Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Use And Abuse Of History" by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on "The Use And Abuse Of History" by Friedrich Nietzsche. It begins:

Everyone now understands that nothing in the past was what it should have been. No one in the past, none of those whose names are still remembered, measured up, fully measured up, to what we today understand are the standards all decent, right thinking people should meet. Washington and Jefferson, all the others who were once given credit for their commitment to the cause of freedom, either owned slaves themselves or did nothing to bring slavery to an end. History, especially American history, the history that was taught to children in schools and to everyone else in Fourth of July orations, was, if not a conscious lie, a failure to see things as they really were.

What everyone now understands, what everyone now thinks he knows, is not, surprising as it may seem, a new discovery, an original insightful of the present age; it is what Friedrich Nietzsche went to war against a hundred fifty years ago. In "The Use And Abuse Of History," the second of four essays known collectively as Thoughts Out Of Season, Nietzsche complained about “unreflective people who write as historians in the naive faith that, according to all popular opinions, their age is right, and that to write in conformity with this age amounts to exactly the same thing as being just.” It is worse than that; the historians want more than to criticize, they want to condemn. “Measuring past opinions and deeds according to the widespread opinions of the present moment is what these naive historians call ‘objectivity.’ It is there that they discover the cannons of all truth; their aim is to force the past to fit the mold of their fashionable triviality.” And as to the worth of these historians, the worth, we must add, of our own over-confident historians, he remarks, “every man’s vanity is directly proportional to his lack of intelligence.” They believe, mistakenly, that, in the present, they stand higher than those in the past, when, instead, they “merely come after them.”

The belief that the present is in all important respects superior to the past would once have been thought a mark of ignorance. The Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, spoke, if in different ways, of...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History".

--Marshal Zeringue