Friedrich Nietzsche
On the
Use and Abuse of History for Life
1873
Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900), the revolutionary German philosopher, wrote the Use and
Abuse of History for Life in 1873. The work was published as the second
part of his Untimely Meditations in 1874.
This translation by Ian Johnston of Malaspina
University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada, has certain copyright
restrictions. For information please use the following link: Copyright.
For comments, question, suggestions for
improvement in the accuracy or fluency of the translation, please contact Ian Johnston.
For a list of other translations by Ian Johnston,
including other works by Nietzsche, use the following link: johnstonia.
This translation was last revised in May 2008.
[Revisions
to this text are a work in progress]
Friedrich Nietzsche
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
Foreward
"Incidentally, I despise everything which merely
instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity."
These are Goethes words. With them, as with a heartfelt expression of Ceterum
censeo, our consideration of the worth and the worthlessness of history may
begin.* For this work is to set down
why, in the spirit of Goethes words, we must in all seriousness despise
instruction
I have tried to describe a feeling which has often
enough tormented me. I take my revenge on this feeling when I expose it to the
general public. Perhaps with such a description someone or other will have
reason to point out to me that he also knows this sensation but that I have not
felt it with sufficient purity and naturalness and definitely have not
expressed myself with the appropriate certainty and mature experience. Perhaps
one or two will respond in this way. However, most people will tell me that
this feeling is totally wrong, unnatural, abominable, and absolutely forbidden,
that with it, in fact, I have shown myself unworthy of the powerful historical
tendency of the times, as it has been, by common knowledge, observed for the
past two generations, particularly among the Germans. Whatever the reaction,
now that I dare to expose myself with this natural description of my feeling,
common decency will be fostered rather than shamed, because I am providing an
opportunity for many people to make polite pronouncements about contemporary
trends, like the one just mentioned. Moreover, I obtain for myself something of
even more value to me than respectability: I become publicly instructed and set
straight about our times.
This essay is also out of touch with the times because
here I am trying for once to see as a contemporary disgrace, infirmity, and
defect something of which our age is justifiably proud, its historical culture.
For I believe, in fact, that we are all suffering from a consumptive historical
fever and at least should recognize that we are afflicted with it. If Goethe
with good reason said that with our virtues we simultaneously cultivate our
faults as well and if, as everyone knows, a hypertrophic virtue (as the
historical sense of our age appears to me to be) can serve to destroy a people
just as well as a hypertrophic vice, then people may make allowance for me just
this once.
Also in my defence I should not conceal the fact that
the experiences which aroused these feelings of torment in me I have derived
for the most part from myself and only from others for the purpose of
comparison and that, insofar as I am a student of more ancient times,
particularly the Greeks, I come as a child in these present times to such
anachronistic experiences concerning myself. But I must be allowed to ascribe
this much to myself on account of my profession as a classical philologist, for
I would not know what sense classical philology would have in our age unless it
is to be effective by its inappropriateness for the times, that is, in
opposition to the age, thus working on the age, and, we hope, for the benefit
of a coming time.
I
Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does
not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests,
jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its
likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus is neither
melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to
himself that his human condition is better than the beasts and yet looks with
jealousy at its happiness. For he wishes only to live like the beast, neither
weary nor in pain, and yet he wants it in vain, because he does not will it as
the animal does. One day the man demands of the beast: Why do you not talk to
me about your happiness and only gaze at me? The beast wants to answer, too,
and say: That comes about because I always immediately forget what I wanted to
say. But by then the beast has already forgotten this reply and remains
silent, so that the man wonders on once more.
But he also wonders about himself, that he is not able
to learn to forget and that he always hangs onto past things. No matter how far
or how fast he may run, this chain runs with him. It is something amazing: the
moment, in one sudden motion there, in one sudden motion gone, before nothing,
afterwards nothing, nevertheless comes back again as a ghost and disturbs the
tranquillity of a later moment. A leaf is continuously released from the roll
of time, falls out, flutters awayand suddenly flutters back again into the mans
lap. For the man says, I remember, and envies the beast, which immediately
forgets and sees each moment really perish, sink back in cloud and night, and
vanish forever.
In this way the beast lives unhistorically. For
it gets up in the present like a number without any odd fraction left over; it
does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment
exactly and entirely what it is. Thus, a beast can be nothing other than
honest. The human being, by contrast, braces himself against the large and
ever-increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows him over. It
makes his way difficult, like an invisible and dark weight, which he can for
appearances at some point sake deny, and which he is only too happy to deny in
his interactions with his peers, in order to awaken their envy. And so it moves
him, as if he imagined a lost paradise, to see the grazing herd or, something
more closely familiar, the child, which does not yet have a past to deny and
plays in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and future.
Nonetheless, this game must be upset for the child. He will be summoned all too
soon out of his forgetfulness. For he learns to understand the expression It
was, that password with which struggle, suffering, and weariness come over
human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically isa never
completed past tense. If death finally brings the longed for forgetting,
nevertheless, in the process, at the same moment it destroys present existence
and thus impresses its seal on that knowledge that existence is only an
uninterrupted living in the past [Gewesensein], something which exists
for the purpose of self-denial, self-destruction, and self-contradiction.
If happiness or a reaching out for new happiness is in
some sense or other what holds the living person onto life and pushes him
forward into continued living, then perhaps no philosopher has more
justification than the cynic. For the happiness of the beast, like that of the
complete cynic, is the living proof of the rightness of cynicism. The smallest
happiness, if only it is uninterrupted and creates happiness, is incomparably
more happiness than the greatest which comes only as an episode, as a mood, so
to speak, as an amazing interruption between nothing but boredom, desire, and
deprivation. However, with the smallest and with the greatest happiness there
is always one way in which happiness becomes happiness: through forgetting or,
to express the matter in a more scholarly fashion, through the capacity, for as
long as the happiness lasts, to sense things unhistorically.
Anyone who cannot set himself down on the crest of the
moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on
a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness and fear, will
never know what happiness is. Even worse, he will never do anything to make
other people happy. Imagine the most extreme example, a person who did not
possess the power of forgetting at all, who would be condemned to see
everywhere a coming into being. Such a person no longer believes in his own
being, no longer believes in himself, sees everything in moving points flowing
out of each other, and loses himself in this stream of becoming. He will, like
the true pupil of Heraclitus, finally hardly dare any more to lift his finger.*
Forgetting belongs to all action, just as not only
light but also darkness belong in the life of all organic things. A person who
wanted to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who was
forced to abstain from sleep or like the beast that is to continue its life
only from rumination to constantly repeated rumination. Moreover, it is
possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the
beast demonstrates; however, it is completely and utterly impossible to live at
all without forgetting. Or, to explain myself even more simply concerning my
thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical
sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally is destroyed,
whether it is a person or a people or a culture.
In order to determine this degree of history and,
through that, the borderline at which the past must be forgotten if it is not
to become the gravedigger of the present, we would have to know precisely how
great the plastic force of a person, a people, or a culture is. I mean that
force of growing in a different way out of oneself, of reshaping and
incorporating the past and the foreign, of healing wounds, compensating for
what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of ones self. There are
people who possess so little of this force that they bleed to death incurably
from a single experience, a single pain, often even from a single tender
injustice, as from a really small bloody scratch. On the other hand, there are
people whom the wildest and most horrific accidents in life and even actions of
their own wickedness injure so little that right in the middle of these
experiences or shortly after they bring the issue to a reasonable state of well
being and a sort of quiet conscience.
The stronger the roots which the innermost nature of a
person has, the more he will appropriate or forcibly take from the past. And if
we were to imagine the most powerful and immense nature, then we would
recognize there that for it there would be no frontier at all beyond which the
historical sense would be able to grow over or cause damage to it. Everything
in the past, in its own and in the most alien, this nature would draw upon,
take it into itself, and, as it were, transform into blood. What such a nature
does not subjugate it knows how to forget. It is there no more. The horizon is
completely unified, and nothing can recall that there still are men, passions,
doctrines, and purposes beyond it. And this is a general principle: each living
being can become healthy, strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If it is
incapable of drawing a horizon around itself and too egotistical to enclose its
own view within an alien one, then it wastes away there, pale or weary, to an
early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to
comeall these depend, with the individual as with a people, on the following
facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the
unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as
well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the
time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically. This is the
specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the
health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the
historical are equally essential.
Now, at this point everyone makes the initial
observation that a persons historical knowledge and feeling can be very
limited, his horizon hemmed in like that of an inhabitant of an Alpine valley;
in every judgment he might set down an injustice and in every experience a
mistake, which he was the first to make, and nevertheless, in spite of all
injustice and every mistake he stands there in invincible health and vigour and
fills every eye with joy, while close beside him the far more just and
scholarly person grows ill and collapses, because the lines of his horizon are
always being shifted about restlessly, because he cannot wriggle out of the
much softer nets of his justices and truths to strong willing and desiring. By
contrast, we saw the beast, which is completely unhistorical and which lives
almost in the middle of a sort of horizon of points, and yet exists with a
certain happiness, at least without weariness and pretense. Thus, we will have
to assess the capacity of being able to feel to a certain degree unhistorically
as more important and more basic, to the extent that in it lies the foundation
above which something right, healthy, and great, something truly human, can
generally first grow. The unhistorical is like an enveloping atmosphere in
which alone life generates itself, only to disappear again with the destruction
of this atmosphere.
The truth is that, in the process by which the human
being, in thinking, reflecting, comparing, separating, and combining, first
limits that unhistorical element, the process by which inside that surrounding
misty cloud a bright gleaming beam of light first arises, only then, through
the power of using the past for living and making history again out of what has
happened, does a person first become a person. But in an excess of history the
human being stops once more; and without that cover of the unhistorical he
would never have started and dare to start. Where do the actions occur which
men are capable of doing without previously having gone into that misty patch
of the unhistorical? Or to set pictures to one side and to grasp an example for
illustration: imagine a man whom a violent passion, for a woman or for a great
idea, shakes up and draws forward. How his world is changed for him! Looking
backwards, he feels blind; listening to the side he hears the strangeness like
a dull sound empty of meaning. What he is generally aware of he has never yet
perceived as so true, so perceptibly close, coloured, resounding, illuminated,
as if he is comprehending with all the senses simultaneously. All his estimates
of worth are altered and devalued. He is unable any longer to value so many
things, because he can hardly feel them any more. He asks himself whether he
has been the fool of strange words and strange opinions all this time. He is
surprised that his memory turns tirelessly in a circle but is nevertheless too
weak and tired just to make a single leap out of this circle. It is the most
unjust condition of the world, narrow, thankless with respect to the past,
blind to dangers, deaf to warnings, a small living vortex in a dead sea of
night and forgetting. Nevertheless this condition unhistorical, thoroughly
anti-historicalis the birthing womb not only of an unjust deed but even more
of every just deed. And no artist would achieve his picture, no field marshal
his victory, and no people its freedom, without previously having desired and
striven for them in that sort of unhistorical condition.
As the active person, according to what Goethe said,
is always without conscience, so he is also always without knowledge. He
forgets most things in order to do one thing; he is unjust towards what lies
behind him and knows only one right, the right of what is to come into being
now. So every active person loves his deed infinitely more than it deserves to
be loved, and the best deeds happen in such a excess of love that they would
certainly have to be unworthy of this love, even if their worth were otherwise
incalculably great.
Should a person be in a position to sniff out and
catch the fragrance in many examples of this unhistorical atmosphere, in which
every great historical event has arisen, then such a person might perhaps be
able, as a knowledgeable being, to elevate himself to a super-historical
standpoint, in the way Niebuhr once described a possible result of historical
observations: In one thing at least, he says, is history, clearly and
thoroughly grasped, useful, the fact that one knows, as even the greatest and
highest spirits of our human race do not know, how their eyes have acquired by
chance the way in which they see and the way in which they forcefully demand
that everyone see, forcefully, that is, because the intensity of their
awareness is particularly great. Someone who has not, through many examples,
precisely determined, known, and grasped this point is overthrown by the
appearance of a mighty spirit who in a given shape presents the highest form of
passionate dedication.
We could call such a standpoint super-historical,
because a person who assumes such a stance could feel no more temptation to
continue living and to participate in history, because he would have recognized
the single condition of every event, that blindness and injustice in the soul
of the man of action. He himself would have been cured from now on of still
taking history excessively seriously. But he would have learned, for every
person and for every experience, among the Greeks or Turks, from a moment of
the first or the nineteenth century, to answer for himself the questions how
and why people lived.
Anyone who asks his acquaintances whether they would
like to live through the last ten or twenty years over again will easily
perceive which of them has been previously educated for that super-historical
point of view. For they will probably all answer No!, but they will
substantiate that No! differently. Some of them perhaps with the hope But
the next twenty years will be better. Those are the ones of whom David Hume
mockingly says:
And from the dregs of life
hope to receive,
What the first sprightly running could not give.
But that question whose first answer we have heard can
be answered again in a different way, that is, once more with a No! but with
a No! that has a different grounding. The denial comes from the
super-historical person, who does not see salvation in the process and for whom
the world is much more complete and has attained its end in every moment. What
could ten new years teach that the past ten years has not been able to teach!
Now, whether the meaning of the theory is happiness,
resignation, virtue, or repentance, on that issue the super-historical people
have never been united. But contrary to all the historical ways of considering
the past, they do come to full unanimity on the following principle: the past
and the present are one and the same, that is, in all their multiplicity
typically identical and, as unchanging types everywhere and always present,
they are a motionless picture of immutable values and an eternally similar
meaning. As the hundreds of different languages correspond to the same
typically permanent needs of people, so that someone who understood these needs
could learn nothing new from all the languages, in the same way the
super-historical thinker illuminates for himself all the histories of people
and of individuals from within, guessing like a clairvoyant the original sense
of the different hieroglyphics and gradually even growing tired of avoiding the
constantly new streams of written signals streaming forth. For, in the endless
excess of what is happening, how is he not finally to reach saturation,
super-saturation, and, yes, even revulsion, so that the most daring one is perhaps
finally ready, with Giacomo Leopardi, to say to his heart
Nothing
lives which would be worthy
of your striving, and the earth
deserves not a sigh.
Pain and boredom is our being and
the world is excrement,
nothing else.
Calm yourself.*
However, let us leave the super-historical people to
their revulsion and their wisdom. Today for once we much prefer become joyful
in our hearts with our lack of wisdom and to make the day a good one for
ourselves as active and progressive people, as those who revere the process.
Let our evaluation of the historical be only a western bias, if only from
within this bias we at least move forward and do not remain still, if only we
always just learn better to carry on history for the purposes of living! For we
wish happily to concede that the super-historical people possess more wisdom
than we do, if only, that is, as we may be confident that we possess more life
than they do. For in this way, at any rate, our lack of wisdom will have more
of a future than their wisdom. Moreover, so as to remove the slightest doubt
about the meaning of this contrast between living and wisdom, I wish to
reinforce my argument with a method well established from time immemorial: I
will immediately establish a few theses.
A historical phenomenon, purely and completely known
and resolved into an object of knowledge, is, for the person who has recognized
it, dead. For in it the person has perceived the delusion, the injustice, the
blind passion, and generally the entire temporal dark horizon of that
phenomenon and, at the same time, in the process he perceives his own
historical power. This power has now become for him, as a knower, powerless,
but perhaps not yet for him as a living person.
History, conceived as pure science, once it became
sovereign, would be a kind of conclusion to living and a final reckoning for
humanity. The historical culture, by contrast, is something healthy which bodes
well for the future only when it comes with a powerful new stream of life, a
developing culture, for example, and thus only at those times when it is ruled
and led on by a higher power and does not itself govern and lead.
