Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History 8

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

VIII

1 In fact, it must seem odd, although it is not contradictory, when to the age which so audibly and insistently is in the habit of bursting out in the most carefree exulting over its historical culture, I nevertheless ascribe an ironical self-consciousness, a presentiment which hovers all around it that this is not a matter for rejoicing, a fear that soon all the celebrations over historical knowledge will be over. Goethe proposed to us a similar enigma with respect to a single personality in his remarkable characterization of Newton. He found at bottom (or more correctly, at the top) of Newton's being "a dark premonition of his own error," as it were, the expression (noticeable in solitary moments) of a consciousness with a superior power of judgment, something which a certain ironical perspective had gained over the essential nature dwelling inside him. Thus we find particularly in the greater people with a higher historical development a consciousness, often toned down to a universal skepticism, of how much folly and superstition are in the belief that the education of a people must be so overwhelmingly historical as it is now. For the most powerful people, that is, powerful in deeds and works, have lived very differently and have raised their young people differently. But that folly and that superstition suit us—so runs the skeptical objection—us, the late comers, the faded last shoots of more powerful and more happily courageous generations, us, in whom one can see realized Herod's prophecy that one day people would be born with instant gray beards and that Zeus would destroy this generation as soon as that sign became visible to him. Historical culture is really a kind of congenital gray-haired condition, and those who bear its mark from childhood on would have to come to the instinctive belief in the old age of humanity. An old person's occupation, however, is appropriate to old age, that is, looking back, tallying the accounts, balancing the books, seeing consolation in what used to be through memories, in short, a historical culture. The human race, however, is a tough and persistent thing and will not have its steps forward and backwards viewed according to millennia, indeed hardly according to hundreds of thousands of years. That is, it will not be viewed at all as a totality from the infinitely small point of an atomic individual person. Then what will a couple of thousand years signify (or, put another way, the time period of thirty-four consecutive human lives, reckoned at sixty years each) so that we can speak of the beginning of such a time as still the "Youth of Mankind" and the end of it as already the "Old Age of Mankind." Is it not much more that case that in this paralyzing belief in an already faded humanity there sticks the misunderstanding of an idea of Christian theology inherited from the Middle Ages, the idea of the imminent end of the world, of the nervously awaited judgment? Has this idea, in fact, changed through the intensified need of history to judge, as if our time, the last of all possible, has been authorized to consider itself the universal judge of everything in the past, something which Christian belief awaits, not in any way from human beings, but from the "Son of Man." In earlier times this was, for humanity as well as for the individual, a loudly proclaimed "memento mori," [reminder you must die] an always tormenting barb and, so to speak, the summit of medieval knowledge and conscience. The phrase of more recent times, called out in a contrasting response, "memento vivere" [remember to live] sounds, to speak openly, still quite timid, is not a full throated cry, and has something almost dishonest about it. For human beings still sit firmly on the memento mori and betray the fact through their universal need for history. In spite of the most powerful beating of its wings, knowledge cannot tear itself loose in freedom. A deep feeling of hopelessness is left over and has taken on that historical coloring, because of which all higher training and education are now melancholy and dark. A religion which of all the hours of a person's life considers the last the most important, which generally predicts the end of earthy life and condemns all living people to live in the fifth act of the tragedy, certainly arouses the deepest and noblest forces, but it is hostile to all new cultivation, daring undertakings, and free desiring. It resists that flight into the unknown, because there it does not love and does not hope. It lets what is coming into being push forward only unwillingly so that at the right time it can push it to the side or sacrifice it as a seducer of being or as a liar about the worth of existence. What the Florentines did when, under the influence of Savonarola's sermons calling for repentance, they organized those famous sacrificial fires of paintings, manuscripts, mirrors, and masks, Christianity would like to do with every culture which rouses one to renewed striving and which leads to that slogan memento vivere. If it is not possible to achieve this directly, without a digression (that is, through superior force), then it attains its goal nonetheless if it unites itself with historical education, usually even with its knowledge. Now, speaking out through historical knowledge, with a shrug of