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When does a people become "historical"? Can we achieve a Greek-like stance as Nietzsche believed late 19th C. Germans could?

aner said in #3116 3w ago:

Inspired by the final section of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditation titled "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life".

Nietzsche's source of hope for his Greek-oriented solution:

"In tracking down the dangers of history we have found ourselves most severely exposed to them... And yet I trust in the inspiring power which instead of a genius guides my vehicle, I trust in youth to have guided me correctly when now it forces me to protest against the historical education of modern youth... An example will be helpful. Not much more than a century ago in Germany a natural instinct for what one calls poetry awoke in a few young people. Do we perhaps think that preceding generations as well as their contemporaries did not speak at all of that art which was alien and unnatural to them?"

FN establishes here that even if our youth has been artificially aged and delimited by the scientific (perhaps metaphysical) casting of history there still persists a "natural instinct for what one calls poetry" (making; life itself implied in this particular use of language) and thus an opportunity to save ourselves from the sort of nihilism produced by scientific history. Nietzsche terms solutions:

"Do not be surprised, they bear the names of poisons: the antidotes to the historical are called—the unhistorical and the superhistorical. With these names we return to the beginnings of our essay and to their calm."

Here we get the first inkling of our question regarding how a people transition from becoming unhistorical (animal-like in this sense) to becoming historical:

"By the word 'the unhistorical' I denote the art and the strength of being able to forget and enclose oneself in a limited horizon; 'superhistorical' I call the powers which guide the eye away from becoming and toward that which gives existence an eternal and stable character, toward art and religion."

Now, to provide further impetus to the question, Goethe once offered:

"America, you have it better Than our old continent, You have no ruined castles And no ancient basalt. Your inner life remains untroubled By useless memory And futile strife.”

Whether America is still in such a state, a thoroughly unhistorical people, is a matter for dispute but it feels as if our metaphorical castles have, in fact, pressed upon our soil. A born American mythology. If such is the case, I propose that total sovereignty—not just of a concrete legal and political sort, but of the cultural kind that establishes boundaries and a conceptual (not animal-instinctual) horizon which grounds reason and provides concrete access to historical referents, an enclosed rational system of life and politics—is that moment in which historicality becomes the mode of a people. Think Lincoln or FDR as the instances.

On the Greeks. FN says:

"There have been centuries in which the Greeks found themselves in a danger similar to the one in which we find ourselves, namely of being swamped by what is alien and past, of perishing through history. Never
have they lived proudly untouchable: for a long time their 'culture' was rather a chaos of foreign, Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and Egyptian forms and concepts... similarly perhaps, as "German culture" and religion is now an internally battling chaos of all foreign countries, of all antiquity. And nevertheless Hellenic culture became no aggregate, thanks to that Apollinian motto (of 'Know Thyself'). The Greeks learned gradually to organize chaos... by reflecting on their genuine needs, and letting their sham needs die out. Thus they took possession of themselves again... after a difficult struggle with themselves... they even became... firstcomers and models of all coming cultured peoples."

I open up the questions from the subject for you all, again, viz.:

When does a people become "historical"? Are we still capable of achieving a Greek-like stance as Nietzsche believed late 19th C. Germans could?

referenced by: >>3151

Inspired by the fina

taurus said in #3117 3w ago:

Could war be an instance of "historicization" of peoples?

Confrontation with a common threat; the realization that they could suddenly cease to exist can give rise to a “reflection” (more like a sudden self-awareness) of what a people is. On the other hand, the maximum concentration of forces in a single point (conquest, destruction, etc.) can give shape and autonomy to what was perhaps previously just a group of people.

I don't have Nietzsche at hand rn, but I'm sure that one could make a similar case using some passages.

Could war be an inst

anon_towa said in #3118 3w ago:

I think we may see cycles of historicity, where a people accumulate historical experience accumulated semantically after a long chain of uninterrupted existence punctuated by social crises such as wars (without generating wide-scale collapse) and rapid techno-cultural evolution which allows one to cognize a break with whatever came before, and hence understand oneself "historically". How true this is of other civilizations except the West, where History as such seems to have become conceptualized in the Neuzeit of the 17th-18th century with the application of positivistic sciences to the study of history is an open question. Supposing other peoples have had some historical bent, a radical break only appears after general collapse and catastrophe. If we take the Greeks, the collapse of the bronze age and the subsequent Greek dark ages played a great role. By the time Herodotus is writing very little was known by them of anything that preceded the Greeks by a couple of centuries, little actual knowledge of the Babylonian, Assyrian, Sumerian empires (Egypt was a bit of an exception I believe). This relative cultural blank slate allowed for experimentation and fusion, Homer as the canonical poet of Greek experience.

What would this look like for us ? Even a general collapse, if internet remains, is in no way a guarantee of a sufficient break. I expect that the only possible break is exit, offworld futures, a new frontier.

referenced by: >>3119 >>3120

I think we may see c

anon_towa said in #3119 3w ago:

>>3118
Continuing the thought you see first sparks of historical thinking in the Greeks with the Persian wars (Herodotus) and then the Peloponnesian war (Thucydides). Most of the interesting cultural productions come around between these two events, with some overlap before and after.

referenced by: >>3121

Continuing the thoug

taurus said in #3120 3w ago:

>>3118
>accumulated semantically

Good point. Historical consciousness seems to be inextricably linked to its linguistic formulation, whether oral or written. This leads me to believe that the historicity of a people depends largely on whether it is created deliberately by the political/intellectual/artistic class—it must be codified in semantic devices such as annals, histories, poems, as well as laws, of course... And possibly enforcing them by force.

