Nietzsche as Deep Historian

Abstract

The recent biocultural turn in evolutionary and neurological research suggests that prior efforts to combine historical and biological thinking, often dismissed as crude biological determinism, warrant a second look. In this essay, I show how a number of Nietzsche’s main ideas about historiography anticipate these developments. Nietzsche insisted that the study of history could assimilate the natural sciences by overcoming fixed disciplinary assumptions about when history begins, thereby extending the historical timeline deep into our species’ past. He also described the ongoing transformations in human mental structure that have been generated through the complex historical interaction of human biology and culture. Nietzsche viewed this interaction as crucial to understanding historical phenomena such as the power of religious organization and ritual, the emergence of democratic egalitarianism, and the formation of entrenched social hierarchies.

Notes

1. The association of evolutionary thought with “historicism” as conceived by Karl Popper and others contributed to its unpopularity among most historians committed to the principle of historical contingency. See Ellen Frankel Paul, “Herbert Spencer: The Historicist as a Failed Prophet,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 619–38.

2. On Nietzsche’s positive attitude to historical science, see Thomas Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Relation to Historical Methods and Nineteenth-Century German Historiography,” History & Theory 46 (2007): 155–79.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); References to Nietzsche’s works will be cited in the text using the following abbreviations: AC: The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990); BGE: Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage, 1966); D: Daybreak, trans. Maudemarie Clarke and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); GM: On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989); GS: The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974); HH: Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephan Lehmann (Lincoln, MI: Bison, 1996); KSA: Kritische Studien Ausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter); and TI: Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1968).

4. See Thomas Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 301–22.

5. Despite his significant disagreements with what he understood to be standard Darwinian theory, Darwinian thought provided a valuable weapon in Nietzsche’s opposition to theology and metaphysics, and a basic framework for understanding the ways in which nature shapes the human species physically, psychologically, and culturally. On Nietzsche’s knowledge of and attitude to Darwinism, see John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

6. See, for example, Babette Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), and Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life (London: Routledge, 1997).

7. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul

Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76–100, and Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5 (1966): 111–34. For an overview of Nietzsche’s influence on modern cultural historiography, see Hans-Peter Soder, “The Return of Cultural History? ‘Literary’ Historiography from Nietzsche to Hayden White,” History of European Ideas 29 (2003): 73–84.

8. A similar approach is advocated by the historian Edmund Russell, whose work highlights the ways in which the biological evolution of humans and other species has shaped human history in the relatively recent past. Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The geographer Jared Diamond has argued that human evolution, specifically in regard to population differences in genetic resistance to disease, has shaped the outcome of historical encounters between European and non-European societies. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

9. The Neolithic period (“New Stone Age”), associated with the beginnings of agriculture, animal domestication, and human settlement, stretches from around 10,000 to 3500 BCE, after which the first “historical” (Postlithic) civilizations emerged in the Near East.

10. Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 4.

11. Leopold von Ranke, Universal History: The Oldest Historical Group of Nations and the Greeks, ed. G. W. Prothero, trans. D. C. Tovey and G. W. Prothero (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885), ix.

12. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 5.

13. On the history of anthropology, see George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), and Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).

14. These works included E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958); John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Friedrich van Hellwald, Kulturgeschichte (Augsburg: Lampart & Co., 1885).

15. For an overview of these arguments, see Richard Alexander, “How Did Humans Evolve?” Special Publication No. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, 1990), 5.

16. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 137.

17. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 200.

18. On the role of the chemical stimulants coffee and tobacco on European economics and culture, see Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, chap. 4, “Civilization and Psychotropy.” On the political impact of cultivating feelings of empathy through novel reading, see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: Norton, 2007).

19. See Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010); Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (London: Penguin, 2004).

20. See Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape (New York: Penguin, 2005).

21. On Nietzsche’s relation to vitalism, see Arnaud Francois, “Life and Will in Nietzsche and Bergson,” Substance 36 (2007): 100–114.

22. Works by these authors that Nietzsche likely owned or read in translation include Alexander Bain, Mind and Body (1874); James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (1882); Alexandre Herzen, Le cervau et l’activité au point de vue psycho-physiologie (1887); Charles Féré, Sensation et movement (1887), and Dégénérénce et criminalité (1888); Charles Richet, L’homme et l’intelligence: Fragments de physiologie et de psychologie (1884). On Nietzsche’s reading of psychology, see Thomas Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading and Knowledge of Natural Science,” in Nietzsche and Science, ed. Gregory Moore and Thomas Brobjer (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 21–50.

23. On the historical impact of animal and plant domestication from a biocultural perspective, see Edmund Russell’s Evolutionary History.

24. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 143.

25. The importance Nietzsche accorded to the study of medicine and physiology for his own historical project became particularly insistent from 1875 onwards, as attested by letters and notes from the period. See Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986), III/I, 20–21 August 1881.

26. On the cultural and historical sources of what comes to be “instinct,” see GM, 2.2.

27. In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche writes, “The moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder… the ‘highest’ states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form” (51).

28. See John T. Cacioppo and Jean Decety, “Social Neuroscience: Challenges and Opportunities in the Study of Complex Behaviour,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1224 (2011): 162–73.

29. See Vittorio Gallese, “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: from Mirror Neurons to Empathy,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001): 33–50.

30. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995).

31. Benedict Anderson has raised interesting questions concerning the role of emotion and the media in enabling the diffusion of shared nationalist sentiment for the emergence of the nation-state. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). On the cultural history of emotions, see the essays collected in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On historiographical issues confronting the subfield, see Barbara Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context: Journal of the History and Philosophy of the Emotions 1 (2010): 1–32.