Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History 7

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

VII

1 When the historical sense reigns unchecked and drags 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 practiced truly and with a purity of conviction, is therefore a fearful virtue, because it always undermines 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 thoroughly go 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, makes its implements permanently blasé and unnatural. For such people destroy illusions, and "whoever destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the strongest tyrant, nature."(23) 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 Voltaire's écrasez.(24) Let no one assume from this a new powerfully constructive instinct. For that we would have to let the so-called Protestant Union [Military alliance formed by the Protestant princes of Germany, 1608-1621.] 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, most transparent, that is, the hardly visible form in the brain of the present theologus liberalis vulgis [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 of—now, 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 found 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?

2 What we can learn from Christianity, how under the effect of a historicizing treatment it has become blasé and unnatural, until finally a fully historical, that is, an impartial treatment, dissolves it in 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 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 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 Luther's Reformation. Their dispassionate pragmatic curiosity would immediately manage to make every spiritual actio in distans [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, "which never succeed without some madness", as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger. (27)

3 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 honor history more than living. Indeed, 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 only 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 labor in the factories of the universal utilities before they are mature, that is, so that they really no longer become mature, because this would be a luxury, which would deprive the "labor market" of a lot of power. We blind some birds, so that they sing more beautifully. I do not think that today's 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 lashed through all the centuries. Youngsters who understand nothing about a war, a diplomatic action, or a trade policy are found 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 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 everything—people really call that historical sense historical education. Without saying anything to gloss over the expression: the mass of stuff streaming in is so great that 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 they do not depend upon the way you are. In melancholy absence of feeling he lets opinion on opinion flow past him and understands Holderlein's 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."(28) 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 newer ages demonstrate. But let us really look at the historical student, the inheritor of a blasé attitude, already apparent all too early, almost in childhood. Now the "method" in his own work, the right grip and the elegant tone of the master's manner, have become his own. An entirely isolated small 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 master in the world empire of history. If, as a child, he was already "ready," now he is already over-ready. One only needs to shake him for wisdom to fall into one's 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 in the process, just like the slaves used these days in this factory. I regret that people 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 life's needs, but the words "Factory, labor 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 laborers have made a working compact among themselves and decreed that genius is superfluous because each laborer is stamped as a genius. Presumably a later time will consider the structure they have cobbled together, not built together. To those who tirelessly proclaim the modern cry of combat and sacrifice "Division of labor! In rows and tiers!" we can once and for all say clearly and firmly: "Do you want to destroy science as quickly as possible, just as you destroy hens, which you artificially compel to lay eggs 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 generation 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 that popular need for the variously curious. 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 be also compassionate towards them and would be on your guard against offering them your historical aqua fortis [Nitric acid] as a living and refreshing drink. But deep down you think little of the people, because you are permitted to have no true and confidently based respect for its 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 your very own welfare. If only the soil still supported us! And if it no longer carries us, then that is also all right. Thus they feel and live an ironic existence.

23. Cf. J. W. von Goethe, Schriften zur Natur- und Wissenschaftslehre, Fragment über die Natur, in Artemis - Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zürich/Stuttgart, 1948ff) Vol. 16, p. 923. The quotation occurs in E. von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewußten (Berlin 1869) 620.

24. Ecrasez l'infâme: (literally) crush the infamous one. Voltaire's motto aimed at superstition and fanatacisim impeding the progress of rational thought, esp. the Church.

27. Hans Sachs sings this line in Act III of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

28. Friedrich Hölderlin's letter to Isaak von Sinclair dated 24 Dec. 1798.

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life VII 1 When the historical sense reigns unchecked and drags 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 practiced truly and with a purity of conviction, is therefore a fearful virtue, because it always undermines 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 thoroughly go 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, makes its implements permanently blasé and unnatural. For such people destroy illusions, and "whoever destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the strongest tyrant, nature."(23) 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 Voltaire's écrasez.(24) Let no one assume from this a new powerfully constructive instinct. For that we would have to let the so-called Protestant Union [Military alliance formed by the Protestant princes of Germany, 1608-1621.] 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, most transparent, that is, the hardly visible form in the brain of the present theologus liberalis vulgis [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 of—now, 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 found 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? 2 What we can learn from Christianity, how under the effect of a historicizing treatment it has become blasé and unnatural, until finally a fully historical, that is, an impartial treatment, dissolves it in 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 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 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 Luther's Reformation. Their dispassionate pragmatic curiosity would immediately manage to make every spiritual actio in distans [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, "which never succeed without some madness", as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger. (27) 3 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 honor history more than living. Indeed, 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 only 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 labor in the factories of the universal utilities before they are mature, that is, so that they really no longer become mature, because this would be a luxury, which would deprive the "labor market" of a lot of power. We blind some birds, so that they sing more beautifully. I do not think that today's 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 lashed through all the centuries. Youngsters who understand nothing about a war, a diplomatic action, or a trade policy are found 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 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 everything—people really call that historical sense historical education. Without saying anything to gloss over the expression: the mass of stuff streaming in is so great that 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 they do not depend upon the way you are. In melancholy absence of feeling he lets opinion on opinion flow past him and understands Holderlein's 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."(28) 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 newer ages demonstrate. But let us really look at the historical student, the inheritor of a blasé attitude, already apparent all too early, almost in childhood. Now the "method" in his own work, the right grip and the elegant tone of the master's manner, have become his own. An entirely isolated small 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 master in the world empire of history. If, as a child, he was already "ready," now he is already over-ready. One only needs to shake him for wisdom to fall into one's 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 in the process, just like the slaves used these days in this factory. I regret that people 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 life's needs, but the words "Factory, labor 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 laborers have made a working compact among themselves and decreed that genius is superfluous because each laborer is stamped as a genius. Presumably a later time will consider the structure they have cobbled together, not built together. To those who tirelessly proclaim the modern cry of combat and sacrifice "Division of labor! In rows and tiers!" we can once and for all say clearly and firmly: "Do you want to destroy science as quickly as possible, just as you destroy hens, which you artificially compel to lay eggs 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 generation 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 that popular need for the variously curious. 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 be also compassionate towards them and would be on your guard against offering them your historical aqua fortis [Nitric acid] as a living and refreshing drink. But deep down you think little of the people, because you are permitted to have no true and confidently based respect for its 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 your very own welfare. If only the soil still supported us! And if it no longer carries us, then that is also all right. Thus they feel and live an ironic existence. 23. Cf. J. W. von Goethe, Schriften zur Natur- und Wissenschaftslehre, Fragment über die Natur, in Artemis - Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zürich/Stuttgart, 1948ff) Vol. 16, p. 923. The quotation occurs in E. von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewußten (Berlin 1869) 620. 24. Ecrasez l'infâme: (literally) crush the infamous one. Voltaire's motto aimed at superstition and fanatacisim impeding the progress of rational thought, esp. the Church. 27. Hans Sachs sings this line in Act III of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. 28. Friedrich Hölderlin's letter to Isaak von Sinclair dated 24 Dec. 1798.