Insofar as history stands in the service of
life, it stands in the service of an unhistorical power and will therefore, in
this subordinate position, never be able to (and should never be able to)
become pure science, the way mathematics is, for example. However, the problem to
what degree living generally requires the services of history is one of the
most important questions and concerns with respect to the health of a human
being, a people, or a culture. For with a certain excess of history, living
crumbles away and degenerates, and through this decay history itself also
finally degenerates.
2
However, the fact that living requires the services of
history must be just as clearly understood as the principle, which will be
demonstrated later, that an excess of history harms the living person. In three
respects history belongs to the living person: it belongs to him as an active
and striving person; it belongs to him as a person who preserves and admires;
it belongs to him as a suffering person in need of emancipation. This trinity
of relationships corresponds to a trinity of methods for history, to the extent
that one may make the distinctions, a monumental method, an antiquarian
method, and a critical method
History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful
man, the man who fights a great battle, who needs the exemplary men, teachers,
and comforters and cannot find them among his contemporary companions. Thats
the way history belonged to Schiller: for our age is so bad, said Goethe, that
the poet no longer encounters any useful nature in the human life surrounding
him. In considering the active men, Polybius, for example, calls political
history the right preparation for ruling a state and the most outstanding
teacher, something which, through the memory of other peoples accidents,
advises us to bear with resolution the changes in our happiness.*
In order not to despair and feel disgust in the midst
of weak and hopeless idlers, surrounded by apparently active, but really only
agitated and fidgeting companions, the active man looks behind him and
interrupts the path to his goal to take a momentary deep breath. His purpose is
some happiness or other, perhaps not his own, often that of a people or of
humanity collectively. He runs back away from resignation and uses history as a
way of fighting resignation. For the most part, no reward beckons him on, other
than fame, that is, becoming a candidate for an honoured place in the temple of
history, where he himself can be, in his turn, a teacher, consoler, and advisor
for those who come later.
For his orders state: whatever once was able to expand
the idea of Human being and to satisfy it more beautifully must constantly be
present in order that it remain eternally possible. That the great moments in the struggle of single
individuals make up a chain, that in them a range of mountains of humanity are
joined over thousands of years, that for me the loftiest thing of such a moment
from the distant past is still vital, bright, and greatthat is the basic idea
of the faith in humanity which expresses itself in the demand for a monumental
history. However, with this very demand that greatness should be eternal there
is ignited the most dreadful struggle. For everything else still living cries
out "No!" The monumental should not be createdthat is the oppositions
slogan. The dull habit, the small and the base, filling all corners of the
world, like a heavy atmosphere clouding around everything great, casts itself
as a barrier, deceiving, dampening, and suffocating along the road which
greatness has to go toward immortality.
This way, however, leads through human brains! Through
the brains of anxious and short-lived animals, who always come back to the same
needs and who with difficulty fend off their destruction for a little while.
For as a first priority they want only one thing: to live at any price. Who
might suppose among them the difficult torch race of monumental history,
through which alone greatness lives once more! Nevertheless, a few of them
always wake up again, those who, by a look back at past greatness and
strengthened by their observation, feel so blessed, as if the life of human
beings is a beautiful thing, as if it is indeed the most beautiful fruit of
this bitter plant to know that in earlier times one man once went through this existence
proud and strong, another with profundity, a third with pity and a desire to
helpall however leaving behind one teaching: that the person lives most
beautifully who does not think about existence.
If the common man considers this time span with such
melancholy seriousness and longing, those men on their way to immortality and
to monumental history knew how to bring matters to an Olympian laughter or at
least to a lofty scorn. Often they climbed with irony into their graves, for
what was there of them to bury! Surely only what had always impressed them as
cinders, garbage, vanity, animality and what now sinks into oblivion, long
after it was exposed to their contempt. But one thing will live on, the
monogram of their most essential individual essence, a work, a deed, an
uncommon inspiration, a creation. That will live, because no later world can do
without it. In this most blissful form fame is indeed something more than the
expensive piece of our amour propre, as Schopenhauer has called it. It
is the belief in the unity and continuity of the greatness of all times. It is
a protest against the changes of the generations and transience!
Nevertheless, to learn right away something new from
the same example, how fleeting and weak, how imprecise that comparison would
be! If the comparison is to carry out that powerful effect, how much of the
difference must be missed in the process. How forcefully must the individuality
of the past be wrenched into a general shape, with all its sharp corners and
angles broken off for the sake of the correspondence! In fact, basically
something that once was possible could appear possible a second time only if
the Pythagoreans were correct in thinking that with the same constellations of
the celestial bodies the same phenomena on the Earth also had to repeat
themselves, even in small single particulars, so that when the stars have a
certain position relative to each other, a Stoic and an Epicurean will, in an
eternal recurrence, unite and assassinate Caesar and, with another stellar
position, Columbus will eternally rediscover America.
As long as the soul of historical writing lies in the
great driving impulses which a powerful man derives from it, as long as the
past must be written about as worthy of imitation, as capable of being
imitated, with the possibility of a second occurrence, history is definitely in
danger of becoming something altered, reinterpreted into something beautiful,
and thus coming close to free poeticizing. Indeed, there are times when one
cannot distinguish at all between a monumental past and a mythic fiction,
because from a single world one of these same impulses can be derived as easily
as the other. Thus, if the monumental consideration of the past rules
over the other forms of analyzing it, I mean, over the antiquarian and the
critical methods, then the past itself suffers harm. Really large parts
of it are forgotten, despised, and flow forth like an uninterrupted gray flood,
and only a few embellished facts raise themselves up above, like islands.
Something unnatural and miraculous strikes our vision of the remarkable person
who becomes especially visible, just like the golden hips which the pupils of
Pythagoras wished to attribute to their master.
Monumental history deceives through its analogies.
With its seductive similarities, it attracts the spirited man to daring acts
and the enthusiastic man to fanaticism. If we imagine this history really in
the hands and heads of the talented egoists and the wild crowds of evil
rascals, then empires are destroyed, leaders assassinated, wars and revolutions
instigated, and the number of the historical effects in themselves, that is,
the effects without adequate causes, increased once more. So much for the
reminders of the injuries which monumental history can cause among great and
active people, whether they were good or evil, but look at what it brings about
when the impotent and inactive empower themselves with it and serve it.
Let us
take the simplest and most frequent example. If we imagine to ourselves
uncultured and weakly cultured natures energized and armed by monumental
cultural history, against whom will they now direct their weapons? Against
their hereditary enemies, the strong cultural spirits and also against the only
ones who are able to learn truly from that history, that is, for life, and to
convert what they have learned into noble practice. For them the path will be
blocked and the air darkened, if we dance around a half-understood monument of
some great past or other like truly zealous idolaters, as if we wanted to
state: See, that is the true and real culture. What concern of yours is
becoming and willing! Apparently this dancing swarm possesses even the
privilege of good taste. For the creative man always stands at a disadvantage
with respect to the man who only looks on and does put his hands to work, just
as, for example, the political know-it-all has always been wiser, more just,
and more considerate than the ruling statesman.
But if we want to transfer into the area of culture
the customs of popular agreement and the popular majority and, as it were, to
require the artist to stand in his own defence before the forum of
aesthetically inert types, then we can take an oath in advance that he will be
condemned, not in spite of but just because of the fact that his judges
have solemnly proclaimed the canon of monumental art (that is, in accordance
with the official explanation of art which in all ages has had effects).
Whereas, for the judges everything which is not yet monumental, because it is
contemporary, always lacks, first, the need for history, second, the clear
inclination toward history, and third, the very authority of history. On the
other hand, their instinct tells them that art can be struck dead by art. The
monumental is definitely not to rise up once more. And for that their instinct
uses precisely what has the authority of the monumental from the past.
So they are knowledgeable about art because they generally
like to get rid of art. They behave as if they were doctors, while basically
they are only concerned with mixing poisons. Thus, they develop their languages
and their taste, in order to explain in their discriminating way why they so
persistently disapprove of all offerings of more nourishing artistic food. For
they do not want greatness to arise. Their method is to say: See! Greatness is
already there! In truth, this greatness that is already there is of as little
concern to them as what arises out of it. Of that their life bears witness.
Monumental history is the theatrical costume in which they pretend that their
hate for the powerful and the great of their time is a fulfilling admiration
for the strong and the great of past times. In this, through disguise they
invert the real sense of that method of historical observation into its
opposite. Whether they clearly know it or not, they certainly act as if their
motto were: let the dead bury the living.
Each of the three existing types of history is right
only for a single area and a single climate; on every other one
it grows up into a destructive weed. If a man who wants to create greatness
uses the past, then he will empower himself through monumental history. On the
other hand, the man who wishes to emphasize the customary and traditionally
valued cultivates the past as an antiquarian historian. Only the man whose
breast is oppressed by a present need and who wants to cast off his load at any
price has a need for critical history, that is, history which sits in judgment
and passes judgment. From the thoughtless transplanting of plants stem many
ills: the critical man without need, the antiquarian without reverence, and the
student of greatness without the ability for greatness are the sort who are
receptive to weeds estranged from their natural mother earth and therefore to
degenerate growths.
3
History belongs secondly to the man who preserves and
honours, to the person who with faith and love looks back in the direction from
which he has come, where he has been. Through this reverence he, as it were,
gives thanks for his existence. While he nurtures with a gentle hand what has
stood from time immemorial, he want to preserve the conditions under which he
came into existence for those who are to come after him. And so he serves life.
His possession of his ancestors household goods changes the ideas in such a
soul, for those goods are far more likely to take possession of his soul. The
small, limited, crumbling, and archaic keep their own worth and integrity,
because the conserving and honouring soul of the antiquarian man settles on
these things and there prepares for itself a secret nest. The history of his
city becomes for him the history of his own self. He understands the walls, the
turreted gate, the dictate of the city council, and the folk festival like an
illustrated diary of his youth, and he rediscovers for himself in all this his
force, his purpose, his passion, his opinion, his foolishness, and his bad
habits. He says to himself, here one could live, here one can live, and here
one can go on living, because we endure and do not collapse overnight. Thus,
with this We he looks back over the past amazing lives of individuals and
feels himself like the spirit of the house, the family, and the city. From time
to time he personally greets from the distant, obscure, and confused centuries
the soul of his people as his own soul. A feeling of completion and
premonition, a scent of almost lost tracks, an instinctively correct reading
even of a past which has been written over, a swift understanding of the erased
and reused parchments, which have, in fact, been erased and written over many
times these are his gifts and his virtues. With them stands Goethe in front
of the memorial to Erwin von Steinbach.
Such a sense and attraction led the Italians of the
Renaissance and reawoke in their poets the old Italian genius, to a
wonderfully renewed sound of the ancient lyre, as Jakob Burckhardt says.
Sometimes it seems as if it is an obstinacy and lack
of understanding which keeps individuals, as it were, screwed tight to these
companions and surroundings, to this arduous daily routine, to these bare
mountain ridges, but it is the most healthy lack of understanding, the most
beneficial to the community, as anyone knows who has clearly experienced the
frightening effects of an adventurous desire to wander away, sometimes even
among entire hordes of people, or who sees close up the condition of a people
which has lost faith in its ancient history and has fallen into a restless
cosmopolitan choice and a constant search for novelty after novelty. The
opposite feeling, the sense of well being of a tree for its roots, the
happiness to know oneself in a manner not entirely arbitrary and accidental,
but as someone who has grown out of a past, as an heir, flower, and fruit, and
thus to have ones existence excused, indeed justifiedthis is what people
nowadays lovingly describe as the real historical sense.
Now, that is naturally not the condition in which a
person would be most capable of dissolving the past into pure knowledge. Thus,
we also perceive here what we discerned in connection with monumental history,
that the past itself suffers, so long as history serves life and is ruled by
the drive for living. To speak with some freedom through an illustration, the
tree feels its roots more than it can see them. The extent of this feeling,
however, is measured by the size and streength of its visible branches. If the
tree makes a mistake here, then how mistaken it will be about the entire forest
around it! From that forest the tree only knows and feels something insofar as
this hinders or helps it, but not otherwise. The antiquarian sense of a person,
a civic community, or an entire people always has a very highly restricted
field of vision. It does not perceive most things at all, and the few things
which it does perceive it looks at far too closely and in isolation. It cannot
measure it and therefore takes everything as equally important. Thus, for the
antiquarian sense each single thing is too important. For it assigns to the things
of the past no difference in value and proportion which would distinguish
things from each other fairly; but always measures the mass and proportions of
things only with reference to the antiquarian individual or people looking back
into the past.
Here there is always an imminent danger: in the end
everything old and past, especially what still enters a field of vision, is
simply taken as equally worthy of reverence, but everything which does not fit
this respect for ancient things, like the new and the coming into being, is
rejected and treated as hostile. So even the Greeks tolerated the archaic style
of their plastic arts alongside the free and the great styles. Indeed, they not
only tolerated later the pointed noses and the frosty smiles, but even made
them into an elegant fashion. When the sense of a people is hardened like this,
when history serves the life of the past in such a way that it buries further
living, especially higher living, when the historical sense no longer conserves
life, but mummifies it, then the tree dies unnaturally, from the top gradually
down to the roots, and at last the roots themselves are generally destroyed.
Antiquarian history itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer
inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present. Then
reverence withers away. The scholarly habit lives on without it and orbits in
an egotistical and self-satisfied manner around its own centre. Then we get a
glimpse of the wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting, a restless
compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in
a mouldy smell. With the antiquarian style, he manages to corrupt even a
significant talent, a noble need, into an insatiable new lust, a desire for
everything really old. Often he sinks so low that he is finally satisfied with
any nourishment and takes pleasure in gobbling up for himself the dust of
biographical rubbish.
But even when this degeneration does not enter into
it, when antiquarian history does not lose the basis upon which it alone can
take root as a cure for living, enough dangers still nevertheless remain,
especially if it becomes too powerful and grows over the other ways of dealing
with the past. Antiquarian history knows only how to preserve life, not
how to generate it. Therefore, it always undervalues what is coming into being,
because it has no instinctive feel for it, the way, for example, monumental
history has. Thus, antiquarian history hinders the powerful willing of new
things; it cripples the active man, who always, as an active person, will and
must set aside reverence to some extent. The fact that something has become old
now gives birth to the demand that it must be immortal, for when a man reckons
what every such ancient fact, an old custom of his fathers, a religious belief,
an inherited political right, has undergone throughout its existence, what a
sum of reverence and admiration from individuals and generations ever since,
then it seems presumptuous or even criminal to replace such an antiquity with
something new and to set up in opposition to such a numerous cluster of revered
and admired things the single fact of what is coming into being and what is
present.
Here it becomes clear how, often enough, a third
method of analyzing the past is necessary for human beings, alongside the
monumental and the antiquarian: the critical method. Once again this is
in the service of living. A person must have the power and from time to time
use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live. He
manages to do this by dragging the past before the court of justice,
investigating it meticulously, and finally condemning it. Every past is worthy
of condemnation, for that is how it stands with human things: in them human
force and weakness have always been strong. Here it is not righteousness which
sits in the judgment seat or, even less, mercy which announces judgment, but
life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable self-desiring force. Its judgment is
always unmerciful, always unjust, because it never flows from a pure spring of
knowledge, but in most cases the judgment would be like that anyway, even if
righteousness itself were to utter it. For everything that arises is worth
destroying. Therefore, it would be better that nothing arose. It requires a
great deal of power to be able to live and to forget just how much living and
being unjust are one and the same. Luther himself once voiced the opinion that
the world only came into being through the forgetfulness of God; for if God had
thought about heavy artillery, he would not have made the world. From time to
time, however, this same life, which uses forgetting, demands the temporary
destruction of this forgetfulness. For if it should be made quite clear how
unjust the existence of something or other is, a right, a caste, a dynasty, for
example, this thing really merits destruction.
