The Use and Abuse of History
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next page disguised universal people. Individuality has drawn itself back into the inner life: on the outside we no longer observe any of it. This being the case, we could doubt whether, in general, there could be causes without effects. Or should a race of eunuchs be necessary as a guard over the great historical harem of the world? For them, of course, pure objectivity is well and truly established on their faces. However, it does seem almost as if it was their assignment to stand guardian over history, so that nothing comes out of it other than just histories without events, to ensure that through it no personalities become "free," that is, true to themselves and true with respect to others in word and deed. First through this truthfulness will the need, the inner misery of the modern man, see the light of day, and art and religion will be able to enter as true helpers in place of that anxiously concealed convention and masquerade, in order to cultivate a common culture corresponding to real needs, culture which does not, like the present universal education, just teach one to lie to oneself about these needs and thus to become a wandering lie. In what an unnatural, artificial, and definitely unworthy position must the truly naked goddess Philosophy, the most sincere of all sciences, be in a time which suffers from universal education. She remains in such a world of compulsory external uniformity the learned monologue of a solitary stroller, an individual's accidental hunting trophy, a hidden parlour secret, or a harmless prattle between academic old men and children. No one is allowed to venture on fulfilling the law of philosophy on his own. No one lives philosophically, with that simple manly truth, which acted forcefully on a man in ancient times, wherever he was, and which thus drove him to behave as Stoic if he had once promised to be true to the Stoa. All modern philosophy is political and police-like, restricted to the appearance of learning through the ruling powers, churches, academies, customs, and human cowardice. It sticks around with sighs of "If only" or with the knowledge "There was once." Philosophy is wrong to be at the heart of historical education, if it wants to be more than an inner repressed knowledge without effect. If the modern human being were, in general, only courageous and decisive, if he were in even his hostility not just an inner being, he would banish philosophy. Thus, he contents himself by modestly covering up her nudity. Yes, people think, write, print, speak, and learn philosophically; to this extent almost everything is allowed. Only in action, in so-called living, are things otherwise. There only one thing is always allowed, and everything else is simply impossible. So historical education wills it. Are they still human beings, we ask ourselves then, or perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines? Of Shakespeare Goethe once said, "No one hated the material costume more than he. He understood really well the inner costume of human beings, and here all people are alike. People say he presented the Romans excellently. I do not find that. They are nothing but inveterate Englishmen, but naturally they are human beings, people from the ground up, and the Roman toga suits them well enough." Now, I ask if it might be possible to lead out our contemporary men of letters, men of the people, officials, and politicians as Romans. It will not work, because they are not human beings, but only physical compendia and, as it were, concrete abstractions. If they should have character and their own style, this is buried so deep that it has no power at all to struggle out into the daylight. If they should be human beings, then they are that only for the man "who tests the kidneys." For everyone else they are something other, not human beings, not gods, not animals, but historically educated pictures, completely and utterly education, picture, form, without demonstrable content, unfortunately only bad form and, in addition, uniform. And in this sense may my claim may be understood and considered: History is borne only by strong personalities; the weak personalities it obliterates completely. It comes down to this: history bewilders feeling and sensing where these are not strong enough to measure the past against themselves. Anyone who does not dare any longer to trust himself but who involuntarily turns to history for his feeling and seeks advice by asking "What should I feel here?" in his timidity gradually becomes an actor and plays a role, usually in fact many roles. Therefore, he plays each badly and superficially. Gradually the congruence between the man and his historical sphere fails. We see no forward young men associating with the Romans, as if they were their equals. They rummage around and dig away in the remnants of the Greek poets, as if these corpora [bodies] were also ready for their post-mortem examination and were vilia [worthless things], whatever their own literary corpora [bodies] might be. If we assume there is a concern with Democritus, then the question always on my lips is this: Why then just Democritus? Why not Heraclitus? Or Philo? Or Bacon? Or Descartes? and so on to one's heart's content. And in that case, why then just a philosopher? Why not a poet, an orator? And why particularly a Greek? Why not an Englishman, a Turk? Is the past then not large enough to find something, so that you do not make yourself so ridiculous on your own. But, as I have mentioned, it is a race of eunuchs; for a eunuch one woman is like another, in effect, one woman, the woman-in-itself, the eternally unapproachable, and so what drives them is something indifferent, so long as history itself remains splendidly objective and protected by precisely the sort of people who could never create history themselves. And since the eternally feminine is never attracted to you, then you pull it down to yourselves and assume, since you are neuters, that history is also a neuter. However, so