The Use and Abuse of History
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next page the antiquarians and gravediggers of those races. Such late arrivals naturally live an ironic existence. Destruction follows closely on the heels of their limping passage through life. They shudder in the face of that, when they derive enjoyment from the past, for they are living memorials, and yet their thoughts are senseless without someone to inherit them. So the dark premonition envelops them that their life may be an injustice, for no future life can set it right. However, if we were to imagine such antiquarian late comers suddenly exchanging that painfully ironic moderation for impudence, and if we imagine them to ourselves as if they were reporting with a ringing voice: "The race is at its peak, because now for the first time it has the knowledge of itself and has become clear to itself," then we would have a performance in which, as in an allegory, the enigmatic meaning of a certain very famous philosophy is deciphered for German culture. I believe that there has been no dangerous variation or change in German culture in this century which has not become more dangerous through the monstrous influence of the philosophy of Hegel, an influence which continues to flow right up to the present. The belief that one is a late comer of the age is truly crippling and disorienting; but it must appear fearful and destructive when such a belief one day with a bold reversal idolizes this late comer as the true meaning and purpose of all earlier events, when his knowledgeable misery is equated to the completion of world history. Such a way of considering things has made the Germans accustomed to talking of the "World Process" and to justify their own time as the necessary result of the world process. Such a way of thinking about things has made history the single sovereign, in the place of the other spiritual powers, culture and religion, insofar as history is "the self-realizing idea" and "the dialectic of the spirits of peoples" and the "last judgment." People have scornfully called this Hegelian understanding of history the earthly changes of God; but this God for His part was first created by history. However, this God became intelligible and comprehensible inside Hegelian brain cases and has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of His being right up to that self-revelation. Thus, for Hegel the summit and end point of the world process coincided with his own individual existence in Berlin. In fact, strictly speaking he should have said that everything coming after him should be valued really only as a musical coda of the world historical rondo, or even more truly, as superfluous. He did not say that. Thus, he planted in the generations leavened by him that admiration for the "Power of History", which transforms practically every moment into a naked admiration of success and leads to idolatrous worship of the factual. For this service people nowadays commonly repeat the very mythological and, in addition, the truly German expression "to carry the bill of facts" But the person who has first learned to stoop down and to bow his head before the "Power of History", finally nods his agreement mechanically, in the Chinese fashion, to that power, whether it is a government or public opinion or a numerical majority, and moves his limbs precisely to the beat of strings plucked by some "power" or other. If every success contains within itself a rational necessity, if every event is the victory of the logical or the "Idea", then get down quickly now and kneel before the entire hierarchy of "success." What? Do you claim there are no ruling mythologies any more and religions are dying out? Only look at the religion of the power of history; pay attention to the priests of the mythology of the Idea and their knees all covered in cuts! Surely all the virtues come only in the wake of this new faith. Is it not unselfishness when the historical person lets himself be blown into an objective glass mirror? Is it not generosity to do without all the force of heaven and earth so that in this power people worship pure force in itself? Is it not justice to have a scale balance always in one's hands and to watch closely what sinks down as the stronger and heavier? And what a respectable school such a consideration of history is! To take everything objectively, to get angry about nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything, how gentle and flexible that makes things. And even if one man brought up in this school becomes publicly angry at some point and gets annoyed, people can then enjoy that, for they know it is really only intended as an artistic expression; it is ira [anger] and studium [study]. However, it is entirely sine ira et studio [without anger and study]. What antiquated thoughts I have in my heart about such a complex of mythology and virtue! But they should come out for once, even if people should just go on laughing. I would also say: history constantly impresses on us "It was once" and the moral "You should not" or "You should not have." So history turns into a compendium of the really immoral. How seriously mistaken would the person be who at the same time considered history as the judge of this factual immorality! For example, it is offensive to morality that a Raphael had to die at thirty-six years of age; such a being should not have died. Now, if you want history, as the apologist for the factual, to provide assistance, then you will say that Raphael expressed everything that was in him; with a longer life he would have been able to create something beautiful only as a similar beauty, and not as something beautifully new, and so on. In so doing, you are the devil's advocate for the very reason that you make success, the fact, your idol; whereas, the fact is always dumb and at all times has looked upon something like a calf as a god. Moreover, as apologists for history, you prompt each other by whispering this ignorance. Because you do not know what such a natura naturans [essential creative force] like Raphael is, it does not make you make you hot to hear that such a person was and will never be