Of what interest can it be to us whether or not these charming little chapters are newly written! If only it were a matter of writing! Between ourselves, I wish they had been written 25 years ago: But that something written in should smell mouldy in arouses my suspicions. Suppose someone fell asleep while reading these chapters and imbibing their odour - what would he be likely to dream about? A friend of mine gave me the answer, for it happened to him.
He dreamed of a waxworks show: They moved their arms and eyes and a screw inside them squeaked as they did so. This discovery wrung from him a scream of fear, he awoke and read no further. Why, Master, did you ever write such mouldy little chapters! We do, to be sure, learn a few novelties from them: All this is certainly new and striking, even if it does not strike us very pleasandy; and, as surely as it is new, just as surely it will never grow old, for it was never young: What ideas the new-style blessed come across in their aesthetic Heaven! And why have they not forgotten at any rate some of them, especially when they are as unaesthetic and earthly-ephemeral and bear the stamp of stupidity as visibly as, for example, some of the opinions of Gervinus!
But it almost seems as though the modest greatness of a Strauss and the immodest minimality of a Gervinus can get on together only too well: I would like to know how a Hallelujah would sound in the mouth of Strauss: I imagine one would have to listen very closely or it would sound like a polite apology or a whispered compliment. I can relate an instructive and appalling example of this. Now, I have no doubt at all as to the existence of this warmth; on the contrary, I have always felt that this warmth of approval of Lessing on the part of Strauss had something suspect about it; I find the same suspect approval of Lessing raised to steam- heat in Gervinus; indeed, none of the great German writers is in general so popular with the little German writers as Lessing is; and yet they deserve no thanks for it: The latter quality distinguishes every great writer, and sometimes even the little writer, for a narrow mind gets on fabulously well with a narrow heart.
And what do you feel when you remember Winckelmann, who, to free his sight of your grotesque absurdities, went begging for help to the Jesuits and whose shameful conversion dishonours not him but you? Do you even dare to speak the name of Schiller and not blush? Look at this picture! The flashing eyes that gaze contemptuously out over your heads, the deathly flushed cheeks - do these say nothing to you? Here was a glorious, divine toy which you broke. None of your great geniuses has ever received any assistance from you, and do you now want to make it a dogma that none ever shall receive any?
Even in his day, Goethe felt impelled to exclaim: We read further, however, and went on to beg entry into the musical sanctum of thfe new faith. The Master opened the door, attended at our side, explained, named names - at last we stopped mistrustfully and looked at him: So long as he was speaking of them, the composers of whom Strauss spoke seemed to us to be wrongly named, and we felt he must be referring to someone else, if not to mere teasing phantoms. When, for example, he takes, with the same warmth as had made us suspicious when he praised Lessing, the name of Haydn into his mouth and gives himself out for an epopt and priest of a Haydnesque mystery cult, while at the same time p.
But who could this Straussian confectionary-Beethoven be? But no, here he is for once in the wrong, here he really is too modest. For who else is to instruct us about the confectionary-Beethoven if not Strauss himself, the only one who seems to know him? It is true that so stern a critic as Gervinus gave it a welcome, namely as a confirmation of one of his own dogmas: He, the classic artist in writing, carries his burden with playful ease, while Beethoven trundles his along out of breath. He seems to dally with his load: And that is how the Strausses of our day in fact proceed: This, of course, they should beat liberty to do: And as for Mozart, there ought truly to apply to him what Aristotle said of Plato: Here, however, all shame has been lost, on the part of the public as much as on that of the Master; not only is he permitted to cross himself before the greatest and purest products of the German genius as though he had beheld something godless and indecent, but his candid confessions of sins are received with delight, especially as he confesses not sins he himself has committed, but those supposedly committed by our great spirits.
This provides the answer to our first question: The Straussian philistine lodges in the works of our great poets and composers like a worm which lives by destroying, admires by consuming, reveres by digesting. Now we come to our second question: This too would already have been answered if courage were identical with immodesty: Strauss has sufficient of that impudence to which every victorious hero feels himself entitled; every flower that blooms belongs to him, the victor, alone, and he lauds the sun for illuminating his window. The universe will not be precisely grateful to our image-mad Master that he can find no better metaphor with which to commend it, if indeed it takes any pleasure at all in being commended by Strauss.
What is this oil called which trickles down on to the pistons and rams? But since it is not an idea, even the fairest Straussian idea of the universe, that has a face, but he who has the idea, the procedure here described consists of the following individual acts: Strauss opens Schopenhauer, whereupon Schopenhauer takes the opportunity to strike Strauss in the face.
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The outcome of this cudgelling: On the other hand, we realize the debt Strauss actually owes to the titillating, jabbing and cudgelling Schopenhauer; and the following express act of kindness towards him therefore fails to occasion in us any further surprise. To whom is the chieftain of the philistines really addressing these words?