that people do not think that I am serious in comparing history with the eternally feminine, I will express myself much more clearly: I consider that history is the opposite of the eternally masculine and that it must be quite unimportant for those who are through and through "historically educated." But whatever the case, such people are themselves neither male nor female, not something common to both, but always only neutral or, to express myself in a more educated way, they are just the eternally objective. If the personalities are, first of all, as has been described, inflated to an eternal loss of subjectivity or, as people say, to objectivity, then nothing more can work on them. Let something good and right come about, in action, poetry, or music. Immediately the person emptied out by his education looks out over the world and asks about the history of the author. If this author has already created a number of things, immediately the critic must allow himself to point out the earlier and the presumed future progress of the author's development; right away he will bring in others for comparative purposes, he will dissect and rip apart the choice of the author's material and his treatment, and will, in his wisdom, fit the work together again anew, giving him advice and setting him right about everything. Let the most astonishing thing occur; the crowd of historical neutrals is always in place ready to assess the author from a great distance. Momentarily the echo resounds, but always as "Criticism." A short time before, however, the critic did not permit himself to dream that such an event was possible. The work never achieves an influence, but only more "Criticism," and the criticism itself, in its turn, has no influence, but leads only to further criticism. In this business people have agreed to consider a lot of critics as an influence and a few critics or none as a failure. Basically, however, everything remains as in the past, even with this "influence." True, people chat for a while about something new, and then about something else new, and in between do what they always do. The historical education of our critics no longer permits an influence on our real understanding, namely, an influence on life and action. On the blackest writing they impress immediately their blotting paper, to the most delightful drawing they apply their thick brush strokes, which are to be considered corrections. And then everything is over once again. However, their critical pens never cease flying, for they have lost power over them and are led by them rather than leading them. In this excess of their critical ejaculations, in the lack of control over themselves, in what the Romans call impotentia [impotence], the weakness of the modern personality reveals itself. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- But let us leave this weakness. Let us rather turn to a much praised strength of the modern person, with the truly awkward question whether, on account of his well known "Objectivity," he has a right to call himself strong, that is, just, and just to a higher degree than the people of other times. Is it true that this objectivity originates from a heightened need and demand for justice? Or does it, as an effect with quite different causes, merely create the appearance that justice might be its real cause? Does this objectivity perhaps tempt one to a detrimental and too flattering bias concerning the virtues of modern man? Socrates considered it an illness close to insanity to imagine oneself in possession of a virtue and not to possess it. Certainly such conceit is more dangerous than the opposite delusion, suffering from a mistake or vice. For through the latter delusion it is perhaps still possible to become better. The former conceit, however, makes a person or a time daily worse, and, in this case, less just. True, no one has a higher claim on our admiration than the man who possesses the drive and the power for justice. For in such people are united and hidden the highest and rarest virtues, as in a bottomless sea that receives streams from all sides and absorbs them into itself. The hand of the just man authorized to sit in judgment no longer trembles when it holds the scales. Unsparingly he puts on weight after weight against himself. His eye does not become dim if he sees the pan in the scales rise and fall, and his voice rings out neither hard nor broken when he delivers the verdict. If he were a cold demon of knowledge, then he would spread out around him the ice cold atmosphere of a terrifyingly superhuman majesty, which we would have to fear and not to revere. But since he is a human being and yet has tried to rise above venial doubt to a strong certainty, above a patient leniency to an imperative "You must," above the rare virtue of magnanimity to the rarest virtue of all justice, since he now is like this demon, but from the very beginning without being anything other than a poor human being, and above all, since in each moment he has to atone for his humanity and be tragically consumed by an impossible virtue, all this places him on a lonely height, as the example of the human race most worthy of reverence. For he wills truth, not as cold knowledge without consequences, but as the ordering and punishing judge, truth not as a selfish possession of the individual but as the sacred entitlement to shift all the boundary stones of egotistical possessions, in a word, truth as the Last Judgment and not at all something like the captured trophy desired by the individual hunter. Only insofar as the truthful man has the unconditional will to be just is the striving after truth, which is so thoughtlessly glorified, something great. In the vision of the duller person a large number of different sorts of drives (like curiosity, the flight from boredom, resentment, vanity, playfulness), which have nothing at all to do with the truth, blend in with that striving for truth which has its roots in justice. In fact, the world seems to be full of people who "serve the truth." But the virtue of justice is