"Nietzsche, Friedrich - On The Use and Abuse of History" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm)

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 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 blasщ 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.




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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 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.


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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 will also understand without further suggestions how a practical philosophy built on these principles would look and that such a philosophy cannot contain any falling apart but only the full reconciliation with life."
The thinking reader will understand it. And people could misunderstand Hartmann! How unspeakably amusing it is that people misunderstand him! Should contemporary Germans be very sensitive? A trusty Englishman noticed their lack of a Delicacy of Perception, and even dared to say "in the German mind there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy and infelicitous" Would the great German writer of parodies really contradict him? In fact, according to Hartmann's explanation, we are approaching "that ideal condition, where the race of mankind consciously makes his own history." But obviously we are quite far from that state, perhaps even more ideal, where humanity reads Hartmann's book with awareness. If that state ever arrives, then no person will let the word "World process" pass his lips any more, without these lips breaking into a smile. For with that phrase people will remember the time when Hartmann's parodying gospel with its stolidly middle-class notion of that "German mind," and with "the distorted seriousness of the owl," as Goethe puts it, was listened to, absorbed, disputed, honoured, publicized, and canonized.
But the world must go forward. The ideal condition cannot be dreamed up; it must be fought for and won. Only through joy does the way go to redemption, to redemption from that misunderstood owl-like seriousness. The time will come in which people wisely refrain from all constructions of the world process or even of human history, a time in which people in general no longer consider the masses but once again think about individuals who construct a sort of bridge over the chaotic storm of becoming. These people do not set out some sort of process, but live timelessly and contemporaneously, thanks to history which permits such a combination. They live like the republic of geniuses, about which Schopenhauer once explained that one giant shouts out to another across the barren intervals of time, and undisturbed by the wanton and noisy midgets who creep around them, the giants continue their lofty spiritual conversation. The task of history is to be a mediator between them and thus to provide an opportunity and the energies for the development of greatness. No, the goal of humanity cannot finally be anywhere but in its greatest examples.
By contrast, our comic person naturally states with that wonderful dialectic, just as worthy of admiration as its admirers, "With the idea of this development it would be inconsistent to ascribe to the world process an infinite length of time in the past, because then each and every imaginable development must have already been gone through; that, however, is not the case (O you rascal). And we are no more able to assign to the process an infinite future period. Both of these raise the idea of development to a final goal (o, once again, you rascal) and makes the world process like the water drawing of the Danaids. The complete victory of the logical over the illogical (O, you rascal of all rascals), however, must coincide with the temporal end of the world process, the day of judgment." No, you lucidly mocking spirit, as long as the illogical still prevails to the extent it does today, for example, as long as people can still talk of the "world process" with a common understanding, in the way you talk, judgment day is still a long way off. For it is still too joyful on this earth; many illusions are still blooming (for example, the illusion of your contemporaries about you). We are not yet sufficiently ripe to be flung back into your nothingness. For we believe that things here will get even more amusing when people first begin to understand you, you misunderstood unconscious man. However, if in spite of this, disgust should come with power, just as you have predicted to your readers, if you should be right in your description of your present and future (and no one has hated both with such disgust as you have) then I am happily prepared to vote with the majority, in the way you have proposed, that next Saturday evening at twelve o'clock precisely your world will go under, and our decree may conclude that from tomorrow on there will be no more time and no newspaper will appear any more. However, perhaps the result will fail to materialize, and we have made our decree in vain.