again. In Goethe's case, recently someone wanted to teach us that with his eighty-two years he had reached his limit, and yet I would happily trade a couple of years of the "washed up" Goethe for an entire cart full of fresh ultra-modern lives, in order to share in conversations like the ones Goethe conducted with Eckermann and in this way to remain protected from all the contemporary teachings of the legionaries of the moment. In comparison with such dead people, how few living people generally have a right to live! That the many live and that those few no longer live is nothing more than a brutal truth, that is, an incorrigible stupidity, a blatant "That is the case" in contrast to the moral "It should not have been so." Yes, in contrast to the moral! For let people speak about whatever virtue they want, about righteousness, generosity, courage, wisdom and human sympathy--a person is always virtuous just because he rebels against that blind power of the factual, against the tyranny of the real and submits himself to laws which are not the laws of that historical fluctuation. He constantly swims against the historical waves, whether he fights his passions as the closest mute facts of his existence or whether he commits himself to truthfulness, while the lies spin around him their glittering webs. If history were in general nothing more than "the world system of passion and error," then human beings would have to read it in the way Goethe summoned us to read Werther, exactly as if it cried out "Be a man and do not follow me!" Fortunately history also preserves the secret of the great fighters against history, that is, against the blind force of the real, and thus puts itself right in the pillory, because it brings out directly as the essential historical natures those who worried so little about the "Thus it was," in order rather to follow with a more cheerful pride a "So it should be." Not to drag their race to the grave but to found a new race--that drove them ceaselessly forwards; and if they themselves were born as latecomers, there is an art of living which makes one forget this. The generations to come will know them only as first comers. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is our age perhaps such a first comer? In fact, the vehemence of its historical sense is so great and expresses itself in such a universal and simply unlimited way that at least in this the coming ages will assess its quality as a first comer, if in fact there are going to be coming ages at all, understood in the sense of culture. But right here there remains a serious doubt. Close by the pride of the modern man stands his irony about his very self, his consciousness that he must live in a historicizing and, as it were, a twilight mood, and his fear that in future he will be totally unable to rescue any more of his youthful hopes and powers. Here and there people go even further, into cynicism, and justify the passage of history, indeed, of the whole development of the world as essentially for the use of modern man, according to the cynical rule that things must turn out just as they are going right now, that man must be nothing other than what people now are, and that against this Must no one may rebel. In the sense of well being of such a cynicism a person who cannot maintain that view with irony curses himself. In addition, the last decade offers him as a gift one of its most beautiful inventions, a rounded and sonorous phrase for such cynicism: it calls his style of living mindlessly with the times, "the full dedication of the personality to the world process." The personality and the world process! The world process and the personality of the turnip flea! If only people did not have to hear the eternal hyperbole of all hyperboles, the word World, World, World, when really each person should speak in all honesty only of Men, Men, Men. Heirs of the Greeks and Romans? Of Christianity? That all appears as nothing to this cynic. But heirs of the world process! The high points and targets of the world process! High points and targets of the world process! Sense and solution of all riddles of becoming in general, expressed in the modern man, the ripest fruit of the tree of knowledge--I call that a swollen feeling of elation. By this symbol are the first comers of all ages known, even if they have come along right at the end. Historical considerations have never flown so far afield, not even in dreams. For now the history of human beings is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants. Indeed, even in the furthest depths of the sea the historical universalist finds the traces of himself, as living mucus; he gazes in astonishment (as if at a miracle) at the immense route which human beings have already passed through and trembles at the sight of the even more astonishing miracle, modern man himself, who has the ability to survey this route. He stands high and proud on the pyramid of the world process. As he sets down on the top of it the final stone of his knowledge, he appears to call out to nature listening all around, "We are at the goal, we are the goal, we are the perfection of nature." Arrogant European of the nineteenth century, you are raving! Your knowledge does not complete nature, but only kills your own. For once measure your height as a knower against your depth as a person who can do something. Of course, you clamber on the solar rays of knowledge upward towards heaven, but you also climb downward to chaos. Your way of going, that is, clambering about as a knower, is your fate. The ground and floor move back away from you into the unknown; for your life there are no supports any more, but only spider's threads, which every new idea of your knowledge rips apart. But no more serious talk about this, for it is possible to say something more cheerful. The incredibly thoughtless fragmenting and fraying of all the fundamentals, their disintegration into a constantly flowing and dissolving becoming, the inexhaustible spinning away and historicizing of all that has come into being because of modern men, the great garden spiders in the knots of the world net, that may keep the moralists, the artists, the