very seldom present, even more rarely recognized, and almost always hated to the death; whereas, the crowd of the apparently virtuous are honoured as they march in with a great public display. Few people serve truthfulness, because only a few have the purity of will to be just. Moreover, even of these, the fewest have the strength to be able to be just. It is certainly not enough only to have the will for justice. And the most horrible sufferings have come directly from the drive for justice without the power of judgment among human beings. For this reason the general welfare would require nothing more than to scatter the seeds of the power of judgment as widely as possible, so that the fanatic remained distinguishable from the judge and blind desire to be a judge distinguishable from the conscious power to be able to judge. But where would one find a means of cultivating the power of judgment! Thus, when there is talk of truth and justice, people remain in an eternal wavering hesitation whether a fanatic or a judge is talking. Hence, we should forgive those who welcome benevolently the "servers of the truth" who possess neither the will nor the power to judge and who set themselves the task of searching for purewith no attention to consequences or, more clearly, of searching for a barren truth. There are many trivial truths; there are problems that never require effort, let alone any self-sacrifice, in order for one to judge them correctly. In this field of the trivial and the safe, a person indeed succeeds in becoming a cold demon of knowledge nonetheless. When, especially in favourable times, whole cohorts of learned people and researchers are turned into such demons, it always remains unfortunately possible that the time in question suffers from a lack of strong and great righteousness, in short, of the most noble kernel of the so-called drive to the truth. Let us now place before our eyes the historical virtuoso of the present times. Is he the most just man of his time? It is true that he has cultivated in himself such a tenderness and sensitivity of feeling that for him nothing human is far distant. The most different times and people ring out at once from his lyre in harmonious tones. He has become a tuneful passive thing, which through its resounding tone works on other passive things of the same type, until finally the entire air of an age is full of such delicate reverberations, twanging away in concord. But, in my view, we hear that original historical major chord only as an overtone, so to speak: the sturdiness and power of the original can no longer be sensed in the thin shrill sound of the strings. Whereas the original tone usually aroused actions, needs, and terrors, this lulls us to sleep and makes us weak hedonists. It is as if we have arranged the Eroica Symphony for two flutes and use it for dreamy opium smoking. By that we may now measure, among the virtuosi, how things stand with the highest demands of modern man for a loftier and purer justice, a virtue which never has anything pleasant, knows no attractive feelings, but is hard and terrifying. Measured by that, how low magnanimity stands now on the ladder of virtues, magnanimity characteristic of a few rare historians! But for many more it is a matter only of tolerance, of leaving aside all consideration of what cannot be once and for all denied, of editing and glossing over in a moderate and benevolent way, of an intelligent acceptance of the fact that the inexperienced man interprets it as a virtue of justice if the past is generally explained without hard accents and without the expression of hate. But only the superior power can judge. Weakness must tolerate, unless it wishes to feign strength and turn justice on the judgment seat into a performing actress. There is just one fearful species of historian still remaining: efficient, strong, and honest characters, but with narrow heads. Here good will to be just is present, together with the strong feeling in the judgments. But all the pronouncements of the judges are false, roughly for the same reasons that the judgments of the ordinary sworn jury are false. How unlikely the frequency of historical talent is! To say nothing at all here about the disguised egoists and fellow travelers, who adopt a thoroughly objective demeanour for the insidious games they play; and by the same token to say nothing of the unthinking people who write as historians in the naive belief that their own age is right in all its popular views and that to write by the standards of the time generally amounts to being right, a faith in which each and every religion lives and about which, in the case of religion, there is nothing more to say. Those naive historians call "Objectivity" the process of measuring past opinions and deeds by the universal public opinion of the moment. Here they find the canon of all truths. Their work is to adapt the past to contemporary triviality. By contrast, they call "subjective" that way of writing history which does not take popular opinion as canonical. And might not an illusion have occurred in the highest interpretation of the word objectivity? With this word, people understand a condition in the historian in which he looks at an event with such purity in all his motives and consequences that they have no effect at all on his subject. People mean that aesthetic phenomenon, that state of being detached from one's personal interests, with which the painter in a stormy landscape, under lightning and thunder, or on the moving sea looks at his inner picture and, in the process, forgets his own person. Thus, people also demand from the historian the artistic tranquility and the full immersion in the thing. However, it is a myth that the picture which shows things in a person constituted in this way reflects the empirical essence of things. Or is it the case that, by some inner capacity at these times things depict themselves and, as it were, draw a good likeness of themselves or photograph themselves on a purely passive |
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