Now here is yet another important
excerpt from Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für
das Leben, Section 8:
“So,
one finds, especially in the greater and more highly developed historical men,
a consciousness, often subdued to the point of general skepticism, of how great
is the absurdity and superstition in the belief that the education of a people
must be as predominantly historical as it is now: after all, the strongest
peoples, strong in deeds and works, have lived differently, have raised their
youth differently.”
(I must now make a pause here and
think at length and in-depth on how the concept of the “unhistorical” society
can be applied to modern American society. What are the parallels? Does
American society need a European-style education at all? Apparently,
Nietzsche’s biting criticism of Europe in this passage points to the fact that
the problems of modern American society lie not in a disregard for the
time-honored European traditions, but in something else, such as a slide toward
a utilitarian labor-market approach to man and his individuality, as well as a host
of other sickening influences, denying this society a truly healthy chance to
live unhistorically, while converting it into a degenerating hybrid, burdened
with the disadvantages of both types, yet allowed the strengths of neither.)
The next most interesting point that
catches my immediate attention is Nietzsche finding an inconsistency and
contradiction in the Christian deification of history, whereas it is only too
commonly stated that Satan is not only the ruler of this world, but the ruler
of history as well. (Hence, so much evil in History! This is of course in an
even sharper conflict with the Hegelian view of History as the process of the
self-realization of the Spirit.)
What,
statistics prove that there are laws of history? Laws? Well, so far as there
are laws in history, laws are worth nothing and history is worth nothing. But
just this kind of history is now universally valued, the kind which takes the
great mass drives to be the important and chief point of history and regards
all great men only as the clearest expression, the bubbles that become visible
on the flood. Here the masses are out of themselves to give birth to greatness,
that is, chaos is out of itself to give birth to order. Everything is then
called great which has for a prolonged time moved such masses and which, as one
says, has been “a historical power.” But is that not quite intentionally to
confuse quantity with quality? If the masses have found some thought or other,
say, a religious thought, adequate, tenaciously defend it, and drag it through
centuries: then and only just then the finder and founder of that thought is
said to be great. But why?! The noblest and highest has no effect on the
masses; the historical success of Christianity proves nothing, as regards the
greatness of its founder, since basically it testifies against him. Greatness
is not to depend on success, and Demosthenes had greatness, even though he had
no success. The purest and the most truthful adherents of Christianity have
always questioned and impeded, rather than promoted, its worldly success, its
so-called historical power; they used to take a stand outside the world, and
did not concern themselves with the “process of the Christian idea,” which is
why they have mostly remained unknown and unnamed by history. Expressed in
Christian way, the devil is the regent of the world and the master of success
and progress. He is the real power in all historical power, and so it will
remain, even though it may ring quite painfully in the ears of an age that
deifies success and historical power. (See my special comment on
this passage in the entry Success And Greatness in the Contradiction section.)
And lastly, in section 10 of his
work, Nietzsche decides to provide the following definitions to his freshly
discovered terms: “What are the cures for the
historical malady? Not surprisingly, they bear the names of poisons: the
antidotes to the historical are the unhistorical and the superhistorical. With
these names we return to the beginnings of our essay and to their calm.
By
the word “unhistorical” I denote the art and the strength of being able to
forget and enclose oneself in a limited horizon. ‘Superhistorical’ I call the
powers which guide the eye away from becoming and toward that, which gives
existence an eternal and stable character, toward art and religion. Science
sees in that force, in these powers, hostile powers and forces: for it only
takes the observation of things to be the true and correct one, that is, to be
scientific observation, which sees what has come to be, the historical, and
nowhere being, the eternal; it lives in inner contradiction with the eternizing
powers of art and religion so far as it hates forgetting, the death of
knowledge, so far as it seeks to remove all horizon limitations and throws man
into an endless-unlimited light-wave-sea of known becoming.
Now,
is life to rule over knowledge, over science, or is knowledge to rule over
life? No one will doubt that life is the higher, ruling authority, for any
knowledge which destroys life would also have destroyed itself. Knowledge
presupposes life and so, has the same interest in the preservation of life
which every being has in its continued existence. Therefore science requires a
higher supervision and guarding: a hygiene of life is placed close beside
science, and one proposition of this hygiene would read: “The unhistorical and
the superhistorical are the natural antidotes to the stifling of life by
history, to the historical malady.”
It is
probable that we, the historically sick, will have to suffer from the
antidotes, but that we suffer from them is no proof that the treatment is
incorrect.
Nietzsche ends his masterpiece by
expressing hope in the young generations that would come and correct the wrongs
of the old-timers:
And
here I recognize the mission of that youth, that first generation of fighters,
which precedes a happier and more beautiful culture and humanity. This youth
will suffer from the malady and from the antidote at the same time, and yet
they will boast of stronger health than their educated forebears. They will be
more ignorant, but at the final point in their cure they will have become human
again, that is something!
Youth, my foot! Indeed, they have
learned to live unhistorically, and perhaps, superhistorically, too, but at what
price? Their new culture of the future, of money, drugs, profanity, and
militant immorality is hardly a harbinger of ‘a happier and more beautiful
culture and humanity.’ What differs modern youth from animals however is
that despite living like animals they are not happy, like them having inherited
their vices without their redeeming virtues. Their best moments are dull and
uneventful while their worst will be forever etched in their unforgotten
memory unless washed out of their systems by alcohol and by the water with
which they swallow their handfuls of prescription pills and forbidden
narcotics…
I said it before and I will say
it again, my friend Nietzsche was an incorrigible optimist, and this exuberant
optimism of his was blinding his otherwise superior senses and corrupting his
better judgment!
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