Several years after his first meeting with Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote The Use and Abuse of History, a part of Thoughts Out of Season, wherein he claimed that
Cheerfulness, a good conscience, belief in the future, the joyful deed- all depend, in the individual, as well as in the nation, on there being a line that divides the visible from the vague and shadowy; we must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember, and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically.19
Like Burckhardt, Nietzsche understood that what individuals believed to have happened in the past influenced their actions in the present. Furthermore, Nietzsche established a distinction between historical thought, which valued the memory of past events, and unhistorical thought, which rejected such memory. While the unhistorical resembled the "optimism" or ahistorical thought that Burckhardt feared, Nietzsche held that this realm had a beneficial aspect. Forgetting the past at the appropriate moment, Nietzsche held, would free the individual to act strictly according to the demands of the present.
Nietzsche also considered carefully the value of objectivity in history, a particularly important consideration in light of Hegel's certainty of the historian's analytical nature:
Might not an illusion lurk in the highest interpretation of the word "objectivity"? We understand by it a certain standpoint in the historian who sees the procession of motive and consequence too clearly for it to have an effect on his own personality. We think of the aesthetic phenomena of the detachment from all personal concern with which the painter sees the picture and forgets himself . . .20
Hegel's depersonalization of history exemplified the condition Nietzsche warned against, that is, the removal of the emotional from the study of history. Reducing every motive in history to an expression of the "spirit" eliminates the role of the individual and, furthermore, it constraints the historian to the analysis of manifestations of the "spirit." Nietzsche further challenged the notion of "objectivity":
To think objectively, in this sense, of history is the work of the dramatist: to think one thing with another, and weave the elements into a single whole, with the presumption that the unity of plan must be put into objects if not already there. So man veils and subdues the past . . . 21
Hence, Nietzsche viewed the clarification of historical events through analytical history as the composition
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 7-8.
20. Nietzsche, 37.
21. Ibid., 37-38.