Metahistory

«Yet Nietzsche's idea of history was a little appreciated by professional historians as Hegel's, not because his reflections on history were clouded by a technical language of the sort used by Hegel, but because his meaning was all too clear and all too obviously threatening to professional conceptions of history's competence. Nietzsche's purpose was to destroy belief in a historical past from which men might learn any single, substantial truth. For Nietzsche - as for Burckhardt - there were as many "truths" about the past as there were individual perspectives on it. In his view, the study of history ought never to be merely an end in itself but should always serve as a means to some vital end or purpose. Men looked at the world in ways that conformed to the purposes which motivated them; and they required different visions of history to justify the various projects which they had to undertake in order to realize their humanity fully. Basically, therefore, Nietzsche divided the ways in which men looked at history into two kinds: a life-denying kind, which pretended to find the single eternally true, or "proper", way of regarding the past; and a life-affirming kind, which encouraged as many different visions of history as there were projects for winning a sense of self in individual human beings. The desire to believe that there was one, eternally true, or "proper", idea of history was, in Nietzsche's opinion, another vestige of the Christian need to believe in the one, true God - or of Christianity's secular counterpart, Positivist science, with its need to believe in a single, complete, and completely true body of natural laws. To both of these essentially constrictive conceptions of truth and to their equivalents in art - Romanticism and Naturalism - Nietzsche opposed his own conception of the relativity of every vision of the real.»

Hayden White, Metahistory