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Stephen Kern suggestively notes that Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who all \u201cinsisted that the past was an essential source of the full life,\u201d had Jewish backgrounds, and he doesn\u2019t think this an accident: \u201cBoth Judaism and Christianity share a reverence for the past and argue their validity partly from tradition. The implicit ethic is that old is good.\u201d But Judaism is older, and if old is good older is better: \u201cIt is possible that the insistence of these men that the past alone is real, that only the recapture of the past can inspire art or cure neurosis, is linked to this feature of the Jewish experience.\u201d <\/p>\n
A few pages later, Kern summarizes Nietzsche\u2019s 1874 essay The Use and Abuse of History <\/em> , where Nietzsche complains that the past is often used as \u201ca cloak under which their hatred of the present power and greatness masquerades as an extreme admiration of the past\u201d and that drawing comfort from the past inhibits action and innovation. It treats the present as \u201clate survivals,\u201d and turns people into beasts who live \u201cby chewing a continual cud.\u201d <\/p>\n And in Zarathustra <\/em> , Nietzsche further complains that redemption means liberation of the will to power from the domination of the past. The \u201cmalignant historical fever\u201d of the age leads only to vengefulness and frustration: \u201cPowerless against what has been done, [the will] is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time\u2019s covetousness, that is the will\u2019s loneliest melancholy.\u201d Revenge is simply \u201cthe will\u2019s ill will against time and against its \u2018it was.\u2019\u201d The will is liberated when it recreates \u201call \u2018it was\u2019 into \u2018thus I willed it.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n The contrast between Nietzsche and the historically-minded Jewish thinkers of his time is recapitulated (perhaps) in the experience of Rosenstock-Huessy, whose conversion from Judaism to Christianity was a conversion to future. In contrast to the Jewish giants of modernism, and though he found precious little help from the Christianity of his own day, Nietzsche is a thinker shaped by Christian sensibilities, a thinker able to say \u201cBehold, a new creation.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stephen Kern suggestively notes that Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who all \u201cinsisted that the past was an essential source of the full life,\u201d had Jewish backgrounds, and he doesn\u2019t think this an accident: \u201cBoth Judaism and Christianity share a reverence for the past and argue their validity partly from tradition. The implicit ethic is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"yoast_head":"\n