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On the Use and Abuse of History for Life........................................................................................................1

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ......................................................................................................................1

For comments, improvements, corrections, or questions please contact johnstoi@mala.bc.ca

[Note that phrases in square brackets have been added to the text by the translator. Nietzsche's longer

paragraphs have been broken into shorter paragraphs. This text is in the public domain, released September

"Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening

my activity." These are Goethe's words. With them, as with a heartfelt expression of Ceterum censeo [I judge

otherwise], our consideration of the worth and the worthlessness of history may begin. For this work is to set

down why, in the spirit of Goethe's saying, we must seriously despise instruction without vitality, knowledge

which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we lack

what is still most essential to us and because what is superfluous is hostile to what is essential. To be sure, we

need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of

knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and

distresses. That is, we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or

merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to use history only insofar as

it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and

degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit as necessary

I have tried to describe a feeling which has often enough tormented me. I take my revenge on this feeling

when I expose it to the general public. Perhaps with such a description someone or other will have reason to

point out to me that he also knows this particular sensation but that I have not felt it with sufficient purity and

naturalness and definitely have not expressed myself with the appropriate certainty and mature experience.

Perhaps one or two will respond in this way. However, most people will tell me that this feeling is totally

wrong, unnatural, abominable, and absolutely forbidden, that with it, in fact, I have shown myself unworthy

of the powerful historical tendency of the times, as it has been, by common knowledge, observed for the past

two generations, particularly among the Germans. Whatever the reaction, now that I dare to expose myself

with this natural description of my feeling, common decency will be fostered rather than shamed, because I

am providing many opportunities for a contemporary tendency like the reaction just mentioned to make polite

pronouncements. Moreover, I obtain for myself something of even more value to me than respectability: I

This essay is also out of touch with the times because here I am trying for once to see as a contemporary

disgrace, infirmity, and defect something of which our age is justifiably proud, its historical culture. For I

believe, in fact, that we are all suffering from a consumptive historical fever and at the very least should

recognize that we are afflicted with it. If Goethe with good reason said that with our virtues we

simultaneously cultivate our faults and if, as everyone knows, a hypertrophic virtue (as the historical sense of

our age appears to me to be) can serve to destroy a people just as well as a hypertrophic vice, then people

may make allowance for me this once. Also in my defence I should not conceal the fact that the experiences

which aroused these feelings of torment in me I have derived for the most part from myself and only from

others for the purpose of comparison and that, insofar as I am a student more of ancient times, particularly the

Greeks, I come as a child in these present times to such anachronistic experiences concerning myself. But I

must be allowed to ascribe this much to myself on account of my profession as a classical philologue, for I

would not know what sense classical philology would have in our age unless it is to be effective by its

inappropriateness for the times, that is, in opposition to the age, thus working on the age, and, we hope, for

Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around,

eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and

dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard

for man, because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy

at its happiness. For he wishes only to live like the beast, neither weary nor amid pains, and he wants it in

vain, because he does not will it as the animal does. One day the man demands of the beast: "Why do you not

talk to me about your happiness and only gaze at me?" The beast wants to answer, too, and say: "That comes

about because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say." But by then the beast has already forgotten

But he also wonders about himself, that he is not able to learn to forget and that he always hangs onto past

things. No matter how far or how fast he runs, this chain runs with him. It is something amazing: the moment,

in one sudden motion there, in one sudden motion gone, before nothing, afterwards nothing, nevertheless

comes back again as a ghost and disturbs the tranquillity of each later moment. A leaf is continuously

released from the roll of time, falls out, flutters awayand suddenly flutters back again into the man's lap.

For the man says, "I remember," and envies the beast, which immediately forgets and sees each moment

Thus the beast lives unhistorically, for it gets up in the present like a number without any odd fraction left

over; it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely

what it is. Thus a beast can be nothing other than honest. By contrast, the human being resists the large and

ever increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows him over. It makes his way difficult, like

an invisible and dark burden which he can for appearances' sake even deny, and which he is only too happy

to deny in his interactions with his peers, in order to awaken their envy. Thus, it moves him, as if he

remembered a lost paradise, to see the grazing herd or, something more closely familiar, the child, which

does not yet have a past to deny and plays in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and the future.

Nonetheless this game must be upset for the child. He will be summoned all too soon out of his forgetfulness.

For he learns to understand the expression "It was," that password with which struggle, suffering, and

weariness come over human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically isa never completed

past tense. If death finally brings the longed for forgetting, it nevertheless thereby destroys present existence

and thus impresses its seal on the knowledge that existence is only an uninterrupted living in the past

[Gewesensein], something which exists for the purpose of selfdenial, selfdestruction, and

If happiness or if, in some sense or other, a reaching out for new happiness is what holds the living onto life

and pushes them forward into life, then perhaps no philosopher has more justification than the cynic. For the

happiness of the beast, like that of the complete cynic, is the living proof of the rightness of cynicism. The

smallest happiness, if only it is uninterrupted and creates happiness, is incomparably more happiness than the

greatest which comes only as an episode, as it were, like a mood, as a fantastic interruption between nothing

but boredom, cupidity, and deprivation. However, with the smallest and with the greatest good fortune,

happiness becomes happiness in the same way: through forgetting or, to express the matter in a more

scholarly fashion, through the capacity, for as long as the happiness lasts, to sense things unhistorically.

The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past,

who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will

never know what happiness is. Even worse, he will never do anything to make other people happy. Imagine

the most extreme example, a person who did not possess the power of forgetting at all, who would be

condemned to see everywhere a coming into being. Such a person no longer believes in his own being, no

longer believes in himself, sees everything in moving points flowing out of each other, and loses himself in

this stream of becoming. He will, like the true pupil of Heraclitus, finally hardly dare any more to lift his

finger. Forgetting belongs to all action, just as both light and darkness belong in the life of all organic things.

A person who wanted to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who was forced to abstain

from sleep, or like the beast that is to continue its life only from rumination to constantly repeated

rumination. For this reason, it is possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the

beast demonstrates; however, it is generally completely impossible to live without forgetting. Or, to explain

myself more clearly concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical

sense, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a

In order to determine this degree of history and, through that, the borderline at which the past must be

forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we have to know precisely how great the

plastic force of a person, a people, or a culture is. I mean that force of growing in a different way out of

oneself, of reshaping and incorporating the past and the foreign, of healing wounds, compensating for what

has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of one's self. There are people who possess so little of this force

that they bleed to death incurably from a single experience, a single pain, often even from a single tender

injustice, as from a really small bloody scratch. On the other hand, there are people whom the wildest and

most horrific accidents in life and even actions of their own wickedness injure so little that right in the middle

of these experiences or shortly after they bring the issue to a reasonable state of well being with a sort of quiet

The stronger the roots which the inner nature of a person has, the more he will appropriate or forcibly take

from the past. And if we imagine the most powerful and immense nature, then we would recognize there that

for it there would be no frontier at all beyond which the historical sense would be able to work as an injurious

overseer. Everything in the past, in its own and in the most alien, this nature would draw upon, take it into

itself, and, as it were, transform into blood. What such a nature does not subjugate it knows how to forget. It

is there no more. The horizon is closed completely, and nothing can recall that there still are men, passions,

instruction, and purposes beyond it. This is a general principle: each living being can become healthy, strong,

and fertile only within a horizon. If he is incapable of drawing a horizon around himself and too egotistical to

enclose his own view within an alien one, then he wastes away there, pale or weary, to an early death.

Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to comeall that depends, with the individual

as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the

unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right

time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when

unhistorically. This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a

single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential.

At this point everyone brings up the comment that a person's historical knowledge and feeling can be very

limited, his horizon hemmed in like that of an inhabitant of an Alpine valley; in every judgement he might set

down an injustice and in every experience a mistake, which he was the first to make, and nevertheless in spite

of all injustice and every mistake he stands there in invincible health and vigour and fills every eye with joy,

while close beside him the far more just and scholarly person grows ill and collapses, because the lines of his

horizon are always being shifted about restlessly, because he cannot wriggle himself out of the much softer

nets of his justices and truths to strong willing and desiring. By contrast, we saw the beast, which is

completely unhistorical and which lives almost in the middle of a sort of horizon of points, and yet exists

with a certain happiness, at least without weariness and pretence. Thus, we will have to assess the capacity of

being able to feel to a certain degree unhistorically as more important and more basic, to the extent that in it

lies the foundation above which something right, healthy, and great, something truly human, can generally

first grow. The unhistorical is like an enveloping atmosphere in which life generates itself alone, only to

The truth is that, in the process by which the human being, in thinking, reflecting, comparing, separating, and

combining, first limits that unhistorical sense, the process in which inside that surrounding misty cloud a

bright gleaming beam of light arises, only then, through the power of using the past for living and making

history out of what has happened, does a person first become a person. But in an excess of history the human

being stops once again; without that cover of the unhistorical he would never have started or dared to start.

