The Art of Travel

by Alain de Botton

enhancing’. The term was Nietzsche’s. In the autumn of 1873, Friedrich Nietzsche composed an essay in which he distinguished between collecting facts like an explorer or academic and using already well-known facts for the sake of inner, psychological enrichment. Unusually for a university professor, he denigrated the former activity and praised the latter. Entitling his essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche began with the extraordinary assertion that collecting facts in a quasi-scientific way was a sterile pursuit. The real challenge was to use facts to enhance ‘life’. He quoted a sentence from Goethe: ‘I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.’ What would it mean to seek knowledge ‘for life’ from one’s travels? Nietzsche offered suggestions. He imagined a person depressed about the state of German culture and the lack of