ANTIQUARIAN OF THE MONUMENTAL

As I have pointed out already, history is not a book to me. It is a very personal preoccupation. I would even call it my life. What kind of historian am I, then, and what makes me unique?

Nietzsche, as always, obliges, distinguishing between three kinds of historians, and from among these three I will be making my choice.

“History belongs to the living man in three respects: it belongs to him so far as he is active and striving, so far as he preserves and admires, and so far as he suffers and is in need of liberation. To these correspond three kinds of history: monumental, antiquarian and critical.” (Unzeitgemäßen: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, 2-4.)

Because Nietzsche’s line of thinking on this key subject is so important, I am taking the liberty of quoting it at some length. Here is how he describes the monumental historian:

“History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful man, to him who fights a great fight, who requires models, teachers and comforters and cannot find them among his associates and contemporaries.

“What is the advantage to the present man of the monumental view of the past? It is the knowledge that the great which once existed was possible. As long as the soul of historiography is found in the great incentives a powerful man receives from it, as long as the past is described as worthy of imitation, so long is the past in danger of being distorted and brought closer to fiction. Consequently, whenever the monumental vision of the past rules over the antiquarian and the critical, the past itself suffers damage. Monumental history deceives with analogies: the courageous are enticed to rashness, the enthusiastic to fanaticism, and if this history is in the hands and heads of talented egoists and enraptured rascals, empires are being destroyed, princes murdered, wars and revolutions instigated, and the number of historical effects-in-themselves, that is, effects without sufficient causes, is further increased.”

In other words, our historian risks turning himself into a poet, a creator of fiction, with no big harm done, however, as my next entry Historian And The Poet will demonstrate, with Schopenhauer’s help, I might add.

Now, here comes the second type, the antiquarian:

“With antiquarian history, the past suffers too. To use a metaphor, the tree feels its roots more than it can see them. This feeling measures them by the size of its visible branches. The tree may already be in error here, but how much greater will the error be about the whole forest, which surrounds it! The antiquarian sense has an extremely limited field of vision; by far, the most is not seen at all, and the little that is seen is seen too closely and in isolation; it cannot apply a standard, and therefore, takes everything as equally important, and therefore, each individual thing is too important. Under these circumstances, there are no differences in value, and no proportions, to do justice to those things of the past in relation to each other. Antiquarian history understands how to preserve life, but not how to generate it. It hinders the resolve for new life, paralyzing the man of action who, as such, will and must always injure some piety or another.”

Before I venture forth with my own take on each type of historian, let us have the third type, according to Nietzsche:

“Here it becomes clear how badly man needs a third kind of seeing the past, the critical: and this, again, in the service of life as well. He must have the strength to shatter something, to enable him to live, and this he achieves by dragging the past to the bar of judgment, interrogating it, and finally condemning it. But every past is, indeed, worth condemning, for, that is how matters stand in human affairs: human violence and weakness have always contributed strongly to shaping them. It is not justice, which here sits in judgment, but life alone, that dark, self-desiring power. Its verdict is always unmerciful, always unjust; but, in most cases, the verdict would be the same were justice itself to proclaim it. For, (as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust says) “whatever has a beginning, deserves to have an undoing; it would be better if nothing began at all.”

Having thus revisited Nietzsche’s idiosyncratically poetic description of the three basic types of historian, allow me now to bring these types into my concrete universe with my own specific and occasionally light-hearted annotations: The monumental historian sees the rather clouded big picture, and bravely repaints it, filling in the missing pieces with his personal inspired vision of what might have happened, and possibly had. Look at the picture now: it used to be blurred and fuzzy, but, as a result of his effort, it has become sharp and bright, like a Bilibin watercolor. His work can be easily called mythology. It has large national and world-historical implications, and in this sense it is probably the most valuable type of history, as it blends with literature and folklore, to constitute the very quintessence of national culture.

The antiquarian is much more down to earth, and he does not care that much about the big picture. He goes around with a large magnifying glass, looking through it at the things which he can actually see for himself, and touching them with a trembling hand, having smelled them first with his nose, recognizing that smell as the sweet smell of history.

The critical historian is, perhaps, a useful breed, but, having familiarized myself with his work of late, I can hardly feel any sympathy or appreciation for him and for his ilk. For me, he is but a nitpicking nitwit. While the monumental historian sees history with the eyes of his mind and the antiquarian looks at her through his magnifying lens, the critic does not even look at history: he carries a magnifying glass exclusively to look at the historians around him, or at those who had come before his time. He himself is a historian by proxy, like those philosophers who learn philosophy not from the raw source, but from the recyclers of philosophy, who write not about ideas, but about others, with (or without) ideas.

And now, it is time to return to my original question: What kind of historian am I?

I cannot possibly call myself a critical historian. I do not read modern historians’ tomes, to begin with. My attitude to modern history books is like to a set of cookie-cut houses, suffering from the same architectural fatal flaw. One doesn’t bother to criticize the floor carpeting in condemned buildings waiting to collapse by themselves or to be justifiably demolished. Rather than touching such houses, I am building ones entirely of my own. As if the old ones did not exist.

But with regard to monumental and antiquarian historians, I might say that in one sense, I am neither, but in another sense, I am both of them. Like the former, I can see the big picture, but, like the latter, I am holding a magnifying lens to it.

My uniqueness, however, results from an antiquarian microscopic preoccupation with things closest to me, which, under normal circumstances, happen to be little things, thus enlarged beyond their due proportion, which, then, starts to constitute their main irresistible charm, yet-- because of their inherent littleness-- also their core defect. In my special circumstances, though, the closest things I am examining with my personal magnifying lens are great, monumental things, the gods and titans of the historical universe. I was born in Valhalla. And, therefore, Nietzsche’s description of the antiquarian myopia (the antiquarian sense has an extremely limited field of vision) does not apply to me.

There is nothing in my Valhalla that can be taken in exaggeration of its importance, no limit to the field of vision, where purified greatness and historical infinity happen to be involved. I am truly an antiquarian of the monumental!