Where do the actions come from which men are capable of doing without previously having gone into that

misty patch of the unhistorical? Or to set pictures to one side and to grasp an example for illustration: we

picture a man whom a violent passion, for a woman or for a great idea, shakes up and draws forward. How

his world is changed for him! Looking backwards, he feels blind; listening to the side he hears the

strangeness like a dull sound empty of meaning. What he is generally aware of he has never yet perceived as

so true, so perceptibly close, coloured, resounding, illuminated, as if he is comprehending with all the senses

simultaneously. All his estimates of worth are altered and devalued. He is unable any longer to value so

much, because he can hardly feel it any more. He asks himself whether he has been the fool of strange words

and strange opinions for long. He is surprised that his memory turns tirelessly in a circle but is nevertheless

too weak and tired to make a single leap out of this circle. It is the most unjust condition of the world,

narrow, thankless with respect to the past, blind to what has passed, deaf to warnings, a small living vortex in

a dead sea of night and forgetting: nevertheless this conditionunhistorical, thoroughly antihistoricalis

the birthing womb not only of an unjust deed but much more of every just deed. And no artist would achieve

his picture, no field marshal his victory, and no people its freedom, without previously having desired and

striven for them in that sort of unhistorical condition. As the active person, according to what Goethe said, is

always without conscience, so he is also always without knowledge. He forgets most things in order to do one

thing; he is unjust towards what lies behind him and knows only one right, the right of what is to come into

being now. So every active person loves his deed infinitely more than it deserves to be loved, and the best

deeds happen in such a excess of love that they would certainly have to be unworthy of this love, even if their

Should a person be in a position to catch in many examples the scent of this unhistorical atmosphere, in

which every great historical event arose, and to breathe it in, then such a person might perhaps be able, as a

knowledgeable being, to elevate himself up to a superhistorical standpoint, in the way Niebuhr once

described a possible result of historical research: "In one thing at least," he says, "is history, clearly and

thoroughly grasped, useful, the fact that one knows, as even the greatest and highest spirits of our human race

do not know, how their eyes have acquired by chance the way in which they see and the way in which they

forcefully demand that everyone see, forcefully because the intensity of their awareness is particularly great.

Someone who has not, through many examples, precisely determined, known, and grasped this point is

overthrown by the appearance of a mighty spirit who in a given shape presents the highest form of passionate

We could call such a standpoint superhistorical, because a person who assumes such a stance could feel no

more temptation to continue living and to participate in history. For he would have recognized the single

condition of every event, that blindness and injustice in the soul of the man of action. He himself would have

been cured from now on of taking history excessively seriously. But in the process he would have learned, for

every person and for every experience, among the Greeks or Turks, from a moment of the first or the

nineteenth century, to answer for himself the question how and why they conducted their lives. Anyone who

asks his acquaintances whether they would like to live through the last ten or twenty years again will easily

perceive which of them has been previously educated for that superhistorical point of view. For they will

probably all answer "No!", but they will substantiate that "No!" differently, some of them perhaps with the

confident hope "But the next twenty years will be better." Those are the ones of whom David Hume

And from the dregs of life hope to receive, What the first sprightly running could not give.

We will call these the historical people. The glance into the past pushes them into the future, fires their spirit

to take up life for a longer time yet, kindles the hope that justice may still come and that happiness may sit

behind the mountain towards which they are walking. These historical people believe that the meaning of

existence will come increasingly to light in the course of its process. Therefore they look backwards only to

understand the present by considering previous process and to learn to desire the future more keenly. In spite

of all their history, they do not understand at all how unhistorically they think and act and also how their

But that question whose first answer we have heard can be answered again in a different way, that is, once

more with a "No!" but with a "No!" that has a different grounding. The denial comes from the superhistorical

person, who does not see healing in the process and for whom the world is much more complete and at its

end in every moment. What could ten new years teach that the past ten years has not been able to teach!

Now, whether the meaning of the theory is happiness, resignation, virtue, or repentance, on that issue the

superhistorical people have not been united. But contrary to all the historical ways of considering the past,

they do come to full unanimity on the following principle: the past and the present are one and the same, that

is, in all their multiplicity typically identical and, as unchanging types everywhere present, they are a

motionless picture of immutable values and eternally similar meaning. As the hundreds of different languages

correspond to the same typically permanent needs of people, so that someone who understood these needs

could learn nothing new from all the languages, so the superhistorical thinker illuminates for himself all the

histories of people and of individuals from within, guessing like a clairvoyant the original sense of the

different hieroglyphics and gradually even growing tired of avoiding the constantly new streams of written

signals streaming forth. For, in the endless excess of what is happening, how is he not finally to reach

saturation, supersaturation, and, yes, even revulsion, so that the most daring ones are perhaps finally ready,

Nothing lives which would be worthy of your striving, and the earth deserves not a sigh. Pain and boredom is

However, let us leave the superhistorical people to their revulsion and their wisdom. Today for once we

would much rather become joyful in our hearts with our lack of wisdom and make the day happy for

ourselves as active and progressive people, as men who revere the process. Let our evaluation of the

historical be only a western bias, if only from within this bias we at least move forward and not do remain

still, if only we always just learn better to carry on history for the purposes of living! For we will happily

concede that the superhistorical people possess more wisdom than we do, so long, that is, as we may be

confident that we possess more life than they do. For thus at any rate our lack of wisdom will have more of a

future than their wisdom. Moreover, so as to remove the slightest doubt about the meaning of this contrast

between living and wisdom, I will reinforce my argument with a method well established from time

A historical phenomenon, purely and completely known and resolved into an object of knowledge, is, for the

person who has recognized it, dead. In it the person perceives the delusion, the injustice, the blind suffering,

and generally the entire temporal dark horizon of that phenomenon and, at the same time, in the process he

perceives his own historical power. This power has now become for him, as a knower, powerless, but perhaps

History, conceived as pure knowledge, once it becomes sovereign, would be a kind of conclusion to living

and a final reckoning for humanity. Only when historical culture is ruled and led by a higher force and does

not itself govern and lead does it bring with it a powerful new stream of life, a developing culture for

Insofar as history stands in the service of life, it stands in the service of an unhistorical power and will

therefore, in this subordinate position, never be able to (and should never be able to) become pure science,

something like mathematics. However, the problem to what degree living requires the services of history

generally is one of the most important questions and concerns with respect to the health of a human being, a

people, or a culture. For with a certain excess of history, living crumbles away and degenerates. Moreover,

However, the fact that living requires the services of history must be just as clearly understood as the

principle, which will be demonstrated later, that an excess of history harms the living person. In three

respects history belongs to the living person: it belongs to him as an active and striving person; it belongs to

him as a person who preserves and admires; it belongs to him as a suffering person in need of emancipation.

This trinity of relationships corresponds to a trinity of methods for history, to the extent that one may make

the distinctions, a monumental method, an antiquarian method, and a critical method

History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful man, the man who fights one great battle, who needs

the exemplary men, teachers, and comforters and cannot find them among his contemporary companions.

Thus, history belongs to Schiller: for our age is so bad, said Goethe, that the poet no longer encounters any

useful nature in the human life surrounding him. Looking back to the active men, Polybius calls political

history an example of the right preparation for ruling a state and the most outstanding teacher, something

which, through the memory of other people's accidents, advises us to bear with resolution the changes in our

happiness. Anyone who has learned to recognize the sense of history in this way must get annoyed to see

inquisitive travellers or painstaking micrologists climbing all over the pyramids of the great things of the

past. There, in the place where he finds the stimulation to breath deeply and to make things better, he does not

wish to come across an idler who strolls around, greedy for distraction or stimulation, as among the

In order not to despair and feel disgust in the midst of weak and hopeless idlers, surrounded by apparently

active, but really only agitated and fidgeting companions, the active man looks behind him and interrupts the

path to his goal to take a momentary deep breath. His purpose is some happiness or other, perhaps not his

own, often that of a people or of humanity collectively. He runs back away from resignation and uses history

as a way of fighting resignation. For the most part, no reward beckons him on, other than fame, that is,

becoming a candidate for an honoured place in the temple of history, where he himself can be, in his turn, a

For his orders state: whatever once was able to expand the idea of "Human being" and to define it more

beautifully must constantly be present in order that it always keeps its potential. The greatest moments in the

struggle of single individuals make up a chain, in which a range of mountains of humanity are joined over

thousands of years. For me the loftiest thing of such a moment from the distant past is bright and greatthat

is the basic idea of the faith in humanity which expresses itself in the demand for a monumental history.

However, with this demand that greatness should be eternal there is immediately ignited the most dreadful

struggle. For everything else still living cries out no. The monumental should not be createdthat is

The dull habit, the small and the base, filling all corners of the world, like a heavy atmosphere clouding

around everything great, casts itself as a barrier, deceiving, dampening and suffocating along the road which

greatness has to go toward immortality. This way, however, leads through human minds! Through the minds

of anxious and shortlived animals, who always come back to the same needs and who with difficulty

postpone their destruction for a little while. As a first priority they want only one thing: to live at any price.

Who might suppose among them the difficult torch race of monumental history, through which alone

greatness lives once more! Nevertheless, a few of them always wake up again, those who, by a look back at

past greatness and strengthened by their observation, feel so blessed, as if the life of human beings is a

beautiful thing, as if it is indeed the most beautiful fruit of this bitter plant to know that in earlier times once

one man went through this existence proud and strong, another with profundity, a third with pity and a desire

to helpall however leaving behind one teaching: that the person lives most beautifully who does not reflect

If the common man considers this time span with such melancholy seriousness and longing, those men on

their way to immorality and to monumental history knew how to bring to life an Olympian laughter or at least

a lofty scorn. Often they climbed with irony into their graves, for what was there of them to bury! Surely only

what had always impressed them as cinders, garbage, vanity, animality and what now sinks into oblivion,

long after it was exposed to their contempt. But one thing will live, the monogram of their very own essence,

a work, a deed, an uncommon inspiration, a creation. That will live, because no later world can do without it.

In this most blessed form fame is indeed something more that the expensive piece of our amour propre, as

Schopenhauer has called it. It is the belief in the unity and continuity of the greatness of all times. It is a

Now, what purpose is served for contemporary man by the monumental consideration of the past, busying

ourselves with the classics and rarities of earlier times? He derives from that the fact that the greatness which

was once there at all events once was possible and therefore will really be possible once again. He goes along

his path more bravely, for now the doubt which falls over him in weaker hours, that he might perhaps be

wishing for the impossible, is beaten back from the field. Let us assume that somebody believes it would take

no more than a hundred productive men, effective people brought up in a new spirit, to get rid of what has

become trendy in German culture right now , how must it strengthen him to perceive that the culture of the

Nevertheless, to learn right away something new from the same example, how fleeting and weak, how

imprecise that comparison would be! If the comparison is to carry out this powerful effect, how much of the

difference will be missed in the process. How forcefully must the individuality of the past be wrenched into a

general shape, with all its sharp corners and angles broken off for the sake of the correspondence! In fact,

basically something that once was possible could appear possible a second time only if the Pythagoreans

were correct in thinking that with the same constellations of the celestial bodies the same phenomena on the

Earth had to repeat themselves, even in the small single particulars, so that when the stars have a certain

position relative to each other, a Stoic and an Epicurean will, in an eternal recurrence, unite and assassinate

Caesar, and with another stellar position Columbus will eternally rediscover America.