its shoulders, Christianity rejects all becoming and thus disseminates the feeling of the person who has come much too late and is unoriginal, in short, of the person born with gray hair. The stringent and profoundly serious consideration of the worthlessness of everything which has happened, of the way in which the world in its maturity is ready for judgment, has subsided to a skeptical consciousness that it is in any case good to know everything that has happened, because it is too late to do anything better. Thus the historical sense makes its servants passive and retrospective. Only in momentary forgetfulness, when that sense is intermittent, does the patient suffering from the historical fever become active, so that, as soon as the action is over and done with, he may seize his deed, through analytical consideration prevent any further effects, and finally flay it for "History." In this sense, we are still living in the Middle Ages, and history is always still a disguised theology, in exactly the same way that the reverence with which the unscientific laity treat the scientific caste is a reverence inherited from the clergy. What people in earlier times gave the church, people now give, although in scantier amounts, to science. However, the fact that people give was something the church achieved in earlier times, not something first done by the modern spirit, which, along with its other good characteristics, much rather has something stingy about it, as is well known, and is, so far as the pre-eminent virtue of generosity is concerned, a piker.

2 Perhaps this observation is not pleasant, perhaps no more pleasant than that derivation of the excess of history from the medieval memento mori and from the hopelessness which Christianity carried in its heart concerning all future ages of earthly existence. But at any rate people should replace the explanation which I have put down only hesitantly with better explanations. For the origin of historical education and its inherent and totally radical opposition to the spirit of a "new age," of a "modern consciousness"—this origin must itself be once again recognized historically. History must itself resolve the problem of history. Knowledge must turn its barbs against itself. This triple Must is the spiritual imperative of the "new age," if there is in it truly something new, powerful, vital, and original. Or if, to leave the Romance peoples out of consideration, it should be the case that we Germans, in all higher matters of culture, always have to be only the "followers" just because that is the only thing we could be, as William Wackernagel(33) once expressed it all too convincingly: "We Germans are a people of followers. With all our higher knowledge and even with our faith, we are always still followers of the old world. Even those who are hostile to that and certainly do not wish it breathe in the spirit of Christianity together with the immortal spirit of the old classical culture, and if anyone were to succeed in separating out these two elements from the living air which envelops the inner man, then not much would be left over with which one might still eke out a spiritual life." But even if we wanted to reassure ourselves happily about this calling to be the followers of antiquity, if we would only make up our minds to take the calling as something right, urgent, serious, and great, and would recognize in this urgency our designated and unique privilege, nonetheless we would find it necessary to ask whether it must always be our purpose to be pupils of a declining antiquity. At some time or other we might be permitted to aim our goal somewhat higher and further, at some time or other we might permit ourselves to praise ourselves for having reworked so fruitfully and splendidly the Alexandrian-Roman culture in ourselves also through our universal history, so that now, as the most noble reward we might set ourselves the still more monumental task of getting back behind and above this Alexandrian world and seeking out our models of the courageous gaze in the ancient Greek original world of the great, the natural, and the human. But there we find also the reality of an essentially unhistorical education, an education nevertheless (or rather therefore) unspeakably rich and vital. If we Germans were nothing but followers, then by looking at such a culture as a legacy appropriately ours, there could be nothing greater or prouder for us than to be its followers.

3 As a result we should say only this and nothing but this: that the often unpleasantly strange thought that we are epigones, nobly thought out, can guarantee important effects and a richly hopeful desire for the future, both for the individual and for a people, to the extent that we understand ourselves as the heirs and followers of an astonishing classical force and see in that our legacy and our spur, but not as pale and withered late arrivals of powerful races, who scrape out a cold living as the antiquarians and gravediggers of those races. Such late arrivals naturally live an ironic existence. Destruction follows closely on the heels of their limping passage through life. They shudder in the face of that, when they derive enjoyment from the past, for they are living memorials, and yet their thoughts are senseless without someone to inherit them. So the dark premonition envelops them that their life may be an injustice, for no future life can set it right.

