The final work of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting (2008), provides a densely argued defence of the concept of collective memory. In one chapter he considers the short work on historiography by Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874). Ironically, what earned Nietzsche this special attention was Ricoeur’s need to ‘set apart’ Nietzsche’s work because it “contributes nothing to the critical examination of the historical operation.” Ricoeur saw Nietzsche as assaulting remembrance. By contrast, David Rieff, who attacked the concept of collective memory in his 2016 book, In Praise of Forgetting, applauds Nietzsche, and encourages the reader to take up Nietzsche’s moral imperative of ‘active forgetting’. Ricoeur and Rieff are on two different sides when it comes to social memory, but both authors share the view that Nietzsche prioritised forgetting over remembering history. As it turns out, both are wrong.
More on this in my article in Philosophy Now magazine.