Only if the Earth were always to begin its theatrical performance once again after the fifth act, if it were

certain that the same knot of motives, the same deux ex machina, the same catastrophe returned in the same

determined interval, could the powerful man desire monumental history in complete iconic truth, that is, each

fact in its precisely described characteristics and unity, and probably not before the time when astronomers

have once again become astrologers. Until that time monumental history will not be able to produce that full

truthfulness. It will always bring closer what is unlike, generalize, and finally make things equal. It will

always tone down the difference in motives and events, in order to set down the monumental effect, that is,

the exemplary effect worthy of imitation, at the cost of the cause. Thus, because monumental history turns

away as much as possible from the cause, we can call it a collection of "effects in themselves" with less

exaggeration than calling it events which will have an effect on all ages. What is celebrated in folk festivals

and in religious or military remembrance days is basically such an "effect in itself." It is the thing which does

not let the ambitious sleep, which for the enterprising lies like an amulet on the heart, but it is not the true

historical interconnection between cause and effect, which fully recognized, would only prove that never

again could anything completely the same fall out in the dice throw of future contingency.

As long as the soul of historical writing lies in the great driving impulses which a powerful man derives from

it, as long as the past must be written about as worthy of imitation, as capable of being imitated, with the

possibility of a second occurrence, history is definitely in danger of becoming something altered,

reinterpreted into something more beautiful, and thus coming close to free poeticizing. Indeed, there are times

which one cannot distinguish at all between a monumental history and a mythic fiction, because from a single

world one of these impulses can be derived as easily as the other. Thus, if the monumental consideration of

the past rules over the other forms of analyzing it, I mean, over the antiquarian and the critical methods, then

the past itself suffers harm. Really large parts of it are forgotten, despised, and flow forth like an

uninterrupted grey flood, and only a few embellished facts raise themselves up above, like islands. Something

unnatural and miraculous strikes our vision of the remarkable person who becomes especially visible, just

like the golden hips which the pupils of Pythagoras wished to attribute to their master.

Monumental history deceives through its analogies. It attracts the spirited man to daring acts with its

seductive similarities and the enthusiastic man to fanaticism. If we imagine this history really in the hands

and heads of the talented egoists and the wild crowds of evil rascals, then empires are destroyed, leaders

assassinated, wars and revolutions instigated, and the number of the historical "effects in themselves," that is,

the effects without adequate causes, increased once more. No matter how much monumental history can

serve to remind us of the injuries among great and active people, whether for better or worse, that is what it

first brings about when the impotent and inactive empower themselves with it and serve it.

Let us take the simplest and most frequent example. If we imagine to ourselves uncultured and weakly

cultured natures energized and armed by monumental cultural history, against whom will they now direct

their weapons? Against their hereditary enemies, the strong cultural spirits and also against the only ones who

are able to learn truly from that history, that is, for life, and to convert what they have learned into an noble

practice. For them the path will be blocked and the air darkened, if we dance around a halfunderstood

monument of some great past or other like truly zealous idolaters, as if we wanted to state: "See, that is the

true and real culture. What concern of yours is becoming and willing!" Apparently this dancing swarm

possess even the privilege of good taste. The creative man always stands at a disadvantage with respect to the

man who only looks on and does not play his own hand, as for example in all times the political knowitall

If we want to transfer into the area of culture the customs of popular agreement and the popular majority and,

as it were, to require the artist to stand in his own defence before the forum of the artistically inert types, then

we can take an oath in advance that he will be condemned, not in spite of but just because his judges have

solemnly proclaimed the canon of monumental culture (that is, in accordance with the given explanation,

culture which in all ages "has had effects"). Whereas, for the judges everything which is not yet monumental,

because it is contemporary, lacks, first, the need for history, second, the clear inclination toward history, and

third, the very authority of history. On the other hand, their instinct tells them that culture can be struck dead

by culture. The monumental is definitely not to rise up once more. And for that their instinct uses precisely

So they are knowledgeable about culture because they generally like to get rid of culture. They behave as if

they were doctors, while basically they are only concerned with mixing poisons. Thus, they develop their

languages and their taste, in order to explain in their discriminating way why they so persistently disapprove

of all offerings of more nourishing cultural food. For they do not want greatness to arise. Their method is to

say: "See greatness is already there!" In truth, this greatness that is already there is of as little concern to them

as what arises out of it. Of that their life bears witness. Monumental history is the theatrical costume in which

they pretend that their hate for the powerful and the great of their time is a fulfilling admiration for the strong

and the great of past times. In this, through disguise they invert the real sense of that method of historical

observation into its opposite. Whether they know it or not, they certainly act as if their motto were: let the

Each of the three existing types of history is only exactly right for a single area and a single climate; on every

other one it grows up into a destructive weed. If a man who wants to create greatness uses the past, then he

will empower himself through monumental history. On the other hand, the man who wishes to emphasise the

customary and traditionally valued cultivates the past as an antiquarian historian. Only the man whose breast

is oppressed by a present need and who wants to cast off his load at any price has a need for critical history,

that is, history which sits in judgement and passes judgement. From the thoughtless transplanting of plants

stem many ills: the critical man without need, the antiquarian without reverence, and the student of greatness

without the ability for greatness are the sort who are receptive to weeds estranged from their natural mother

History belongs secondly to the man who preserves and honours, to the person who with faith and love looks

back in the direction from which he has come, where he has been. Through this reverence he, as it were,

gives thanks for his existence. While he nurtures with a gentle hand what has stood from time immemorial,

he want to preserve the conditions under which he came into existence for those who are to come after him.

And so he serves life. His possession of his ancestors' goods changes the ideas in such a soul, for those goods

are far more likely to take possession of his soul. The small, limited, crumbling, and archaic keep their own

worth and integrity, because the conserving and honouring soul of the antiquarian man settles on these things

and there prepares for itself a secret nest. The history of his city becomes for him the history of his own self.

He understands the walls, the turreted gate, the dictate of the city council, and the folk festival, like an

illustrated diary of his youth, and he rediscovers for himself in all this his force, his purpose, his passion, his

opinion, his foolishness, and his bad habits. He says to himself, here one could live, for here one may live,

and here one can go on living, because we endure and do not collapse overnight. Thus, with this "We" he

looks back over the past amazing lives of individuals and feels himself like the spirit of the house, the

generation, and the city. From time to time he personally greets from the far away, obscure, and confused

centuries the soul of a people as his own soul, with a feeling of completion and premonition, a scent of almost

lost tracks, an instinctively correct reading even of a past which has been written over, a swift understanding

of the erased and reused parchments (which have, in fact, been erased and written over many times). These

are his gifts and his virtues. With them stands Goethe in front of the memorial to Erwin von Steinbach. In the

storm of his feeling the veil of the historical cloud spread out between them was torn apart. He saw the

German work for the first time once more, "working from the strong rough German soul."

Such a sense and attraction led the Italians of the Renaissance and reawoke in their poets the old Italian

genius, to a "wonderfully renewed sound of the ancient lyre," as Jakob Burckhardt says. But that antiquarian

historical sense of reverence has the highest value when it infuses into the modest, raw, even meagre

conditions in which an individual or a people live a simple moving feeling of pleasure and satisfaction, in the

way, for example, Niebuhr admitted with honest sincerity he could live happily on moor and heath among

free farmers who had a history, without missing art. How could history better serve living than by the fact

that it thus links the less favoured races and people to their home region and home traditions, keeps them

settled there, and prevents them from roaming around and from competition and warfare, looking for

Sometimes it seems as if it is an obstinate lack of understanding which keeps individuals, as it were, screwed

tight to these companions and surroundings, to this arduous daily routine, to these bare mountain ridges, but it

is the most healthy lack of understanding, the most beneficial to the community, as anyone knows who has

clearly experienced the frightening effects of an adventurous desire to wander away, sometimes even among

entire hordes of people, or who sees nearby the condition of a people which has lost faith in its ancient history

and has fallen into a restless cosmopolitan choice and a constant search for novelty after novelty. The

opposite feeling, the sense of well being of a tree for its roots, the happiness to know oneself in a manner not

entirely arbitrary and accidental, but as someone who has grown out of a past, as an heir, flower, and fruit,

and thus to have one's existence excused, indeed justified, this is what people nowadays lovingly describe as

Now, that is naturally not the condition in which a person would be most capable of dissolving the past into

pure knowledge. Thus, also we perceive here what we discerned in connection with monumental history, that

the past itself suffers, so long as history serves life and is ruled by the drive to live. To speak with some

freedom in the illustration, the tree feels its roots more than it can see them. The extent of this feeling,

however, is measured by the size and force of its visible branches. If the tree makes a mistake here, then how

mistaken it will be about the entire forest around it! From that forest the tree only knows and feels something

insofar as this hinders or helps it, but not otherwise. The antiquarian sense of a person, a civic community, an

entire people always has a very highly restricted field of vision. It does not perceive most things at all, and

the few things which it does perceive it looks at far too closely and in isolation. It cannot measure it and

therefore takes everything as equally important. Thus, for the antiquarian sense each single thing is too

important. For it assigns to the things of the past no difference in value and proportion which would

distinguish things from each other fairly, but measures things by the proportions of the antiquarian individual

Here there is always the imminent danger that at some point everything old and past, especially what still

enters a particular field of vision, is taken as equally worthy of reverence but that everything which does not

fit this respect for ancient things, like the new and the coming into being, is rejected and treated as hostile. So

even the Greeks tolerated the hieratic style of their plastic arts alongside the free and the great styles, indeed,

they not only tolerated later the pointed noses and the frosty smiles, but made them into an elegant fashion.