4 However, if we were to imagine such antiquarian late comers suddenly exchanging that painfully ironic moderation for impudence, and if we imagine them to ourselves as if they were reporting with a ringing voice: "The race is at its peak, because now for the first time it has the knowledge of itself and has become clear to itself," then we would have a performance in which, as in an allegory, the enigmatic meaning of a certain very famous philosophy is deciphered for German culture. I believe that there has been no dangerous variation or change in German culture in this century which has not become more dangerous through the monstrous influence of the philosophy of Hegel, an influence which continues to flow right up to the present. The belief that one is a late comer of the age is truly crippling and disorienting; but it must appear fearful and destructive when such a belief one day with a bold reversal idolizes this late comer as the true meaning and purpose of all earlier events, when his knowledgeable misery is equated to the completion of world history. Such a way of considering things has made the Germans accustomed to talking of the "World Process" and to justify their own time as the necessary result of the world process. Such a way of thinking about things has made history the single sovereign, in the place of the other spiritual powers, culture and religion, insofar as history is "the self-realizing idea" and "the dialectic of the spirits of peoples" and the "last judgment."

5 People have scornfully called this Hegelian understanding of history the earthly changes of God; but this God for His part was first created by history. However, this God became intelligible and comprehensible inside Hegelian brain cases and has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of His being right up to that self-revelation. Thus, for Hegel the summit and end point of the world process coincided with his own individual existence in Berlin. In fact, strictly speaking he should have said that everything coming after him should be valued really only as a musical coda of the world historical rondo, or even more truly, as superfluous. He did not say that. Thus, he planted in the generations leavened by him that admiration for the "Power of History", which transforms practically every moment into a naked admiration of success and leads to idolatrous worship of the factual. For this service people nowadays commonly repeat the very mythological and, in addition, the truly German expression "to carry the bill of facts" But the person who has first learned to stoop down and to bow his head before the "Power of History", finally nods his agreement mechanically, in the Chinese fashion, to that power, whether it is a government or public opinion or a numerical majority, and moves his limbs precisely to the beat of strings plucked by some "power" or other. If every success contains within itself a rational necessity, if every event is the victory of the logical or the "Idea", then get down quickly now and kneel before the entire hierarchy of "success." What? Do you claim there are no ruling mythologies any more and religions are dying out? Only look at the religion of the power of history; pay attention to the priests of the mythology of the Idea and their knees all covered in cuts! Surely all the virtues come only in the wake of this new faith. Is it not unselfishness when the historical person lets himself be blown into an objective glass mirror? Is it not generosity to do without all the force of heaven and earth so that in this power people worship pure force in itself? Is it not justice to have a scale balance always in one's hands and to watch closely what sinks down as the stronger and heavier? And what a respectable school such a consideration of history is! To take everything objectively, to get angry about nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything, how gentle and flexible that makes things. And even if one man brought up in this school becomes publicly angry at some point and gets annoyed, people can then enjoy that, for they know it is really only intended as an artistic expression; it is ira [anger] and studium [study]. However, it is entirely sine ira et studio [without indignation and involvement].