It is obvious that he swallowed Schopenhauer the wrong way: He has no notion of the fundamental antinomies of idealism or of the extreme relativity of all science and reason. He who has once contracted Hegelism and Schleiermacherism is never quite cured of them. The pessimistic philosopher does not see that he declares his own thought bad when his thought declares the world bad; but if a thought which declares the world bad is itself bad thinking, then the world is, on the contrary, good. Optimism has here for once deliberately made things too easy for itself.
This is to be achieved by showing that there is no need whatever to take a pessimist seriously: Who, for example, could read the following psychological elucidation without feeling indignation, since it can quite clearly have sprung only from the stem of this infamous ease-and- contentment theory: But the worst example of this infamous vulgarity of mind is supplied in the fact that Strauss knows no other way of explaining to himself the whole dreadfully serious drive to self-abnegation and to salvation in asceticism evidenced in the first centuries of Christianity than by supposing it to have originated in a preceding surfeit of sexual indulgence of all kinds and the disgust and nausea that resulted: We, however, turn aside for a moment to overcome our disgust.
Let us first hear his confession: It likes to live unstintingly, like a great lord, it receives and pays out for as long as it has anything to pay with: And precisely that is what my head and heart have always impelled me to do. That would accord very well with natural cowardice, such as is proper to the philistine: He cannot manage an aggressive act, only aggressive words, but he chooses the most offensive words he can find and exhausts all his force and energy in uncouth and blustering expressions: Even the phantom form of actions, ethics, reveals that he is a hero only of words, and that he avoids every occasion on which it is necessary to proceed from words to grim earnest.
With a certain rude contentment he covers himself in the hairy cloak of our ape-genealogists and praises Darwin as one of the greatest benefactors of mankind - but it confuses us to see that his ethics are constructed entirely independently of the question: For with a genuine Darwinian ethic, seriously and consistently carried through, he would have had against him the philistine whom with such outbursts he attracts to his side. Live as a man and not as an ape or a seal! Unfortunately this imperative is altogether without force and useless, because the concept of man yokes together the most diverse and manifold things, for example the Patagonian and Master Strauss, and because no one will venture to demand: We are at once given a fresh demonstration of the point at which courage is transposed into its opposite.
He shows us that, while chance would be an irrational master of the world, necessity, i.
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He is thus in need of a complete cosmodicy and at a disadvantage compared with those who are concerned only with a theodicy, who conceive the entire existence of man as, for example, a punishment or a process of purification. There has been found in it an expression of his restless desire for actiosi and investigation. Or would our world not be, rather, as Lichtenberg once called it, the work of a subordinate being who as yet lacked a full understanding of his task, and thus an experiment? So that Strauss himself would have to concede that our world is an arena, not of rationality, but of error, and that its laws and purposefulness are no source of consolation, since they proceed from a God who is not merely in error but takes pleasure in being in error.
It is a truly delicious spec- 32 David Strauss, the confessor and the writer tacle to behold Strauss as a metaphysical architect building up into the clouds. But for whom is this spectacle mounted? For he does not dare to tell them honestly: I have liberated you from a helpful and merciful God, the universe is only a rigid machine, take care you are not mangled in its wheels! This he dares not do: To the philistine, however, even a Straussian metaphysic is preferable to the Christian, and the idea of an erring God more attractive than that of a miracle-working one. It is for this very reason that the philistine hates the genius: Why does he do it?
From fear, this time fear of the social democrats. Now even the most stiff-necked and surly of these fellows must be constrained to look upwards a little, so as to get a sight of these exalted figures, even if only to the knee. It does happen, metaphysical Master, you know that- then the kings will have to grin and bear it.
If I thought that young men could endure such a book, even treasure it, I would sadly renounce all hope for their future. These are gruesome presuppositions for anyone who wants to assist the coming generation to that which the present does not possess - to a truly German culture. To such a one the ground seems strewn with ashes and all the stars appear obscured; every dead tree, every desolate field cries to him: Here there will be no more spring!
He has to feel as the youthful Goethe felt when he looked into the sad atheistical twilight of the Systeme de la nature, the book seemed to him so Cimmerian, so stagnant, so dead, that it cost him an effort to endure its proximity, and he shuddered in its presence as in the presence of a ghost. Students are said to have greeted it as a syllabus for the training of strong minds and professors are said not to have objected: For this is the trick of the thing: This is part of the explanation of the extraordinary success of this book: Whether he happens to differ from the Master on individual points - over Darwin, for example, or capital punishment - is to him of little moment, since he is on the whole so certain of breathing his own air and hearing the echo of his voice and his needs.
The painfulness of this unanimity for any true friend of German culture must not deter him from acknowledging it to himself or from making the fact public. We all know how our age is typified by its pursuit of science; we know it because it is part of our life: For the nature of scientific man quite apart from the form he assumes at present contains a real paradox: He seems to be permitted to squander his life on questions whose answer could at bottom be of consequence only to someone assured of an eternity.
