The second of Nietzsche's UM, “On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life” (HL), is one of his most celebrated and influential works, profoundly shaping the work of Continental theorists such as Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Paul de Man. For all the immense attention paid to this little text, philosophers and scholars have focused mainly on Nietzsche's reflections on culture, overlooking the text's epistemological concerns. Jensen's commentary rectifies this omission and succeeds admirably not only in analyzing the often cryptic and meandering arguments of the text, but also in contextualizing it in nineteenth-century debates about objectivity and teleology in history.
In the first chapter, Jensen engages in a rare feat for Nietzsche scholars: he offers a philological analysis of the composition and publication of the text itself. In doing so, he corrects some of the errors and omissions of the Colli and Montinari KSA edition...
