Historical study should serve life’s needs, not idle comfort.

Evidence

An arresting phrase appears in the second essay of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, on “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” written in the same year that Valck arrived in Bali. Chiding the feverish turn to history in his own age, Nietzsche urges his reader not to idle in the garden of history, to not shy as historical observers from our “rough and charmless needs and requirements.” We must service history, he insists, “only to the extent that history serves life.” Methodological insights are packed into those simple phrases. Together, they open to the “untimeliness” he advocates and the comfort zones he so abhors. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1360

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Nietzsche’s formulation that history should serve life and the ideal of ‘untimeliness.’