6 What antiquated thoughts I have in my heart about such a complex of mythology and virtue! But they should come out for once, even if people should just go on laughing. I would also say: history constantly impresses on us "It was once" and the moral "You should not" or "You should not have." So history turns into a compendium of the really immoral. How seriously mistaken would the person be who at the same time considered history as the judge of this factual immorality! For example, it is offensive to morality that a Raphael had to die at thirty-six years of age; such a being should not have died. Now, if you want history, as the apologist for the factual, to provide assistance, then you will say that Raphael expressed everything that was in him; with a longer life he would have been able to create something beautiful only as a similar beauty, and not as something beautifully new, and so on. In so doing, you are the devil's advocate for the very reason that you make success, the fact, your idol; whereas, the fact is always dumb and at all times has looked upon something like a calf as a god. Moreover, as apologists for history, you prompt each other by whispering this ignorance. Because you do not know what such a natura naturans [creative nature] like Raphael is, it does not make you make you hot to hear that such a person was and will never be again. In Goethe's case, recently someone wanted to teach us that with his eighty-two years he had reached his limit, and yet I would happily trade a couple of years of the "washed up" Goethe for an entire cart full of fresh ultra-modern lives, in order to share in conversations like the ones Goethe conducted with Eckermann and in this way to remain protected from all the contemporary teachings of the legionaries of the moment. In comparison with such dead people, how few living people generally have a right to live! That the many live and that those few no longer live is nothing more than a brutal truth, that is, an incorrigible stupidity, a blatant "That is the case" in contrast to the moral "It should not have been so." Yes, in contrast to the moral! For let people speak about whatever virtue they want, about righteousness, generosity, courage, wisdom and human sympathy—a person is always virtuous just because he rebels against that blind power of the factual, against the tyranny of the real and submits himself to laws which are not the laws of that historical fluctuation. He constantly swims against the historical waves, whether he fights his passions as the closest mute facts of his existence or whether he commits himself to truthfulness, while the lies spin around him their glittering webs. If history were in general nothing more than "the world system of passion and error," then human beings would have to read it in the way Goethe summoned us to read Werther, exactly as if it cried out "Be a man and do not follow me!" Fortunately history also preserves the secret of the great fighters against history, that is, against the blind force of the real, and thus puts itself right in the pillory, because it brings out directly as the essential historical natures those who worried so little about the "Thus it was," in order rather to follow with a more cheerful pride a "So it should be." Not to drag their race to the grave but to found a new race—that drove them ceaselessly forwards; and if they themselves were born as latecomers, there is an art of living which makes one forget this. The generations to come will know them only as first comers.

33. Carl Heinrich Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806-1869) was, next to Jacob Grimm, the most emminent Germanist of his time.

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life VIII 1 In fact, it must seem odd, although it is not contradictory, when to the age which so audibly and insistently is in the habit of bursting out in the most carefree exulting over its historical culture, I nevertheless ascribe an ironical self-consciousness, a presentiment which hovers all around it that this is not a matter for rejoicing, a fear that soon all the celebrations over historical knowledge will be over. Goethe proposed to us a similar enigma with respect to a single personality in his remarkable characterization of Newton. He found at bottom (or more correctly, at the top) of Newton's being "a dark premonition of his own error," as it were, the expression (noticeable in solitary moments) of a consciousness with a superior power of judgment, something which a certain ironical perspective had gained over the essential nature dwelling inside him. Thus we find particularly in the greater people with a higher historical development a consciousness, often toned down to a universal skepticism, of how much folly and superstition are in the belief that the education of a people must be so overwhelmingly historical as it is now. For the most powerful people, that is, powerful in deeds and works, have lived very differently and have raised their young people differently. But that folly and that superstition suit us—so runs the skeptical objection—us, the late comers, the faded last shoots of more powerful and more happily courageous generations, us, in whom one can see realized Herod's prophecy that one day people would be born with instant gray beards and that Zeus would destroy this generation as soon as that sign became visible to him. Historical culture is really a kind of congenital gray-haired condition, and those who bear its mark from childhood on would have to come to the instinctive belief in the old age of humanity. An old person's