. Much depends on the capacity of the pupil. There is probably no branch of learning, except economics, in which conjecture plays so large a part. Almost any set of facts can be selected, in a partial fashion, to prove any theory, however, absurd.“
William Joyce in “Twilight Over England”
… ‘a “gorge yourself” attitude or an “eat sparsely” attitude’…
“Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.
Everywhere means nowhere.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca – “Moral letters to Lucilius”
“Letter 2 of 124. On Discursiveness in Reading”
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_2