The heir of but a few hours, he is ringed around with frightful abysses, and every step he takes ought to make him ask: But his soul is warmed with the task of counting the stamens of a flower or breaking up the stones of the pathway, and all the interest, j oy, strength and desire he possesses is absorbed in this work.
Nowadays he works as hard as the fourth estate, the slaves; his study is no longer an occupation but a necessity, he looks neither to right nor left and goes through all the business of life, and its more questionable aspects, with the half-consciousness or the repellent need for entertainment characteristic of the exhausted worker. He behaves as though life were to him only otium but sine dignitate: Now, Pascal believes quite generally that men pursue their business and their sciences so eagerly only so as to elude the most important questions which would press upon them in a state of solitude or if they were truly idle, that is to say precisely those questions as to Whither, Whence and Why.
Amazingly, the most obvious question fails to occur to our scholars: To earn bread or acquire positions of honour, perhaps? No one has time for it - and yet what is science for at all if it has no time for culture? At least reply to this question: To lead to barbarism, perhaps? One is reminded of the social world of the learned classes, where too, when the shop talk is exhausted, there is evidence only of weariness, of a desire for diversion at any price, of a tattered memory and incoherent personal experience.
When we hear Strauss speak of the problems of life - whether it be the problem of marriage or of war or of capital punishment - we are appalled at his lack of real experience, of any native insight into the nature of man: How congenial this spirit must find the spirit of Strauss: With what kind of lantern would one have to search here for men capable of inward contemplation and an undivided devotion to the genius and possessing the strength and courage to conjure up demons which have deserted our age!
Genuine culture likewise avoids these places as it conducts its campaigns, feeling instinctively that it has nothing to hope for and much to fear in them. For the only form of culture with which the inflamed eye and the blunted brain of the learned working class want to occupy themselves is precisely that philistine culture whose gospel has been proclaimed by Strauss. In the first place, this culture wears an expression of complacency and will have nothing essential changed in the present condition of German education; it is above all seriously convinced of the superiority of all German educational institutions, especially the grammar schools and universities, never ceases to recommend them to foreigners as models, and does not doubt for a moment that they have made the German people into the most educated and judicious nation in the world.
Philistine culture believes in itself and therefore in the means and methods available to it. In the second place, however, it lays the final arbitration as to all questions of taste and culture in the hands of the scholar and regards itself as an ever- Untimely Meditations growing compendium of learned opinions on art, literature and philosophy; it is concerned to constrain the scholar to express his opinions and then to administer them to the German people, admixed, diluted or systematized, as a medicinal draught.
In reality, however, this supposed aesthetic infallibility is very questionable, so questionable indeed that one may assume that a scholar in fact lacks taste, ideas and aesthetic judgment until he has demonstrated the opposite. And only a few will be able to do so. For, after the panting and harassment of the daily race which the world of the sciences is today, how many of them will be able to maintain that courageous and steady glance that characterizes the champion of culture even if they ever possessed it - that glance which condemns this daily race itself as a source of barbarism?
That is why these few must, moreover, live in a state of opposition: Through its theological colouring it 38 David Strauss, the confessor and the writer stands outside our German culture and awakens the antipathy of the various theological parties, indeed of every individual German insofar as he is a theological sectarian by nature and invents his own strange private theology so as to be able to dissent from every other. But just hear all these theological sectarians as soon as Strauss is spoken of as a writer ; at once the theological dissonances die away and we hear in the purest unison as though from the mouth of one community: His theological opponents, though they spoke loudest, are in this case only a small fragment of the great public: If, in such a matter as this is, those who disagree have spoken up, while those who agree have contented themselves with silent approval, that lies in the nature of the case.
And the treatment Strauss has received at the hands of the literary day-labourers of the theological parties therefore proves nothing against our proposition that in this book philistine culture -has celebrated a triumph. It must be admitted that the educated philistine is on average a degree less candid than Strauss, or at least is more reserved when he speaks publicly: For, as we already know, our culture philistine is somewhat cowardly, even when he is strongly moved: If he were to overstep these limits, as Schopenhauer for instance does with almost every sentence, he would no longer lead on the philistines as their chieftain but would be deserted as precipitately as he is now followed.
If anyone thought 39 Untimely Meditations to call this moderation and mediocritas in courage, which if not wise is at any rate prudent, an Aristotelean virtue he would be in error: It might perhaps be in order to go on to speak of Strauss the stylist and artist in language, but let us first of all consider whether as a writer he is capable of constructing his house, whether he really understands the architecture of a book. The latter capacity without the former would, to be sure, not suffice to raise him to the rank of a classic author, but at best to that of the classic improvisers or virtuosi of style who, with all their skill in expression, reveal in the actual erection of the building the clumsy hand and ignorant eye of the bungler.
If this most vital of tasks has been achieved and the building itself erected with proper scale and balance, there nonetheless remains a great deal still to do: The opposite of this, to put a book together out of bits and pieces, is well known to be the way of scholars. They trust that these bits and pieces will cohere of themselves and thereby confuse logical 'totum ponere: Do we still possess religion?
