The Use and Abuse of History
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next page attain that goal but it is certain that a life so governed is not worth much, because it is much less living and it establishes a life for the future far less than does the previous life governed not by knowledge but by instinct and powerful illusory images. But, as stated, it is clearly not to be the era of fully developed and mature people, of harmonious personalities, but the era of common work which is as useful as possible. That, however, amounts only to the fact that people are to be trained for the purposes of the time, in order to get to work with their hands as promptly as possible. They are to labour in the factories of the universal utilities before they are mature, that is, so that they really no longer become mature, because this would be a luxury, which would deprive the "labour market" of a lot of power. We blind some birds, so that they sing more beautifully. I do not think that today's people sing more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I do know this: we blind them early. But the method, the disreputable method, which people use to blind them is excessively bright, excessively sudden, and excessively changing light. The young person is lashed through all the centuries. Youngsters who understand nothing about a war, a diplomatic action, or a trade policy are found fit to be introduced to political history. But then, just as the young person races through history, so we moderns race through the store rooms of art and listen to concerts. We really feel that something sounds different from something else, that something has a different effect than something else. Constantly losing more of this feeling of surprise and dislike, becoming excessively astonished no longer, or finally allowing oneself to enjoy everything--people really call that historical sense historical education. Without saying anything to gloss over the expression: the mass of stuff streaming in is so great that what is surprising, shocking, barbarous, and powerful, "concentrated in a dreadful cluster," presses so overpoweringly on the young soul that it knows how to rescue itself only with a deliberate apathy. Where a keener and stronger consciousness is firmly established, then a very different feeling appears: disgust. The young man has become homeless and has doubts about all customs and ideas. Now he knows this fact: that at all times things were different, and they do not depend upon the way you are. In melancholy absence of feeling he lets opinion on opinion flow past him and understands Holderlein's pointed words in response to his reading of Laertius Diogenes concerning the life and teaching of the Greek philosophers: "Here I have also experienced more of what I have already come across sometimes, that what passes temporarily by and what comes and goes in human thoughts and systems strike me as almost more tragic than the fates which we usually call the only realities." No, such an overwhelming, anaesthetizing, and powerful historicizing is certainly not required for the young, as ancient times demonstrate, and is, indeed, dangerous in the highest degree, as newer ages demonstrate. But let us really look at the historical student, the inheritor of a blasé attitude, already apparent all too early, almost in childhood. Now the "method" in his own work, the right grip and the elegant tone of the master's manner, have become his own. An entirely isolated small chapter of the past has fallen victim to his keen mind and the method he has learned. He has already produced, indeed, in prouder language, he has "created." He has now become a servant of truth in action and master in the world empire of history. If, as a child, he was already "ready," now he is already over-ready. One only needs to shake him for wisdom to fall into one's lap with a rattle. But the wisdom is rotten, and each apple has its own worm. Believe me on this point: when people work in the scientific factory and are to become useful before they are mature, then science itself is ruined in the process, just like the slaves used these days in this factory. I regret that people even find it necessary to use the verbal jargon of the slave holder and employer to describe such relationships which should be thought of as free from utility, free from life's needs, but the words "Factory, labour market, bargain, exploitation," uttered like all the words assisting egoism, spontaneously press themselves on the lips when we want to describe the youngest generation of scholars. The stolid mediocrity becomes ever more mediocre, science becomes ever more practical economically. Essentially all the most recent scholars are wise in only a single point, and in that naturally wiser than all people of the past. In all other points they are, to speak with care, only infinitely different from all the scholars of the old school. Nevertheless they demand respect and perquisites for themselves, as if the state and official opinion were under an obligation to consider the new coins just as valuable as the old. The labourers have made a working compact among themselves and decreed that genius is superfluous because each labourer is stamped as a genius. Presumably a later time will consider the structure they have cobbled together, not built together. To those who tirelessly proclaim the modern cry of combat and sacrifice "Division of labour! In rows and tiers!" we can once and for all say clearly and firmly: "Do you want to destroy science as quickly as possible, just as you destroy hens, which you artificially compel to lay eggs too quickly." Well, in the last century science has been promoted at an astonishing rate. But take a look now at the scholars, the exhausted hens. There are in truth no "harmonious" natures. They can only cackle more than before, because they lay eggs more often. Naturally, however, the eggs have become constantly smaller (although the books have become constantly thicker). As the final natural result, things resign themselves to the commonly loved "Popularizing" of science (in addition to the "Feminization" and "Infantization"), that is, the notorious tailoring of the scientific coat to the body of the "motley public" (I am attempting here to cultivate a moderately tailored German to describe a moderately tailored activity). Goethe saw an abuse in this and demanded that sciences should have an effect on the external world only through a higher praxis. Besides, to the older generation of scholars such an abuse appeared (for good reasons) difficult and tiresome. For similarly good reasons it comes easily to the younger scholars, because they themselves, with the exception of a really small corner of knowledge, are the motley public and carry its needs in themselves. They only need once to settle themselves down comfortably in order for them to succeed in opening up the small study area to that popular need for the variously curious. People pretend that below this action of making themselves comfortable stands the title "the modest condescension of the scholar for his people"; while at bottom the scholar, to the extent that he is not a scholar but a member of the rabble, is only descending into himself. If you create for yourself the idea of a "people" then you can never think sufficiently nobly and highly of it. If you thought highly of a people, then you would be also compassionate towards them and would be on your guard against offering them your historical aqua fortis [nitric acid] as a living and refreshing drink. But deep down you think little of the people, because you are permitted to have no true and confidently based respect for its future, and you operate as practical pessimists, I mean as people led by the premonition of destruction, people who thus become indifferent and permissive towards what is strange, even towards your very own welfare. If only the soil still supported us! And if it no longer carries us, then that is also all right. Thus they feel and live an ironic existence. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 of death] 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" [a reminder of living] 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 colouring, 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. 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 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. 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 |
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