occupation, however, is appropriate to old age, that is, looking back, tallying the accounts, balancing the books, seeing consolation in what used to be through memories, in short, a historical culture. The human race, however, is a tough and persistent thing and will not have its steps forward and backwards viewed according to millennia, indeed hardly according to hundreds of thousands of years. That is, it will not be viewed at all as a totality from the infinitely small point of an atomic individual person. Then what will a couple of thousand years signify (or, put another way, the time period of thirty-four consecutive human lives, reckoned at sixty years each) so that we can speak of the beginning of such a time as still the "Youth of Mankind" and the end of it as already the "Old Age of Mankind." Is it not much more that case that in this paralyzing belief in an already faded humanity there sticks the misunderstanding of an idea of Christian theology inherited from the Middle Ages, the idea of the imminent end of the world, of the nervously awaited judgment? Has this idea, in fact, changed through the intensified need of history to judge, as if our time, the last of all possible, has been authorized to consider itself the universal judge of everything in the past, something which Christian belief awaits, not in any way from human beings, but from the "Son of Man." In earlier times this was, for humanity as well as for the individual, a loudly proclaimed "memento mori," [reminder you must die] an always tormenting barb and, so to speak, the summit of medieval knowledge and conscience. The phrase of more recent times, called out in a contrasting response, "memento vivere" [remember to live] sounds, to speak openly, still quite timid, is not a full throated cry, and has something almost dishonest about it. For human beings still sit firmly on the memento mori and betray the fact through their universal need for history. In spite of the most powerful beating of its wings, knowledge cannot tear itself loose in freedom. A deep feeling of hopelessness is left over and has taken on that historical coloring, because of which all higher training and education are now melancholy and dark. A religion which of all the hours of a person's life considers the last the most important, which generally predicts the end of earthy life and condemns all living people to live in the fifth act of the tragedy, certainly arouses the deepest and noblest forces, but it is hostile to all new cultivation, daring undertakings, and free desiring. It resists that flight into the unknown, because there it does not love and does not hope. It lets what is coming into being push forward only unwillingly so that at the right time it can push it to the side or sacrifice it as a seducer of being or as a liar about the worth of existence. What the Florentines did when, under the influence of Savonarola's sermons calling for repentance, they organized those famous sacrificial fires of paintings, manuscripts, mirrors, and masks, Christianity would like to do with every culture which rouses one to renewed striving and which leads to that slogan memento vivere. If it is not possible to achieve this directly, without a digression (that is, through superior force), then it attains its goal nonetheless if it unites itself with historical education, usually even with its knowledge. Now, speaking out through historical knowledge, with a shrug of its shoulders, Christianity rejects all becoming and thus disseminates the feeling of the person who has come much too late and is unoriginal, in short, of the person born with gray hair. The stringent and profoundly serious consideration of the worthlessness of everything which has happened, of the way in which the world in its maturity is ready for judgment, has subsided to a skeptical consciousness that it is in any case good to know everything that has happened, because it is too late to do anything better. Thus the historical sense makes its servants passive and retrospective. Only in momentary forgetfulness, when that sense is intermittent, does the patient suffering from the historical fever become active, so that, as soon as the action is over and done with, he may seize his deed, through analytical consideration prevent any further effects, and finally flay it for "History." In this sense, we are still living in the Middle Ages, and history is always still a disguised theology, in exactly the same way that the reverence with which the unscientific laity treat the scientific caste is a reverence inherited from the clergy. What people in earlier times gave the church, people now give, although in scantier amounts, to science. However, the fact that people give was something the church achieved in earlier times, not something first done by the modern spirit, which, along with its other good characteristics, much rather has something stingy about it, as is well known, and is, so far as the pre-eminent virtue of generosity is concerned, a piker. 