I don't feel like writing much today so I will just copy-based what I learned about Nietzsche's approaches to history.
He divides it into three:
- monumental history
- antiquarian history
- critical history
Nietzsche goes on to identify three different methods of history: the monumental method, the antiquarian, and the critical. The monumental is the method of looking back at history for ideals and exemplars, for sources of inspiration, “The greatest moments in the struggle of single individuals make up a chain, in which a range of mountains of humanity are joined over thousands of years. For me the loftiest thing of such a moment from the distant past is bright and great–that is the basic idea of the faith in humanity which expresses itself in the demand for a monumental history.”
The antiquarian mode is that impulse to preserve and honor history, to value tradition and custom for their own sake. [...]
The critical method is exactly what it sounds like, “dragging the past before the court of justice, investigating it meticulously, and finally condemning it”. The critical is valuable because sometimes the past is unjust and does deserve to be destroyed.
Each of these historical modes is important and we suffer when any of them becomes too dominant. Taken too far, the monumental becomes hagiography, the Great Man theory of history. The antiquarian’s weakness is that it always undervalues what is coming into being; conservation of the past becomes mummification. An excess of the critical can lead to arrogant attempts at replacing tradition without an understanding of why the tradition exists in the first place (i.e. Chesterton’s Fence). Conversely, the critical can also fail to serve life by making it hard for us to let go of grievances and past mistakes.
This problem of having too much historical knowledge ties well to the Age of Thery:
In Nietzsche’s view, his culture (and he would probably say ours too) has become bloated with too much knowledge. And this explosion of knowledge is not serving “life”–that is, it is not leading to a richer, more vibrant, contemporary culture. On the contrary.
Scholars obsess over methodology and sophisticated analysis. In doing so, they lose sight of the real purpose of their work. Always, what matters most isn’t whether their methodology is sound, but whether what they are doing serves to enrich contemporary life and culture.
Very often, instead of trying to be creative and original, educated people simply immerse themselves in relatively dry scholarly activity. The result is that instead of having a living culture, we have merely a knowledge of culture. Instead of really experiencing things, we take up a detached, scholarly attitude to them. One might think here, for instance, of the difference between being transported by a painting or a musical composition, and noticing how it reflects certain influences from previous artists or composers.
More on this can be read here or alternatively Nietzsche's entire essay can be read here.