PHL questions about Nietzsche

Autumn Quarter

2014

Pepe

Quiz 3: Nietzsche

INSTRUCTIONS: select three of the four questions. Answer each of them separately in approximately 500 words (give or take 100 words). Submit a hardcopy of your exam in class on Monday, November 3rd.

1. Why does Nietzsche insist from the opening of the text that history needs an interrogation with respect to its worth? What conceptual tools does Nietzsche deploy for the sake of this evaluation of history? In consequence, what can we hope to gain from this project and what might it tell us about the relationship of life and histroy?

2. In the beginning of §1, Nietzsche compares our human historical sense against the utterly unhistorical experience of nature or animal life. Explain the terms of this contrast (the animal’s and the human’s experience of history) and how it helps to illuminate the experience of history that human beings are stuck with, as it were. What are both the dangers and the unique possibilities that our human, historical sense offers?

3. In section three, Nietzsche gives us a tripartite typology of history. Explain each of the three kinds of history, for what they may individually be used, their merits and their faults according to Nietzsche. What might this tripartite typology tell us about the use of history for Nietzsche (versus, for example, the one use of history for Kant)?

4. Explain how science has committed an interruption between life and history—for example, turning history into an intellectual phenomenon, according to Nietzsche. Then offer an interpretation of how Nietzsche attempts to save action by overcoming this interruption and restoring a kind of intimacy between life and history.