How do we conceive the world? How do we order our life? The natural scientist, for example, who poses the third question, demonstrates the immaculateness of his sense for truth precisely in that he passes by the second in silence; and that the themes of the fourth section - marriage, society, capital punishment - would only be confused and darkened by the introduction of Darwinist theories from the third section seems to be grasped by Strauss himself, for he in fact pays no further regard to these theories.
Or should we regard the new faith as only an ironical accommodation to linguistic usage?
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According to his introduction, moreover, he intends to present the evidence upon which the modern philosophy of life depends: At bottom, then, the new religion is not a new faith but precisely on a par with modern science and thus not religion at all. If Strauss nevertheless asserts that he does have a religion, the reasons for it lie outside thedomain of contemporary science. In these pages at least the scientific spirit is certainly not in evidence: For what is so extremely striking is the artificiality of the procedures our author has to adopt in order to convince himself he still possesses a faith and a religion at all: It creeps weakly along, this stimulated faith: Strauss promises in his introduction to test whether this new faith is capable of doing for the new believer what the old faith does for the believer of the old stamp, but in the end he himself comes to think he has promised too much.
For when he deals with the subject he does so in a quite offhand, indeed almost embarrassed manner, in a couple of pages pp. But, as we have said, whether it is new or old, original or imitated, would be a matter of indifference if only it exhibited naturalness, health and strength. The timidity with which he speaks of his faith is matched by his loud orotundity whenever he cites the greatest benefactor of most recent mankind, Darwin: Good; but others will come who understand them and who have also understood me.
It certainly does not meet them: But let us forget about the logician: And it is only now, after determining that he has not borne himself as a scientific, orderly minded and systematizing scholar, that we arrive at the question whether Strauss is a good writer. If he thought of scholars and the educated as his first readers, he must have realized from his own experience that, while they can be laid low with the heavy artillery of scientific proof, they can never by this means be brought to surrender, though they fall prey all the more readily to lightly clad arts of seductions.
All the negative traits are in keeping: It almost seems, indeed, that even that mysterious feeling for the cosmos was intended mainly as a means of aesthetic effect, like a view of an irrational element, the sea for instance, from within an elegant and rational terrace. In the meantime, the master of the house has had occasion to state that he is in entire agreement with Lessing, also with Goethe, though excluding the second part of Faust. Finally the summer-house owner commends himself, and expresses the view that those he disagrees with are beyond help and not yet ripe for his point of view; whereupon he offers us his carriage, with the polite reservation that he cannot guarantee it will answer to all our requirements; the stones on his carriageways are, moreover, newly scattered and we might be much buffeted about.
Who could now doubt this incomparable dexterity? I want to be Voltaire, the German Voltaire! He would approve if one called him headstrong, rash, malicious, foolhardy; but he would be most pleased of all to be compared with Lessing or Voltaire, since 45 Untimely Meditations they were certainly not philistines.
In his search to procure this pleasure he is often undecided whether he ought to imitate the bold dialectical impetuosity of Lessing or whether it might not be better to comport himself as a satyr-like free-spirited elder in the manner of Voltaire. When we read his praise of the Voltairean style p. But if an author possesses genius he betrays it in more than simplicity and precision of expression: Stiff and timid steps will get no one along unfamiliar paths littered with a thousand abysses: That the problems Strauss passes in review are serious and dreadful ones, and have been treated as such by the wise of every age, is known to Strauss himself, and yet he calls his book lightly clad.
But an author has already attained much if he has constrained his reader to regard him more solemnly than he does some other, more heavily clad author. Alas, the philistine does return, again and again, despite all such decrees and throwings-out! Alas, the face, twisted into a semblance of Voltaire or Lessing, from time to time snaps back into its old, honest, original shape! Alas, the mask of genius all too often falls off, and the Master never wears a more vexed expression, his gestures are never stiff er, than when he has just attempted to imitate the stride of genius and to make his eyes flash with the fire of genius.
Ours is a cold clime, and it is precisely because he goes around so lightly clad that he runs the risk of catching cold more often and more gravely than others; that the others then notice all this may be acutely painful, but if he is ever to be cured he will have to submit to the following public diagnosis: There was once a Strauss, a brave, rigorous and austerely clad scholar-, whom we found as congenial as anyone who in Germany serves truth seriously and with vigour and knows how to stay within his own limitations; he who is now celebrated by public opinion as David Strauss has become someone else: When he now informs us: Others can do that too!
And many could do it better! I believe I have made it clear how I regard Strauss the writer: I could wish that Strauss the writer were more honest, for then he would write better and be less celebrated. Or - if he absolutely must be an actor - I could wish he were a good actor and knew better how to imitate the style of naive genius and the classic. For it remains to be said that Strauss is in fact a bad actor and utterly worthless as a stylist.