Bit then at any rate we will not lack the time for a beautiful experiment. We take a balance scale and put in one scale pan Hartmann's unconsciousness and in the other Hartmann's world process. There are people who think that they will both weigh the same, for in each scale pan would lie an equally poor quotation and an equally good jest. When people first come to understand Hartmann's jest, then no one will use Hartmann's talk of "world process" as anything but a joke. In fact, it is high time we moved forward to proclaim satirical malice against the dissipation of the historical sense, against the excessive pleasure in the process at the expense of being and living, against the senseless shifting of all perspectives. And in praise of the author of the Philosophy of the Unconscious it should always be repeated that he was the first to succeed in registering keenly the ridiculousness of the idea of the "world process" and to allow an even keener appreciation of that ridiculousness through the particular seriousness of his treatment. Why the "world" is there, why "humanity" is there--these should not concern us at all for the time being. For it may be that we want to make a joke. The presumptuousness of the small human worm is simultaneously the funniest and the most joyful thing on this earthly stage. But why you, as an individual, are there, that is something I am asking you. And if no one else can say it for you, then at least try once to justify the sense of your existence, as it were, a posteriori by establishing for yourself a purpose, a final goal, a "To this end," and a high and noble "To this end." If you are destroyed by this, well, I know no better purpose for life than to die in service of the great and the impossible, animae magnae prodigus [a generous man with a great spirit].
If by contrast the doctrine of the sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all ideas, types, and styles, of the lack of all cardinal differences between man and animal (doctrines which I consider true but deadly) are foisted on people for another generation with the frenzied instruction which is now customary, then it should take no one by surprise if people destroy themselves in egotistical trifles and misery, ossifying themselves in their self-absorption, initially falling apart and ceasing to be a people. Then, in place of this condition, perhaps systems of individual egotism, alliances for the systematic larcenous exploitation of those non-members of the alliance and similar creations of utilitarian nastiness will step forward onto the future scene. Let people just proceed to prepare these creations, to write history from the standpoint of the masses and to seek for those laws in it which are to be inferred from the needs of these masses, and for the laws of motion of the lowest clay and loam layers of society. To me, the masses seem to be worth a glance in only in three respects: first as blurred copies of great men, presented on bad paper with worn out printing plates, then as the resistance against the great men, and finally as working implements of the great. For the rest, let the devil and statistics carry them off! How might statistics demonstrate that there could be laws in history? Laws? Yes, statistics prove how coarse and disgustingly uniform the masses are. Are we to call the effects of the powerful forces of stupidity, mimicry, love, and hunger laws?
Now, we are willing to concede that point, but by the same token the principle then is established that as far as there are laws in history, they are worth nothing and history is worth nothing. However, precisely this sort of history nowadays is generally esteemed, the history which takes the large mass tendencies as the important and principal thing in history and considers all great men only like the clearest examples of bubbles which become visible in the watery flood. Thus, the mass is to produce greatness out of itself, and chaos is to produce order from itself. At the end, of course, the hymn is sung to the productive masses. Everything which has preoccupied such masses for a long time is then called "Great" and, as people say, "a historical power" has come into being. But is that not a case of quite deliberately exchanging quantity and quality? When the podgy masses have found some idea or other (for example, a religious idea) quite adequate, has tenaciously defended it, and dragged it along for centuries, then, and only then, the discoverer and founder of that idea is to be great. But why? The most noble and highest things have no effect at all on the masses. The historical success of Christianity, its historical power, tenacity, and duration, all that fortunately proves nothing with respect to the greatness of its founder. Basically, that would act as a proof against him. But between him and that historical success lies a very earthly and dark layer of passion, error, greed for power and honour, the persisting powers of the imperium romanum, a layer from which Christianity acquired that earthy taste and scrap of ground which made possible its perseverance in this world and, as it were, gave it its durability.
Greatness should not depend upon success. Demosthenes had greatness, although at the same time he had no success. The purest and most genuine followers of Christianity were always more likely to put their worldly success, their so-called "historical power," into question and to restrict it rather than to promote it. For they trained themselves to stand outside "the world" and did not worry themselves about the "progress of the Christian idea." For this reason, for the most part they are also unknown to history and have remained unnamed. To express this in a Christian manner: in this way the devil is the regent of the world and the master of success and progress. He is in all historical powers the essential power, and so it will substantially remain, although it may for some time sound quite painful to ears which have become accustomed to the idolatry of success and historical power. For in this matter these people have practiced giving things new names and have rechristened even the devil. It is certainly a time of great danger: human beings seem to be close to discovering that the egotism of the individual, the group, or the masses was the lever of historical movements at all times. However, at the same time, people are not at all worried by this discovery. On the contrary, people declaim: Egotism is to be our God. With this new faith people are on the point of erecting, with the clearest of intentions, future history on egotism. But it is only to be a clever egotism subject to a few limitations, in order that it may consolidate itself in an enduring way. It is the sort of egotism which studies history just in order to acquaint itself with unclever egotism.
