In the case of the critical historian, the difficulty is not to avoid injus-

tice, but how to build a new and just order on the basis of error and
injustice. The critical historian is fully aware of the extent to which “to live
and to be unjust is one and the same thing” (HL 3), or, as Nietzsche later
writes, that “the whole of human life is sunk deeply in untruth” (HH 34).
The kind of injustice the critical historian sees himself confronted with
reflects what Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human calls “necessary injus-
tice [nothwendige Ungerechtigkeit]”:
All judgments as to the value of life have evolved illogically and are
therefore unjust. The falsity [Unreinheit] of human judgment derives
firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely, very
incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on
the basis of this material, and thirdly from the fact that every indi-
vidual piece of this material is in turn the outcome of false knowledge
[unreinen Erkennens], and is so with absolute necessity [voller Nothwen-
digkeit]. Our experience of another person, for example, no matter how
close he stands to us, can never be complete, so that we would have a
logical right to a total evaluation of him; all evaluations are premature
and are bound to be. Finally, the standard [Maass] by which we mea-
sure, our own being, is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject
to moods and fluctuations, and yet we would have to know ourselves
as a fixed standard to be able justly to assess [gerecht abzuschätzen] the
relation between our self and anything else whatever. (HH 32)27
The dilemma of the critical historian is that of the heroic human being
who, “however much he may strive after justice,” is “bound, according to
the human limitations of his insight, to be unjust” (SE 4).
The false or impure basis of judgment is particularly problematic for
critical history because, in relation to the other two forms of history, criti-
cal history judges the past as a function of its drive to truth: critical history
wants knowledge, more so than antiquarian and monumental history.
Seen from the perspective of life, critical history is life’s knowledge, where
antiquarian history aims for the preservation of life, and monumental his-
tory for the action of life. Critical history expresses life at its highest level
of self-awareness. But since life lives of untruth and illusion and injustice,
the judgment that is brought about by life’s knowledge can never be based
on a pure, whole knowledge of the whole. What form does such knowledge
take so as to remain true to its ground in falsity and illusion, in the impos-
sibility of having a pure knowledge? How can life be just (and justified)
when its essence is injustice? Nietzsche’s answer is that critical history is a
form of tragic wisdom.

Life and Justice in Nietzsche’s Conception of History ■ 119