Culture for the Greeks, therefore, neither confounds itself with an accumulation of knowledge, nor with imitation and repetition. Instead, it stands for a pluralization of life that “augments nature with new living nature” (SE 6). Consequently, “humanity” for the Greeks is not something added to life, like a dress veiling the body, but rather signifies an affirmation of their animality as an inherently cultural force (HL 10).60
Nietzsche’s Prefaces as Examples of Artistic Historiography
Nietzsche’s project of reediting his entire body of work started in 1886 with “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” prefacing The Birth of Tragedy, and ended in 1888 with the writing of Ecce Homo. During this period Nietzsche reread all of his pre-Zarathustra books and added new prefaces to their original editions.61 These prefaces provide us with examples of artistic historiography insofar as they are constituted by a return to the past that breaks open the past and reorients it toward the future. The underlying premise of Nietzsche’s project was that the past is not yet defined, determined, and fixed, but open to “an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate” (HL 3).62 Such an attempt requires adopting the perspective of the artistic historian who knows not only how to remember but also how to forget, and who can therefore supply artistic formations and transformations of the past, which are carriers of future life.