EREIGNIS

No concept is a-temporal or a-historical. Nietzsche challenges this characteristic of philosophers to approach philosophical problems in an a-historical or de-historicized way, and in particular those so-called historians of morality who lack “historical spirit.” Nietzsche claims that “the thinking of all of them is by nature unhistorical” (GM, 25). Such would be the “common failing” of philosophers—they do Not take account of the historicity of their object, and think of Man as an “aeterna veritas.“ Nietzsche accounts for this a-historicity in reference to what he calls the fetishism of language, i.e., our belief in grammar, and in §11 of book 1 of Human, All Too Human, he explains that “man has for long ages believed in the concept and names of things as in aeternae veritates,” and that “he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.” Lack of historical sense is therefore “the family failing of all philosophers” (HH, 13); this is what is “idiosyncratic” about them: “their lack of a sense of history, their hatred for the very notion of becoming” (TI, 18). They produce nothing but “conceptual mummies.”