Abstract
Throughout his life, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was preoccupied with historical themes. He lived in an age when historical accounts played an essential role in intellectual, political, and cultural life, and he became a professor of classical philology at a time when the discipline was heavily influenced by historical perspectives. Given all this, it is interesting that his 'Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben' (1874) delivered such a harsh critique of contemporary historical science and education. This work should be read as a philosophical negation of modern historical thinking. Nietzsche presents a conceptual triad of historical, unhistorical, and suprahistorical thinking that in turn entails a multiplicity of life orientations. The historical outlook is but one of three possible ways of seeing the world and of living one's life. Nietzsche also indicates that there are different forms of historiography and that these are grounded in their value for life. He gives primacy to the historian and his/her mode of life rather than to history as process and reality, and even less to a concern with its direction and meaning. Thus, history loses the ontological status it had acquired in the late 18th century, and, being subordinated to the concept of life, it can then be evaluated as to its benefits for life. With such considerations, Nietzsche breaks with the modern conceptual foundations of the historical revolution.