On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

VI

1 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 "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. 

2 True, 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 against himself. His eye does not become dim if 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 terrifyingly superhuman majesty, which we would have to fear and not to 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 wills 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 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, something great. In the vision of the duller person 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. In fact, the world seems to be full of people who "serve the truth." But 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 are honored as they march in with a great public display. Few people serve truthfulness, because only a few have the purity of will to be just. Moreover, even of these, the fewest have the strength to be able to be just. It is certainly not enough only to have 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. Hence, we should forgive those who welcome benevolently the "servers of the truth" who possess neither the will nor the power to judge and who set themselves the task of searching for pure with no attention to consequences or, more clearly, of searching for a barren truth. There are 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 nonetheless. When, especially in favorable 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 most noble kernel of the so-called drive to the truth.

3 Let us now place before our eyes the historical virtuoso of the present times. 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 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 that 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 thin shrill 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(19) for two flutes and use it for dreamy opium smoking. By that we may now measure, among the virtuosi, how things stand with the highest demands of modern man for a loftier and purer justice, a virtue which never has anything pleasant, knows no attractive feelings, but is hard and terrifying. Measured by that, how low magnanimity stands now on the ladder of virtues, magnanimity 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 just 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 travelers, who adopt a thoroughly objective demeanor for the insidious games they play; and by the same token to say nothing of the unthinking people who write as historians in the naive belief that their own age is 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" that way of writing history which does not take popular opinion as canonical.

4 And might not an illusion have occurred in the highest interpretation of the word objectivity? 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 one's 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 the thing. However, it is a myth that the picture which shows things in a person constituted in this way reflects the empirical essence of things. Or is it the case that, by some inner capacity at these times things depict themselves and, as it were, draw a good likeness of themselves or photograph themselves on a purely passive medium? 

5 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 artistic and most spontaneous creative moment in the inner life of the artist, a moment of composition of the very highest order, whose result will be an artistically really true 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 the artistic impulse itself expresses its drive for justice, but not its drive for truth. 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 able to claim the highest rating on an objective scale. 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 its ideas of external purposes a totality which really can only be known from within, and 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, render it impossible to prove a compelling, all-encompassing necessity for events." However, this necessary conclusion about that "objective" look at the matter in hand should be exposed right away. This is an assumption which, when it is voiced as a statement of belief by historians, can only assume an odd form. Schiller, in fact, is completely clear concerning the essential subjectivity of this assumption, when he says of historians: "One phenomenon after another begins to liberate itself from accidental and lawless freedom and, as a coordinated link, to become part of a harmonious totality, which naturally is present only in its depiction."(20) 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 that all human action and striving are subordinate to the light and often unremarked but powerful and irresistible progress of things"? In such a statement we do not feel any mysterious wisdom expressing itself as clear illogic, like the saying of Goethe's gardener, "Nature lets itself be forced but not compelled", or in the inscription of 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 progress of things? In particular, it strikes me that such historians, like that one from whom we quoted a sentence, cease to instruct as soon as they become general and then, in their darkness, show a sense of weakness. 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 particularly true in such statements, once we remove the above-mentioned irreconcilably dark remainder, is well known and totally trivial. For it is apparent to everyone's 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,(21) natural science nowadays may suffer from an excess of experimentation. If the value of a drama is to lie only in the main ideas of the conclusion, then drama itself would be the furthest possible route to the goal, crooked and laborious. And thus I hope that history can realize that its significance is not in universal ideas, like some sort of blossom or fruit, but that its worth is directly one which indicates a known, perhaps a habitual theme, a daily melody, in an elegant way, elevates it, intensifies it to an inclusive symbol, and thus allows one to make out in the original theme an entire world of profundity, power, and beauty.

6 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 types—to 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 artist's eyes, the affectation of composure emerges, just as the lack of pathos and moral power cultivates the disguise of a biting coldness of expression. In certain cases, the banality of the conviction ventures to appear, that wisdom of every man, which creates the impression of composure for unexcited people only through its tediousness, 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 immediately the right 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. Philologues and Greeks frequently behave towards each other in this way. They do not concern themselves with each other in the slightest. People call this real "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 objectively indifferent behavior. Incidentally, with such authors people should base their judgment more closely on the principle that each man's 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 in 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 once was! As a matter of fact, times and generations never have the right to be the judges of all earlier times and generations. Such an uncomfortable task always falls to only a few, 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 must 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 places? 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.

7 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 reduce 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, because they will certainly not be able to become great historians. Even less should we exchange them for numskulls. We should see them as the necessary colleagues and manual laborers in the service of the master, just as the French, with greater naïveté than is possible among the Germans, were accustomed to speak of the historiens de M. Thiers.(22) These workers should gradually become very learned men, but for that reason cannot ever become masters. An eminently learned man and a great numskull—those go together very easily under a single hat.

8 Thus, the person of experience and reflection writes history. Anyone who has not experienced life on a greater and higher level than everyone else will not know how to interpret the greatness and loftiness of the past. The utterance of the past is always an oracular pronouncement. You will understand it only as 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 history the highest command: to become mature and to flee away from that paralyzing and prohibiting 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. So-and-so 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. With a hundred people raised in such an unmodern way, that is, people who have become mature and familiar with the heroic, one could permanently silence the entire noisy pseudo-education of this age.

19. Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica.

20. In 1789, Freidrich Schiller became a professor of history at the University of Jena. The quotation is from his inaugural lecture delivered on 26-27 May, 1789.

21. The astrophysicist Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1836-1882).

22. Louis Akolphe Thiers (1797-1877), French politician, journalist and historian, whose Histoire du consulat et de l'empire was published in 20 volumes between 1845-62.