A natural basis is lacking, an artistic evaluation, treatment and cultivation of oral speech. Now, it is extremely characteristic of the pseudo-culture of the cultural philistine that he should even appropriate the concept of the classic and the model writer - he who exhibits his strength only in warding off a real, artistically vigorous cultural style and through steadfastness in warding off arrives at a homogeneity of expression which almostresembles a unity of style.
How is it possible that, given the limitless experimentation with language everyone is permitted to indulge in, certain individual authors nonetheless discover a universally agreeable tone of voice? What is it really that is here so universally agreeable? Above all a negative quality: This explains the tutti unisono which, notwithstanding the general debility and sickness, greets every newly invented solecism: Thus the solecism - this is the remarkable thing- is felt by our philistines, not as objectionable, but as a stimulating refreshment in the arid and treeless desert of everyday German.
But the truly productive he does find objectionable. The most modern model author is not merely forgiven his distorted, extravagant or threadbare syntax and his ludicrous neologisms, they are reckoned a merit in him which gives his work piquancy: It seems that, though reputed thorough, the Germans have never yet reflected on these strange notions, under the rule of which more or less every German lives and writes. Then we have the demand that from time to time a simile or a metaphor should appear, and that the metaphor must be a new one: It is in this way, namely the most modern way, that Strauss has complied with the philistine demand that from time to time a new metaphor must make an appearance.
Strauss provides on page a model sentenceof the didactic and scholarly kind: Some of them have already spoken out.
Should I therefore keep silent? I do not believe so. For we all supplement one another. If another knows many things better than I, perhaps I know a few things better than he; and I have a viewpoint on many things different from the viewpoint of others. So out with it, let me display my colours, that it may be seen whether or not they are genuine.
I searched and searched but could list nothing. Perhaps it will reveal precisely what it is that evokes in the contemporary German his belief that Strauss is a great stylist: For the rest of the book displays a total lack of anything whatever offensive, that is to say productive, such as would now be reckoned a positive quality in the classic prose-writer. Extreme sobriety and aridity, a truly starving sobriety, nowadays awakens in the educated masses the unnatural feeling that precisely these are the signs of flourishing health, so that here there apply the words of the author of the Dialogus de Oratibus: They have agreed together to invert the nature and names of things and henceforth to speak of health where we see weakness, of sickness and tension where we encounter true health.
If only this sobriety were at least a stricdy logical sobriety: Just try translating this Straussian style into Latin - which can be done even with Kant, and with Schopenhauer is pleasurable and easy. Hewhoknows theeffortthe ancients expended on learning to speak and write, and how the moderns make no such effort, feels, as Schopenhauer once said, a real sense of relief when, having been compelled to wade through a German book like this one, he turns to those other ancient yet ever new languages: It is truly an agony to see a fair and ancient language possessing a classical literature mishandled by ignoramuses and asses.
But he who absolutely refuses to heed this warning, and insists on continuing in his belief that Strauss is a classic, should, as a final word of advice, be recommended to imitate him. If you do try this, though, it will be at your peril: Indeed, we concede to him a great deal when we concede to him one eye; we do so, however, because at least Strauss does not write like the most infamous of all corrupters of German, the Hegelians and their deformed offspring. He therewith lost as a stylist his best possessions and, if he is not to slip back into the Hegelian mud, is condemned to live out his life on the barren and perilous quicksands of newspaper style.
Nonetheless he has succeeded in becoming famous for a couple of hours in our time, and perhaps there will be a couple of hours more when it will be remembered that he was once famous; but then night will come and he will be forgotten: For he who has sinned against the German language has profaned the mystery of all that is German: It alone also guarantees the future of this spirit, provided it does not itself perish at the hands of the present. This is the German language, in which men have spoken, in which great poets have sung and great thinkers written.
Keep your paws off! The faults exposed include grammatical errors ofvarious kinds, offences against good usage, jumbled metaphors, impossible imagery and meaninglessness; and the critique substantiates the charge that Strauss has lost all feeling for German and any clear awareness of the meaning of the words he uses. O ye good gods! The sensible course would therefore seem to be to omit this passage.
His judgment would - to leave you with one last genuine feather from the Straussian plumage- be only 'ofas much subjective truth as without any objective power of proof: So continue to be of good cheer! For the time being? That is to say, for as long as that for which it is always time, and which the present time has more need of than ever, continues to count as untimely - I mean; telling the truth.
We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on our rough and charmless needs and requirements. We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and action, not so as to turn comfortably away f rom life and action, let alone for the purpose of extenuating the self- seeking life and the base and cowardly action.
We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life: Perhaps this depiction will inspire someone or other to tell me that he too knows this feeling but that I have not felt it in its pure and elemental state and have certainly not expressed it with the assurance that comes from mature experience.
Someone, I say, may perhaps do so: And for myself I shall gain something that is worth more to me even than decorum - that is, to be publicly instructed and put right about the character of our own time. This meditation too is untimely, because I am here attempting to look afresh at something of which our time is rightly proud - its cultivation of history - as being injurious to it, a defect and deficiency in it; because I believe, indeed, that we are all suffering from a consuming fever of history and ought at least to recognize that we are suffering from it.