2 Perhaps this observation is not pleasant, perhaps no more pleasant than that derivation of the excess of history from the medieval memento mori and from the hopelessness which Christianity carried in its heart concerning all future ages of earthly existence. But at any rate people should replace the explanation which I have put down only hesitantly with better explanations. For the origin of historical education and its inherent and totally radical opposition to the spirit of a "new age," of a "modern consciousness"—this origin must itself be once again recognized historically. History must itself resolve the problem of history. Knowledge must turn its barbs against itself. This triple Must is the spiritual imperative of the "new age," if there is in it truly something new, powerful, vital, and original. Or if, to leave the Romance peoples out of consideration, it should be the case that we Germans, in all higher matters of culture, always have to be only the "followers" just because that is the only thing we could be, as William Wackernagel(33) once expressed it all too convincingly: "We Germans are a people of followers. With all our higher knowledge and even with our faith, we are always still followers of the old world. Even those who are hostile to that and certainly do not wish it breathe in the spirit of Christianity together with the immortal spirit of the old classical culture, and if anyone were to succeed in separating out these two elements from the living air which envelops the inner man, then not much would be left over with which one might still eke out a spiritual life." But even if we wanted to reassure ourselves happily about this calling to be the followers of antiquity, if we would only make up our minds to take the calling as something right, urgent, serious, and great, and would recognize in this urgency our designated and unique privilege, nonetheless we would find it necessary to ask whether it must always be our purpose to be pupils of a declining antiquity. At some time or other we might be permitted to aim our goal somewhat higher and further, at some time or other we might permit ourselves to praise ourselves for having reworked so fruitfully and splendidly the Alexandrian-Roman culture in ourselves also through our universal history, so that now, as the most noble reward we might set ourselves the still more monumental task of getting back behind and above this Alexandrian world and seeking out our models of the courageous gaze in the ancient Greek original world of the great, the natural, and the human. But there we find also the reality of an essentially unhistorical education, an education nevertheless (or rather therefore) unspeakably rich and vital. If we Germans were nothing but followers, then by looking at such a culture as a legacy appropriately ours, there could be nothing greater or prouder for us than to be its followers. 3 As a result we should say only this and nothing but this: that the often unpleasantly strange thought that we are epigones, nobly thought out, can guarantee important effects and a richly hopeful desire for the future, both for the individual and for a people, to the extent that we understand ourselves as the heirs and followers of an astonishing classical force and see in that our legacy and our spur, but not as pale and withered late arrivals of powerful races, who scrape out a cold living as the antiquarians and gravediggers of those races. Such late arrivals naturally live an ironic existence. Destruction follows closely on the heels of their limping passage through life. They shudder in the face of that, when they derive enjoyment from the past, for they are living memorials, and yet their thoughts are senseless without someone to inherit them. So the dark premonition envelops them that their life may be an injustice, for no future life can set it right. 4 However, if we were to imagine such antiquarian late comers suddenly exchanging that painfully ironic moderation for impudence, and if we imagine them to ourselves as if they were reporting with a ringing voice: "The race is at its peak, because now for the first time it has the knowledge of itself and has become clear to itself," then we would have a performance in which, as in an allegory, the enigmatic meaning of a certain very famous philosophy is deciphered for German culture. I believe that there has been no dangerous variation or change in German culture in this century which has not become more dangerous through the monstrous influence of the philosophy of Hegel, an influence which continues to flow right up to the present. The belief that one is a late comer of the age is truly crippling and disorienting; but it must appear fearful and destructive when such a belief one day with a bold reversal idolizes this late comer as the true meaning and purpose of all earlier events, when his knowledgeable misery is equated to the completion of world history. Such a way of considering things has made the Germans accustomed to talking of the "World Process" and to justify their own time as the necessary result of the world process. Such a way of thinking about things has made history the single sovereign, in the place of the other spiritual powers, culture and religion, insofar as history is "the self-realizing idea" and "the dialectic of the spirits of peoples" and the "last judgment." 