When the sense of a people is hardened like this, when history serves the life of the past in such a way that it

buries further living, especially higher living, when the historical sense no longer conserves life, but

mummifies it, then the tree dies unnaturally, from the top gradually down to the roots, and at last the roots

themselves are generally destroyed. Antiquarian history itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer

inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present. Then reverence withers away. The scholarly

habit lives on without it and orbits in an egotistical and selfsatisfied manner around its own centre. Then we

get a glimpse of the wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of

everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a mouldy smell. With the antiquarian style, he

manages to corrupt a significant talent, a noble need, into an insatiable new lust, a desire for everything really

old. Often he sinks so deep that he is finally satisfied with that nourishment and takes pleasure in gobbling up

But even when this degeneration does not enter into it, when antiquarian history does not lose the basis upon

which it alone can take root as a cure for living, enough dangers still remain, especially if it becomes too

powerful and grows over the other ways of dealing with the past. Antiquarian history knows only how to

preserve life, not how to generate it. Therefore, it always undervalues what is coming into being, because it

has no instinctive feel for it, as, for example, monumental history has. Thus, antiquarian history hinders the

powerful willing of new things; it cripples the active man, who always, as an active person, will and must set

aside reverence to some extent. The fact that something has become old now gives birth to the demand that it

must be immortal, for when a man reckons what every such ancient fact, an old custom of his fathers, a

religious belief, an inherited political right, has undergone throughout its existence, what sum of reverence

and admiration from individuals and generations ever since, then it seems presumptuous or even criminal to

replace such an antiquity with something new and to set up in opposition to such a numerous cluster of

revered and admired things the single fact of what is coming into being and what is present.

Here it becomes clear how a third method of analyzing the past is quite often necessary for human beings,

alongside the monumental and the antiquarian: the critical method. Once again this is in the service of living.

A person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be

able to live. He manages to do this by dragging the past before the court of justice, investigating it

meticulously, and finally condemning it. That past is worthy of condemnation; for that is how it stands with

human things: in them human force and weakness have always been strong. Here it is not righteousness

which sits in the judgement seat or, even less, mercy which announces judgement, but life alone, that dark,

driving, insatiable selfdesiring force. Its judgement is always unmerciful, always unjust, because it never

emerges from a pure spring of knowledge, but in most cases the judgement would be like that anyway, even

if righteousness itself were to utter it. "For everything that arises is worth destroying. Therefore, it would be

better that nothing arose." It requires a great deal of power to be able to live and to forget just how much life

and being unjust are one and the same. Luther himself once voiced the opinion that the world only came into

being through the forgetfulness of God; if God had thought about "heavy artillery," he would never have

made the world. From time to time, however, this same life, which uses forgetting, demands the temporary

destruction of this forgetfulness. For it should be made quite clear how unjust the existence of something or

other is, a right, a caste, a dynasty, for example, and how this thing merits destruction.

For when its past is analyzed critically, then we grasp with a knife at its roots and go cruelly beyond all

reverence. It is always a dangerous process, that is, a dangerous process for life itself. And people or ages

serving life in this way, by judging and destroying a past, are always dangerous and in danger. For since we

are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes,

and even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely. When we condemn that confusion

and consider ourselves released from it, then we have not overcome the fact that we are derived from it. In

the best case, we bring the matter to a conflict between our inherited customary nature and our knowledge, in

fact, even to a war between a new strict discipline and how we have been brought up and what we have

inherited from time immemorial. We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first

nature atrophies. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past a posteriori [after the fact], out of which we

may be descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended. It is always a dangerous attempt,

because it is so difficult to find a borderline to the denial of the past and because the second nature usually is

weaker than the first. Too often what remains is a case of someone who understands the good without doing

it, because we also understand what is better without being able to do it. But here and there victory is

nevertheless achieved, and for the combatants, for those who make use of critical history for their own living,

there is even a remarkable consolation, namely, they know that that first nature was at one time or another

once a second nature and that every victorious second nature becomes a first nature.

These are the services which history can carry out for living. Every person and every people, according to its

goals, forces, and needs, uses a certain knowledge of the past, sometimes as monumental history, sometimes

as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history, but not as a crowd of pure thinkers only watching

life closely, not as people eager for knowledge, individuals only satisfied by knowledge, for whom an

increase of understanding is the only goal, but always only for the purpose of living and, in addition, under

the command and the highest guidance of this life. This is the natural relationship to history of an age, a

culture, and a people: summoned up by hunger, regulated by the degree of the need, held to limits by the

plastic power within, the understanding of the past is desired at all times to serve the future and the present,

not to weaken the present, not to uproot a forceful living future. That all is simple, as the truth is simple, and

is also immediately convincing for anyone who does not begin by letting himself be guided by historical

And now for a quick look at our time! We are frightened and run back. Where is all the clarity, all the

naturalness and purity of that connection between life and history? How confusedly, excessively, and

anxiously this problem now streams before our eyes! Does the fault lie with us, the observers? Or has the

constellation of life and history altered, because a powerful and hostile star has interposed itself between

them? Other people might point out that we have seen things incorrectly, but we want to state what we think

we see. In any case, such a star has come in between, an illuminating and beautiful star. The constellation has

truly changed through science, through the demand that history is to be a science. Now not only does life no

longer rule and control knowledge about the past, but also all the border markings have been ripped up, and

everything that used to exist has come crashing down onto people. As far back as there has been a coming

into being, far back into the endless depths, all perspectives have also shifted. No generation ever saw such an

immense spectacle as is shown now by the science of universal becoming, by history. Of course, history even

shows this with the dangerous boldness of its motto: Fiat veritas, pereat vita [let the truth be done and let life

Let us picture to ourselves the spiritual result produced by this process in the soul of the modern man.

Historical knowledge streams out of invincible sources always renewing itself with more. Strange and

disconnected things push forward. Memory opens all its gates and is nevertheless not open wide enough.

Nature strives its utmost to receive these strange guests, to arrange and honour them. But these are at war

with each other, and it appears necessary to overcome them forcibly, in order not to destroy oneself in their

conflict. Habituation to such a disorderly, stormy, and warring household gradually becomes a second nature,

although it is immediately beyond question that this second nature is much weaker, much more restless, and

completely less healthy than the first. Modern man finally drags a huge crowd of indigestible rocks of

knowledge around inside him, which then occasionally audibly bang around in his body, as it says in fairy

tales. Through this noise the most characteristic property of this modern man reveals itself: the remarkable

conflict on the inside, to which nothing on the outside corresponds, and an outside to which nothing inside

Knowledge, taken up to excess without hunger, even in opposition to any need, now works no longer as

something which reorganizes, a motivation driving outwards. It stays hidden in a certain chaotic inner world,

which that modern man describes with a strange pride as an "Inwardness" peculiar to him. Thus, people say

that we have the content and that only the form is lacking. But with respect to everything alive this is a totally

improper contradiction. For our modern culture is not alive, simply because it does let itself be understood

without that contradiction; that is, it is really no true culture, but only a way of knowing about culture. There

remain in it thoughts of culture, feelings of culture, but no cultural imperatives come from it. In contrast to

this, what really motivates and moves outward into action then often amounts to not much more than a trivial

convention, a pathetic imitation, or even a raw grimace. At that point the inner feeling is probably asleep, like

the snake which has swallowed an entire rabbit and then lies down contentedly still in the sunlight and avoids

The inner process, that is now the entire business, that essentially is "Culture." And everyone who wanders

by has only one wish, that such a culture does not collapse from indigestion. Think, for example, of a Greek

going past such a culture. He would perceive that for more recent people "educated" and "historically

educated" appear to be mentioned very closely together, as if they are one and the same and are distinguished

only by the number of words. If he talked of his own principle that it is possible for an individual to be very

educated and nevertheless not to be historically educated at all, then people would think they had not heard

him correctly and shake their heads. That famous people of a not too distant past, I mean those very Greeks,

had in the period of their greatest power an unhistorical sense tried and tested in rough times. A contemporary

man magically taken back into that world would presumably find the Greeks very uneducated. In that

reaction, of course, the secret of modern education, so painstakingly disguised, would be exposed to public

laughter. For we modern people have nothing at all which comes from us. Only because we fill and overfill

ourselves with foreign ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions, and discoveries do we become something

worthy of consideration, that is, like wandering encyclopaedias, as some ancient Greek lost our time would

However, people come across all the value of encyclopaedias only in what is inside, in the contents, not in

what is on the outside or in the binding and on the cover. Thus, all modern education is essentially inner. The

bookbinder has printed on the outside something to this effect: Handbook of inner education for external

barbarians. In fact, this contrast between inner and outer makes the outer even more barbaric than it would

have to be, if a rough people were evolving out of it only according to their basic needs. For what means does

nature still have at its disposal to deal with the superabundance forcing itself outward? Only one means, to

take it as lightly as possible in order to shove it aside again quickly and dispose of it. From that arises a habit

of not taking real things seriously any more. From that arises the "weak personality," as a result of which

reality and existence make only an insignificant impression. Finally people become constantly more venial

and more comfortable and widen the disturbing gulf between content and form until they are insensitive to

the barbarism, so long as the memory is always newly stimulated, so long as constantly new things worthy of

The culture of a people, in contrast to that barbarism, was once described (and correctly so, in my view) as a

unity of the artistic style in all expressions of the life of the people. This description must not be

misunderstood, as if the issue were an opposition between barbarism and a beautiful style. The people to

whom we ascribe a culture should be only in a really vital unity and not so miserably split apart into inner

and outer, into content and form. Anyone who wants to strive after and foster the culture of a people strives

after and fosters this higher unity and, for the sake of a true education, works to destroy the modern notion of

being educated. He dares to consider how the health of a people which has been disturbed by history could be

restored, how the people could find their instinct once again and with that their integrity.