And it may partly exonerate me when I give an assurance that the experiences which evoked those tormenting feelings were mostly my own and that I have drawn on the experiences of others only for purposes of comparison; and further, that it is only to the extent that I am a pupil of earlier times, especially the Hellenic, that though a child of the present time I was able to acquire such untimely experiences. That much, however, I must concede to myself on account of my profession as a classicist: This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness - what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal.
A human being may well ask an animal: But he also wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past: And it is a matter for wonder: Thus the animal lives unhistorically. That is why it affects him like a vision of a lost paradise to see the herds grazing or, in closer proximity to him, a child which, having as yet nothing of the past to shake off, plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future. Yet its play must be disturbed; all too soon it will be called out of its state of forgetfulness. If death at last brings the desired forgetting, by that act it at the same time extinguishes the present and all existence and therewith sets the seal on the knowledge that existence is only an uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming and contradicting itself.
If happiness, if reaching out for new happiness, is in any sense what fetters living creatures to life and makes them go on living, then perhaps no philosopher is more justified than the Cynic: The smallest happiness, if only it is present uninterruptedly and makes happy, is incomparably more happiness than the greatest happiness that comes only as an episode, as it were apiece of waywardness or folly, in acontinuum ofjoylessness, desire 61 Untimely Meditations and privation.
In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness, however, it is always the same thingthatmakes happiness happiness: He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment, and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is - worse, he will never do anything to make others happy. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic.
A man who wanted to feel historically through and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated rumination. Or, to express my theme even more simply: To determine this degree, and therewith the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, a culture is: There are people who possess so little of this power that they can perish from a single experience, from a single painful event, often and especially from a single subtle piece of injustice, like a man bleeding to death from a scratch; on the other hand, there are those who are so little affected by the worst and most dreadful disasters, and even by their own wicked acts, that they are able to feel tolerably well and be in possession of a kind of clear conscience even in the midst of them or at any rate very soon afterwards.
That which such a nature cannot subdue it knows how to forget; it no longer exists, the horizon is rounded and closed, and there is nothing left to suggest there are people, passions, teachings, goals lyingbeyond it. And this is auniversal law: This, precisely, is the proposition the reader is invited to meditate upon: First of all, there is an observation that everyone must have made: On the other hand we have observed the animal, which is quite unhistorical, and dwells within a horizon reduced almost to a point, and yet lives in a certain degree of happiness, or at least without boredom and dissimulation; we shall thus have to account the capacity to feel to a certain degree unhistorically as being more vital and more fundamental, inasmuch as it constitutes the foundation upon which alone anything sound, healthy and great, anything truly human, can grow.
The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with 63 Untimely Meditations the destruction of which it must vanish. What deed would man be capable of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhistorical? Or, to desert this imagery and illustrate by example: All his valuations are altered and disvalued; there are so many things he is no longer capable of evaluating at all because he can hardly feel them any more: It is the condition in which one is the least capable of beingjust; narrow-minded, ungrateful to the past, blind to dangers, deaf to warnings, one is a little vortex of life in a dead sea of darkness and oblivion: Thus he who acts loves his deed infinitely more than it deserves to be loved: If, in a sufficient number of cases, one could scent out and retro- On the uses and disadvantages of history for life spectively breathe this unhistorical atmosphere within which every great historical event has taken place, he might, as a percipient being, raise himself to a suprahistorical vantage point such as Niebuhr once described as the possible outcome of historical reflection.
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If you ask your acquaintances if they would like to relive the past ten or twenty years, you will easily discover which-of them is prepared for this suprahistorical standpoint: Some may perhaps be consoling themselves: And from the dregs of life hope to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. Let us call them historical men; looking to the past impels them towards the future and fires their courage to go on living and their hope that what they want will still happen, that happiness lies behind the hill they are advancing towards.
These historical men believe that the meaning of existence will come more and more to light in the course of its process, and they glance behind them only so that, from the process so far, they can learn to understand the present and to desire the future more vehemently; they have no idea that, despite their preoccupation with history, they in fact think and act unhis- torically, or that their occupation with history stands in the service, not of pure knowledge, but of life.
Again with a No - but with a No for a different reason: What could ten more years teach that the past ten were unable to teach! Whether the sense of this teaching is happiness or resignation or virtue or atonement, suprahistorical men have never been able to agree; but, in opposition to all historical modes of regarding the past, they are unanimous in the proposition: So that perhaps the boldest of them is at last ready to say to his heart, with Giacomo Leopardi: Nothing lives that is worthy Thy agitation, and the earth deserves not a sigh.
