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This article explores some of the moral meanings vested in the concept of historicization. With the help of a discussion of Jules Michelet's notions about the "duty of the historian" - to rescue the dead from oblivion - it becomes possible to flesh out these moral meanings and to insert them into a series of historical contexts. These contexts comprise the cultural history of humanitarian morality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the intellectual and cultural histories of ideas of immortality, memory, forgetting, and the valorization of the human life. The resulting meaning of historicization is that of a humanitarianism for the dead, with all the ambiguities this position entails.
This article develops a novel reading of the threefold division of modes of historicization in Nietzsche's "Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life". It argues that Nietzsche's stance is closely matched, and indirectly responds, to specific features of the argument for progress in human history that Kant presents in "Conflict of the Faculties". Kant had hit upon interest, boredom, publicity, and forgetting as systematic problems for the philosophy of history, and Nietzsche's thought on history takes up these concerns. I argue that Nietzsche's reaction to these Kantian problems prompted him to subtly dissociate historicization and historicity. This manoeuver allowed him to counter the conceptual challenges Kant had established and to align his notions on history with those on ethical normativity in lived life, embracing what he elsewhere rejected as a “"moral ontology."