Now I want to speak directly about us Germans of the present day. It is our lot to suffer more than any other

people from this weakness of the personality and from the contradiction between content and form. Form is

commonly accepted by us Germans as a convention, as a disguise and a pretence, and is thus, when not hated,

then at any rate not particularly loved. It would be even more just to say that we have an extraordinary

anxiety with the word convention and also with the fact of convention. In this anxiety, the German abandoned

the French school, for he wanted to become more natural and thereby more German. Now, however, he

appears to have included in this "thereby" a running away from the school of convention. Now he lets himself

go how and where he has the mere desire to go, and basically imitates nervously whatever he wants in

semiforgetfulness of what in earlier times he imitated painstakingly and often happily.

Thus, measured against earlier times, people still live according to a slipshod, incorrect French convention, as

all our moving, standing, conversing, clothing, and dwelling demonstrate. While people believe they are

escaping back to the natural, they only think about letting themselves go, about comfort, and about the

smallest possible amount of selfcontrol. Wander through a German city: everything is conventional,

compared to the particular national characteristics of foreign cities. This shows itself in negatives: all is

colourless, worn out, badly copied, apathetic. Each man goes about as he wishes, but not with a forceful

desire rich in ideas, but following the laws which the general haste, along with the general desire for comfort,

establishes for the time being. A piece of clothing, whose invention required no brain power, whose

manufacture took no time, one derived from foreigners and imitated as casually as possible, instantly counts

among the Germans as a contribution to German national dress. The sense of form is disavowed with

complete irony, for people have indeed the sense of the content. After all, they are the renowned people of the

However, there is a well known danger with this inwardness: the content itself, which people assume they

cannot see at all from the outside, may one day happen to disappear. From the outside people would not

notice either its absence or its earlier presence. But even if people think that, in any case, the German people

are as far as possible from this danger; the foreigner will always have a certain justification when he levels

the accusation at us that our inner life is too weak and unorganized to be effective on the outside and to give

itself a shape. This inward life can to a rare degree prove delicately sensitive, serious, strong, and sincere, and

perhaps even richer than the inward lives of other peoples. But as a totality it remains weak, because all the

beautiful threads are not tied together into a powerful knot. Thus, the visible act is not the total action and

selfrevelation of this inner life, but only a weak or crude attempt of a few strands or other to will something

whose appearance might pass muster as the totality. Thus, one cannot judge the German according to a single

action. As an individual he is still completely hidden after the action. As is well known, he must be measured

by his thoughts and feelings, and they speak out nowadays in his books. If only these books did not awaken,

in recent times more than ever, a doubt about whether the famous inner life is really still sitting in its

inaccessible little temple. It would be a horrible idea that one day it may have disappeared and now the only

thing left behind is the externality, that arrogant, clumsy, and respectfully unkempt German externality.

Almost as terrible as if that inner life, without people being able to see it, sat inside, counterfeit, coloured,

painted over, and had become an actress, if not something worse, as, for example, Grillparzer, who stood on

the sidelines as a quiet observer, appears to assume about his experience as a dramatist in the theatre: "We

feel with abstractions," he says, "we hardly know any more how feeling expresses itself among our

contemporaries. We let our feelings jump about in ways they do not affect us any more. Shakespeare has

This is a single example, perhaps too quickly generalized. But how fearful would his justified generalization

be if the individual cases should force themselves upon the observer far too frequently, how despairingly the

statement would echo: We Germans feel abstractedly; we have all been corrupted by history. This statement

would destroy at the root every hope for a future national culture. For that kind of hope grows out of the faith

in the authenticity and the immediacy of German feeling, from the belief in the undamaged inner life. What is

there still to be hoped for or to be believed, if the inner life has learned to leap about, to dance, to put on make

up, and to express itself outwardly with abstraction and calculation and gradually to lose itself! And how is

the great productive spirit to maintain himself among a people no longer sure of its unified inner life, which

falls apart into sections, with a miseducated and seduced inner life among the cultured, and an inadequate

inner life among the uneducated? How is he to keep going if the unity of the people's feeling gets lost, if, in

addition, he knows that the very part which calls itself the educated portion of the people and which arrogates

to itself the national artistic spirit is false and biased. Here and there the judgement and taste of individuals

may themselves have become finer and more sublimated, but that is no compensation for him. It pains the

productive spirit to have to speak, as it were, to one class and no longer to be necessary within his own

people. Perhaps he would sooner bury his treasure, since it disgusts him to be exquisitely patronized by one

class, while his heart is full of pity for all. The instinct of the people no longer comes to meet him. It is

useless to stretch out one's arms toward it in yearning. What still remains for him, other than to turn his

enthusiastic hate against that restricting prohibition, against the barriers erected in the socalled education of

his people, in order at least, as a judge, to condemn what for him, the living and the producer of life, is

destruction and degradation? Thus, he exchanges the deep understanding of his own fate for the divine

pleasure of the creator and helper and finishes up a lonely philosopher, a supersaturated wise man.

It is the most painful spectacle. Generally whoever sees it will recognize a holy need here. He tells himself:

here it is necessary to give assistance; that higher unity in the nature and soul of a people must be established

once more; that gulf between the inner and the outer must disappear again under the hammer blows of need.

What means should he now reach for? What remains for him now other than his deep understanding? By

speaking out on this and spreading awareness of it, by sowing from his full hands, he hopes to plant a need.

And out of the strong need will one day arise the strong deed. And so that I leave no doubt where I derive the

example of that need, that necessity, that knowledge, here my testimony should stand, that it is German unity

in that highest sense which we are striving for and more passionately for that than for political reunification,

the unity of the German spirit and life after the destruction of the opposition of form and content, of the inner

In five ways the supersaturation of an age in history seems to me hostile and dangerous. Through such an

excess, first, that hitherto mentioned contrast between inner and outer is produced; second, the personality is

weakened; an age is caught up in the fantasy that it possesses the rarest virtue, righteousness, in a higher

degree than any other time; third, the instincts of a people are disrupted, and the individual no less than the

totality is hindered from developing maturely; fourth, through this excess the always dangerous belief in the

old age of humanity takes root, the belief that we are late arrivals and epigones; fifth, an age attains the

dangerous mood of irony about itself and, beyond that, an even more dangerous cynicism. In this, however, it

increasingly ripens towards a cleverly egotistical practice, through which the forces of life are crippled and

And now back to our first statement: modern man suffers from a weakened personality. Just as the Roman in

the time of the Caesars became unRoman with regard to the area of the earth standing at his disposal, as he

lost himself among the foreigners streaming in and degenerated with the cosmopolitan carnival of gods,

customs, and arts, so matters must go with the modern person who continually allows his historical artists to

prepare the celebration of a world market fair. He has become a spectator, enjoying and wandering around,

converted into a condition in which even great wars and huge revolutions are hardly able to change anything

momentarily. The war has not yet ended, and already it is transformed on printed paper a hundred thousand

times over; soon it will be promoted as the newest stimulant for the palate of those greedy for history. It

appears almost impossible that a strong and full tone will be produced by the most powerful plucking of the

strings. As soon as the sound appears again, already in the next moment it dies away, softly evaporating

without force into history. To state the matter in moral terms: you do not manage to hold onto what is noble

any more; your deeds are sudden bangs, not rolling thunder. If the very greatest and most wonderful thing is

accomplished, it must nevertheless move to Hades without any fuss. For art runs away, when you instantly

throw over your actions the roof of the historical marquee. The person there who wants to understand

immediately, to calculate and grasp, where he should in an enduring oscillation hang onto the unknowable as

something sublime, may be called intelligent, but only in the sense in which Schiller speaks of the

understanding of the intelligent person: he does not see some things which even the child sees; he does not

hear some things which the child hears; these "some things" are precisely the most important thing. Because

he does not understand this, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simplistic than

simple mindedness, in spite of the many shrewd wrinkles on his parchmentlike features and the virtuoso

practice of his fingers unravelling all complexities. This amounts to the fact that he has destroyed and lost his

instinct. Now he can no longer let the reins hang loose, trusting the "divine animal," when his understanding

wavers and his road leads through deserts. Thus, individuality becomes timid and unsure and can no longer

believe in itself. It sinks into itself, into the inner life. That means here only into the piled up mass of

scholarly data which does not work towards the outside, instruction which does not become living. If we look

for a moment out to the exterior, then we notice how the expulsion of instinct by history has converted people

almost into nothing but abstraction and shadows. A man no longer gambles his identity on that instinct.

If we seize such masks because we believe the matter is something serious and not merely a marionette play

(for they all paper themselves over with seriousness), then we suddenly have only rags and bright patches in

our hands. Therefore, we should no longer allow ourselves to be deceived and should shout out, "Strip off

your jackets or be what you seem." No longer should each serious person turn into a Don Quixote, for he has

something better to do than to keep getting into fights with such illusory realities. In any case, however, he

must keenly inspect each mask, cry "Halt! Who goes there?" and pull the mask down onto their necks.