Our being is pain and boredom and the world is dirt - nothing more. But let us leave the suprahistorical men to their nausea and their wisdom: Our valuation of the historical may be only an occidental prejudice: And in order to leave no doubt as to the meaning of this antithesis of life and wisdom, I shall employ an ancient, tried-and- tested procedure and straightway propound a number of theses. This power has now lost its hold over him insofar as he is a man of knowledge: History become pure, sovereign science would be for mankind a sort of conclusion of life and a settling of accounts with it.
The study of history is something salutary and fruitful for the future only as the attendant of a mighty new current of life, of an evolving culture for example, that is to say only when it is dominated and directed by a higher force and does not itself dominate and direct.
Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy: Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations
Insofar as it stands in the service of life, history stands in the service of an unhistorical power, and, thus subordinate, it can and should never become a pure science such as, for instance, mathematics is. For when it attains a certain degree of excess, life crumbles and degenerates, and through this degeneration history itself Finally degenerates too. History belongs above all to the man of deeds and power, to him who fights a great fight, who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.
It belonged thus to Schiller: It is the man of deeds Polybius has in mind when he calls political history the proper preparation for governing a state and the 67 Untimely Meditations best teacher who, by recalling to us the misfortunes of others, instructs us in how we may steadfastly endure our own changes of fortune. He who has learned to recognize in this the meaning of history is vexed at the sight of inquisitive tourists or pedantic micrologists clambering about on the pyramids of the great eras of the past; where he finds inspiration to imitate or to do better, he does not wish to encounter the idler who, hungry for distraction or excitement, prowls around as though among pictures in a gallery.
Among these feeble and hopeless idlers, among those around him who seem active but are in fact merely agitated and bustling, the m an of action avoids despair and disgust by turning his gaze backwards and pausing for breath in his march towards the goal. For the commandment which rules over him is: That the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that this chain unites mankind across the millennia like a range of human mountain peaks, that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great - that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in the demand for a monumental history.
But it is precisely this demand that greatness shall be everlasting that sparks off the most fearful of struggles. For everything else that lives cries No. The monumental shall not come into existence - that is the counter-word. Apathetic habit, all that is base and petty, filling every corner of the earth and billowing up around all that is great like a heavy breath of the earth, casts itself across the path that greatness has to tread on its way to immortality and retards, deceives, suffocates and stifles it.
This path, however, leads through human brains! Through the brains of timorous and shortlived animals which emerge again and again to the same needs and distresses and fend off destruction only with eff ort and then only for a short time. F or they want first of all but one thing: Who would associate them with that hard relay-race of monumental history through which alone greatness goes on living!
And yet again and again there awaken some who, On the uses and disadvantages of history for life gaining strength through reflecting on past greatness, are inspired with the feeling that the life of man is a glorious thing, and even that the fairest fruit of this bitter plant is the knowledge that in earlier times someone passed through this existence infused with pride and strength, someone else sunk in profound thoughtfulness, a third exhibiting mercy and helpfulness - all of them, however, leaving behind them a single teaching: If the common man takes this little span of time with such gloomy earnestness and clings to it so desperately, those few we have just spoken of have known, on their way to immortality and to monumental history, how to regard it with Olympian laughter or at least with sublime mockery; often they descended to their grave with an ironic smile - for what was there left of them to bury!
Only the dross, refuse, vanity, animality that had always weighed them down and that was now consigned to oblivion after having for long been the object of their contempt. In this transfigured form, fame is something more than the tastiest morsel of our egoism, as Schopenhauer called it: Of what use, then, is the monumentalistic conception of the past, engagement with the classic and rare of earlier times, to the man of the present? He learns from it that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again; he goes his way with more cheerful step, for the doubt which assailed him in weaker moments, whether he was not perhaps desiring the impossible, has now been banished.
Supposing someone believed that it would require no more than a hundred men educated and actively working in a new spirit to do away with the bogus form of culture which has just now become the fashion in Germany, how greatly it would strengthen him to realize that the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the shoulders of just such a band of a hundred men. And yet - to learn something new straightaway from this example - how inexact, fluid and provisional that comparison would be!
At bottom, 69 Untimely Meditations indeed, that which was once possible could present itself as a possibility for a second time only if the Pythagoreans were right in believing that when the constellation of the heavenly bodies is repeated the same things, down to the smallest event, must also be repeated on earth: Until that time, monumental history will have no use for that absolute veracity: If, therefore, the monumental mode of regarding history rules over the other modes -1 mean over the antiquarian and critical 70 On the uses and disadvantages of history for life - the past itself suffers harm: Monumental history deceives by analogies: So much as a reminder of the harm that monumental history can do among men of power and achievement, whether they be good men or evil: Let us take the simplest and most frequent example.
Imagine the inartistic natures, and those only weakly endowed, armoured and armed by a monumentalist history of the artists: Against their arch-enemies, the strong artistic spirits, that is to say against those who alone are capable of learning from that history in a true, that is to say life-enhancing sense, and of transforming what they have learned into a more elevated practice.
