ABSTRACT
Does history have a sense? Can there be a sense in history? What can the word ‘‘sense’’ mean for history? These are the questions Historics explores. Nietzsche offers a place to start. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886),
he defines history in terms of the contemporary attitudes and forms of behaviour behind it. The context is a scathing criticism of the values of his age, of those Europeans of the ‘day after tomorrow’, the ‘firstcomers to the twentieth century’ (Nietzsche 1988: V, 151, x214). He is confronting the heterogeneity of values and theorizing in contemporary culture. What comes out, is a cultural malaise: historical interests produce existential disorientation. The ‘sense of history’ is the ‘sixth sense’ of ‘good Europeans’ – fairly
adaptable, democratic, intellectually mediocre people, susceptible still in this ‘age of the masses’ to atavistic bouts of nationalism (Nietzsche 1988: V, 157ff., 180, 182, xx224, 241, 242). It’s a sensory aptitude conditioned by prevailing social and cultural values. The vast output of nineteenth-century historical scholarship has made the sense of history an extension of the human cognitive capacity. As a sixth sense, it suggests something uncanny, almost telepathic – a ‘divinatory instinct’ (as Nietzsche calls it). It’s a quick and easy way of apprehending the scale of value-systems societies and individuals have lived by, how they relate to each other, and how the authority of these values relates to the authority of the forces at work in society. Though it’s the pride of the ‘good European’, Nietzsche is ironically reserved. The sense of history is nothing to boast about. It’s only an effect of the ‘semi-barbarity’ that has befallen Europe as a democratic melting-pot of different social orders and ethnicities.