For if
its past is analyzed critically, then we grasp with a knife at its roots and go
cruelly beyond all reverence. It is always a dangerous process, that is, dangerous
for life itself. And people or ages serving life in this way, by judging
and destroying a past, are always dangerous and in danger. For since we are now
the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their
aberrations, passions, mistakes, even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself
from this chain entirely. When we condemn those mistakes and consider ourselves
released from them, then we have not overcome the fact that we are derived from
them. In the best case, we bring the matter to a conflict between our inherited
customary nature and our knowledge, in fact, even to a war between a new strict
discipline and how we have been brought up and what has been congenital to us
from time immemorial. We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second
nature, so that the first nature atrophies. It is an attempt to give oneself,
as it were, a past a posteriori [after the fact], out of which we may be
descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended, always a
dangerous attempt, because it is so difficult to find a borderline to the
denial of the past and because the second natures usually are weaker than the
first. Too often what remains is a case of someone who understands the good
without doing it, because we also understand what is better without being able
to do it. But here and there victory is nevertheless achieved, and for the
combatants, for those who make use of critical history for their own living,
there is even a remarkable consolation, namely, they know that that first
nature was at one time or another once a second nature and that every
victorious second nature becomes a first nature.
4
These are the services which history can carry out for
living. Every person and every people, according to its goals, forces, and
needs, uses a certain knowledge of the past, sometimes as monumental history,
sometimes as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history, but not as
a crowd of pure thinkers merely peering at life, not as people eager for
knowledge, individuals only satisfied by knowledge, for whom an increase of
understanding is the goal itself, but always only for the purpose of living
and, in addition, under the command and the highest guidance of this purpose.
This is the natural relationship to history of an age, a culture, and a people:
summoned up by hunger, regulated by the degree of the need, held to limits by
the plastic power within, the fact that the understanding of the past is desired
at all times only to serve the future and the present, not to weaken the
present, not to uproot a forceful living future. All that is simple, as the
truth is simple, and is also immediately convincing for anyone who does not
begin by letting himself be guided by historical proof.
And now for a quick look at our time! We are
frightened and run back. Where is all the clarity, all the naturalness and
purity of that connection between life and history? How confusedly,
excessively, and anxiously this problem now streams before our eyes! Does the
fault lie with us, the observers? Or has the constellation of life and history
truly altered, because a powerful and hostile star has interposed itself
between them? Other people might point out that we have seen things
incorrectly. We, however, want to state what we think we see. For its true
that such a star has come in between, an illuminating and beautiful star. The
constellation has truly changed through science, through the demand that
history is to be a science. Now not only does life no longer rule and
control knowledge about the past, but also all the border markings have been
ripped up, and everything that used to exist has come crashing down onto
people. As far back as there has been a coming into being, far back into the
endless depths, all perspectives have also shifted. No generation ever saw such
an incalculable spectacle as is shown now by the science of universal becoming,
by history. Of course, history even demonstrates this with the dangerous boldness
of its motto: Fiat veritas, pereat vita.
Let us picture to ourselves the spiritual result
produced by this process in the soul of the modern man. Historical knowledge
streams out of invincible sources in on him always renewing itself with more.
Strange and disconnected things push forward. Memory opens all its gates and is
nevertheless not open wide enough. Nature strives its utmost to receive these
strange guests, to arrange and honour them. But these are at war with each other,
and it appears necessary to overcome them all forcibly, in order not to destroy
oneself in their conflict. Habituation to such a disorderly, stormy, and
warring household gradually becomes a second nature, although it is immediately
beyond question that this second nature is much weaker, much more restless, and
completely less healthy than the first. Modern man finally drags a huge crowd
of indigestible rocks of knowledge around inside him, which then occasionally
audibly bang around in his body, as it says in fairy tales. Through this noise
the most characteristic property of this modern man reveals itself: the
remarkable conflict on the inside, to which nothing on the outside corresponds,
an outside to which nothing inside corresponds, a conflict of which ancient
peoples were ignorant.
Knowledge, taken up to excess without hunger, even in
opposition to any need, now works no longer as a motive which reshapes and has
a drive toward the outside. It stays hidden in a certain chaotic inner world,
which that modern man describes with a strange pride as an Inwardness
peculiar to him. Thus, people say that we have the content and that only the
form is lacking. But with respect to every living person this is a totally
improper contradiction. For that very reason our modern culture is not
something living, because it does let itself be understood at all without that
contradiction; that is, it is really no true culture, but only a way of knowing
about culture. There remain in it thoughts of culture, feelings of culture, but
no cultural imperatives come from it. In contrast to this, what really
motivates and moves outward into visible action then often amounts to not much
more than a trivial convention, a pathetic imitation, or even a crude grimace.
At that point the inner feeling is probably asleep, like the snake which has
swallowed an entire rabbit and then lies down contentedly still in the sunlight
and avoids all movements other than the most essential.
The inner process, that is now the entire business, that
essentially is education. Everyone who wanders by has only one wish, that
such an education does not collapse from indigestion. Think, for example, of a
Greek going past such a culture. He would perceive that for more recent people
educated and historically educated appear to belong together, as if they
were one and the same and distinguished only by the number of words. If he
talked of his own principle that it is possible for an individual to be
very educated and nevertheless not to be historically educated at all, then
people would think they had not heard him correctly and shake their heads. That
famous group from a not too distant past, I mean those very Greeks, had in the
period of their greatest power an unhistorical sense tried and tested in rough
times. A contemporary man magically forced to return back into that world would
presumably find the Greeks very uneducated. In that reaction, of course, the
secret of modern education, so painstakingly disguised, would be exposed to
public laughter. For we modern people have nothing at all which comes from us.
Only because we fill and overfill ourselves with foreign ages, customs, arts,
philosophies, religions, and discoveries do we become something worthy of
consideration, that is, like wandering encyclopaedias, as some ancient Greek
who strayed into our age would perhaps put it.
However, people encounter the entire value of
encyclopaedias only in what is inside, in the contents, not in what is on the
outside or in the binding and on the cover. Thus, all modern education is
essentially inner. The bookbinder has printed on the outside something to this
effect: Handbook of inner education for external barbarians. In fact, this
contrast between inner and outer makes the outer even more barbaric than it
would have to be, if a rough people were evolving out of themselves only
according to their basic needs. For what means does nature still have at its
disposal to deal with super-abundance forcing itself outward? Only one means,
to take it as lightly as possible in order to shove it aside again quickly and
dispose of it. From that arises a habit of not taking real things seriously any
more. From that arises the weak personality, as a result of which reality,
what exists, makes only an insignificant impression. Finally on the outside
people become constantly more venial and more comfortable and widen the
disturbing gulf between content and form until they are insensitive to the
barbarism, so long as the memory is always newly stimulated, so long as constantly
new things worthy of knowledge flow by, which can be neatly packaged in the
compartments of memory.
The culture of a people, in contrast to that
barbarism, was once described (with some justice, in my view) as a unity of the
artistic style in all expressions of the life of the people. This description
must not be misunderstood, as if the issue were an opposition between barbarism
and a beautiful style. The people to whom we ascribe a culture should
only exist in a really vital unity and not so miserably split apart into inner
and outer, into content and form. Anyone who wants to strive after and foster
the culture of a people strives after and fosters this higher unity and, for
the sake of a true education, works to destroy the modern notion of being educated.
He dares to consider how the health of a people which has been disturbed by
history could be restored, how the people could find their instinct once again
and with that its integrity.
Now I want to speak bluntly about us Germans of the
present day. It is our lot to suffer more than any other people from that
weakness of the personality and from the contradiction between content and
form. Form is commonly accepted by us Germans as a convention, as a disguise
and a pretence, and is thus, when not hated, then at any rate not particularly
loved. It would be even more just to say that we have an extraordinary anxiety
about the word convention and also about the fact of convention. In this
anxiety, the German abandoned the French school, for he wanted to become more
natural and thereby more German. Now, however, with this thereby he seems to
have made a miscalculation: having run off away from the school of convention,
he now lets himself go how and where he has the mere desire to go, and
basically imitates hapazardly whatever he wants in semi-forgetfulness of what
in earlier times he imitated meticulously and often happily.
Thus, measured against earlier times, people today
still live according to a slipshod, incorrect French convention, as all our
moving, standing, conversing, clothing, and dwelling demonstrate. While people
believe they are escaping back to the natural, they think only about
letting themselves go, about comfort, and about the smallest possible amount of
self-control. Wander through a German city: everything is conventional,
compared to the particular national characteristics of foreign cities. This
shows itself in negatives: all is colourless, worn out, badly copied,
apathetic. Each man goes about as he wishes, but not with a forceful desire
rich in ideas, but following the laws which the general haste, along with the
general desire for comfort, establishes. A piece of clothing, whose invention
required no brain power, whose manufacture took no time, an article of clothing
derived from foreigners and imitated as casually as possible, instantly counts
among the Germans as a contribution to German national dress. The sense of form
they disavow almost ironically, for indeed they do have the sense of the
content: after all, they are the renowned people of the inward life.
However, there is now a well-known danger with this
inwardness: the content itself, which people assume they cannot see at all from
the outside, may one day happen to disappear. From the outside people would not
notice either its absence or its earlier presence. But even if people think
that, in any case, the German people are as far as possible from this danger;
the foreigner will always have a certain justification when he levels the
accusation at us that our inner life is too weak and unorganized to be
effective on the outside and to give itself a shape. This inward life can to a
rare degree well prove delicately sensitive, serious, strong, and sincere, and
perhaps even richer than the inner lives of other peoples. But as a totality it
remains weak, because all the beautiful threads are not tied together into a
powerful knot. Thus, the visible act is not the total action and
self-revelation of this inwardness, but only a weak or crude attempt of a few
strands or other to will something whose appearance might for once pass muster
as the totality. And so one cannot judge the German according to a single
action. As an individual he is still completely hidden after the action. As is
well known, he must be measured by his thoughts and feelings, and he expresses
these nowadays in his books. If only these very books did not awaken, in recent
times more than ever, a doubt about whether the famous inwardness is really
still sitting in its inaccessible little temple. It would be a horrible idea
that one day it may have disappeared and now the only thing still left behind
is the externality, that arrogant, clumsy, and respectfully unkempt
externality, as the hallmark of the German. Almost as terrible as if that
inwardness, without people being able to see it, sat inside, counterfeit,
coloured, painted over, and had become an actress, if not something worse, as,
for example, Grillparzer, who stood on the sidelines as a quiet observer,
appears to assume about his experience as a dramatist in the theatre: We feel
with abstractions, he says; we hardly know any more how feeling expresses
itself among our contemporaries. We let our feelings jump about in ways they no
longer do nowadays. Shakespeare has destroyed everything for us moderns.
This is a single example, perhaps too quickly
generalized. But how fearful would his justified generalization be if the
individual cases should force themselves upon the observer far too frequently;
how despairingly the statement would echo: We Germans feel abstractedly; we
have all been corrupted by history, a statement which would destroy at the
root every hope for a national culture still to come. For that kind of hope
grows out of the faith in the authenticity and the immediacy of German feeling,
from the belief in the undamaged inner life. What is there still to be hoped
for or still believed, if the well spring of believing and hoping has
deteriorated, if the inner life has learned to leap about, to dance, to put on
make up, and to express itself outwardly with abstraction and calculation and
gradually to lose itself? And how is the great productive spirit still to
maintain himself among a people no longer sure of its unified inner life, which
falls apart into sections, with a miseducated and seduced inner life among the
cultured and an inadequate inner life among the uneducated? How is he to keep
going if the unity of the peoples feeling gets lost, if, in addition, he knows
that the very part which calls itself the educated portion of the people and which
arrogates to itself a right to the national artistic spirit has false and
biassed feeling. Here and there the judgment and taste of individuals may
themselves have become finer and more sublimated, but that is no compensation
for him. It torments the productive spirit to have to speak, as it were, only
to one class and no longer to be necessary within his own people. Perhaps he
would now sooner bury his treasure, since it disgusts him to be exquisitely
patronized by one class, while his heart is full of pity for all. The instinct
of the people no longer comes to meet him. It is useless to stretch out ones
arms toward it in yearning. What now still remains for him, other than to turn
his enthusiastic hate against that restricting prohibition, against the
barriers erected in the so-called education of his people, in order at least,
as a judge, to condemn what for him, the living person and the producer of
life, is destruction and degradation? Thus, he exchanges the deep understanding
of his own fate for the divine pleasure of the creator and helper and finishes
up a lonely man of knowledge, a supersaturated wise man.
It is the most painful spectacle. Generally whoever
sees it will recognize a holy need here. He tells himself: here it is necessary
to give assistance; that higher unity in the nature and soul of a people must
be established once more; that gulf between the inner and the outer must
disappear again under the hammer blows of necessity. What means should he now
reach for? However, what remains for him now other than his deep understanding?
By speaking out on this and spreading awareness of it, by sowing from his full
hands, he hopes to plant a need. And out of the strong need will one day arise
the strong deed. And so that I leave no doubt where I derive the example of
that need, that necessity, that knowledge, here my testimony should stand
explicitly, that it is German unity in that highest sense which we are
striving for and striving for more passionately than for political
reunification, the unity of the German spirit and life after the destruction
of the opposition of form and content, of inwardness and convention.
5
In five respects the supersaturation of an age in
history seems to me hostile and dangerous to life. Through such an excess that
hitherto mentioned contrast between inner and outer is produced and, in the
process, the personality is weakened; through this excess an age is caught up
in the fantasy that it possesses the rarest virtue, righteousness, in a higher
degree than any other time; third, through this excess the instincts of a
people are disrupted, and the individual no less than the totality is hindered
from developing maturely; fourth,.through this excess the always dangerous
belief in the old age of humanity takes root, the belief that we are late
arrivals and epigones; fifth, through this excess an age attains the dangerous
mood of irony about itself and, from that, an even more dangerous cynicism. In
this, however, it increasingly ripens towards a cleverly egotistical practice,
through which the forces of life are crippled and finally destroyed.
And now back to our first statement: modern man
suffers from a weakened personality. Just as the Roman in the time of the
Caesars became un-Roman with regard to the area of the earth standing at his
disposal, as he lost himself among the foreigners streaming in and degenerated
with the cosmopolitan carnival of gods, customs, and arts, so matters must go
with the modern person who continually allows his historical artists to prepare
the celebration of a world market fair. He has become a spectator, enjoying
himself and wandering around, converted into a condition in which even great
wars and huge revolutions are hardly able to change anything momentarily. The
war has not yet ended, and already it is transformed on printed paper a hundred
thousand times over; it is already being promoted as the newest stimulant for
the exhausted palate of those greedy for history. It appears almost impossible
that a strong and full tone will be produced even by the most powerful plucking
of the strings. It dies away again immediately; in the next moment it is
already growing fainter, softly evaporating without force into history. To
state the matter in moral terms: you do not manage to hold onto what is noble
any more; your deeds are sudden bangs, not rolling thunder. If the very
greatest and most wonderful thing is accomplished, it must nevertheless move to
Hades silently without any fuss. For art runs away when you instantly throw
over your actions the roof of the historical marquee. The person there who
wants to understand immediately, to calculate and grasp, where he should in an
enduring shock hang onto the unknowable as something sublime, may be called
intelligent, but only in the sense in which Schiller speaks of the
understanding of the intelligent person: he does not see something which even
the child sees; he does not hear something which the child hears; this
something is precisely the most important thing. Because he does not
understand this, his understanding is more childish than the childs and more
simplistic than simple mindedness, in spite of the many shrewd wrinkles on his
parchment-like features and the virtuoso practice of his fingers unravelling
complexities. This amounts to the fact that he has destroyed and lost his
instinct. Now he can no longer let the reins hang loose, trusting the divine
animal, when his understanding wavers and his road leads through deserts.
Thus, individuality becomes timid and unsure and can no longer believe in
itself. It sinks into itself, into the inner life. That means here only into
the piled-up jumble of scholarly data which does not work towards the outside,
instruction which does not become living. If we look for a moment out to the
exterior, then we notice how the expulsion of instinct by history has converted
people almost into nothing but abstraction and shadows. No one gambles his
identity on that instinct any more. Instead he masks himself as educated man,
as scholar, as poet, as politician.
If we seize such masks because we believe the matter
is something serious and not merely a marionette play (for they all paper
themselves over with seriousness), then we suddenly have only rags and bright
patches in our hands. Therefore, we should no longer allow ourselves to be
deceived and should yell at them, Strip off your jackets or be what you seem.
No longer should everyone with seriousness in his blood turn into a Don
Quixote, for he has something better to do than to keep getting into fights
with such illusory realities. In any case, however, he must keenly inspect each
mask, cry Halt! Who goes there? and pull the mask down onto their necks.
Strange! We should have thought that history
encouraged human beings above all to be honest, even if only an honest fool.
This has always been its effect. But nowadays it is no longer that! Historical
culture and the common uniform of the middle class together both rule at the
same time. While never before has there been such sonorous talk of the free
personality, we never once see personalities, to say nothing of free people,
but only anxiously disguised universal people. Individuality has drawn itself
back into the inner life: on the outside we no longer observe any of it. This
being the case, we could doubt whether, in general, there could be causes
without effects. Or should a race of eunuchs be necessary as a guard over the
great historical harem of the world? For them, of course, pure objectivity is
well and truly established on their faces. However, it does seem almost as if
it was their assignment to stand guardian over history, so that nothing comes
out of it other than just histories without events, to ensure that through it
no personalities become free, that is, true to themselves and true with respect
to others in word and deed. First through this truthfulness will the need, the
inner misery of the modern man, see the light of day, and in place of that
anxiously concealed convention and masquerade, art and religion will be able to
enter as true helpers, in order to cultivate a common culture corresponding to
real needs, culture which does not, like the present universal education, just
teach one to lie to oneself about these needs and thus to become a wandering
lie.
In what an unnatural, artificial, and definitely
unworthy position must the most sincere of all sciences, the truly naked
goddess Philosophy, be in a time which suffers from universal education. In
such a world of compulsory external uniformity she remains the learned
monologue of a solitary stroller, an individuals accidental hunting trophy, a
hidden parlour secret, or harmless prattle between academic old men and
children. No one is allowed to venture on fulfilling the law of philosophy on
his own. No one lives philosophically, with that simple manly truth, which
acted forcefully on a man in ancient times, wherever he was and whatever he
did, to behave as a Stoic if he had once promised to be true to the Stoa.
All modern philosophy is political and police-like,
restricted to the appearance of learning through the ruling powers, churches,
academies, customs, and human cowardice. What remains in it are sighs of If
only or the knowledge There was once. Philosophy is wrong to be at the heart
of historical education, if it wants to be more than an inner repressed
knowledge without effect. If the modern human being were only courageous and
decisive, if he were in his hostility not just an inner being, he would banish
philosophy. Thus, he contents himself by modestly covering up her nudity. Yes,
people think, write, print, speak, and learn philosophically; to this extent
almost everything is allowed. Only in action, in so-called living, are things
otherwise. There only one thing is always allowed, and everything else is
simply impossible. So historical culture wills it. Are they still human beings,
we ask ourselves then, or perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines?
Of Shakespeare Goethe once said, "No one hated
the material costume more than he. He understood really well the inner costume
of human beings, and here all people are alike. People say he presented the
Romans excellently. I do not find that. They are nothing but inveterate
Englishmen, but naturally they are human beings, people from the ground up, and
the Roman toga suits them well enough." Now, I ask if it might be possible
to lead out our contemporary men of letters, men of the people, officials, and
politicians as Romans. It will not work, because they are not human beings, but
only physical compendia and, as it were, concrete abstractions. If they should
have character and their own style, this is buried so deep that it has no power
at all to struggle out into the daylight. If they are to be human beings, then
they are that only for the man who tests the kidneys. For everyone else they
are something other, not human beings, not gods, not animals, but historically
educated pictures, completely and utterly education, picture, form, without
demonstrable content, unfortunately only bad form and, in addition, uniform. And
in this sense may my claim may be understood and considered: History is
borne only by strong personalities; the weak personalities it obliterates
completely. It comes down to this: history bewilders feeling and sensing
where these are not strong enough to measure the past against themselves.
Anyone who does not dare any longer to trust himself
but who involuntarily turns to history for his feeling and seeks advice by
asking What should I feel here? in his timidity gradually becomes an actor
and plays a role, usually in fact many roles, and therefore he plays each badly
and superficially. Little by little the congruence between the man and his
historical sphere fails. We see no forward young men associating with the
Romans as if they were their equals. They rummage around and dig away in the
remnants of the Greek poets, as if these bodies were ready for their
post-mortem examination and were worthless things, whatever their own literary
bodies might be. If we assume there is a concern in one mans case with
Democritus, then the question always on my lips is this: Why then just
Democritus? Why not Heraclitus? Or Philo? Or Bacon? Or Descartes? and so on to
ones hearts content. And in that case, why then just a philosopher? Why not a
poet, an orator? And why particularly a Greek? Why not an Englishman, a Turk?
Is the past then not large enough to find something, so that you do not make
yourself so ridiculous with whatever you arbitrarily select? But, as I have
mentioned, it is a race of eunuchs; for a eunuch one woman is like another, in
effect, merely one woman, the woman-in-itself, the eternally unapproachable,
and so what drives them is something indifferent, so long as history itself
remains splendidly objective and, of course, protected by precisely the sort
of people who could never create history themselves. And since the eternally
feminine is never attracted to you, then you pull it down to yourselves and
assume, since you are neuters, that history is also a neuter.
However, so that people do not think that I am serious
in comparing history with the eternally feminine, I will express myself much
more clearly: I consider that history is the opposite of the eternally
masculine, but for those who are historically educated through and through it
must be quite unimportant whether history is one or the other. But whatever the
case, such people are themselves neither male nor female, not something common
to both, but always only neutral or, to express myself in a more educated way,
they are just the eternally objective.
If personalities are, first of all, as has been
described, inflated to an eternal loss of subjectivity or, as people say, to
objectivity, then nothing more can work on them. Let something good and right
come about, in action, poetry, or music. Immediately the person emptied out by
his education looks out over the work and asks about the history of the author.
If this author has already created a number of things, immediately the person
must allow himself to point out the earlier and the presumed future progress of
the authors development; right away he will bring in others for comparative
purposes, he will dissect and rip apart the choice of the authors material and
his treatment, and will, in his wisdom, fit the work together again anew, giving
him advice and setting him right about everything. Let the most astonishing
thing occur; the crowd of historical neutrals is always in place ready to
assess the author from a great distance. Momentarily the echo resounds, but
always as Criticism. A short time before, however, the critic did not permit
himself to dream that such an event was possible.
The work never achieves an influence, but only more
Criticism, and the criticism itself, in its turn, has no influence, but leads
only to further criticism. In this business people have agreed to consider a
lot of critics as an influence and a few critics or none as a failure.
Basically, however, everything remains as in the past, even with this
influence. True, people chat for a while about something new, and then about
something else new, and in between do what they always have done. The
historical education of our critics no longer permits an influence on our real
understanding, namely, something that produces an effect on life and action. On
the blackest writing they impress immediately their blotting paper, to the most
delightful drawing they apply their thick brush strokes, which are to be
considered corrections. And then everything is over once again. However, their
critical pens never cease flying, for they have lost power over them and are
led by them rather than leading them. In this excess of their critical
ejaculations, in the lack of control over themselves, in what the Romans call impotentia,
the weakness of the modern personality reveals itself.
6
But let us leave this weakness. Let us rather turn to
a much-praised strength of the modern person, with the truly awkward question
whether, on account of his well-known historical Objectivity, he has a right to
call himself strong, that is, just, and just to a higher degree than the people
of other times. Is it true that this objectivity originates from a heightened
need and demand for justice? Or does it, as an effect with quite different
causes, merely create the appearance that justice might be its real cause? Does
this objectivity perhaps tempt one to a detrimental and too flattering bias
concerning the virtues of modern man? Socrates considered it an illness close
to insanity to imagine oneself in possession of a virtue and not to possess it.
Certainly such conceit is more dangerous than the opposite delusion, suffering
from a mistake or vice. For through the latter delusion it is perhaps still
possible to become better. The former conceit, however, makes a person or a
time daily worse, and, in this case, less just.
Its true that no one has a higher claim on our
admiration than the man who possesses the drive and the power for justice. For
in such people are united and hidden the highest and rarest virtues, as in a
bottomless sea that receives streams from all sides and absorbs them into
itself. The hand of the just man authorized to sit in judgment no longer
trembles when it holds the scales. Unsparingly he puts on weight after weight
even against himself. His eye does not become dim when he sees the pan in the
scales rise and fall, and his voice rings out neither hard nor broken when he
delivers the verdict. If he were a cold demon of knowledge, then he would
spread out around him the ice-cold atmosphere of a terrifying superhuman
majesty, which we would have to be afraid of and not revere. But since he is a
human being and yet has tried to rise above venial doubt to a strong certainty,
above a patient leniency to an imperative You must, above the rare virtue of
magnanimity to the rarest virtue of all, justice, since he now is like this
demon, but from the very beginning without being anything other than a poor
human being, and above all, since in each moment he has to atone for his
humanity and be tragically consumed by an impossible virtue, all this places
him on a lonely height, as the example of the human race most worthy of
reverence. For he wants truth, not as cold knowledge without consequences, but
as the ordering and punishing judge, truth not as a selfish possession of the
individual but as the sacred entitlement to shift all the boundary stones of
egotistical possessions, in a word, truth as the Last Judgment and not at all
as something like the captured trophy desired by the individual hunter.
Only insofar as the truthful man has the unconditional
will to be just is the striving after truth, which is so thoughtlessly
glorified everywhere, something great. By contrast, in the case of duller eyes,
a large number of different sorts of drives (like curiosity, the flight from
boredom, resentment, vanity, playfulness), which have nothing at all to do with
the truth, blend in with that striving for truth which has its roots in
justice. So the world does indeed seem to be full of people who serve the truth,
and yet the virtue of justice is very seldom present, even more rarely
recognized, and almost always hated to the death; whereas, the crowd of the
apparently virtuous in every age march with honour and a great public display.
In truth, few people serve truthfulness, because only a few have the purity of
will to be just, and even among these, the fewest have the strength to be
capable of being just. It is certainly not enough to have only the will for
justice. And the most horrible sufferings have come directly from the drive for
justice without the power of judgment among human beings. For this reason the
general welfare would require nothing more than to scatter the seeds of the
power of judgment as widely as possible, so that the fanatic remained distinguishable
from the judge and blind desire to be a judge distinguishable from the
conscious power to be able to judge. But where would one find a means of
cultivating the power of judgment! Thus, when there is talk of truth and
justice, people remain in an eternal wavering hesitation whether a fanatic or a
judge is talking to them. Hence, we should forgive those who welcome with
special kindness these servers of the truth who possess neither the will nor
the power to judge and who set themselves the task of searching for pure
discovery without regard for consequences or, more clearly, of searching for
the truth from which nothing emerges. There are a great many trivial truths;
there are problems that never require effort, let alone any self-sacrifice, in
order for one to judge them correctly. In this field of the trivial and the
safe, a person indeed succeeds in becoming a cold demon of knowledge. And yet!
When, in especially favourable times, whole cohorts of learned people
and researchers are turned into such demons, it always remains unfortunately
possible that the time in question suffers from a lack of strong and great
righteousness, in short, of the noblest kernel of the so-called drive to the
truth.
Let us now place before our eyes the historical
virtuoso of the present age. Is he the most just man of his time? It is true
that he has cultivated in himself such a tenderness and sensitivity of feeling
that for him nothing human is far distant. The most different times and people
ring out at once from his lyre in harmonious tones. He has become a tuneful
passive thing, which through its resounding tone also works on other passive
things of the same type, until finally the entire air of an age is full of such
delicate reverberations, twanging away in concord. But, in my view, we hear
every original historical major chord only as an overtone, so to speak: the
sturdiness and power of the original can no longer be sensed in the heavenly
thin, celestial, and sharp sound of the strings. Whereas the original tone
usually aroused actions, needs, and terrors, this lulls us to sleep and makes
us weak hedonists. It is as if we have arranged the Eroica Symphony for
two flutes and use it for dreamy opium smokers. By that we may now measure how
things stand among the virtuosi with the highest demands of modern man for a
loftier and purer justice, a virtue which never has anything pleasant, knows no
attractive feelings, and is hard and terrifying.
Measured by that, how low magnanimity stands now on
the ladder of virtues, magnanimity, the characteristic of a few rare
historians! But for many more it is a matter only of tolerance, of leaving
aside all consideration of what cannot be once and for all denied, of editing
and glossing over in a moderate and benevolent way, of an intelligent
acceptance of the fact that the inexperienced man interprets it as a virtue of
justice if the past is generally explained without hard accents and without the
expression of hate. But only the superior power can judge. Weakness must tolerate,
unless it wishes to feign strength and turn justice on the judgment seat into a
performing actress.
There is now still one fearful species of historian
still remaining: efficient, strong, and honest characters, but with narrow
heads. Here good will to be just is present, together with the strong feeling
in the judgments. But all the pronouncements of the judges are false, roughly
for the same reasons that the judgments of the ordinary sworn jury are false.
How unlikely the frequency of historical talent is! To
say nothing at all here about the disguised egoists and fellow travellers, who
adopt a thoroughly objective demeanour for the insidious games they play. And
by the same token to say nothing of the entirely unthinking people who write as
historians in the naive belief that their own age is exactly right in all its
popular views and that to write by the standards of the time generally amounts
to being right, a faith in which each and every religion lives and about which,
in the case of religion, there is nothing more to say. Those naive historians
call Objectivity the process of measuring past opinions and deeds by the
universal public opinion of the moment. Here they find the canon of all truths.
Their work is to adapt the past to contemporary triviality. By contrast, they
call subjective every way of writing history which does not take those
popular opinions as canonical.
And might not an illusion have occurred in the highest
interpretation of the word objectivity? For with this word, people understand a
condition in the historian in which he looks at an event with such purity in
all his motives and consequences that they have no effect at all on his
subject. People mean that aesthetic phenomenon, that state of being detached
from ones personal interests, with which the painter in a stormy landscape,
under lightning and thunder, or on the moving sea looks at his inner picture
and, in the process, forgets his own person. Thus, people also demand from the
historian the artistic tranquillity and the full immersion in things. However,
it is a myth that the picture which things reveal in a person constituted in
this way reflects the empirical essence of things. Or is it the case that
through their own activity, as it were, at these times things depict
themselves, draw a good, likeness of themselves, or photograph themselves on a
purely passive medium?
This would be a mythology and, on top of that, a bad
one. In addition, people might forget that that very moment is the most
powerful and most spontaneous creative moment in the inner life of the artist,
a moment of composition of the very highest order, whose result may well be a
true artistic picture, not a historically true one. To think of history as
objective in this way is the secret work of the dramatist, that is, to think of
everything one after the other, to weave the isolated details into a totality,
always on the condition that a unity of the plan in the material has to be
established, if it is not inherent in it. Thus, man spins a web over the past
and tames it; in this way he expresses his artistic impulse, but not his drive
for truth, his drive for justice. Objectivity and Justice have nothing to do
with each other.
One might imagine a way of writing history which has
no drop of the common empirical truth in it and yet which might be entitled to
claim the highest rating on a scale of objectivity. Indeed, Grillparzer
ventures to clarify this point. What is history then other than the way in
which the spirit of man takes in the events which are impenetrable to him,
something in which only God knows whether there is a relationship holding it
together, in which that spirit replaces an incomprehensible thing with
something comprehensible, underwrites with his ideas of external purposefulness
a totality which really can be known only from within, and also assumes chance
events, where a thousand small causes were at work. At any one time everyone
has his own individual necessity so that millions of trends run next to each
other in parallel, crooked, and straight lines, intersect each other, help,
hinder, flow forward and backwards, thus taking on in relation to each other
the character of chance and, to say nothing of the effects of natural events,
thus render it impossible to prove a compelling, all-encompassing necessity for
events.
However, such necessity, thought of as the result of
that objective look at the matter at hand, should be exposed right away! This is an assumption which, when it is
voiced as dogma by the historian, can only assume an odd form. Schiller, in
fact, is completely clear concerning the essential subjectivity of this
assumption, when he says of the historian: One phenomenon after another begins
to liberate itself from blind contingency and lawless freedom and, as a coordinated
link, to become joined into a harmonious totality, which, of course, is
present only in its depiction. But how should we consider the claim made
in good faith of a famous historical virtuoso, a claim hovering artificially
between tautology and absurdity: The
fact is that all human action and striving are subordinate to the light and
often unnoticed but powerful and irresistible progress of things? In such a
statement we do not feel any mysterious wisdom expressing itself as clear
illogic, as in the saying of Goethes gardener, Nature may let itself be
forced but not compelled, or in the inscription on a booth in a fair ground,
as Swift tells it, "Here you can see the largest elephant in the world
except itself." For what is, in fact, the opposition between the actions
and the drives of men and the process of things? Besides, it strikes me that
such historians, like that one from whom we quoted a sentence, cease to
instruct as soon as they generalize and then reveal a sense of their weakness
in their obscurities. In other sciences generalizations are the most important
thing, insofar as they contain laws. However, if statements like the one we
quoted were to serve as valid laws, one would have to reply that then the work
of the writer of history is changed, for what remains generally true in such
statements, once we remove the irreconcilably dark remainder we spoke about, is
well known and totally trivial. For it is apparent to everyones eye in the
smallest area of experience.
However, for that reason to inconvenience entire
peoples and to spend wearisome years of work on the subject amounts to nothing
more than, as in the natural sciences, to pile experiment on experiment a long
time after the law can be inferred from the present store of experiments.
Incidentally, according to Zoellner, natural science nowadays suffers from a
senseless excess of experimentation.
If the value of a drama is to lie only in the main and
concluding ideas, then drama itself would be the furthest possible route to the
goal, crooked and laborious. And thus I hope history can realize that its
significance is not in universal ideas, like some sort of blossom or fruit, but
that its value comes directly from reworking a well-known, perhaps habitual theme,
a daily melody, in a stimulating way, elevating it, intensifying it to an
inclusive symbol, and thus allowing one to make out in the original theme an
entire world of profundity, power, and beauty.
What is appropriate, however, in this process, before
everything else, is a great artistic potential, a creative hovering above and a
loving immersion in the empirical data, a further poetical composing on the
given typesto this process objectivity certainly belongs, but as a positive
quality. However, too often objectivity is only a phrase. Instead of that
innerly flashing, externally unmoving and mysterious composure in the artists
eyes, the affectation of composure emerges, just as the lack of pathos and
moral power habitually discuises itself in a biting coldness of expression. In
certain cases, the banality of the conviction ventures to appear, that wisdom
of every man, which merely because of itse tedidousness creates the impression
of a calm, unexcited person, in order to pass muster as that artistic condition
in which the subject is silent and becomes completely imperceptible. So
everything which generally does not rouse emotion is sought out, and the driest
expression is precisely the correct one. Indeed, people go as far as to assume
that the person whom a moment in the past does not affect in the slightest
is competent to present it. Philologists and Greeks frequently behave towards
each other in this way. They do not concern themselves with each other in the
least. And people call this objectivity, as well.
Now, in those places where the highest and rarest
matter is to be directly presented, it is absolutely outrageous to find the
deliberate state of indifference, something put on for show, the acquired flat
and sober art of seeking out motives, especially when the vanity of the
historian drives toward this attitude of objective indifference. Incidentally,
with such authors people should base their judgment more closely on the
principle that each mans vanity is inversely proportional to his understanding.
No, at least be honest! Do not seek the appearance of that artistic power truly
called objectivity, and do not seek the appearance of justice, if you have not
been ordained for the fearful vocation of the just. As if it also were the work
of every age to have to be just in relation to everything that has ever been!
As a matter of fact, times and generations never have
the right to be the judges of all earlier times and generations. Such an
troublesome task always falls to only a few individuals, indeed, to the rarest
people. Who compels you then to judge? And so, just test yourselves, whether
you could be just, if you wanted to! As judges you would have to stand higher
than what is being assessed, whereas, you have only come later. The guests who
come last to the table should in all fairness receive the last places. And you
wish to have the first? Then at least do something of the highest and best
order. Perhaps people will then really make a place for you, even if you come
at the end.
You can interpret the past only on the basis of the
highest power of the present. Only
in the strongest tension of your noblest characteristics will you surmise what
from the past is great and worth knowing and preserving. Like by like!
Otherwise you drag the past down to your level. Do not believe a piece of
historical writing if it does not spring out of the head of the rarest of
spirits. You will always perceive the quality of its spirit if it is forced to
express something universal or to repeat once more something universally known.
The true historian must have the power of reshaping the universally known into
what has never been heard and to announce what is universal so simply and
deeply that people overlook the simplicity in the profundity and the profundity
in the simplicity. No person can be simultaneously a great historian, an
artistic person, and a numskull. On the other hand, people should not rate as
insignificant the workers who go around with a cart, piling things up and
sifting through them, on the ground that they will certainly not be able to
become great historians. Even less should we confuse them with numskulls.
Instead, we should see them as the necessary colleagues and manual labourers in
the service of the master, just as the French, with greater naivet than is
possible among the Germans, were accustomed to speak of the historians of
Monsieur Thiers.
Thus, the person of experience and reflection writes
history. Anyone who has not lived through something greater and higher than
everyone else will not know how to interpret something great and lofty from the
past. The utterance of the past is always an oracular pronouncement. You will
understand it only as master builders of the future and as people who know
about the present. People now explain the extraordinarily deep and far-reaching
effect of Delphi by the particular fact that the Delphic priests had precise
knowledge about the past. It is appropriate now to understand that only the man
who builds the future has a right to judge the past. In order to look ahead,
set yourselves an important goal, and at the same time control that voluptuous
analytical drive with which you now lay waste the present and render almost
impossible all tranquillity, all peaceful growth and maturing. Draw around
yourself the fence of a large and extensive hope, an optimistic striving.
Create in yourselves a picture to which the future is to correspond, and forget
the myth that you are epigones. You have enough to plan and to invent when you
imagine that future life for yourselves. But in considering history do not ask
that she show you the "How?" and the "With what?"
If, however, you live your life in the history of
great men, then you will learn from her a high command: to become mature and to
flee away from that paralysing and restricting upbringing of the age, which
sees advantages for itself in not allowing you to become mature, in order to
rule and exploit you, the immature. And when you ask after biographies, then do
not ask for those with the refrain Mr. Soandso and His Age but for those
whose title page must read A Fighter Against His Age. Fill your souls with
Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you have faith in his heroes.
7
When the historical sense reigns unchecked and drags
along with it all its consequences, it uproots the future, because it destroys
illusions and takes from existing things the atmosphere in which they alone can
live. Historical justice, even if it is practised truly and with a purity of
conviction, is therefore a fearful virtue, because it always undermines what is
living and brings about its downfall. Its judgment is always an annihilation.
If behind the historical drive no constructive urge is at work, if things are
not destroyed and cleared away so that a future, something already alive in
hope, builds its dwelling on the liberated ground, if justice alone rules, then
the creative instinct is enfeebled and disheartened.
For example, a religion which is to be turned into
historical knowledge under the power of pure justice, a religion which is to be
scientifically understood through and through, is by the end of this process
immediately destroyed. The reason for this is that in the historical method of
reckoning so many false, crude, inhuman, absurd, and violent things always
emerge that the fully pious atmosphere of illusion in which alone everything
that wants to live can live necessarily disappears. But only in love, only in a
love overshadowed by illusion, does a person create, that is, only in
unconditional belief in perfection and righteousness. Anything which compels a
person no longer to love unconditionally cuts away the roots of his power. He
must wither up, that is, become dishonest.
In effects like this, history is opposed by art. And
only when history takes it upon itself to turn itself into an art work and thus
to become a purely artistic picture can it perhaps maintain the instincts or
even arouse them. Such historical writing, however, would go completely against
the analytical and inartistic trends of our time; indeed, they would consider
it counterfeit. But history which only destroys, without an inner drive to
build guiding it, in the long run makes its implements blas and unnatural. For
such people destroy illusions, and whoever destroys illusions in himself and
others is punished by the strongest tyrant, nature. True, for a fairly long
time one can keep oneself really busy with history completely harmlessly and
thoughtlessly, as if it were an occupation as good as any other. The newer
Theology, in particular, seems to have become involved with history purely
harmlessly, and now it will hardly notice that, in doing so, it stands,
probably very much against its will, in the service of Voltaires crasez.
No one should assume that behind this there is a new
powerfully constructive instinct. For that we would have to let the so-called
Protestant Union be considered the maternal womb of a new religion and someone
like Judge Holtzendorf (the editor of and chief spokesman for the even more
questionable Protestant Bible) as John at the River Jordan. For some time
perhaps the Hegelian philosophy still clouding the brains of older people will
help to promote that harmlessness, somewhat in the way that people
differentiate the Idea of Christianity from its manifold incomplete apparent
forms and convince themselves it is really just a matter of the tendency of
the idea to reveal itself in ever purer forms, and finally as certainly the
purest and most transparent, that is, the hardly visible form in the brain of
the present liberal theologian for the rabble.
However, if we listen to this purest of all
Christianities expressing itself concerning the earlier impure forms of
Christianity, then the uninvolved listener often has the impression that the
talk is not at all about Christianity, but ofnow, what are we to think if we
find Christianity described by the greatest Theologian of the century as the
religion which makes the claim that it can be felt in all true and even in a
few other barely possible religions and when the true church is to be the
one which becomes a flowing mass, where there is no outline, where each part
finds itself sometimes here, sometimes there, and everything mingles freely
with everything else. Once again, what are we to think?
What we can learn from Christianity, how under the
effect of a historicizing treatment it has become blas and unnatural, until
finally a fully historical, that is, an impartial treatment, dissolves it into
pure knowledge about Christianity and thereby destroys it, that fact we can
study in everything which has life. It ceases to live when it is completely
dissected, and it exists in pain and sickness, if we start to practice historical
dissection on it. There are people who believe in a revolutionary and reforming
art of healing in German music among German people. They get angry and consider
it an injustice committed against the most living aspect of our culture when
even such men as Mozart and Beethoven are inundated nowadays with the entire
scholarly welter of biographical detail and are compelled through the
systematic torture of the historical critic to answer to a thousand importunate
questions. Through this method, is it not the case that something which has
definitely not yet exhausted its living effects is dismissed as irrelevant or
at least paralyzed, because we direct our curiosity at countless microscopic
details of the life and the work and seek intellectual problems in places where
we should learn to live and to forget all problems?
Set a pair of such modern biographers to thinking
about the birth place of Christianity or of Luthers Reformation. Their
dispassionate pragmatic curiosity would immediately manage to make every
spiritual action at a distance impossible, just as the most wretched animal can
prevent the origin of the most powerful oak by gobbling down the acorn. All
living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness. If
this veil is taken from them, if people condemn a religion, an art, a genius to
orbit like a star without an atmosphere, then we should no longer wonder about
their rapid decay and the way they become hard and barren. That is the way it
is now with all great things
But every people, indeed every person who wishes to
become mature, needs such an enveloping delusion, such a protecting and veiling
cloud. But today people generally despise becoming mature, because they honour
history more than living. In fact, people exult over the fact that now science
is beginning to rule over living. It is possible that people will attain that
goal, but it is certain that a life so governed is not worth much, because it
is much less living and it establishes a life for the future far less than does
the previous life governed, not by knowledge, but by instinct and powerful
illusory images. But, as stated, it is clearly not to be the era of fully
developed and mature people, of harmonious personalities, but the era of common
work which is as useful as possible. That, however, amounts simply to the fact
that people are to be trained for the purposes of the time, in order to get to
work with their hands as promptly as possible. They are to labour in the
factories of universal utilities before they are mature, indeed, so that in the
process they really no longer become mature, because this would be a luxury,
which would deprive the labour market of a lot of power. We blind some birds,
so that they sing more beautifully. I do not think that todays people sing
more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I do know this: we blind them
early. But the method, the disreputable method which people use to blind them,
is excessively bright, excessively sudden, and excessively changing light.
The young person is whipped through all the centuries. Youngsters who
understand nothing about a war, a diplomatic action, or a trade policy are
considered fit to be introduced to political history.
But then, just as the young person races through
history, so we moderns race through the store rooms of art and listen to
concerts. We really do feel that something sounds different from something
else, that something has a different effect than something else. Constantly
losing more of this feeling of surprise and dislike, becoming excessively
astonished no longer, or finally allowing oneself to enjoy everythingpeople
really call that the historical sense, historical education. Without saying
anything to gloss over the expression: the mass of stuff streaming in is so
great, what is surprising, shocking, barbarous, and powerful, concentrated in
a dreadful cluster, presses so overpoweringly on the young soul that it knows
how to rescue itself only with a deliberate apathy. Where a keener and stronger
consciousness is firmly established, then a very different feeling appears:
disgust. The young man has become homeless and has doubts about all customs and
ideas. Now he knows this fact: that at all times things were different, and
what you are like is irrelevant. In melancholy absence of feeling he lets
opinion on opinion flow past him and understands Holderleins pointed words in
response to his reading of Laertius Diogenes concerning the life and teaching
of the Greek philosophers: Here I have also experienced more of what I have
already come across sometimes, that what passes temporarily by and what comes
and goes in human thoughts and systems strike me as almost more tragic than the
fates which we usually call the only realities.
No, such an overwhelming, anaesthetizing, and powerful
historicizing is certainly not required for the young, as ancient times
demonstrate, and is, indeed, dangerous in the highest degree, as more recent
ages show. But now let us really look at the historical student, the inheritor
of a blas attitude, already apparent all too early, almost in childhood. Now
the method in personal work, the right grip and the elegant tone of the masters
manner, have become his own. An entirely isolated little chapter of the past
has fallen victim to his keen mind and the method he has learned. He has
already produced, indeed, in prouder language, he has created. He has now
become a servant of truth in action and a master in the world empire of
history. If, as a child, he was already prepared now he is already
over-prepared. One only needs to shake him for wisdom to fall into ones lap
with a rattle. But the wisdom is rotten, and each apple has its own worm.
Believe me on this point: when people work in the
scientific factory and are to become useful before they are mature, then
science itself is ruined, just as the slaves used nowadays in this factory are
ruined. I regret that we even find it necessary to use the verbal jargon of the
slave holder and employer to describe such relationships, which should be
thought of as free from utility, free from lifes needs, but the words
Factory, labour market, bargain, exploitation, uttered like all the words
assisting egoism, spontaneously press themselves on the lips when we want to
describe the youngest generation of scholars. The stolid mediocrity becomes
ever more mediocre, science becomes ever more practical economically.
Essentially all the most recent scholars are wise in only a single point, and
in that naturally wiser than all people of the past. In all other points they
are, to speak with care, only infinitely different from all the scholars of the
old school. Nevertheless they demand respect and perquisites for themselves, as
if the state and official opinion were under an obligation to consider the new
coins just as valuable as the old. The labourers have made a working compact
among themselves and decreed that genius is superfluous because each labourer
is stamped as a genius. Presumably a later time will consider how they have
piled up a structure, not built it together.
To those who tirelessly proclaim the modern cry of
combat and sacrifice Division of labour! In rows and tiers! we can once and
for all say clearly and firmly: If you want to advance science as quickly as
possible, you will destory it as quickly as possible, just as you destroy hens,
which you artificially compel to lay eggs much too quickly. Well, in the last
century science has been promoted at an astonishing rate. But take a look now
at the scholars, the exhausted hens. There are in truth no harmonious
natures. They can only cackle more than before, because they lay eggs more
often. Naturally, however, the eggs have become constantly smaller (although
the books have become constantly thicker). As the final natural result, things
resign themselves to the commonly loved Popularizing of science (in addition
to the Feminization and Infantization), that is, the notorious tailoring of
the scientific coat to the body of the motley public (I am attempting here to
cultivate a moderately tailored German to describe a moderately tailored
activity). Goethe saw an abuse in this and demanded that sciences should have
an effect on the external world only through a higher praxis. Besides, to the
older generations of scholars such an abuse appeared (for good reasons)
difficult and tiresome. For similarly good reasons it comes easily to the
younger scholars, because they themselves, with the exception of a really small
corner of knowledge, are the motley public and carry its needs in themselves.
They only need once to settle themselves down comfortably in order for them to
succeed in opening up the small study area to the miscellaneous needs of
popular curiosity.
People pretend that below this action of making
themselves comfortable stands the title the modest condescension of the
scholar for his people; while at bottom the scholar, to the extent that he is
not a scholar but a member of the rabble, is only descending into himself. If
you create for yourself the idea of a people, then you can never think
sufficiently nobly and highly of it. If you thought highly of a people, then
you would also be compassionate towards them and would be on your guard against
offering them your historical nitric acid as a living and refreshing drink. But
at the deepest level you think little of the people, because you are permitted
to have no true and confidently based respect for their future, and you operate
as practical pessimists, I mean as people led by the premonition of
destruction, people who thus become indifferent and permissive towards what is
strange, even towards their own welfare. If only the soil still supports us!
And if it no longer carries us, then that is also all right. So they feel and
live an ironic existence.
8
In fact, it must seem odd, although it is not
contradictory, when to the age which so audibly and insistently is in the habit
of bursting out in the most carefree exulting over its historical culture, I
nevertheless ascribe a style of ironical self-consciousness, a presentiment
which hovers all around it that here is nothing to rejoice about, a fear that
soon all the celebrations over historical knowledge will be gone. Goethe proposed
to us a similar enigma with respect to a single personality in his remarkable
characterization of Newton. Newton found at bottom (or more correctly, at the
top) of his being a dark premonition of his own error, the expression,
noticeable in solitary moments, of, as it were, a consciousness with a superior
power of judgment, something which a certain ironical perspective had gained
over the essential nature dwelling inside him. Thus we find particularly in the
greater people with a higher historical development a consciousness, often
toned down to a universal skepticism, of how much folly and superstition are in
the belief that the education of a people must be so overwhelmingly historical
as it is now, but it has been precisely the most powerful people, that is,
powerful in deeds and works, have lived very differently and have raised their
young people differently. However, that folly and that superstition suit usso
runs the skeptical objectionus, the late comers, the faded last shoots of more
powerful and more happily courageous generations, us, in whom one can see
realized Herods prophecy that one day people would be born with instant gray
beards and that Zeus would exterminate this generation as soon as that sign
became visible to him. Historical culture is really a kind of congenital
gray-haired condition, and those who bear its mark from childhood on would have
to come to the instinctive belief in the old age of humanity. However,
in old age what is suitable now is an old persons occuption, that is, looking
back, tallying the accounts, balancing the books, seeking through memories
consolation in what used to bein short, a historical culture.
The human race, however, is a tough and persistent
thing and does not want to have its steps forward and backwards viewed
according to millennia, indeed hardly according to hundreds of thousands of
years. That is, it does not wish to be viewed at all as a totality by
the infinitely small atomic point of the individual person. Then what will a
couple of thousand years signify (or, put another way, the time period of
thirty-four consecutive human lives, reckoned at sixty years each) so that we
can still speak of the beginning of such a time as still the Youth of Mankind
and the end of it as already the Old Age of Mankind? Is it not much more the
case that in this paralyzing belief in an already faded humanity there sticks
the misunderstanding of an idea of Christian theology inherited from the Middle
Ages, the idea of the imminent end of the world, of the nervously awaited
judgment? Has that idea really changed through the intensified need of history
to judge, as if our time, the last of all possible, has been authorized to
consider itself the universal judge of everything in the past, something which
Christian belief awaits, not in any way from human beings, but from the Son of
Man? In earlier times this was, for humanity as well as for the individual, a
loudly proclaimed memento mori , an always tormenting barb and, so to
speak, the summit of medieval knowledge and conscience. The phrase of more
recent times, called out in a contrasting response, memento vivere,
sounds, to speak openly, still quite timid, is not a full throated cry, and has
something almost dishonest about it. For human beings still sit firmly on the memento
mori and betray the fact through their universal need for history.
In spite of the most powerful beating of its wings,
knowledge cannot tear itself loose in freedom. A deep feeling of hopelessness
is left over and has taken on that historical colouring, because of which all
higher education and culture are now melancholy and dark. A religion which of
all the hours of a persons life considers the last the most important, which
generally predicts the end of earthy life and condemns all living people to
live in the fifth act of the tragedy, certainly arouses the deepest and noblest
forces, but it is hostile to all new cultivation, daring undertakings, and free
desiring. It resists every flight into the unknown, because there it does not
love and does not hope. It lets what is coming into being push forward only
unwillingly, so that at the right time it can force it to the side or sacrifice
it as a seducer of being, as a liar about the worth of existence. What the
Florentines did when, under the influence of Savonarolas sermons calling for
repentance, they organized those famous sacrificial fires of paintings,
manuscripts, mirrors, and masks, Christianity would like to do with every
culture which rouses one to renewed striving and which leads to that slogan memento
vivere.
The stringent and profoundly serious consideration of
the worthlessness of everything which has happened, of the way in which the
world in its maturity is ready for judgment, has evaporated to a skeptical
consciousness that it is in any case good to know everything that has happened,
because it is too late to do anything better. Thus the historical sense makes
its servants passive and retrospective. Its almost the case that only in
momentary forgetfulness, when that very sense is intermittent, does the patient
suffering from the historical fever become active, so that, as soon as the
action is over and done with, he may seize his deed, through analytical consideration
prevent any further effects, and finally flay it for History. In this sense,
we are still living in the Middle Ages, and history is still a disguised
theology, in exactly the same way that the reverence with which the
unscientific laity treat the scientific caste is a reverence inherited from the
clergy. What people in earlier times gave the church, people now give, although
in scantier amounts, to scientific knowledge. However, the fact that people
give was something the church achieved in earlier times, not something first
done by the modern spirit, which, along with its other good characteristics,
instead has something stingy about it, as is well known, and is, so far as the
pre-eminent virtue of generosity is concerned, a piker.
Perhaps this observation is not pleasant, perhaps no
more pleasant than that derivation of the excess of history from the medieval memento
mori and from the hopelessness which Christianity carried in its heart
concerning all future ages of earthly existence. But at any rate people should
replace the explanation which I have put down only hesitantly with better
explanations. For the origin of historical culture and its inherent and totally
radical opposition to the spirit of a new age, of a modern
consciousnessthis origin must itself once again be recognized
historically. History must itself resolve the problem of history.
Knowledge must turn its barbs against itself. This triple Must is
the spiritual imperative of the new age, if there is in it truly something
new, powerful, vital, and original, or if, to leave the Romance peoples out of
consideration, it should be the case that we Germans, in all higher matters of
culture, always have to be merely followers just because that is the only
thing we could be, as William Wackernagel once expressed it in a statement well
worth thinking about: We Germans are a nation of followers. With all our
higher knowledge and even with our faith, we are still successors of the old
world. Even those who are certainly
hostile to this and do not want it are constantly breathing the spirit of
Christianity along with the immortal spirit of old classical culture, and if
anyone were to succeed in separating out these two elements from the living air
which envelops the inner man, then not much would be left over with which one
might still eke out a spiritual life.*
But even if we wanted to reassure ourselves happily
about this calling to be the followers of antiquity, even if we would only make
up our minds to take the calling as something right, urgent, serious, and
great, and would recognize in this urgency our designated and unique privilege,
nonetheless we would find it necessary to ask whether it must always be our
purpose to be pupils of a declining antiquity. At some time or other we
might be permitted gradually to set our goal somewhat higher and further, at
some time or other we might be permitted to praise ourselves for having
reworked so fruitfully and splendidly the spirit of Alexandrian-Roman culture in
ourselves also through our universal history, so that now, as the most noble
reward we might be allowed to set ourselves the still more monumental task of
getting back behind and above this Alexandrian world and seeking out our models
of the courageous gaze in the ancient Greek original world of the great, the
natural, and the human. But thats the place where we find the reality of an
essentially unhistorical culture, a culture nevertheless (or rather therefore)
unspeakably rich and vital. Even if we Germans were nothing but followers,
then if we looked at such a culture as a legacy appropriately ours, there could
be nothing greater or prouder for us than to be its followers.
As a result we should say only this and nothing but
this: that the often distressingly strange thought that we are epigones, nobly
thought out, can guarantee important effects and a richly hopeful desire for
the future, both for the individual and for a people, to the extent that we
understand ourselves as the heirs and followers of an astonishing classical
force and see in that our legacy and our spur, but not as pale and withered
late arrivals of powerful races, who scrape out a cold living as antiquarians
and gravediggers of those races. Such late arrivals naturally live an ironic existence.
Destruction follows closely on the heels of their limping passage through life.
They shudder in the face of that, when they derive enjoyment from the past, for
they are living memorials, and yet their thoughts are senseless without someone
to inherit them. So the dark premonition envelops them that their life may be
an injustice, for no future life can set it right.
However, if we were to imagine such antiquarian late
comers suddenly exchanging that painfully ironic moderation for impudence, and
if we imagine them to ourselves as if they were reporting with a ringing voice:
The race is at its peak, because now for the first time it has the knowledge
of itself and has become clear to itself, then we would have a performance in
which, as in an allegory, the enigmatic meaning of a certain very famous
philosophy is deciphered for German culture.
I believe that there has been no dangerous variation
or change in German culture in this century which has not become more dangerous
through the monstrous influence of the philosophy of Hegel, an influence which
continues to flow right up to the present.
People have scornfully called this Hegelian
understanding of history the earthly changes of God; but this God for His part
was first created by history. However, this God became intelligible and
comprehensible inside Hegelian brain cases and has already ascended all the
dialectically possible steps of His being right up to that self-revelation, so
that for Hegel the summit and end point of the World Process coincided with his
own individual existence in Berlin. In fact, he would have to have said that
everything coming after him should, in fact, be valued only as a musical coda
of the world historical rondo, or even more truly, as superfluous. He did not
say that. Thus, he planted in the generations leavened by him that admiration
for the Power of History, which transforms practically every moment into a
naked admiration of success and leads to idolatrous worship of the factual. For
this service people nowadays commonly repeat the very mythological and, beyond
that, truly German expression to take the facts into account. But the person who has first learned to
stoop down and to bow his head before the Power of History, finally nods his agreement
mechanically, in the Chinese fashion, to every power, whether it is a
government or public opinion or a numerical majority, and moves his limbs
precisely to the rhythm of strings pulled by some power or other.
If every success contains within itself a rational
necessity, if every event is the victory of the logical or the Idea, then
just get down quickly and kneel now before the entire hierarchy of success.
What? Do you claim there are no ruling mythologies any more? Religions are
dying out? Just look at the religion of the power of history; pay attention to
the priests of the mythology of the Idea and their knees all covered in cuts!
Surely all the virtues come only in the wake of this new faith. Is it not
unselfishness when the historical person lets himself be blown into an
objective glass mirror? Is it not generosity to dispense with all the force of
heaven and earth, so that in every power people worship pure force in itself?
Is it not justice to have a scale balance of powers always in ones hands and
to watch closely what sinks down as the stronger and heavier? And what a
respectable school such a consideration of history is! To take everything
objectively, to get angry about nothing, to love nothing, to understand
everything, how gentle and flexible that makes people. And even if one man
brought up in this school becomes publicly angry at some point and gets
annoyed, we can enjoy that, for we know it is really only intended as an
artistic expression; it is ira and studium. However, it is
entirely sine ira et studio.
What antiquated thoughts I have in my heart about such
a complex of mythology and virtue! But they should come out for once, even if
people may just go on laughing all the time. I would also say: history
constantly impresses on us It was once and the moral You should not or You
should not have. So history turns into a compendium of what is actually
immoral. How seriously mistaken would the person be who at also considered
history the judge of this factual immorality! For example, it is offensive to
morality that a Raphael had to die at thirty-six years of age; such a being
should not have died.
In comparison with such dead people, how few living
people generally have a right to live! That the many live and that those few
are no longer alive is nothing more than a brutal truth, that is, an
incorrigible stupidity, a blatant That is the case, in contrast to the moral
It should not have been so. Yes, in contrast to the moral! For let people
speak about whatever virtue they want, about righteousness, generosity,
courage, wisdom, and human sympathya person is always virtuous precisely
because he rebels against that blind power of the factual, against the tyranny
of the real, and submits himself to laws which are not the laws of that
historical fluctuation. He constantly swims against the historical waves,
whether he fights his passions as the closest stupid facts of his existence or
whether he commits himself to truthfulness, while the lies spin around him
their glittering webs. If history were in general nothing more than the world
system of passion and error, then human beings would have to read it in the
way Goethe summoned us to read Werther, exactly as if it cried out Be a
man and do not follow me!*
9
Is our age perhaps such a first comer? In fact, the
vehemence of its historical sense is so great and expresses itself in such a
universal and simply unlimited way that at least in this the coming ages will
assess its quality as a first comer, if in fact there are going to be coming
ages at all, understood in the sense of culture. But right here there
remains a serious doubt. Close by the pride of the modern man stands his irony
about his very self, his consciousness that he must live in a historicizing
and, as it were, a twilight mood, his fear that in future he will be totally
unable to rescue any more of his youthful hopes and powers. Here and there
people go even further, into cynicism, and justify the passage of history,
indeed, of the whole development of the world, as essentially for the use of
modern man, according to the cynical rule that things must turn out just as
they are going right now, that man must be nothing other than what people now
are, and that against this Must no one is entitled to rebel. A person who
cannot maintain an ironical stance feels for a sense of well being into that
sort of cynicism. In addition, the last
decade offers him as a gift one of its most beautiful inventions, a rounded and
sonorous phrase for such cynicism: it calls his style of living totally
mindlessly and in keeping with the times, the full dedication of the
personality to the World Process. The personality and the World Process! The
World Process and the personality of the turnip flea!
If only people did not have to hear all the time the
eternal hyperbole of all hyperboles, the word World, World, World, when really
each person should speak in all honesty only of Men, Men, Men. Heirs of the
Greeks and Romans? Of Christianity? That all appears as nothing to this cynic.
But heirs of the World Process! High points and goals of the World Process!
Sense and solution of all riddles of becoming in general, expressed in the
modern man, the ripest fruit of the tree of knowledgeI call that a swollen
feeling of elation. By this symbol are the first comers of all ages known, even
if they have come along right at the end. Historical considerations have never
flown so far afield, not even in their dreams. For now the history of human
beings is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants. Indeed,
even in the furthest depths of the sea the historical universalist still finds
the traces of himself, as living slime; he gazes in astonishment, as if at a
miracle, at the immense route which human beings have already passed through
and trembles at the sight of the even more astonishing miracle, at modern man
himself, who has the ability to survey this route. He stands high and proud on
the pyramid of the World Process. As he sets down on the top of it the final
stone of his knowledge, he appears to call out to nature listening all around,
We are at the goal; we are the goal; we are the perfection of nature.
Arrogant European of the nineteenth century, you are
raving! Your knowledge does not complete nature, but only kills your own. For
once just measure your height as a knower against your depth as a person who
can do something. Of course, you clamber on the solar rays of knowledge upward
towards heaven, but you also climb downward to chaos. Your way of going, that
is, clambering about as a knower, is your fate. The ground and floor move back
away from you into the unknown; for your life there are no supports any more,
but only spiders threads, which every new grasp of your knowledge rips apart.
But no more serious talk about this, for it is
possible to say something more cheerful.
The incredibly thoughtless fragmenting and fraying of
all the fundamentals, their disintegration into a constantly flowing and
dissolving becoming, the inexhaustible spinning away and historicizing of all
that has come into being because of modern men, the great garden spiders in the
knots of the entire world net, that may keep the moralists, the artists, the
devout, as well as the statesman, busy and worried. Today it should for once
cheer us up, because we see all this in the gleaming magical mirror of a philosophical
writer of parodies, in whose head the age has come to an ironical
consciousness of itself, a consciousness clear all the way to wickedness (to
speak in Goethes style). Hegel once taught us, when the spirit makes a sudden
turn, then we philosophers are still there. Our age has made a turn into
self-irony, and, lo and behold, E. von Hartmann was also at hand and had
written his famous Philosophy of the Unconscious, or, to speak more clearly,
his philosophy of unconscious irony. Rarely have we read a more amusing
invention and a more philosophically roguish prank than Hartmanns.*
If we wanted a truly matter-of-fact account of what
Hartmann is telling us about the noxious tripod stool of unconscious irony,
then we would say that he is telling us that our age would have to be just the
way it is if humanity is ever going to get seriously fed up with this
existence. That is what we believe in our hearts. That frightening fossilizing
of the age, that anxious rattling of the bones, which David Strauss has
described for us in his naive way as the most beautiful reality, is justified
in Hartmann not only retrospectively ex causis efficientibus, but even
looking ahead, ex causa finali.*
The vineyard of the Lord! The process! For redemption!
Who does not see and hear the historical culture which knows only the word
becoming as it intentionally disguises itself in a misshapen parody, as it
expresses through the grotesque grimacing mask held up in front of its face the
most willful things about itself! For what does this last mischievous summons
to the workers in the vineyard essentially want from them? In what work are
they to strive vigorously forwards? Or, to ask the question another way, what
has the historically educated man, the modern fanatic of the process swimming
and drowning in the flood of becoming, still left to do, in order at some point
to reap that disgust, the expensive grapes of that vineyard? He has to do
nothing other than continue to live as he has been living, to continue loving
what he has loved, to continue to hate what he has hated, and to continue
reading the newspapers which he has been reading. For him there is only one
sin, to live differently from the way he has been living. But we are told the
way he has been living with the excessive clarity of something written in stone
by that famous page with the sentences in large print, in which the entire kingdom
of the contemorary cultural rabble is caught up in a blind rapture and frenzy
of delight, because they believe that in these sentences they read their own
justification, indeed, their own justification in the light of the apocalypse.
For the unconscious writer of parody has required of each one of them the
complete dedication of his personality to the World Process in pursuit of its
goal, for the sake of the redemption of the world, or still more clearly and
brightly, for the time being the affirmation of the will to live is proclaimed
as the only correct way, for only in the full dedication to life and its pains,
not in cowardly personal renunciation and drawing back, is there something to
achieve for the World Process, the striving for individual denial of the will
is just as foolish and useless, in fact even more foolish, than suicide. The
thinking reader will also understand without further suggestions how a
practical philosophy built on these principles would look and that such a
philosophy cannot contain any divisiveness but only the full reconciliation
with life."
The thinking reader will understand it. And people
could misunderstand Hartmann! How unspeakably amusing it is that people
misunderstand him! Should contemporary Germans be very sensitive? A trusty Englishman
finds them lacking a delicacy of perception and even dares to say in the
German mind there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged,
unhandy and infelicitous. Would the great German writer of parodies really
contradict him? In fact, according to Hartmanns explanation, we are
approaching that ideal condition, where the race of mankind consciously makes
its own history. But obviously we are quite far from that state, perhaps even
more ideal, where humanity reads Hartmanns book with awareness. If that state
ever arrives, then no person will let the word World Process pass his lips
any more, without these lips breaking into a smile. For with that phrase people
will remember the time when Hartmanns parodying gospel with its stolidly
middle-class notion of that German mind, and with the distorted seriousness
of the owl, as Goethe puts it, was listened to, absorbed, disputed, honoured,
publicized, and canonized.
But the world must go forward. That ideal condition
cannot be dreamed up; it must be fought for and won. Only through joy does the
way go to redemption, to redemption from that misunderstood owlish seriousness.
The time will come in which people wisely refrain from all constructions of the
World Process or even of history of man, a time in which people in general no
longer consider the masses but once again think about individuals who construct
a sort of bridge over the desolate storm of becoming. These people do not set
out some sort of process, but live timelessly and contemporaneously; thanks to
the history which permits such a combination, they live like the republic of
geniuses, about which Schopenhauer once explained that one giant shouts out to
another across the barren intervals of time, and undisturbed by the wanton and
noisy midgets who creep around them, the giants continue their lofty spiritual
conversation. The task of history is to be a mediator between them and thus
always to provide once more an opportunity and the energies for the development
of greatness. No, the goal of humanity cannot lie in its ending, but only in
its highest examples.
By contrast, our comic person naturally states, with
that wonderful dialectic, which is just as genuine as its admirers are worthy
of admiration, With the idea of evolution it would be inconsistent to ascribe
to the World Process an infinite length of time in the past, because then each
and every imaginable development must have already been gone through; that,
however, is not the case (O you rascal!) and we are no more able to assign to
the process an infinite future period. Both of these raise the idea of
evolution to a final goal (O, once again, you rascal!) and makes the World
Process like the water drawing of the Danaids. The complete victory of the
logical over the illogical (O, you rascal of all rascals!), however, must
coincide with the temporal end of the World Process, the day of judgment. No,
you lucidly mocking spirit, as long as the illogical still prevails to the
extent it does today, for example, as long as people can still talk of the
World Process with general approval, the way you talk, judgment day is still
a long way off. For it is still too joyful on this earth; many illusions are
still blooming for example, the illusion of your contemporaries about you we
are not yet sufficiently ripe to be flung back into your nothingness, for we
believe that things here will get even more amusing when people first begin to
understand you, you misunderstood unconscious man. However, if in spite of
this, disgust should come with power, just as you have predicted to your
readers, if you should be right in your description of your present and future
(and no one has hated both with such disgust as you have) then I am happily
prepared to vote with the majority, in the way you have proposed, that next
Saturday evening at twelve oclock precisely your world will go under, and our
decree may conclude that from tomorrow on there will be no more time and no
newspaper will appear any more. However, perhaps the result will fail to
materialize, and we will have made our decree in vain.
But then at any rate we will not lack the time for a
beautiful experiment. We take a balance scale and put in one scale pan Hartmanns
unconsciousness and in the other Hartmanns World Process. There are people who
think that they will both weigh the same, for in each scale pan would lie an
equally poor word and an equally good jest. When people first come to
understand Hartmanns joke, then no one will use Hartmanns talk of World
Process as anything but a joke. In fact, it is high time we moved forward to proclaim
satirical malice against the dissipation of the historical sense, against the
excessive pleasure in the process at the expense of being and living, against
the senseless shifting of all perspectives. And in praise of the author of the Philosophy
of the Unconscious it should always be repeated that he was the first to
succeed in registering keenly the ridiculousness of the idea of the World
Process and to allow an even keener appreciation of that ridiculousness
through the particular seriousness of his treatment. Why the world is there,
why humanity is therethese should not concern us at all for the time being,
unless we want to make a joke. For the presumptuousness of the small human worm
is simultaneously the funniest and the most joyful thing on this earthly stage,
but why you, as an individual, are there, that is something I am asking you.
And if no one else can say it for you, then at least try once to justify the
sense of your existence, as it were, a posteriori by establishing for
yourself a purpose, a final goal, a To this end, a high and noble To this
end. If you are destroyed by this, well, I know no better purpose for life
than to die in service of the great and the impossible, animae magnae
prodigus.*
If, by contrast, the doctrines of the sovereign
becoming, of the fluidity of all ideas, types, and styles, of the lack of all
cardinal differences between man and animal (doctrines which I consider true
but deadly) are still foisted on the people for another generation with the
frenzied instruction which is now customary, then it should take no one by
surprise if people destroy themselves in egotistical trifles and misery,
ossifying themselves in their self-absorption, initially falling apart and
ceasing to be a people. Then, in place of this condition, perhaps systems of
individual egotism, alliances for the systematic larcenous exploitation of
those non-members of the alliance and similar creations of utilitarian
nastiness will step forward onto the future scene.
Let people just proceed to prepare these creations, to
write history from the standpoint of the masses and to seek for those
laws in it which are to be inferred from the needs of these masses as well as
for the laws of motion of the lowest clay and loam layers of society. To me,
the masses seem to be worth a glance only in three respects: first as blurred
copies of great men, presented on bad paper with worn out printing plates, then
as the resistance against the great men, and finally as working implements of
the great. For the rest, let the devil and statistics carry them off! How might
statistics demonstrate that there could be laws in history? Laws? Yes,
statistics prove how coarse and disgustingly uniform the masses are. Are we to
call the effects of the force of gravitystupidity, mimicry, love, and hungerlaws?
Now, we are willing to concede that point, but by the
same token the principle is then established that, as far as there are laws in
history, they are worth nothing and history is worth nothing. However,
precisely this sort of history nowadays is generally esteemed, the history
which takes the large mass tendencies as the important and principal thing in
history and considers all great men merely their clearest expression, like
bubbles, as it were, which become visible in the watery flood. Thus, the mass
is to produce greatness out of itself, and chaos is to produce order from
itself as well. At the end, of course, the hymn is sung to the productive masses.
Everything which has preoccupied such masses for a long time is then called
Great and, as people say, a historical power has come into being. But is
that not a case of quite deliberately exchanging quantity and quality? When the
podgy masses have found some idea or other (for example, a religious idea)
quite adequate, has tenaciously defended it, and dragged it along for
centuries, then, and only then, the discoverer and founder of that idea is to
be great. But why? The most noble and highest things have no effect at all on
the masses. The historical success of Christianity, its historical power,
tenacity, and duration, all that fortunately proves nothing with respect to the
greatness of its founder. Basically, that would act as a proof against him. But
between him and that historical success lies a very earthly and dark layer of
passion, error, greed for power and honour, the persisting powers of the imperium
romanum, a layer from which Christianity acquired that earthy taste and
scrap of ground which made possible its perseverance in this world and, as it
were, gave it its durability.*
Greatness should not depend upon
success. Demosthenes had greatness, although at the same time he had no
success.*
Through this study people have learned that the state
has received a very special mission in the established world system of egoism:
the state is to become the patron of all clever egoism, so that, with its
military and police forces, it may protect against the frightening outbreak of
foolish egoism. For the same purpose history, that is, the history of animals
and human beings, is also carefully stirred into the popular masses and working
classes, who are dangerous because they are unintelligent, for people know that
a small grain of historical education is capable of breaking the rough and
stupefied instincts and desires or diverting them into the path of improved egoism.
In summa:
people are paying attention now, to use E. von Hartmanns words, to deliberate
looking around for a practical domestic structure in their earthly homeland,
considering the future with care. The same writer calls such a period the
full maturity of mankind and makes fun about what is now called Man, as if
with that term one is to understand only the sober selfish person; in the same
way he also prophecies that after such a period of full maturity there comes to
this Man an appropriate old age, but apparently only with this idea to vent
his ridicule on our contemporary old men. For he speaks of the mature
tranquillity with which they review all the chaotic stormy suffering of their
past lives and understand the vanity of the previously assumed goals of their
striving. No, a maturity of this sly and historically educated egoism is
appropriate for an old age of hostile craving and disgraceful clinging to life
and then a final act, with its
last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childhood and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.*
However, people use history even against the young, in
order to train them for that maturity of egoism which is striven for
everywhere; people use it to break the natural aversion of youth through a
transfiguring, that is to say, a magically scientific illumination of that egoism,
which is both manly and effeminate. Yes, people know what a certain
predominance of history is capable of; people know it only too well: to uproot
the strongest instincts of youthfire, defiance, forgetting of the self, and
loveto dampen down the heat of their sense of right and wrong, to hold back or
repress the desire to mature slowly with the contrary desire to be finished
quickly, to be useful quickly, and to be productive quickly, to infect the
honesty and boldness of the feelings with doubts. Indeed, history is itself
capable of deceiving the young about their most beautiful privilege, about
their power to cultivate in themselves with complete conviction a great idea
and to allow an even greater idea to grow forth out of it. A certain excess of
history is capable of all this. We have seen it. And this is the reason:
through its incessant shifting of the horizons of significance, through the
elimination of a surrounding atmosphere, it no longer allows a person to
perceive and to act unhistorically. He then draws himself from the
infinity of his horizon back into himself, into the smallest egoistic region
and there must wither away and dry up; in the process he probably achieves cleverness, but never wisdom. He
permits himself inner conversations, calculates, and gets along well with the
facts, does not boil over, winks, and understands how to seek out his own
advantage or that of his party amid the advantages and disadvantages of
strangers; he forgets superfluous modesty and thus step by step becomes a Man
and an Old Man on the Hartmann model. But he should become thisthat
is the precise sense of the cynical demand nowadays for the complete
dedication of the personality to the World Process, so far as his goal is
concerned, for the sake of the redemption of the world, as that rascal E.
Hartmann assures us. Now, the will and goal of these Hartmann men and old
men is indeed hardly the redemption of the world. Certainly the world would be
more redeemed if it were redeemed from these men and old men. For then the
kingdom of youth would come.
10
At this point, thinking of youth, I cry out Land,
land! Enough and more than enough of the passionate seeking and the wandering
voyage on dark alien seas! Now finally a coast reveals itself. Whatever it may
be, we must land on it. The worst emergency port is better than returning to
staggering in hopeless infinite skepticism. If at first we only hold onto the
land, we will soon afterwards find the good havens and ease the approach for
those who come later.
This journey was dangerous and exciting. How far we
are now from the calm contemplation with which we first saw our ship set out to
sea. By investigating the dangers of history, we have found ourselves exposed
to all these dangers as strongly as possible. We ourselves bear the traces of
that suffering which has come over humanity in recent times as a result of an
excess of history. Its on display. For
example, this very treatise shows its modern character, the character of the
weak personality (which I will not conceal from myself) in the intemperance of
its criticism, the immaturity of its humanity, the frequent transitions from
irony to cynicism, from pride to skepticism. Nevertheless I trust in the
inspiring power which, rather than my genius, controls the vessel: I trust in youth,
that it has led me correctly when it requires from me now a protest against
the historical education of modern young people and when the protester
demands that human beings above all learn to live and to use history only in
the service of the life which he has learned. People must be young to
understand this protest. In fact, among the contemporary gray-haired types of
our present youth, one can hardly be young enough still to feel what is here
essentially being protested against.
To help people understand this point I will use an
example. In Germany it is not much longer than a hundred years ago that a
natural instinct for what people call poetry arose in a few young people. Do
people think that the previous generations up to that time would never have
spoken of that art, inwardly strange and unnatural to them? We know the
opposite is true: they thought about poetry with loving passion, wrote and
argued about it with words, words, and more words. The appearance of that revival
of words for living was not the immediate death of those word makers. In a
certain sense, they are still alive nowadays, because if, as Gibbon says, for a
world to go under takes not just time but plenty of time, then in Germany, the
land of gradual change, for a false idea to be destroyed takes more than
time; it takes a great deal of time.
Today there are perhaps a hundred people more than a
hundred years ago who know what poetry is; perhaps one hundred years from now
there will be another hundred people more who in the meantime have also learned
what culture is and that the Germans up to this point have had no culture, no
matter how much they may talk and boast about it. For them the very general
contentment of the Germans with their culture would seem just as incredible
and stupid as the formerly acknowledged classicism of Gottsched or the
appraisal of Ramler as a German Pindar seem to us.
The German education of the young, however, begins
directly from this false and barren idea of culture. Its end goal, imagined in
all purity and loftiness, is not at all the freely educated man, but the scholar,
the scientific person, indeed, the scientific person who is useful as early as
possible, the person who sets himself apart from life in order to recognize it
clearly. The product of this education, considered in a correct empirically
general way, is the historically and aesthetically educated Philistine, the
precocious and freshly wise chatterer about state, church, and art, the
sensorium for thousands of sensations, the inexhaustible stomach which
nevertheless does not know what honest hunger and thirst are. The fact that an
education with this goal and result is an unnatural education is felt only by
the person who is not yet completely developed in it; it is felt only by the
instinct of the young, because they still have the instinct of nature, which is
first artificially and powerfully broken through that education. But the person
who wants to break this education in its turn must assist the young in
expressing themselves. He must shine the bright light of ideas to illuminate
their unconscious resistance and turn that into a conscious and loudly uttered
consciousness. How is he to reach such a strange goal?
Above all through the fact that he destroys a
superstition, the faith in the necessity of that method of education.
But people think that there could be no other possibility than our contemporary
highly tiresome reality. Just let someone examine the essential literature of
the higher schooling and education system in the last decades exactly on this
point. For all the varieties of proposals and for all the intensity of the
opposition, the examiner will to his astonishment and dismay realize how
uniform the thinking is about the entire purpose of education, how
thoughtlessly people assume that the present result, the educated person, as
the term is now understood, is a necessary and reasonable fundamental basis for
that wider education. That monotonous orthodoxy would sound something like
this: the young person has to begin with a knowledge of culture, not at first
with a knowledge of life, and even less with life and experience themselves.
Moreover, this knowledge about culture is poured over or stirred into the youth
as historical knowledge; that is, his head is filled up with a monstrous number
of ideas derived from extremely indirect knowledge of past times and peoples,
not from the immediate contemplation of living. His desire to experience
something for himself and to feel growing in him a coordinated and living
system of his own experiencessuch a desire is narcotized and, as it were, made
drunk through opulent deceptions, as if it were possible in a few years to sum
up in oneself the highest and most remarkable experiences of all times,
especially of the greatest ages. It is precisely this insane procedure which
leads our young developing artists into the halls of culture and galleries
instead of into the workshop of a master and, above all, into the sole
workshops of the single master craftswoman Nature. Yes, as if people were able
to predict their ideas and arts, their actual lifes work, as cursory strollers
in the history of past times. Yes, as if life itself were not a craft which
must be learned continuously from the basic material and practised without
special treatment, if it is not to allow bunglers and chatterers to be produced!
Plato considered it necessary that the first
generation of his new society (in the perfect state) would be brought up with
the help of a powerful necessary lie. The children were to learn to
believe that they had all already lived a long time dreaming under the earth,
where they had been properly kneaded and formed by natures master worker. It
was impossible to rebel against this past! Impossible to have any effect
against this work of the gods! It is to stand as an inviolable law of nature
that the person who is a philosopher has gold in his body, the person who is
born as a guard has only silver, and the person who is born as a worker has
iron and bronze. Since it is not possible to mix these metals, Plato explains,
then it should not be possible ever to overthrow or mix up the order of
classes. The faith in the eternal truth of this order is the basis of the new
education and thus of the new state. The modern German similarly believes now
in the eternal truth of his education, of his style of culture. Nevertheless,
this faith would collapse, as the Platonic state would have collapsed, if in
opposition to the necessary lie there was set up a necessary truth: the
German has no culture, because he can have nothing whatsoever on the basis of
his education. He wants the flowers without roots and stalk. So he wants them
in vain. That is the simple truth, unpleasant and gross, a correct necessary
truth.
In this necessary truth, however, our first
generation must be educated. Certainly they will suffer the greatest difficulties
from it, for they must educate themselves through it, in fact, divided against
themselves, to new habits and a new nature derived out of an old and previous
nature and habits, so that they may be able to say with the ancient Spaniards:
Efienda me Dios de my, God, defend me from myself, that is, from the
nature already instilled into me. They must taste that truth drop by drop, as
if sampling a bitter and powerful medicine. Each individual of this generation
must overcome himself, judge for himself what he might more easily endure as a
general judgment concerning an entire age: we are without education, even more,
we are ruined for living, for correct and simple seeing and hearing, for the
fortunate grasping of what is closest at hand and natural, and we have up to
this moment not yet even the basis of a culture, because we ourselves are not
convinced that we have a genuine life within us. Fractured and fallen apart, in
everything carved up mechanically into an inner and an outer half, saturated with
ideas like dragons teeth producing dragon ideas, thus suffering from the
sickness of words and without trust in any unique sensation which is not yet
franked with words, as such a non-living and yet uncannily lively factory of
ideas and words, I still perhaps have the right to say about myself cogito,
ergo sum, but not vivo, ergo cogito.*
No god and no human being: only their own youth
unleashes this, and with it you will liberate life for yourself. For it only
lay hidden in prison. It has not yet withered away and diedinquire of yourself!
But this unbridled life is sick and must be healed. It
is ailing from many ills. Not only does it suffer from the memory of its
fettersit suffers from what is here our principal concern, from the historical
sickness. The excess of history has seized the plastic force of life. It no
longer understands how to make use of the past as a powerful nourishment. The
evil is fearsome, and nevertheless if youth did not have the clairvoyant gift
of nature, then no one would know that that is an evil and that a paradise of
health has been lost. This same youthfulness surmises, however, also with the
powerful healing instinct of this same nature, how this paradise can be won
back. It knows the juices for wounds and the medicines to combat the historical
sickness, to combat the excess of the historical. What are they called?
Now, people should not be surprised: they are the
names of poisons: the antidotes against the historical are called the
unhistorical and the super-historical. With these names we turn back to the
start of our examination and to its close.
With the phrase the unhistorical I designate the art
and the power of being able to forget and to enclose oneself in a horizon
with borders; super-historical I call the powers which divert the gaze from
what is developing back to what gives existence an eternal and unchanging
character, to art and religion. Sciencefor it is science which would talk about poisonssees in that force, in these powers, opposing forces,
for it maintains that only the observation of things is true and right, the
scientific way of considering things, which everywhere sees what has come into
being as something historical and never as something living, something eternal.
Science lives in an inner contradiction with the externalising powers of art
and religion, just as much as it hates forgetfulness, the death of knowledge,
when it seeks to remove all limitations of horizons and to hurl human beings
into an infinite sea without frontiers, a sea of light waves of acknowledged
becoming.
If he only could live there! As the cities collapse in
an earthquake and become desolate and the human being, trembling and in haste,
erects his house on volcanic ground, so life breaks apart and becomes weak and
dispirited when the earthquake of ideas which science arouses takes from
a person the basis of all his certainty and rest, his faith in the eternally
permanent. Is life to rule over knowledge now, over science, or is knowledge to
rule over life? Which of the two forces is the higher and decisive one? No one
will have any doubt: life is the higher, the ruling power, for knowledge which
destroyed life would in the process have destroyed itself. Knowledge presupposes
life and has the same interest in preserving life which every being has in its
own continuing existence. So science needs a higher supervision and control. A doctrine
of a healthy life is positioned close beside science, and a principle of
this doctrine of health would sound like this: the unhistorical and the
super-historical are the natural counter-measures against the excess cancerous
growth of history on life, against the historical sickness. It is probable that
we, the historically ill, also have to suffer from the counter measures. But
the fact that we suffer from them is no proof against the correctness of the
course of treatment we have chosen.
And here I recognize the mission of that youth,
that first generation of fighters and dragon slayers, which brings forth a more
fortunate and more beautiful culture and humanity, without having more of this
future happiness and beauty still to come than a promise-filled premonition.
These youth will suffer from the evil and the counter-measures simultaneously,
and nevertheless they believe they may boast of a more powerful health and in
general a more natural nature than their previous generations, the educated
Men and Old Men of the present. However, their mission is to shake the
ideas which this present holds about health and culture and to develop
contempt and hatred against such hybrid monstrous ideas. The guaranteed mark of
their own stronger health is to be precisely the fact that they, I mean these
young people, themselves can use no idea, no party slogan, from the presently
circulating currency of words and ideas as a designation of their being, but
are convinced only by a power acting in it, a power which fights, eliminates,
and cuts into pieces, and by an always heightened sense of life in every good
hour. People may dispute the fact that these youth already have culture, but
for what young person would this be a reproach? People may speak against their
crudeness and immoderation, but they are not yet old and wise enough to be
content; above all, they do not need to feign any ready-made culture to defend
and enjoy all the comforts and rights of youth, especially the privilege of a
braver spontaneous honesty and the energizing consolation of hope.
Of these hopeful people I know that they understand
all these generalities at close hand and in their own most personal experience
will translate them into a personally thought-out teaching for themselves. The
others may for the time being perceive nothing but covered over bowls, which
could also really be empty, until, surprised one day, they see with their own
eyes that the bowls are full and that attacks, demands, living impulses,
passions lay mixed in and impressed into these generalities, which could not
lie hidden in this way for a long time. I refer these doubters to time, which
brings all things to light, and, in conclusion, I turn my attention to that
society of those who hope, in order to explain to them in an allegory the
progress and outcome of their healing, their salvation from the historical
sickness, and thus their own history, up to the point in time where they will
be again healthy enough to undertake a new history and to make use of the past
under the mastery of life in a threefold sense, that is, monumental, or
antiquarian, or critical. At that point of time they will be less knowledgeable
than the educated of the present, for they will have forgotten a good deal
and even have lost all pleasure of looking for what those educated ones wish to
know, in general the pleasure of looking backwards. Their distinguishing marks,
from the point of view of those educated ones, are precisely their lack of
education, their indifference and reserve with respect to many famous men,
even with respect to many good things. But they have become, at that final
point of their healing, once again men and have ceased to be human-like
aggregatesthat is something! There are still hopes! Are you not laughing at
that in your hearts, you hopeful ones!
And, you will ask, How do we come to that end point?
The Delphic god shouts out to you, at the very start of your trek to that goal,
his aphorism: Know thyself. It is a difficult saying, for that god hides
nothing and announces nothing, but only points the way, as Heraclitus has
said. But what direction is he indicating to you?
There were centuries when the Greeks found themselves
in a danger similar to the one in which we find ourselves, that is, the danger
of destruction from being swamped by what is foreign and past, from history.
The Greeks never lived in proud isolation; their culture was for a long time
much more a chaos of foreign, Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian forms
and ideas, and their religion a real divine struggle of the entire Orient,
something similar to the way German culture and religion are now a
self-struggling chaos of all foreign lands and all prehistory. Nevertheless
Hellenic culture did not become an aggregate, thanks to that Apollonian saying.
The Greeks learned gradually to organize the chaos because, in accordance
with the Delphic teaching, they directed their thoughts back to themselves,
that is, to their real needs, and let the apparent needs die off. So they
seized possession of themselves again. They did not remain long the
over-endowed heirs and epigones of the entire Orient. After an arduous battle
with themselves, through the practical interpretation of that saying, they
became the most fortunate enrichers and increasers of the treasure they had
inherited and the firstlings and models for all future national cultures.
This is a parable for every individual among us. He
must organize the chaos in himself by recalling in himself his own real needs.
His honesty, his more courageous and more genuine character, must now and then
struggle against what will be constantly repeated, relearned, and imitated. He
begins then to grasp that culture can still be something other than a decoration
of life, that is, basically always only pretence and disguise; for all
ornamentation covers over what is decorated. So the Greek idea of culture
reveals itself to him, in opposition to the Roman, the idea of culture as a new
and improved nature, without inner and outer, without pretence and convention,
culture as a unanimous sense of living, thinking, appearing, and willing. Thus,
he learns out of his own experience that it was the higher power of moral
nature through which the Greeks attained their victory over all other cultures
and that each increase of truthfulness must also be a demand preparing for true
culture. This truthfulness may also occasionally seriously harm the idea of
culture esteemed at the time; it even may be able to assist a totally
decorative culture to collapse.
Notes
*Goethe:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1739-1842), Germanys most famous literary genius; ceterum censeo: "I judge otherwise," a
Latin expression made famous by Cato the Elder (c. 200 BC) in his attacks on Carthage. [Back to Text]
*Heraclitus:
pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (c. 500 BC). [Back to Text]
*Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831), a prominent German
statesman and historian.
*. . . could not give: David
Hume (1711-1776), a very famous Scottish philosopher. The quotation comes from John Drydens play Aurengzebe,
4.1. [Back to Text]
*Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) a famous Italian
poet. [Back to Text]
*Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), German
dramatist, poet, and philosopher.
Polybius (203-120 BC), Greek historian. [Back
to Text]
*. . . amour propre: vain self esteem. Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860), an important German philosopher immediately before Nietzsche. [Back to Text]
*. . . Pythagoreans:
follower of Pythagoras, a 6th century Greek philosopher. The phrase a Stoic and an Epicurean is a
reference to Brutus and Cassius who led the conspiracy to murder Julius Caesar
in 44 BC. [Back to Text]
*Erwin von Steinbach (1244-1318), a famous medieval
German architect who built Strasburg Cathedral. [Back
to Text]
*Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), Swiss historian of
art and culture.
*The Latin reads Let the truth be done, and let
life perish.
*Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austrian dramatist.
*Johann Karl Friedrich Zoellner (1834-1882), a well
known German astonomer.
*Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), well known French historian.
*Plutarch c. 46-77, Greek historian famous for his
celebration of great mens lives.
*Voltaire (1694-1778), very famous French essayist,
playwright, and man of letters. His
slogan crasez
linfame [crush the infamy] became a rallying cry against
religious superstition. [Back to Text]
*Hans Sachs (1494-1576) was the most famous of the
medieval German master singers and a character in Richard Wagners opera Die
Meistersinger.
*Holderlein (1770-1843), important German Romantic poet. Laertius Diogenes, a biographer of the Greek
philosophers in the third century.
*Memento mori: a reminder that one will die; memento
vivere: a reminder to live.
*Girolama Savonarola (1452-1498), an Italian religious
reformer hostile to the Renaissance.
*Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806-1869), German philologist.
*Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), German
philosopher who saw history as the progressive realization of an idea. [Back to Text]
*Ira: the
Latin word for anger; studium: the Latin word for study. The expression sine ira et studio (without
anger and with study) originates with the Roman historian Tacitus (60-120) and
is frequently used to describe an objective (i.e., emotion free) style of
writing history.
*Raphael (1483-1520), one of the greatest Italian
painters of the Renaissance.
*Natura naturans: This Latin phrase means
literally nature naturing. The phrase
is a traditional term for an essential creative or divine force. [Back to Text]
*Goethes novel The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774) helped to define the Romantic hero and brought him great early success.
*Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), German
philosopher, who published his first book, The Philosophy of the Unconscious,
in 1869. [Back to Text]
*Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), German philosopher
and preacher.
*David Strauss (1808-1874), German theologian and writer
who wrote on the historical Jesus; ex causis efficientibus: from
efficient causes, i.e., as the result of certain mechanical processes; ex
causa finali: from a final cause, i.e., as having a higher moral purpose. [Back to Text]
*animae magnae prodigus: filled with a great spirit
*imperium romanum: imperial power of Rome.
*Demosthenes (384-322 BC), famous Greek orator who spoke
out against the growing power of Macedonia. [Back to Text]
* . . . sans everything: The quotation is from
Shakespeares As You Like It. Nietzsche quotes the lines in German. [Back to Text]
*Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), very famous English historian.
*Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766), German author and
critic; Karl Wilhelm Ramler (1725-1798), German poet; Pindar (518-438 BC), one
of the most famous of the ancient Greek poets. [Back to Text]
*Cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am; vivo,
ergo cogito: I live, therefore I think.