Por uma concepção exotérica de história : uma leitura da Segunda consideração extemporânea de Nietzsche

Abstract

An exoteric conception of History is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proposes in his Second Untimely Consideration. The notion behind this Nietzschean project is that history as a science must be guided by its ability to use knowledge from the past so that it can encourage the improvement of action in the present and not just be restricted to knowing the past as a neutral object of knowledge. The notion, therefore, of a neutral history – in the sense of being independent of a reflection regarding its effects on action in the present – is understood by the philosopher as undesirable. It is also, in a certain sense, even impossible, since historians are always already immersed in a socio-historical configuration that precedes them and that defines the horizon of expectations and values mobilized in their various investigations of the past. The objective of the Thesis, therefore, is to explain this Nietzschean project and provide a monographic study of the work, a study that, until now, does not exist in the brazilian national scenario of research on Nietzsche. To this end, the Thesis focuses on the positive program that the author outlines for the historical sciences based on the formulation and exploration of two central typologies. The first typology has a foundational aspect for all the arguments mobilized by the philosopher regarding the positive program presented there. The second typology presents itself as an application of the contents formulated in the first. The analysis of the first typology demonstrated that there was a serious inconsistency in its formulation. In this sense, the Thesis aims to present a solution to this serious hermeneutical problem. It must be stated, finally, that the thesis makes a choice to reconstruct the positive components of the work to the detriment of its critical-negative elements, as during the investigation a difficulty in secondary literature in dealing with the precise determination of these components was noticed. Therefore, despite being a study that focuses on a single text, the Thesis does not have as its primary objective to exhaust it.