Abstract

Arthur Danto invokes his philosophy of history to authorize a reading of Nietzsche that his philosophy of history nevertheless undermines. Danto's Nietzsche was a system builder, for, “if only tacitly,” he submitted his thinking to the demands of the philosophical “discipline,” “where there is no such thing as an isolated solution to an isolated problem”. In his Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto invents a character he dubs “the Ideal Chronicler.” Danto's notion of a narrative sentence clarifies his idea that historical understanding is retrospective; that it is a matter of assigning significance to earlier events in light of later ones – thus, a matter of placing earlier events within a story we wish to tell. Danto attributes the structural coherence of Nietzsche's writings both to historical understanding and to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry.