On the
Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874)
I
1 Observe the herd which is razing 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
neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man, because
he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast
and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness. For he wishes only to
live like the beast, neither weary nor amid pains, and 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.
2 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 runs, 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 each later moment.
A leaf is continuously released from the roll of time, falls out,
flutters away—and suddenly flutters back again into the man's
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. Thus 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. By contrast, the human being resists
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 burden which he can for appearances' sake even deny, and
which he is only too happy to deny in his interactions with his peers,
in order to awaken their envy. Thus, it moves him, as if he remembered
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 the 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 is—a never completed past tense. If death
finally brings the longed for forgetting, it nevertheless thereby
destroys present existence and thus impresses its seal on the 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.
3 If happiness or if, in some sense or other, a reaching out for
new happiness is what holds the living onto life and pushes them forward
into life, 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
it were, like a mood, as a fantastic interruption between nothing
but boredom, cupidity, and deprivation. However, with the smallest
and with the greatest good fortune, happiness becomes happiness in
the same way: 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. The person 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 or 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,(2)
finally hardly dare any more to lift his finger. Forgetting belongs
to all action, just as both light and 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. For this reason, it is possible
to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the
beast demonstrates; however, it is generally completely impossible
to live without forgetting. Or, to explain myself more clearly concerning
my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination,
of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm
and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people
or a culture.
4 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 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 one's 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 with a sort of quiet conscience. The stronger
the roots which the inner nature of a person has, the more he will
appropriate or forcibly take from the past. And if we 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 work as an injurious overseer. 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 closed completely, and nothing can recall
that there still are men, passions, instruction, and purposes beyond
it. This is a general principle: each living being can become healthy,
strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If he is incapable of drawing
a horizon around himself and too egotistical to enclose his own view
within an alien one, then he wastes away there, pale or weary, to
an early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust
in what is to come—all that depends, 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.
5 At this point everyone brings up the comment that a person's 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 vigor 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 himself 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 life generates itself alone,
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 sense, the process in which inside that surrounding misty
cloud a bright gleaming beam of light arises, only then, through the
power of using the past for living and making history out of what
has happened, does a person first become a person. But in an excess
of history the human being stops once again; without that cover of
the unhistorical he would never have started or dared to start. Where
do the actions come from 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: we picture 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, colored, 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 much, because he can hardly feel it any more.
He asks himself whether he has been the fool of strange words and
strange opinions for long. He is surprised that his memory turns tirelessly
in a circle but is nevertheless too weak and tired 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 what has passed,
deaf to warnings, a small living vortex in a dead sea of night and
forgetting: nevertheless this condition—unhistorical, thoroughly
anti-historical—is the birthing womb not only of an unjust deed
but much 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, (3) 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.
6 Should a person be in a position to catch in many examples the
scent of this unhistorical atmosphere, in which every great historical
event arose, and to breathe it in, then such a person might perhaps
be able, as a knowledgeable being, to elevate himself up to a superhistorical
standpoint, in the way Niebuhr (4) once described a possible result
of historical research: "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
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 superhistorical, because a person
who assumes such a stance could feel no more temptation to continue
living and to participate in history. For 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 taking history excessively seriously. But in the process
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 question how and why they conducted
their lives. Anyone who asks his acquaintances whether they would
like to live through the last ten or twenty years again will easily
perceive which of them has been previously educated for that superhistorical
point of view. For they will probably all answer "No!", but they will
substantiate that "No!" differently, some of them perhaps with the
confident 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.(5)
7 We will call these the historical people. The glance into the past
pushes them into the future, fires their spirit to take up life for
a longer time yet, kindles the hope that justice may still come and
that happiness may sit behind the mountain towards which they are
walking. These historical people believe that the meaning of existence
will come increasingly to light in the course of its process.
Therefore they look backwards only to understand the present by considering
previous process and to learn to desire the future more keenly. In
spite of all their history, they do not understand at all how unhistorically
they think and act and also how their concern with history stands,
not in service to pure knowledge, but to living.
8 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
superhistorical person, who does not see healing in the process and
for whom the world is much more complete and at its end in every moment.
What could ten new years teach that the past ten years has not been
able to teach!
9 Now, whether the meaning of the theory is happiness, resignation,
virtue, or repentance, on that issue the superhistorical people have
not 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
present, they are a motionless picture of immutable values and 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,
so the superhistorical 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, supersaturation, and, yes,
even revulsion, so that the most daring ones are perhaps finally ready,
with Giacomo Leopardi, to say to their 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.(6)
10 However, let us leave
the superhistorical people to their revulsion and their wisdom. Today
for once we would much rather become joyful in our hearts with our
lack of wisdom and make the day happy for ourselves as active and
progressive people, as men 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 not do remain still, if only we
always just learn better to carry on history for the purposes of living!
For we will happily concede that the superhistorical people possess
more wisdom than we do, so long, that is, as we may be confident that
we possess more life than they do. For thus 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 will reinforce my argument with a method
well established from time immemorial: I will immediately establish
a few theses.
11 A historical phenomenon,
purely and completely known and resolved into an object of knowledge,
is, for the person who has recognized it, dead. In it the person perceives
the delusion, the injustice, the blind suffering, 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.
12 History, conceived
as pure knowledge, once it becomes sovereign, would be a kind of conclusion
to living and a final reckoning for humanity. Only when historical
culture is ruled and led by a higher force and does not itself govern
and lead does it bring with it a powerful new stream of life, a developing
culture for example, something healthy with future promise.
13 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, something like
mathematics. However, the problem to what degree living requires the
services of history generally 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. Moreover, history itself also degenerates through
this decay.
2. Alludes to Cratylus
who came to the view that, since no true statement can be made about
a thing which is always changing, one ought to say nothing, but only
move one's finger (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, V, 1013, a13).
3. "The man of action
is always without conscience; no one has a conscience except the observer,"
from "Sprüche in Prosa," quoted in Gedanken aus
Goethe's Werken, ed. Hermann Levi, F. Bruckmann, A. G. Munich,
no date, 4th ed., p. 80.
4. Probably Barthold Georg
Niebuhr.
5. Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion, Part X, quoted from John Dryen, Aureng-Zebe,
Act IV, Scene 1.
6. From Leopardi's poem,
"A se stesso," (To himself), Trans. Edwin Morgan.
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