Strange! We should have thought that history encouraged human beings above all to be honest, even if only

an honest fool. This has always been its effect. But nowadays it is no longer that! Historical education and the

common uniform of the middle class together both rule. While never before has there been such sonorous talk

of the "free personality," we never once see personalities, to say nothing of free people, but only anxiously

disguised universal people. Individuality has drawn itself back into the inner life: on the outside we no longer

observe any of it. This being the case, we could doubt whether, in general, there could be causes without

effects. Or should a race of eunuchs be necessary as a guard over the great historical harem of the world? For

them, of course, pure objectivity is well and truly established on their faces. However, it does seem almost as

if it was their assignment to stand guardian over history, so that nothing comes out of it other than just

histories without events, to ensure that through it no personalities become "free," that is, true to themselves

and true with respect to others in word and deed. First through this truthfulness will the need, the inner

misery of the modern man, see the light of day, and art and religion will be able to enter as true helpers in

place of that anxiously concealed convention and masquerade, in order to cultivate a common culture

corresponding to real needs, culture which does not, like the present universal education, just teach one to lie

In what an unnatural, artificial, and definitely unworthy position must the truly naked goddess Philosophy,

the most sincere of all sciences, be in a time which suffers from universal education. She remains in such a

world of compulsory external uniformity the learned monologue of a solitary stroller, an individual's

accidental hunting trophy, a hidden parlour secret, or a harmless prattle between academic old men and

children. No one is allowed to venture on fulfilling the law of philosophy on his own. No one lives

philosophically, with that simple manly truth, which acted forcefully on a man in ancient times, wherever he

was, and which thus drove him to behave as Stoic if he had once promised to be true to the Stoa.

All modern philosophy is political and policelike, restricted to the appearance of learning through the ruling

powers, churches, academies, customs, and human cowardice. It sticks around with sighs of "If only" or with

the knowledge "There was once." Philosophy is wrong to be at the heart of historical education, if it wants to

be more than an inner repressed knowledge without effect. If the modern human being were, in general, only

courageous and decisive, if he were in even his hostility not just an inner being, he would banish philosophy.

Thus, he contents himself by modestly covering up her nudity. Yes, people think, write, print, speak, and

learn philosophically; to this extent almost everything is allowed. Only in action, in socalled living, are

things otherwise. There only one thing is always allowed, and everything else is simply impossible. So

historical education wills it. Are they still human beings, we ask ourselves then, or perhaps only thinking,

Of Shakespeare Goethe once said, "No one hated the material costume more than he. He understood really

well the inner costume of human beings, and here all people are alike. People say he presented the Romans

excellently. I do not find that. They are nothing but inveterate Englishmen, but naturally they are human

beings, people from the ground up, and the Roman toga suits them well enough." Now, I ask if it might be

possible to lead out our contemporary men of letters, men of the people, officials, and politicians as Romans.

It will not work, because they are not human beings, but only physical compendia and, as it were, concrete

abstractions. If they should have character and their own style, this is buried so deep that it has no power at

all to struggle out into the daylight. If they should be human beings, then they are that only for the man "who

tests the kidneys." For everyone else they are something other, not human beings, not gods, not animals, but

historically educated pictures, completely and utterly education, picture, form, without demonstrable content,

unfortunately only bad form and, in addition, uniform. And in this sense may my claim may be understood

and considered: History is borne only by strong personalities; the weak personalities it obliterates completely.

It comes down to this: history bewilders feeling and sensing where these are not strong enough to measure

Anyone who does not dare any longer to trust himself but who involuntarily turns to history for his feeling

and seeks advice by asking "What should I feel here?" in his timidity gradually becomes an actor and plays a

role, usually in fact many roles. Therefore, he plays each badly and superficially. Gradually the congruence

between the man and his historical sphere fails. We see no forward young men associating with the Romans,

as if they were their equals. They rummage around and dig away in the remnants of the Greek poets, as if

these bodies were also ready for their postmortem examination and were worthless things, whatever their

own literary bodies might be. If we assume there is a concern with Democritus, then the question always on

my lips is this: Why then just Democritus? Why not Heraclitus? Or Philo? Or Bacon? Or Descartes? and so

on to one's heart's content. And in that case, why then just a philosopher? Why not a poet, an orator? And

why particularly a Greek? Why not an Englishman, a Turk? Is the past then not large enough to find

something, so that you do not make yourself so ridiculous on your own. But, as I have mentioned, it is a race

of eunuchs; for a eunuch one woman is like another, in effect, one woman, the womaninitself, the eternally

unapproachable, and so what drives them is something indifferent, so long as history itself remains splendidly

objective and protected by precisely the sort of people who could never create history themselves. And since

the eternally feminine is never attracted to you, then you pull it down to yourselves and assume, since you are

However, so that people do not think that I am serious in comparing history with the eternally feminine, I will

express myself much more clearly: I consider that history is the opposite of the eternally masculine and that it

must be quite unimportant for those who are through and through "historically educated." But whatever the

case, such people are themselves neither male nor female, not something common to both, but always only

neutral or, to express myself in a more educated way, they are just the eternally objective.

If the personalities are, first of all, as has been described, inflated to an eternal loss of subjectivity or, as

people say, to objectivity, then nothing more can work on them. Let something good and right come about, in

action, poetry, or music. Immediately the person emptied out by his education looks out over the world and

asks about the history of the author. If this author has already created a number of things, immediately the

critic must allow himself to point out the earlier and the presumed future progress of the author's

development; right away he will bring in others for comparative purposes, he will dissect and rip apart the

choice of the author's material and his treatment, and will, in his wisdom, fit the work together again anew,

giving him advice and setting him right about everything. Let the most astonishing thing occur; the crowd of

historical neutrals is always in place ready to assess the author from a great distance. Momentarily the echo

resounds, but always as "Criticism." A short time before, however, the critic did not permit himself to dream

The work never achieves an influence, but only more "Criticism," and the criticism itself, in its turn, has no

influence, but leads only to further criticism. In this business people have agreed to consider a lot of critics as

an influence and a few critics or none as a failure. Basically, however, everything remains as in the past, even

with this "influence." True, people chat for a while about something new, and then about something else new,

and in between do what they always do. The historical education of our critics no longer permits an influence

on our real understanding, namely, an influence on life and action. On the blackest writing they impress

immediately their blotting paper, to the most delightful drawing they apply their thick brush strokes, which

are to be considered corrections. And then everything is over once again. However, their critical pens never

cease flying, for they have lost power over them and are led by them rather than leading them. In this excess

of their critical ejaculations, in the lack of control over themselves, in what the Romans call impotence, the

But let us leave this weakness. Let us rather turn to a much praised strength of the modern person, with the

truly awkward question whether, on account of his well known "Objectivity," he has a right to call himself

strong, that is, just, and just to a higher degree than the people of other times. Is it true that this objectivity

originates from a heightened need and demand for justice? Or does it, as an effect with quite different causes,

merely create the appearance that justice might be its real cause? Does this objectivity perhaps tempt one to a

detrimental and too flattering bias concerning the virtues of modern man? Socrates considered it an illness

close to insanity to imagine oneself in possession of a virtue and not to possess it. Certainly such conceit is

more dangerous than the opposite delusion, suffering from a mistake or vice. For through the latter delusion it

is perhaps still possible to become better. The former conceit, however, makes a person or a time daily worse,

True, no one has a higher claim on our admiration than the man who possesses the drive and the power for

justice. For in such people are united and hidden the highest and rarest virtues, as in a bottomless sea that

receives streams from all sides and absorbs them into itself. The hand of the just man authorized to sit in

judgement no longer trembles when it holds the scales. Unsparingly he puts on weight after weight against

himself. His eye does not become dim if he sees the pan in the scales rise and fall, and his voice rings out

neither hard nor broken when he delivers the verdict. If he were a cold demon of knowledge, then he would

spread out around him the ice cold atmosphere of a terrifyingly superhuman majesty, which we would have

to fear and not to revere. But since he is a human being and yet has tried to rise above venial doubt to a strong

certainty, above a patient leniency to an imperative "You must," above the rare virtue of magnanimity to the

rarest virtue of all justice, since he now is like this demon, but from the very beginning without being

anything other than a poor human being, and above all, since in each moment he has to atone for his

humanity and be tragically consumed by an impossible virtue, all this places him on a lonely height, as the

example of the human race most worthy of reverence. For he wills truth, not as cold knowledge without

consequences, but as the ordering and punishing judge, truth not as a selfish possession of the individual but

as the sacred entitlement to shift all the boundary stones of egotistical possessions, in a word, truth as the Last

Judgement and not at all something like the captured trophy desired by the individual hunter.

Only insofar as the truthful man has the unconditional will to be just is the striving after truth, which is so

thoughtlessly glorified, something great. In the vision of the duller person a large number of different sorts of

drives (like curiosity, the flight from boredom, resentment, vanity, playfulness), which have nothing at all to

do with the truth, blend in with that striving for truth which has its roots in justice. In fact, the world seems to

be full of people who "serve the truth." But the virtue of justice is very seldom present, even more rarely

recognized, and almost always hated to the death; whereas, the crowd of the apparently virtuous are honoured

as they march in with a great public display. Few people serve truthfulness, because only a few have the

purity of will to be just. Moreover, even of these, the fewest have the strength to be able to be just. It is

certainly not enough only to have the will for justice. And the most horrible sufferings have come directly

from the drive for justice without the power of judgement among human beings. For this reason the general

welfare would require nothing more than to scatter the seeds of the power of judgement as widely as possible,

so that the fanatic remained distinguishable from the judge and blind desire to be a judge distinguishable

from the conscious power to be able to judge. But where would one find a means of cultivating the power of

judgement! Thus, when there is talk of truth and justice, people remain in an eternal wavering hesitation

whether a fanatic or a judge is talking. Hence, we should forgive those who welcome benevolently the

"servers of the truth" who possess neither the will nor the power to judge and who set themselves the task of

searching for pure knowledge with no attention to consequences or, more clearly, of searching for a barren

truth. There are many trivial truths; there are problems that never require effort, let alone any selfsacrifice,

in order for one to judge them correctly. In this field of the trivial and the safe, a person indeed succeeds in

becoming a cold demon of knowledge nonetheless. When, especially in favourable times, whole cohorts of

learned people and researchers are turned into such demons, it always remains unfortunately possible that the

time in question suffers from a lack of strong and great righteousness, in short, of the most noble kernel of the