devout, as well as the statesman, busy and worried. Today it should for once cheer us up, because we see all this in the gleaming magical mirror of a philosophical writer of parodies, in whose head the age has come to an ironical consciousness of itself, a consciousness clear all the way to lunacy (to speak in Goethe's style). Hegel once taught us, "when the spirit makes a sudden turn, then we philosophers are still there." Our age has made a turn into self-irony, and, lo and behold, E. von Hartmann was also at hand and had written his famous Philosophy of the Unconscious, or, to speak more clearly, his philosophy of unconscious irony. Rarely have we read a more amusing invention and a more philosophically roguish prank than Hartmann's. Anyone who is not enlightened by him concerning Becoming, who is not really set right on the inside, is truly ripe for the state of existing in the past. The start and the goal of the world process, from the first motions of consciousness right to the state of being hurled back into nothingness, together with the precisely defined task of our generation for the world process, all presented from such a wittily inventive font of inspiration of the unconscious and illuminated with an apocalyptic light, with everything so deceptively imitative of a unsophisticated seriousness, as if it were really serious philosophy and not playful philosophy, such a totality makes its creator one of the pre-eminent writers of philosophical parodies of all times. Let us sacrifice on an altar, sacrifice to him, the inventor of a truly universal medicine, a lock of hair, to steal an expression of admiration from Schleiermacher. For what medicine would be healthier against the excess of historical culture than Hartmann's parody of all world history? If we want a correct matter-of-fact account of what Hartmann is telling us about the noxious tri-legged stool of unconscious irony, then we would say that he is telling us that our age would have to be just the way it is if humanity is to ever get seriously fed up with this existence. That is what we believe in our hearts. That frightening fossilizing of the age, that anxious rattling of the bones, which David Strauss has described for us in his naive way as the most beautiful reality, is justified in Hartmann not only retrospectively ex causis efficientibus [from efficient causes, i.e., as the result of certain mechanical causes], but even looking ahead, ex causa finali [from a final cause, i.e., as having a higher purpose]. The joker lets his light stream over the most recent periods of our time, and there finds that our age is very good, especially for the person who wants to endure as strongly as possible the indigestible nature of life and who cannot wish that doomsday comes quickly enough. Indeed, Hartmann calls the age which humanity is now approaching the "maturity of humanity." But that maturity is, according to his own description, the fortunate condition where there is still only " pure mediocrity" and culture is "some evening farce for the Berlin stockbroker," where "geniuses are no longer a requirement of the age, because that means casting pearls before swine or also because the age has progressed to a more important level, beyond the stage for which geniuses are appropriate," that is, to that stage of social development in which each worker "with a period of work which allows him sufficient leisure for his intellectual development leads a comfortable existence." You rogue of all rogues, you speak of the yearning of contemporary humanity; but you also know what sort of ghost will stand at the end of this maturity of humanity as the result of that intellectual development--disgust. Things stand in a state of visible wretchedness, but they will get even more wretched, "before our eyes the Antichrist reaches out further and further around him"--but things must be so, thing must come about this way, because for all that we are on the best route to disgust with all existing things. "Thus, go forward vigorously into the world process as a worker in the vineyard of the Lord, for the process is the only thing which can lead to redemption." The vineyard of the Lord! The process! For redemption! Who does not see and hear the historical culture which knows the word "becoming" only as it intentionally disguises itself in a misshapen parody, as it expresses through the grotesque grimacing mask held up in front of its face the most willful things about itself! For what does this last mischievous summons to the workers in the vineyard essentially want from them? In what work are they to strive vigorously forwards? Or, to ask the question another way, what has the historically educated man, the modern fanatic swimming and drowning in the flood of becoming, still left to do, in order to reap that disgust, the expensive grapes of that vineyard? He has to do nothing other than continue to live as he has been living, to continue loving what he has loved, to continue to hate what he has hated, and to continue reading the newspapers which he has been reading. For him there is only one sin, to live differently from the way he has been living. But we are told the way he has been living with the excessive clarity of something written in stone by that famous page with the sentences in large print, in which the entire contemporary cultural rabble kingdom is caught up in a blind rapture and a frenzy of delight, because they believe they read their own justification, indeed, their own justification in the light of the apocalypse. For the unconscious writer of parody has required of each one of them "the complete dedication of his personality to the world process in pursuit of its goal, for the sake of the world's redemption," or still more pellucid, "the approval of the will to live is proclaimed as right only provisionally, for only in the full dedication to life and its pains, not in cowardly renunciation and drawing back, is there something to achieve for the world process," "the striving for individual denial of the will is just as foolish and useless, even more foolish, than suicide." "The thinking reader |
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