The Use and Abuse of History
|
|||||
|
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next page medium? This would be a mythology and on top of that a bad one. In addition, people might forget that that very moment is the most artistic and most spontaneous creative moment in the inner life of the artist, a moment of composition of the very highest order, whose result will be an artistically really true picture, not a historically true one. To think of history as objective in this way is the secret work of the dramatist, that is, to think of everything one after the other, to weave the isolated details into a totality, always on the condition that a unity of the plan in the material has to be established, if it is not inherent in it. Thus, man spins a web over the past and tames it; in this way the artistic impulse itself expresses its drive for justice, but not its drive for truth. Objectivity and Justice have nothing to do with each other. One might imagine a way of writing history which has no drop of the common empirical truth in it and yet which might be able to claim the highest rating on an objective scale. Indeed, Grillparzer ventures to clarify this point. "What is history then other than the way in which the spirit of man takes in the events which are impenetrable to him, something in which only God knows whether there is a relationship holding it together, in which that spirit replaces an incomprehensible thing with something comprehensible, underwrites with its ideas of external purposes a totality which really can only be known from within, and assumes chance events, where a thousand small causes were at work. At any one time everyone has his own individual necessity so that millions of trends run next to each other in parallel, crooked, and straight lines, intersect each other, help, hinder, flow forward and backwards, thus taking on in relation to each other the character of chance and, to say nothing of the effects of natural events, render it impossible to prove a compelling, all-encompassing necessity for events." However, this necessary conclusion about that "objective" look at the matter in hand should be exposed right away. This is an assumption which, when it is voiced as a statement of belief by historians, can only assume an odd form. Schiller, in fact, is completely clear concerning the essential subjectivity of this assumption, when he says of historians: "One phenomenon after another begins to liberate itself from accidental and lawless freedom and, as a coordinated link, to become part of a harmonious totality, which naturally is present only in its depiction." But how should we consider the claim (made in good faith) of a famous historical virtuoso, a claim hovering artificially between tautology and absurdity: "The fact is that that all human action and striving are subordinate to the light and often unremarked but powerful and irresistible progress of things"? In such a statement we do not feel any mysterious wisdom expressing itself as clear illogic, like the saying of Goethe's gardener, "Nature lets itself be forced but not compelled", or in the inscription of a booth in a fair ground, as Swift tells it, "Here you can see the largest elephant in the world except itself." For what is, in fact, the opposition between the actions and the drives of men and the progress of things? In particular, it strikes me that such historians, like that one from whom we quoted a sentence, cease to instruct as soon as they become general and then, in their darkness, show a sense of weakness. In other sciences generalizations are the most important thing, insofar as they contain laws. However, if statements like the one we quoted were to serve as valid laws, one would have to reply that then the work of the writer of history is changed, for what remains particularly true in such statements, once we remove the above-mentioned irreconcilably dark remainder, is well known and totally trivial. For it is apparent to everyone's eye in the smallest area of experience. However, for that reason to inconvenience entire peoples and to spend wearisome years of work on the subject amounts to nothing more than, as in the natural sciences, to pile experiment on experiment a long time after the law can be inferred from the present store of experiments. Incidentally, according to Zoellner, natural science nowadays may suffer from an excess of experimentation. If the value of a drama is to lie only in the main ideas of the conclusion, then drama itself would be the furthest possible route to the goal, crooked and laborious. And thus I hope that history can realize that its significance is not in universal ideas, like some sort of blossom or fruit, but that its worth is directly one which indicates a known, perhaps a habitual theme, a daily melody, in an elegant way, elevates it, intensifies it to an inclusive symbol, and thus allows one to make out in the original theme an entire world of profundity, power, and beauty. What is appropriate, however, in this process, before everything else, is a great artistic potential, a creative hovering above and a loving immersion in the empirical data, a further poetical composing on the given types--to this process objectivity certainly belongs, but as a positive quality. However, too often objectivity is only a phrase. Instead of that innerly flashing, externally unmoving and mysterious composure in the artist's eyes, the affectation of composure emerges, just as the lack of pathos and moral power cultivates the disguise of a biting coldness of expression. In certain cases, the banality of the conviction ventures to appear, that wisdom of every man, which creates the impression of composure for unexcited people only through its tediousness, in order to pass muster as that artistic condition in which the subject is silent and becomes completely imperceptible. So everything which generally does not rouse emotion is sought out, and the driest expression is immediately the right one. Indeed, people go as far as to assume that the person whom a moment in the past does not affect in the slightest is competent to present it. Philologues and Greeks frequently behave towards each other in this way. They do not concern themselves with each other in the slightest. People call this real "objectivity," as well. Now, in those places where the highest and rarest matter is to be directly presented, it is absolutely outrageous to find the deliberate state of indifference, something put on for show, the acquired flat and sober art of seeking out motives, especially when the vanity of the historian drives toward this objectively indifferent behaviour. Incidentally, with such authors people should base their judgment more closely on the principle that each man's vanity is inversely proportional to his understanding. No, at least be honest! Do not seek the appearance of that artistic power truly called objectivity, and do not seek the appearance of justice, if you have not been ordained in the fearful vocation of the just. As if it also were the work of every age to have to be just in relation to everything that once was! As a matter of fact, times and generations never have the right to be the judges of all earlier times and generations. Such an uncomfortable task always falls to only a few, indeed, to the rarest people. Who compels you then to judge? And so, just test yourselves, whether you could be just, if you wanted to! As judges you must stand higher than what is being assessed, whereas, you have only come later. The guests who come last to the table should in all fairness receive the last places. And you wish to have the first places? Then at least do something of the highest and best order. Perhaps people will then really make a place for you, even if you come at the end. You can interpret the past only on the basis of the highest power of the present. Only in the strongest tension of your noblest characteristics will you surmise what from the past is great and worth knowing and preserving. Like by like! Otherwise you reduce the past down to your level. Do not believe a piece of historical writing if it does not spring out of the head of the rarest of spirits. You will always perceive the quality of its spirit if it is forced to express something universal or to repeat once more something universally known. The true historian must have the power of reshaping the universally known into what has never been heard and to announce what is universal so simply and deeply that people overlook the simplicity in the profundity and the profundity in the simplicity. No person can be simultaneously a great historian, an artistic person, and a numskull. On the other hand, people should not rate as insignificant the workers who go around with a cart, piling things up and sifting through them, because they will certainly not be able to become great historians. Even less should we exchange them for numskulls. We should see them as the necessary colleagues and manual labourers in the service of the master, just as the French, with greater naïveté than is possible among the Germans, were accustomed to speak of the historiens de M. Thiers [historians of Monsieur Thiers]. These workers should gradually become very learned men, but for that reason cannot ever become masters. An eminently learned man and a great numskull--those go together very easily under a single hat. Thus, the person of experience and reflection writes history. Anyone who has not experienced life on a greater and higher level than everyone else will not know how to interpret the greatness and loftiness of the past. The utterance of the past is always an oracular pronouncement. You will understand it only as builders of the future and as people who know about the present. People now explain the extraordinarily deep and far-reaching effect of Delphi by the particular fact that the Delphic priests had precise knowledge about the past. It is appropriate now to understand that only the man who builds the future has a right to judge the past. In order to look ahead, set yourselves an important goal, and at the same time control that voluptuous analytical drive with which you now lay waste the present and render almost impossible all tranquility, all peaceful growth and maturing. Draw around yourself the fence of a large and extensive hope, an optimistic striving. Create in yourselves a picture to which the future is to correspond, and forget the myth that you are epigones. You have enough to plan and to invent when you imagine that future life for yourselves. But in considering history do not ask that she show you the "How?" and the "With what?" If, however, you live your life in the history of great men, then you will learn from history the highest command: to become mature and to flee away from that paralyzing and prohibiting upbringing of the age, which sees advantages for itself in not allowing you to become mature, in order to rule and exploit you, the immature. And when you ask after biographies, then do not ask for those with the refrain "Mr. Soandso and His Age" but for those whose title page must read "A Fighter Against His Age." Fill your souls with Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you have faith in his heroes. With a hundred people raised in such an unmodern way, that is, people who have become mature and familiar with the heroic, one could permanently silence the entire noisy pseudo-education of this age. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- and drags with it all its consequences, it uproots the future, because it destroys illusions and takes from existing things the atmosphere in which they alone can live. Historical justice, even if it is practiced truly and with a purity of conviction, is therefore a fearful virtue, because it always undermines living and brings about its downfall. Its judgment is always an annihilation. If behind the historical drive no constructive urge is at work, if things are not destroyed and cleared away so that a future, something already alive in hope, builds its dwelling on the liberated ground, if justice alone rules, then the creative instinct is enfeebled and disheartened. For example, a religion which is to be turned into historical knowledge under the power of pure justice, a religion which is to be scientifically understood through and through, is by the end of this process immediately destroyed. The reason for this is that in the historical method of reckoning so many false, crude, inhuman, absurd, and violent things always emerge that the fully pious atmosphere of illusion in which alone everything that wants to live can live necessarily disappears. But only in love, only in a love overshadowed by illusion, does a person create, that is, only in unconditional belief in perfection and righteousness. Anything which compels a person no longer to love unconditionally cuts away the roots of his power. He must wither up, that is, become dishonest. In effects like this, history is opposed by art. And only when history takes it upon itself to turn itself into an art work and thus to become a purely artistic picture can it perhaps maintain the instincts or even arouse them. Such historical writing, however, would thoroughly go against the analytical and inartistic trends of our time; indeed, they would consider it counterfeit. But history which only destroys, without an inner drive to build guiding it, makes its implements permanently blasé and unnatural. For such people destroy illusions, and "whoever destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the strongest tyrant, nature." True, for a fairly long time one can keep oneself really busy with history completely harmlessly and thoughtlessly, as if it were an occupation as good as any other. The newer Theology, in particular, seems to have become involved with history purely harmlessly, and now it will hardly notice that, in doing so, it stands, probably very much against its will, in the service of Voltaire's écrasez [i.e., Voltaire's extreme hostility to the church]. Let no one assume from this a new powerfully constructive instinct. For that we would have to let the so-called Protestant Union be considered the maternal womb of a new religion and someone like Judge Holtzendorf (the editor of and chief spokesman for the even more questionable Protestant Bible) as John at the River Jordan. For some time perhaps the Hegelian philosophy still clouding the brains of older people will help to promote that harmlessness, somewhat in the way that people differentiate the "Idea of Christianity" from its manifold incomplete "apparent forms" and convince themselves it is really just a matter of the "tendency of the idea" to reveal itself in ever purer forms, and finally as certainly the purest, most transparent, that is, the hardly visible form in the brain of the present theologus liberalis vulgis [liberal theologian for the rabble]. However, if we listen to this purest of all Christianities expressing itself concerning the earlier impure forms of Christianity, then the uninvolved listener often has the impression that the talk is not at all about Christianity, but of--now, what are we to think if we find Christianity described by the "greatest Theologian of the century" as the religion which makes the claim that "it can be found in all true and even in a few other barely possible religions" and when the "true church" is to be the one which "becomes a flowing mass, where there is no outline, where each part finds itself sometimes here, sometimes there, and everything mingles freely with everything else." Once again, what are we to think? What we can learn from Christianity, how under the effect of a historicizing treatment it has become blasé and unnatural, until finally a fully historical, that is, an impartial treatment, dissolves it in pure knowledge about Christianity and thereby destroys it, that fact we can study in everything which has life. It ceases to live when it is completely dissected and exists in pain and sickness, if we start to practice historical dissection on it. There are people who believe in a revolutionary and reforming art of healing in German music among German people. They get angry and consider it an injustice committed against the most living aspect of our culture when even such men as Mozart and Beethoven are inundated nowadays with the entire scholarly welter of biographical detail and are compelled through the systematic torture of the historical critic to answer to a thousand importunate questions. Through this method, is it not the case that something which has definitely not yet exhausted its living effects is dismissed as irrelevant or at least paralyzed, because we direct our curiosity at countless microscopic details of the life and work and seek intellectual problems in places where we should learn to live and to forget all problems? Set a pair of such modern biographers to thinking about the birth place of Christianity or Luther's Reformation. Their dispassionate pragmatic curiosity would immediately manage to make every spiritual action at a distance impossible, just as the most wretched animal can prevent the origin of the most powerful oak by gobbling down the acorn. All living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness. If this veil is taken from them, if people condemn a religion, an art, a genius to orbit like a star without an atmosphere, then we should no longer wonder about their rapid decay and the way they become hard and barren. That is the way it is now with all great things which never succeed without some delusion But every people, indeed every person, who wishes to become mature needs such an enveloping delusion, such a protecting and veiling cloud. But today people generally despise becoming mature, because they honour history more than living. Indeed, people exult over the fact that now "science is beginning to rule over living." It is possible that people will |
|||||
|