ABSTRACTThis article explores Nietzsche’s approach to the fundamental question of “how to live one’s life”, and more specifically his view of the role of the past in seeking an answer to this question. By discussing Nietzsche’s views of how different nations and cultures relate to their history, I suggest some comparisons with how individuals might do so. Common to both is the relationship between the past as a resource and as a burden: the burden of single events or periods and (...) the burden of the abundance of facts. Key to Nietzsche’s thinking on these questions is his account of the relationship between remembering, promising, and forgetting. He considers “active forgetting” paradoxically as both a form of forgetting and a way of taking full responsibility for the past. (shrink)

The question of how literature can evoke emotions is a familiar one, as is the idea that a good work of literature arouses the right emotion in the right place through our capacity for sympathy. However, there is no consensus on how this works, partly because there is no agreement on the nature of emotions. One figure that contributes to both of these topics is Robert Musil. As a thinker and as a novelist, he had both a theory of emotions (...) and a novelistic treatment of them. His novels are notable, however, for the way in which they do not appeal to the reader’s capacity for sympathy, owing partly to the formlessness of his characters. Yet it is precisely the gap he creates between fiction and emotional reality that allows for a richer investigation of the relationship between emotions and literature. (shrink)

This article focuses on Nietzsche’s critique of the moral ideal of forgiveness and explores the idea of active forgetting as a possible alternative to this ideal. It situates Nietzsche’s critique against the background of a substantial body of work which has grown around the more general question of unconditional and conditional forgiving. I examine Nietzsche’s concept of active forgetting in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874) and in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). In both texts (...) Nietzsche addresses the question of how nations and individuals relate to their past and argues that a healthy psyche, of nations as of individuals, requires the ability to relieve ourselves of the burden of the past. I suggest that, while what Nietzsche calls active forgetting is a natural endowment of the human being, albeit suppressed by the abundance of memory, it can also be thought of as an ethical principle in its own right. (shrink)