Nietzsche on Human Action and the Art of Forgetting
It seems to me that Nietzsche is right in claiming, within his short work On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, that all human action is predicated upon the power to forget—specifically, I think, in forgetting one’s past failures so that they do not become debilitating, but also in forgetting our own nature as finite beings.
As Nietzsche says, “Take as an extreme example a man who possesses no trace of the power to forget, who is condemned everywhere to see becoming: such a one no longer believes in his own existence, no longer believes in himself; he sees everything flow apart in mobile points and loses himself in the stream of becoming: he will, like the true pupil of Heraclitus, hardly dare in the end to lift a finger.” (Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Section 1)
I’ve seen jobs come and go, relationships begin and end, dear family and friends depart from this Earth, whole companies that I’ve worked for get dismantled (some of my greatest work along with it!). Yet, somehow, in order to carry on and push forward, I must forget that such is the inevitable end of all things—myself and my own finite life, not the least of which, included!
The sheer horror of this realization is stultifying, or at least it would be stultifying were it not for our uniquely human ability not only to ignore it but ultimately to thumb our very noses at it in disgust—even at the universe itself with the destructive necessity of its Logos that the stoics somehow revered so much while still getting out of bed and doing their respective duties.
It’s no wonder, then, that Nietzsche is committed to the notion that all human truth is really just the art of dissimulation and of lying to ourselves. We tell ourselves that we are bigger than the inevitable decomposition of ourselves, of our minds, of our bodies, and of our greatest works back into their constituent elements—mere atoms and the void, as Democritus said—and we tell ourselves, once again anew after every single setback, that we will not be defined or limited by even our greatest of failures.
By the time we start climbing the next mountain, we’ve already forgotten our having fallen off the cliffs and into the ravines of the previous one, on and on and on we go toward each new mountaintop until we reach the final cliff, when that insurmountable final mountain finally triumphs over us merely human mountaineers.
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