Nietzsche a kontrafaktuální dějiny jako kardinální otázka historie

Counterfactual history has been a significant component of European historical culture since antiquity and remains today one of the popular methods of portraying history. On the other hand, modern historiography, by way of its methodology, is very skeptical of such an approach to the past, and this position is often repeated through the utterances of its protagonists. In one of his early preparatory notes, Friedrich Nie­tzsche called counterfactual history the “cardinal question” of history as such. The paper presented here aims to explore the context of this deliberation in the context of Nietzsche’s Basel period (1869–1879), especially in relation to texts with a historiographical dimension. Emphasis will also be placed on two of his prominent role models from that time – Thucydides and Jacob Burckhardt. Based on a historical-systematic analysis of his work (both published and in manuscript), this paper answers the question: “In what sense is counterfactual history a cardinal problem of history?”