Let us now place before our eyes the historical virtuoso of the present times. Is he the most just man of his

time? It is true that he has cultivated in himself such a tenderness and sensitivity of feeling that for him

nothing human is far distant. The most different times and people ring out at once from his lyre in

harmonious tones. He has become a tuneful passive thing, which through its resounding tone works on other

passive things of the same type, until finally the entire air of an age is full of such delicate reverberations,

twanging away in concord. But, in my view, we hear that original historical major chord only as an overtone,

so to speak: the sturdiness and power of the original can no longer be sensed in the thin shrill sound of the

strings. Whereas the original tone usually aroused actions, needs, and terrors, this lulls us to sleep and makes

us weak hedonists. It is as if we have arranged the Eroica Symphony for two flutes and use it for dreamy

opium smoking. By that we may now measure, among the virtuosi, how things stand with the highest

demands of modern man for a loftier and purer justice, a virtue which never has anything pleasant, knows no

Measured by that, how low magnanimity stands now on the ladder of virtues, magnanimity characteristic of a

few rare historians! But for many more it is a matter only of tolerance, of leaving aside all consideration of

what cannot be once and for all denied, of editing and glossing over in a moderate and benevolent way, of an

intelligent acceptance of the fact that the inexperienced man interprets it as a virtue of justice if the past is

generally explained without hard accents and without the expression of hate. But only the superior power can

judge. Weakness must tolerate, unless it wishes to feign strength and turn justice on the judgement seat into a

There is just one fearful species of historian still remaining: efficient, strong, and honest characters, but with

narrow heads. Here good will to be just is present, together with the strong feeling in the judgements. But all

the pronouncements of the judges are false, roughly for the same reasons that the judgements of the ordinary

How unlikely the frequency of historical talent is! To say nothing at all here about the disguised egoists and

fellow travellers, who adopt a thoroughly objective demeanour for the insidious games they play; and by the

same token to say nothing of the unthinking people who write as historians in the naive belief that their own

age is right in all its popular views and that to write by the standards of the time generally amounts to being

right, a faith in which each and every religion lives and about which, in the case of religion, there is nothing

more to say. Those naive historians call "Objectivity" the process of measuring past opinions and deeds by

the universal public opinion of the moment. Here they find the canon of all truths. Their work is to adapt the

past to contemporary triviality. By contrast, they call "subjective" that way of writing history which does not

And might not an illusion have occurred in the highest interpretation of the word objectivity? With this word,

people understand a condition in the historian in which he looks at an event with such purity in all his

motives and consequences that they have no effect at all on his subject. People mean that aesthetic

phenomenon, that state of being detached from one's personal interests, with which the painter in a stormy

landscape, under lightning and thunder, or on the moving sea looks at his inner picture and, in the process,

forgets his own person. Thus, people also demand from the historian the artistic tranquillity and the full

immersion in the thing. However, it is a myth that the picture which shows things in a person constituted in

this way reflects the empirical essence of things. Or is it the case that, by some inner capacity at these times

things depict themselves and, as it were, draw a good likeness of themselves or photograph themselves on a

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.

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, allencompassing

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

abovementioned irreconcilably dark remainder, is well known and totally trivial. For it is apparent to

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 typesto this process

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 judgement 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 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 na�vet� 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 numskullthose go together very easily under a

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

farreaching 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 tranquillity, 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

When the historical sense reigns unchecked 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 practised truly and with a purity of conviction, is therefore a fearful virtue,

because it always undermines living and brings about its downfall. Its judgement 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

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

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 blas� 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 �crasez [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

socalled 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

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 ofnow, 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

What we can learn from Christianity, how under the effect of a historicising treatment it has become blas�

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 as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger.

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 everythingpeople really call that historical sense

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

No, such an overwhelming, anaesthetizing, and powerful historicising 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 blas� 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 overready. 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

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

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 selfconsciousness, 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 judgement,

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 scepticism, 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 usso runs the sceptical objectionus, 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 grey 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 grey 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

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 thirtyfour 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

judgement? 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

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

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 judgement, has subsided to a sceptical

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 preeminent 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 AlexandrianRoman 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

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

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 selfrealizing idea" and "the dialectic of

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

selfrevelation. 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

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 thirtysix 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 eightytwo 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 ultramodern lives,

in order to share in conversations like the ones Goethe conducted with Eckermann and in this way to remain

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 sympathya 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 racethat 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

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 historicising 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 knowledgeI call that a swollen feeling of elation. By this symbol are the first

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

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

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 historicising 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 selfirony, 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 preeminent 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

If we want a correct matteroffact account of what Hartmann is telling us about the noxious trilegged 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 developmentdisgust. 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 wilful 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

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 bluntedged, 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 middleclass notion of that "German mind," and with "the

distorted seriousness of the owl," as Goethe puts it, was listened to, absorbed, disputed, honoured, publicized,

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 owllike

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 judgement." 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, judgement 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

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 therethese 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

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

selfabsorption, 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 nonmembers 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

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 socalled "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 practised 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

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,

last scene of all That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childhood and mere oblivion, Sans teeth,

Whether the dangers of our life and our culture now come from these desolate, toothless and tasteless old

men, whether they come from those socalled "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

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 manlyeffeminate 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 thisthat 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

Imagining this reign of youth, I cry out "Land, land! Enough and more than enough of the passionate seeking

and the wandering passage on the dark alien seas!" Now finally a coast reveals itself. Whatever it may be, we

must land on it. The worst emergency port is better than returning to staggering in hopeless infinite

scepticism. If now we only hold on to the land, we will later find the good havens and ease the approach for

those who come later. This journey was dangerous and exciting. How far we are now from the calm

contemplation with which we first saw our ship set out to sea. By investigating the dangers of history, we

have found ourselves exposed to all these dangers as strongly as possible. We ourselves bear the traces of that

illness which has come over humanity in recent times as a result of an excess of history. For example, this

very treatise shows its modern character, the character of the weak personality (which I will not conceal from

myself) in the intemperance of its criticism, the immaturity of its humanity, the frequent transitions from

irony to cynicism, from pride to scepticism. Nevertheless I trust in the inspiring power which, rather than my

genius, controls the vessel: I trust in youth, that it has led me correctly when it requires from me now a

protest against the historical education of young modern people and if the protester demands that human

beings above all learn to live and to use history only in the service of the life which he has learned. People

must be young to understand this protest. In fact, among the contemporary greyhaired types of our present

youth, one can hardly be young enough still to feel what is here essentially being protested against.

To help people understand this point I will use an example. In Germany it is not much longer than a hundred

years ago that a natural instinct for what people call poetry arose in a few young people. Do people think that

the previous generations up to that time would never have spoken of that art, inwardly strange and unnatural

to them? We know the opposite is true: they thought about "poetry" with loving passion, wrote and argued

about it with words, words, and more words. The appearance of that revival of words for living was not the

immediate death of those word makers. In a certain sense they are still alive, because if, as Gibbon says, for a

world to go under takes not just time but plenty of time, then in Germany, the "land of gradual change," for a

false idea to be destroyed takes more than time; it takes a great deal of time. Today there are perhaps a

hundred people more than a hundred years ago who know what poetry is; perhaps one hundred years from

now there will be another hundred people more who in the meantime have also learned what culture is and

that the Germans up to this point have had no culture, no matter how much they may talk and boast about it.

For them the very general contentment of the Germans with their "culture" would seem just as incredible and

stupid as the formerly acknowledged classicism of Gottsched or the appraisal of Ramler as a German Pindar

seem to us. They will perhaps judge that this culture has been only a sort of knowledge about culture and, in

addition, a completely false and superficial knowledge. I say false and superficial because people endured the

contradiction of life and knowledge, for they did not see anything characteristic of a truly cultured people:

that the culture can only grow up and blossom forth out of living. By contrast, with the Germans culture is

put up like a paper flower or poured out like a sugar drink. Therefore it must always remain untruthful and

The German education of the young, however, begins directly from this false and barren idea of culture. Its

end goal, imagined in all purity and loftiness, is not at all the freely educated man, but the scholar, the

scientific person, indeed, the scientific person who is useful as early as possible, the person who sets himself

apart from life in order to recognize it clearly. The product of this education, considered in a correct

empirically general way, is the historically and aesthetically educated Philistine, the precocious and freshly

wise chatterer about state, church, and art, the sensorium for thousands of sensations, the inexhaustible

stomach which nevertheless does not know what an honest hunger and thirst are. The fact that an education

with this goal and result is an unnatural education is felt only by the person who has not yet completed it; it is

felt only by the instinct of the young, because they still have the instinct of nature, which is first artificially

and powerfully broken through that education. But the person who wants to break this education in its turn

must assist the young in expressing themselves. He must shine the bright light of ideas to illuminate their

unconscious resistance and turn that into a conscious and loudly uttered consciousness. How is he to reach

Above all through the fact that he destroys a superstition, the faith in the necessity of that method of

education. People think that there would be no other possibility than our contemporary highly tiresome

reality. Just let someone examine the essential literature of the higher schooling and education system in the

last decades exactly on this point. For all the varieties of proposals and for all the intensity of the opposition,

the examiner will to his astonishment realize how uniform the thinking is about the entire purpose of

education, how thoughtlessly people assume that the present result, the "educated person," as the term is now

understood, is a necessary and reasonable fundamental basis for that wider education. That monotonous

orthodoxy would sound something like this: the young person has to begin with a knowledge of culture, not

at first with a knowledge of life, and even less with life and experience themselves. Moreover, this

knowledge about culture as historical knowledge is poured over or stirred into the youth; that is, his head is

filled up with a monstrous number of ideas derived from extremely indirect knowledge of past times and

peoples, not from the immediate contemplation of living. His desire to experience something for himself and

to feel growing in him a coordinated and living system of his own experiencessuch a desire is narcotized

and, as it were, made drunk through the opulent deceptions about matters of fact, as if it were possible in a

few years to sum up in oneself the highest and most remarkable experiences of all times, especially of the

greatest ages. It is precisely this insane procedure which leads our young developing artists into the halls of

culture and galleries instead of into the workshop of a master and, above all, into the extraordinary workshops

of the extraordinary master craftswoman Nature. Yes, as if people were able to predict their ideas and arts,

their actual life's work, as cursory strollers in the history of past times. Yes, as if life itself were not a craft

which must be learned continuously from the basic material and practised without special treatment, if it is

Plato considered it necessary that the first generation of his new society (in the perfect state) would be

brought up with the help of a powerful necessary lie. The children were to learn to believe that they had all

already lived a long time dreaming under the earth, where they had been properly kneaded and formed by

nature's master worker. It was impossible to have any effect against this work of the gods. It is to stand as an

inviolable law of nature that the person who is born a philosopher has gold in his body, the person who is

born as a guard has only silver, and the person who is born as a worker has iron and bronze. Since it is not

possible to mix these metals, Plato explains, then it should not be possible to overthrow or mix up the order

of classes. The faith in the aeterna veritas [eternal truth] of this order is the basis of the new education and

thus of the new state. The modern German similarly believes now in the aeterna veritas of his education, of

his style of culture. Nevertheless, this faith would collapse, as the Platonic state would have collapsed, if in

opposition to the necessary lie there was set up a necessary truth: the German has no culture, because he can

have nothing whatsoever on the basis of his education. He wants the flowers without roots and stalk. So he

wants them in vain. That is the simple truth, unpleasant and gross, a correct necessary truth.

