Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History 5

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

1 In five ways the supersaturation of an age in history seems to me hostile and dangerous. Through such an excess, first, that hitherto mentioned contrast between inner and outer is produced; second, the personality is weakened; an age is caught up in the fantasy that it possesses the rarest virtue, righteousness, in a higher degree than any other time; third, 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, an age attains the dangerous mood of irony about itself and, beyond 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.

2 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 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; soon it will be promoted as the newest stimulant for the palate of those greedy for history. It appears almost impossible that a strong and full tone will be produced by the most powerful plucking of the strings. As soon as the sound appears again, already in the next moment it dies away, 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 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 oscillation 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 some things which even the child sees; he does not hear some things which the child hears; these "some things" are precisely the most important thing. Because he does not understand this, his understanding is more childish than the child's 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 unraveling all 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 mass 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 abstractis [abstraction] and shadows. A man no longer gambles his identity on that instinct. 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 shout out, "Strip off your jackets or be what you seem." No longer should each serious person 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 education and the common uniform of the middle class together both rule. 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 art and religion will be able to enter as true helpers in place of that anxiously concealed convention and masquerade, 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.

3 In what an unnatural, artificial, and definitely unworthy position must the truly naked goddess Philosophy, the most sincere of all sciences, be in a time which suffers from universal education. She remains in such a world of compulsory external uniformity the learned monologue of a solitary stroller, an individual's accidental hunting trophy, a hidden parlor secret, or a 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 which thus drove him to behave as 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. It sticks around with sighs of "If only" or with 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, in general, only courageous and decisive, if he were in even 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 education wills it. Are they still human beings, we ask ourselves then, or perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines?

4 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."(16) 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 should 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. Therefore, he plays each badly and superficially. Gradually 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 corpora [bodies](17) were also ready for their post-mortem examination and were vilia [worthless things], whatever their own literary corpora might be. If we assume there is a concern 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 one's heart's 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 on your own. But, as I have mentioned, it is a race of eunuchs; for a eunuch one woman is like another, in effect, 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 protected by precisely the sort of people who could never create history themselves. And since the eternally feminine is never attracted to you,(18) 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 and that it must be quite unimportant for those who are through and through "historically educated." 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.

5 If the 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 world and asks about the history of the author. If this author has already created a number of things, immediately the critic must allow himself to point out the earlier and the presumed future progress of the author's development; right away he will bring in others for comparative purposes, he will dissect and rip apart the choice of the author's 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 do. The historical education of our critics no longer permits an influence on our real understanding, namely, an influence 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 [impotence], the weakness of the modern personality reveals itself.

16. J. W. von Goethe, "Shakespeare und kein Ende".

17. There is a play here on the Latin "corpora" (plural of corpus which can mean either the body of a human being or a collection of literary works). The point is that these people dissect the Greek poets as though they were vile and cheap bodies, while their own literary works are vile and cheap.

18. An allusion to the last two lines of Goethe's Faust, Part II.

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life V 1 In five ways the supersaturation of an age in history seems to me hostile and dangerous. Through such an excess, first, that hitherto mentioned contrast between inner and outer is produced; second, the personality is weakened; an age is caught up in the fantasy that it possesses the rarest virtue, righteousness, in a higher degree than any other time; third, 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, an age attains the dangerous mood of irony about itself and, beyond 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. 2 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 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; soon it will be promoted as the newest stimulant for the palate of those greedy for history. It appears almost impossible that a strong and full tone will be produced by the most powerful plucking of the strings. As soon as the sound appears again, already in the next moment it dies away, 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 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 oscillation 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 some things which even the child sees; he does not hear some things which the child hears; these "some things" are precisely the most important thing. Because he does not understand this, his understanding is more childish than the child's 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 unraveling all 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 mass 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 abstractis [abstraction] and shadows. A man no longer gambles his identity on that instinct. 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 shout out, "Strip off your jackets or be what you seem." No longer should each serious person 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 education and the common uniform of the middle class together both rule. 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 art and religion will be able to enter as true helpers in place of that anxiously concealed convention and masquerade, 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. 3 In what an unnatural, artificial, and definitely unworthy position must the truly naked goddess Philosophy, the most sincere of all sciences, be in a time which suffers from universal education. She remains in such a world of compulsory external uniformity the learned monologue of a solitary stroller, an individual's accidental hunting trophy, a hidden parlor secret, or a 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 which thus drove him to behave as 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. It sticks around with sighs of "If only" or with 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, in general, only courageous and decisive, if he were in even 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 education wills it. Are they still human beings, we ask ourselves then, or perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines? 4 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."(16) 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 should 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. Therefore, he plays each badly and superficially. Gradually 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 corpora [bodies](17) were also ready for their post-mortem examination and were vilia [worthless things], whatever their own literary corpora might be. If we assume there is a concern 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 one's heart's 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 on your own. But, as I have mentioned, it is a race of eunuchs; for a eunuch one woman is like another, in effect, 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 protected by precisely the sort of people who could never create history themselves. And since the eternally feminine is never attracted to you,(18) 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 and that it must be quite unimportant for those who are through and through "historically educated." 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. 5 If the 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 world and asks about the history of the author. If this author has already created a number of things, immediately the critic must allow himself to point out the earlier and the presumed future progress of the author's development; right away he will bring in others for comparative purposes, he will dissect and rip apart the choice of the author's 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 do. The historical education of our critics no longer permits an influence on our real understanding, namely, an influence 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 [impotence], the weakness of the modern personality reveals itself. 16. J. W. von Goethe, "Shakespeare und kein Ende". 17. There is a play here on the Latin "corpora" (plural of corpus which can mean either the body of a human being or a collection of literary works). The point is that these people dissect the Greek poets as though they were vile and cheap bodies, while their own literary works are vile and cheap. 18. An allusion to the last two lines of Goethe's Faust, Part II.