Through this study people have learned that the state has received a very special mission in the established world system of egotism: the state is to become the patron of all clever egotism, so that, with its military and police forces, it may protect against the frightening outbreak of the unintelligent egotism. For the same purpose history, that is, the history of animals and human beings, is also stirred into the popular masses and working classes, who are dangerous because they are unintelligent, for people know that a small grain of historical education is capable of breaking the rough and stupefied instincts and desires or to divert them into the path of improved egotism. In summa: people are paying attention now, to express oneself with E. von Hartmann, " to a deliberate looking into the future for a practical homely structure in their earthly home region." The same writer calls such a period the "full maturity of mankind" and makes fun about what is now called "Man," as if with that term one is to understand only the sober selfish person; in the same way he also prophecies that after such a period of full maturity there comes to this "Man" an appropriate old age, but apparently only with this idea to vent his ridicule on our contemporary old men. For he speaks of the mature peacefulness with which they "review all the chaotic stormy suffering of their past lives and understand the vanity of the previously assumed goals of their striving." No, a maturity of this sly egotism of a historical culture is appropriate for an old age of hostile craving and disgraceful clinging to life and then a final act, with its
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childhood and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Whether the dangers of our life and our culture now come from these desolate, toothless and tasteless old men, whether they come from those so-called "Men" of Hartmann's, in opposition to both we wish to hold on with our teeth to our right to our youth and not to grow tired of defending, in our youth, the future against these forceful portrayers of the future. In this fight, however, we would have to acknowledge a particularly unpleasant perception: that people intentionally promote the excesses of the historical sense from which the present time suffers, they encourage them, and they use them.
However, people use history against the young, in order to train them for that maturity of egotism which is striven for everywhere; people use it to break the natural aversion of youth through a transfiguring, that is to say, a magically scientific illumination of that manly-effeminate egotism. Yes, people know what a certain predominance of history is capable of; people know it only too well: to uproot the strongest instincts of youth, fire, defiance, forgetting of the self, to dampen down the heat of their sense of right and wrong, to hold back or repress the desire to mature slowly with the contrary desire to be finished quickly, to be useful and productive, to infect the honesty and boldness of the feelings with doubts. Indeed, history is itself capable of deceiving the young about their most beautiful privilege, about their power to cultivate in themselves with complete conviction a great idea and to allow an even greater idea to grow forth out of it. A certain excess of history is capable of all this. We have seen it. And this is the reason: through its incessant shifting of the horizons of significance, through the elimination of a surrounding atmosphere, it no longer allows a person to perceive and to act unhistorically. He then draws himself from the infinity of his horizon back into himself, into the smallest egotistical region and there must wither away and dry up. He probably achieves cleverness in this, but never wisdom. He permits himself inner conversations, calculates, and gets along well with the facts, does not boil over, winks, and understands how to seek out his own advantage or that of his party amid the advantages and disadvantages of strangers; he forgets superfluous modesty and thus step by step becomes a "Man" and an "Old Man" on the Hartmann model. But he should become this--that is the precise sense of the cynical demand nowadays for "the complete dedication of the personality to the world process," so far as his goal is concerned, for the sake of the redemption of the world, as that rascal E. Hartmann assures us. Now, the will and goal of these Hartmann "men" and "old men" is indeed hardly the redemption of the world. Certainly the world would be more redeemed if it were redeemed from these men and old men. For then the kingdom of youth would come.