Their path will be barred, their air darkened, if a half- understood monument to some great era of the past is erected as an idol and zealously danced around, as though to say: But if one goes so far as to employ the popular referendum and the numerical majority in the domain of art, and as it were compels the artist to defend himself before the forum of the aesthetically inactive, then you can take your oath on it in advance that he will be condemned: On the other hand, their instincts tell them that art can be slain by art: They are connoisseurs of art because they would like to do away with art altogether; they pose as physicians, while their basic intent is to mix poisons; they develop their taste and tongue as they do so as to employ this spoiled taste as an explanation of why they so resolutely reject all the nourishing artistic food that is offered them.
For they do not desire to see new greatness emerge: Monumental history is the masquerade costume in which their hatred of the great and powerf ul of their own age is disguised as satiated admiration for the great and powerful of past ages, and muffled in which they invert the real meaning of that mode of regarding history into its opposite; whether they are aware of it o r not, they act as though their motto were: Each of the three species of history which exist belongs to a certain soil and a certain climate and only to that: If the man who wants to do something great has need of the past at all, he appropriates it by means of monumental history; he, on the other hand, who likes to persist in the familiar and the revered of old, tends the past as an antiquarian historian; and only he who is oppressed by a present need, and who wants to throw off this burden at any cost, has need of critical history, that is to say a history that judges and condemns.
Much mischief is caused through the thoughtless transplantation of these plants: By tending with care that which has On the uses and disadvantages of history for life existed from of old, he wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence - and thus he serves life.
The possession of ancestral goods changes its meaning in such a soul: The trivial, circumscribed, decaying and obsolete acquire their own dignity and inviolability through the fact that the preserving and revering soul of the antiquarian man has emigrated into them and there made its home. Here we lived, he says to himself, for here we are living; and here we shall live, for we are tough and not to be ruined overnight.
Sometimes he even greets the soul of his nation across the long dark centuries of confusion as his own soul; an ability to feel his way back and sense how things were, to detect traces almost extinguished, to read the past quickly and correctly no matter how intricate its palimpsest may be - these are his talents and virtues. But this antiquarian sense of veneration of the past is of the greatest value when it spreads a simple feeling of pleasure and contentment over the modest, rude, even wretched conditions in which a man or a nation lives; Niebuhr, for example, admits with honourable candour that on moor and heathland, among free peasants who possess a history, he can live contented and never feel the want of art.
How could history serve life better than when it makes the less favoured generations and peoples contented with their own homeland and its customs, and restrains them from roving abroad in search of something they think more worth having and engaging in battles for it? This notwithstanding, such a condition is certainly not one in which a man would be most capable of resolving the past into pure knowledge; so that here too, as in the case of monumental history, we perceive that, as long as the study of history serves life and is directed by the vital drives, the past itself suffers.
If, however, the tree is in error as to this, how greatly it will be in error regarding all the rest of the forest around it! The antiquarian sense of a man, a community, a whole people, always possesses an extremely restricted field of vision; most of what exists it does not perceive at all, and the little it does see it sees much too close up and isolated; it cannot relate what it sees to anything else and it therefore accords everything it sees equal importance and therefore to each individual thing too great importance. This always produces one very imminent danger: Thus even the Greeks tolerated the hieratic style in their plastic arts beside the free and great; later, indeed, they did not merely tolerate the elevated nose 74 On the uses and disadvantages of history for life and the frosty smile but even made a cult of it.
When the senses of a people harden in this fashion, when the study of history serves the life of the past in such a way that it undermines continuing and especially higher life, when the historical sense no longer conserves life but mummifies it, then the tree gradually dies unnaturally from the top downwards to the roots - and in the end the roots themselves usually perish too. Antiquarian history itself degenerates from the moment it is no longer animated and inspired by the fresh life of the present. Its piety withers away, the habit of scholarliness continues without it and rotates in egoistic self-satisfaction around its own axis.
Then there appears the repulsive spectacle of a blind rage for collecting, a restless raking together of everything that has ever existed. For it knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it; it always undervalues thatwhich is becoming because it has no instinct for divining it — as monumental history, for example, has.
Thus it hinders any firm resolve to attempt something new, thus it paralyses the man of action who, as one who acts, will and must offend some piety or other. The fact that something has grown old now gives rise to the demand that it be made immortal; for when one considers all that such an antiquity - an ancient custom of the ancestors, a religious belief, an inherited political privilege - has experienced during the course of its existence, how great a sum of piety and reverence on the part of individuals and generations, then it must seem arrogant or even wicked to replace such an antiquity with a novelty and to set against such a numerical accumulation of acts of piety and reverence the single unit of that which is evolving and has just arrived.
Here it becomes clear how necessary it is to mankind to have, beside the monumental and antiquarian modes of regarding the past, a third mode, the critical, and this, too, in the service of life. If he is to live, man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past: It is not justice which here sits in judgment; it is even less mercy which pronounces the verdict: Its sentence is always unmerciful, always unjust, because it has never proceeded out of a pure well of knowledge; but in most cases the sentence would be the same even if it were p ronounced by justice itself.
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