In this necessary truth, however, our first generation must be educated. Certainly they suffer from it with the

greatest difficulty, for they must educate themselves through it, in fact, divided against themselves, to new

habits and a new nature derived out of old and previous nature and habits, so that they might be able to say

with the ancient Spaniards: "Efienda me Dios de my," God, defend me from myself, that is, from the nature

already instilled into me. They must taste that truth drop by drop, as if sampling a bitter and powerful

medicine. Each individual of this generation must overcome himself, to judge for himself what he might

more easily endure as a general judgement concerning an entire age: we are without education, even more,

we are ruined for living, for correct and simple seeing and hearing, for the fortunate grasping of what is

closest at hand and natural, and we have up to this moment not yet even the basis of a culture, because we

ourselves are not convinced that we have a genuine life within us. Fractured and fallen apart, in everything

carved up mechanically into an inner and an outer half, saturated with ideas like dragons' teeth producing

dragon ideas, thus suffering from the sickness of words and without trust in any unique sensation which is not

yet franked with words, as such a nonliving and yet uncannily lively factory of ideas and words, I still

perhaps have the right to say about myself cogito, ergo sum [I am thinking; therefore, I am], but not vivo,

ergo cogito [I am living; therefore, I am thinking]. That empty "Being", not that full and green "Living" is

ensured for me. My original feeling only guarantees me that I am a thinking thing, not that I am a living

essence, that I am not animal, but at most a cogital. First give me life; then I will make a culture out of it for

you!so shouts each individual of this first generation, and all these individuals will recognize each other

No god and no human being: only their own youth unleashes this life, and with it you will liberate life for

yourself. For it only lay hidden in a prison. It has not yet withered away and diedinquire of yourself!

But this unbridled life is sick and must be healed. It is ailing from many ills. Not only does it suffer from the

memory of its fetters; it suffers from what is here our principal concern, from the historical sickness. The

excess of history has seized the plastic force of life. It understands no more to make use of the past as a

powerful nourishment. The evil is fearsome, and nevertheless if youth did not have the clairvoyant gift of

nature, then no one would know that that is an evil and that a paradise of health has been lost. This same

youth surmises, however, also with the powerful healing instinct of this same nature, how this paradise can be

won back. It knows the juices for wounds and the medicines to combat the historical sickness, to combat the

Now, people should not be surprised: they are the names of poisons: the antidotes against the historical are

called the unhistorical and the superhistorical. With these names we turn back to the start of our

With the phrase "the unhistorical" I designate the art and the power of being able to forget and to enclose

oneself in a horizon with borders; "superhistorical" I call the powers which divert the gaze from what is

developing back to what gives existence an eternal and unchanging character, to art and religion. Science (for

it is science which would talk about poisons) sees in that force, in these powers opposing forces, for it

maintains that only the observation of things is true and right, the scientific way of considering things, which

everywhere sees what has come into being as something historical and never as something eternally living.

Science lives in an inner contradiction against the eternalizing powers of art and religion just as much as it

hates forgetfulness, the death of knowledge, when it seeks to remove all limitations of horizons and to hurl

human beings into an infinite sea without frontiers, a sea of light waves of acknowledged becoming.

If he only could live there! As the cities collapse in an earthquake and become desolate and the human being,

trembling and in haste, erects his house on volcanic ground, so life breaks apart and becomes weak and

dispirited when the earthquake of ideas which science arouses takes from a person the basis of all his

certainty and rest, his faith in the eternally permanent. Is life to rule over knowledge now, over science, or is

knowledge to rule over life? Which of the two forces is the higher and the decisive one? No one will have any

doubt: life is the higher, the ruling power, for knowledge which destroyed life would in the process have

destroyed itself. Knowledge presupposes life and has the same interest in preserving life which every being

has in its own continuing existence. So science needs a higher supervision and control. A doctrine of a

healthy life is positioned close beside science, and a principle of this doctrine of health would sound like this:

the unhistorical and the superhistorical are the natural countermeasures against the excess cancerous

growth of history on life, against the historical sickness. It is probable that we, the historically ill, also have to

suffer from the counter measures. But the fact that we suffer from them is no proof against the correctness of

And here I recognize the mission of that youth, that first generation of fighters and dragon slayers, which

brings forth a more fortunate and more beautiful culture and humanity, without having more of this future

happiness and future beauty than a promisefilled premonition. These youth will suffer from the evil and the

countermeasures simultaneously, and nevertheless they believe they may boast of a more powerful health

and in general a more natural nature than their previous generations, the educated "Men" and "Old Men" of

the present. However, their mission is to shake the ideas which this present holds about "health" and "culture"

and to develop contempt and hatred against such hybrid monstrous ideas. The most strongly guaranteed mark

of their own stronger health is to be precisely the fact that they, I mean these youth, themselves can use no

idea, no party slogan from the presently circulating currency of words and ideas, as a designation of their

being, but are convinced only by a power acting in it, a power which fights, eliminates, and cuts into pieces,

and by an always heightened sense of life in every good hour. People may dispute the fact that these youth

already have culture, but for what young person would this be a reproach? People may speak against their

crudeness and immoderation, but they are not yet old and wise enough to be content; above all they do not

need to feign any readymade culture to defend and enjoy all the comforts and rights of youth, especially the

Of these hopeful people I know that they understand all these generalities at close hand and in their own most

personal experience will translate them into a personally thoughtout teaching for themselves. The others

may for the time being perceive nothing but covered over bowls, which could also really be empty, until,

surprised one day, they see with their own eyes that the bowls are full and that attacks, demands, living

impulses, passions lay mixed in and impressed into these generalities, which could not lie hidden in this way

for a long time. I refer these doubters to time, which brings all things to light, and, in conclusion, I turn my

attention to that society of those who hope, in order to explain to them in an allegory the progress and

outcome of their healing, their salvation from the historical sickness, and thus their own history, up to the

point where they will be again healthy enough to undertake a new history and to make use of the past under

the mastery of life in a threefold sense, that is, monumental, or antiquarian, or critical. At that point of time

they will be less knowledgeable than the "educated" of the present, for they will have forgotten a good deal

and even have lost the pleasure of looking for what those educated ones above all wish to know, in general

still in order to look back. Their distinguishing marks, from the point of view of those educated ones, are

precisely their "lack of education," their indifference and reserve with respect to many famous men, even

with respect to many good things. But they have become, at this final point of their healing, once again men

and have ceased to be humanlike aggregatesthat is something! There are still hopes! Are you not

And, you will ask, How do we come to that end point? The Delphic god shouts out to you, at the very start of

your trek to that goal, his aphorism: "Know thyself." It is a difficult saying; for that god "hides nothing and

announces nothing, but only points the way," as Heraclitus has said. But what direction is he indicating to

There were centuries when the Greeks found themselves in a danger similar to the one in which we find

ourselves, that is, the danger of destruction from being swamped by what is foreign and past, from "history."

The Greeks never lived in proud isolation; their "culture" was for a long time much more a chaos of foreign,

Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian forms and ideas, and their religion a real divine struggle of the

entire Orient, something similar to the way "German culture" and religion are now a selfstruggling chaos of

all foreign lands and all prehistory. Nevertheless Hellenic culture did not become an aggregate, thanks to that

Apollonian saying. The Greeks learned gradually to organize the chaos because, in accordance with the

Delphic teaching, they directed their thoughts back to themselves, that is, to their real needs, and let the

apparent needs die off. So they seized possession of themselves again. They did not remain long the

overendowed heirs and epigones of the entire Orient. After an arduous battle with themselves, through the

practical interpretation of that saying, they became the most fortunate enrichers and increasers of the treasure

they had inherited and the firstlings and models for all future national cultures.

This is a parable for every individual among us. He must organize the chaos in himself by recalling in himself

his own real needs. His honesty, his better and more genuine character must now and then struggle against

what will be constantly repeated, relearned, and imitated. He begins then to grasp that culture can still be

something other than a decoration of life, that is, basically always only pretence and disguise; for all

ornamentation covers over what is decorated. So the Greek idea of culture reveals itself to him, in opposition

to the Roman, the idea of culture as a new and improved nature, without inner and outer, without pretence

and convention, culture as a unanimity of living, thinking, appearing, and willing. Thus, he learns out of his

own experience that it was the higher power of moral nature through which the Greeks attained their victory

over all other cultures and that each increase of truthfulness must also be a demand in preparation for true

culture. This truthfulness may also occasionally seriously harm the idea of culture esteemed at the time; it