Historicization depends not only on preconditions (a certain unity of customs, languages, etc.) or circumstances (technology, war), but on the genius of a group of men who decide to forge a historical consciousness.

Good point. Historic

taurus said in #3121 3w ago:

>>3119
Similar to the case of Rome with Fabius Pictor. He writes in Greek one of the first Roman histories, forged in conflicts with the Gauls and Carthaginians.

Similar to the case

anon_dybi said in #3126 3w ago:

Bruh we are becoming historical after human germline editing

Bruh we are becoming

aner said in #3129 3w ago:

From Kondylis's Conservatismus
>Sovereign in the full modern sense of the word is ultimately the one who enters the scene as a historical demiurge, who wants to model history on the basis of his own plans and ideas. From this it follows that history is not a rounded and closed circle in the shadow of the eternal order of being, but an open and dynamic movement. If sovereign is the one who does not allow himself to be commanded by anyone and who can command everyone without any exception, this entails an abolition of rule as a personal dependence, which was characteristic of the societas civilis.

Of course, Kondylis is uniquely interested in political affairs and not the spiritual matters with which Nietzsche concerns himself. Nevertheless we bear witness to the fact that the imposition of "sovereignty"—not at all a necessary prerequisite for human social living—brings with it the externalization of governance, rule, and thought. This to me seems to also be a primary of concern for Nietzsche in the Use/Abuse of History for Life in that the Greek conception of culture, to know thyself, necessarily inhibits the kind of dependence and therefore laziness which is seen in a people subject to a clear and direct sovereign. A lack of historicality (referring to the sort of time-conception which strangles life) implies not a lack of rationality but a freedom.

When Kondylis says history is not a closed circle in the shadow of the eternal order of being, but an open and dynamic movement he, in fact, agrees with Nietzsche that the mere presence of history among people is variable, it is not permanent.

From Kondylis's Cons

anon_haby said in #3136 3w ago:

I do not have the book on hand, but an important work that relates Man (and can be extended to peoples at-large) is Mircea Eliade's "The Myth of The Eternal Return" & "The Sacred and The Profane". In it he talks of History (with capital H) as something that Man has had an ever-evolving relationship toward throughout its history. What he terms as Archaic Man was one that sought to avoid having to deal with History (Man's relation to it, which brings about nihilism, fragmentation, and alienation) through cyclical repetition of rituals. This was the case up until the Judeo-Christian view of history which culminated in Jesus Christ's Atonement. History became linear, not cyclical, and it was sanctified rather than avoided.

In response to your question, the Greeks were not always a historical people. There were programs (of a eugenic sort), enemies, and more that melded them together into a distinct people. I actually was reading yesterday from Coulanges' The Ancient City and he stated this in regard to religious evolution in Indo-European cultures:

>We are not to suppose that this ancient religion resembled those founded when men became more enlightened. For a great number of centuries the human race has admitted no religious doctrine except on two conditions: first, that it proclaimed but one god; and, second, that it was addressed to all men, and was accessible to all, systematically rejecting no class or race. But this primitive religion fulfilled neither of these conditions. Not only did it not offer one only god to the adoration of men, but its gods did not accept the adoration of all men. They did not offer themselves as the gods of the human race. They did not even resemble Brahma, who was at least the god of one whole great caste, nor the Panhellenian Zeus, who was the god of an entire nation. In this primitive religion each god could be adored only by one family. Religion was purely domestic. (P. 25)

It is external pressures, but also the by the Laws of Great Men that make a people historical. Lycurgus, Solon, and Moses all created a people based around their sets of laws.

I do not have the bo

anon_nuqu said in #3151 2w ago:

>>3116
I’ve not yet read the rest of this discussion but OP i don’t really understand from your quotes what you mean by a people becoming “historical”. To situate oneself in history? Anericans have always done that right from winthrop’s speech in 1630. To have developed a sovereign self-concept out of one’s own history and nature? This seems a bad name for that.

I’ll take that last one for your meaning. Yes we are capable of becoming ourselves IFF we rigorously pursue the problem of knowing each other without foreign intermediation and discussing our own ideas and interests frankly among ourselves. But that is very difficult in this day of pervasive social censorship and narrative control arranged by various inauthentic propaganda programs. In America, what you believe and discuss is downstream of someone else’s politics, which is the opposite of what you want.

I think the internet has broken this situation open for us. Our freedom to think socially online has waxed and waned over the past 15 years, but i think we are making progress and there is much opportunity still. But make no mistake, to become sovereign (“historical” if you prefer) is a revolutionary proposition, and will be resisted to the point of total war by the system.

referenced by: >>3179

I’ve not yet read th

aner said in #3179 2w ago:

>>3151
In the context of Nietzsche's essay, "historicality" refers precisely to when a civilization/people emerges from acting freely, or, uninhibited by a variety of historical phenomena—ancestral worship, rigid moral tradition, and so forth. Perhaps in other words, when a people does not possess a concrete, weighty bearing regarding who they are as a collective and where they've been. Enabling themselves to create freely and to practice the Greek "know thyself" on their own terms. Nietzsche's invocation of the Greek neighbors—Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and Egyptian—serves as a good example of a people defining themselves, and thus also their activity, by concrete referents. In the context of modern peoples, specifically 19th C. Germans, the scientific study of history inhibits people from understanding themselves in an individual fashion.

In the context of Ni

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