5 People have scornfully called this Hegelian understanding of history the earthly changes of God; but this God for His part was first created by history. However, this God became intelligible and comprehensible inside Hegelian brain cases and has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of His being right up to that self-revelation. Thus, for Hegel the summit and end point of the world process coincided with his own individual existence in Berlin. In fact, strictly speaking he should have said that everything coming after him should be valued really only as a musical coda of the world historical rondo, or even more truly, as superfluous. He did not say that. Thus, he planted in the generations leavened by him that admiration for the "Power of History", which transforms practically every moment into a naked admiration of success and leads to idolatrous worship of the factual. For this service people nowadays commonly repeat the very mythological and, in addition, the truly German expression "to carry the bill of facts" But the person who has first learned to stoop down and to bow his head before the "Power of History", finally nods his agreement mechanically, in the Chinese fashion, to that power, whether it is a government or public opinion or a numerical majority, and moves his limbs precisely to the beat of strings plucked by some "power" or other. If every success contains within itself a rational necessity, if every event is the victory of the logical or the "Idea", then get down quickly now and kneel before the entire hierarchy of "success." What? Do you claim there are no ruling mythologies any more and religions are dying out? Only look at the religion of the power of history; pay attention to the priests of the mythology of the Idea and their knees all covered in cuts! Surely all the virtues come only in the wake of this new faith. Is it not unselfishness when the historical person lets himself be blown into an objective glass mirror? Is it not generosity to do without all the force of heaven and earth so that in this power people worship pure force in itself? Is it not justice to have a scale balance always in one's hands and to watch closely what sinks down as the stronger and heavier? And what a respectable school such a consideration of history is! To take everything objectively, to get angry about nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything, how gentle and flexible that makes things. And even if one man brought up in this school becomes publicly angry at some point and gets annoyed, people can then enjoy that, for they know it is really only intended as an artistic expression; it is ira [anger] and studium [study]. However, it is entirely sine ira et studio [without indignation and involvement]. 6 What antiquated thoughts I have in my heart about such a complex of mythology and virtue! But they should come out for once, even if people should just go on laughing. I would also say: history constantly impresses on us "It was once" and the moral "You should not" or "You should not have." So history turns into a compendium of the really immoral. How seriously mistaken would the person be who at the same time considered history as the judge of this factual immorality! For example, it is offensive to morality that a Raphael had to die at thirty-six years of age; such a being should not have died. Now, if you want history, as the apologist for the factual, to provide assistance, then you will say that Raphael expressed everything that was in him; with a longer life he would have been able to create something beautiful only as a similar beauty, and not as something beautifully new, and so on. In so doing, you are the devil's advocate for the very reason that you make success, the fact, your idol; whereas, the fact is always dumb and at all times has looked upon something like a calf as a god. Moreover, as apologists for history, you prompt each other by whispering this ignorance. Because you do not know what such a natura naturans [creative nature] like Raphael is, it does not make you make you hot to hear that such a person was and will never be again. In Goethe's case, recently someone wanted to teach us that with his eighty-two years he had reached his limit, and yet I would happily trade a couple of years of the "washed up" Goethe for an entire cart full of fresh ultra-modern lives, in order to share in conversations like the ones Goethe conducted with Eckermann and in this way to remain protected from all the contemporary teachings of the legionaries of the moment. In comparison with such dead people, how few living people generally have a right to live! That the many live and that those few no longer live is nothing more than a brutal truth, that is, an incorrigible stupidity, a blatant "That is the case" in contrast to the moral "It should not have been so." Yes, in contrast to the moral! For let people speak about whatever virtue they want, about righteousness, generosity, courage, wisdom and human sympathy—a person is always virtuous just because he rebels against that blind power of the factual, against the tyranny of the real and submits himself to laws which are not the laws of that historical fluctuation. He constantly swims against the historical waves, whether he fights his passions as the closest mute facts of his existence or whether he commits himself to truthfulness, while the lies spin around him their glittering webs. If history were in general nothing more than "the world system of passion and error," then human beings would have to read it in the way Goethe summoned us to read Werther, exactly as if it cried out "Be a man and do not follow me!" Fortunately history also preserves the secret of the great fighters against history, that is, against the blind force of the real, and thus puts itself right in the pillory, because it brings out directly as the essential historical natures those who worried so little about the "Thus it was," in order rather to follow with a more cheerful pride a "So it should be." Not to drag their race to the grave but to found a new race—that drove them ceaselessly forwards; and if they themselves were born as latecomers, there is an art of living which makes one forget this. The generations to come will know them only as first comers. 33. Carl Heinrich Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806-1869) was, next to Jacob Grimm, the most emminent Germanist of his time.