While visiting a used bookstore last week, I picked up a copy of Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History, one of the few things of his I had not read. Now I have and was fascinated by how much it anticipates much of his later philosophy but also presents many important ideas not found in his other works. Speaking as a non-historian, it strikes me that it should be required reading for any serious student of history. In any case, one passage jumped out at me as worth sharing because of its humor:
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The Greeks, the famous people of a past still near to us, had the "unhistorical sense" strongly developed in the period of their greatest power. If a typical child of his age were transported to that world by some enchantment, he would probably find the Greeks very "uneducated." And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions, and sciences; we are wandering encyclopedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopedia lies on the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, on the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: "Manual of internal culture for external barbarians."
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