THE MEANING OF WAGNER

(This is my third and last entry on Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: #4: Richard Wagner In Bayreuth.)

Turning this into a separate entry, I still have a lingering doubt whether I was right to separate it from the previous one: after all, Nietzsche’s uniquely original interpretation of Wagner’s Ring continues here!... But then, indeed, Nietzsche’s enormously powerful conclusion to the above, does stand apart from the rest, and thus deserves a separate entry.---

"And now ask yourselves, ye generation of today,--- Was all this composed for you? Have ye the courage to point up to the stars of the whole of this heavenly dome of beauty and goodness and to say: “this is our life, that Wagner has transferred to a place beneath the stars”?

Where are the men among you who are able to interpret the divine image of Wotan in the light of their own lives, and who can become ever greater while, like him, ye retreat? Who among you would renounce power knowing and having learned that power is evil? Where are they who, like Brunhilde, abandon knowledge to love, and finally rob their lives of the highest wisdom, “afflicted love, deepest sorrow, opened my eyes”? Where are the free and fearless, developing and blossoming in innocent egoism? Where are the Siegfrieds, among you?

He who questions thus and does so in vain, will find himself compelled to look around him for signs of the future; and should his eye, on reaching an unknown distance, espy just that “people” which his own generation can read out of the signs contained in Wagnerian art, he will, then, also understand what Wagner shall mean to this people—something that he cannot be to all of us, namely, not the prophet of the future, as perhaps he would fain appear to us, but the interpreter and clarifier of the past."

I guess, the question to myself ought to be whether I can in any way identify with Wotan. The honest answer is: no, I don’t think so. But the very next question is whether I can understand Wagner at all, and I think I can, which is surely the solid ground for my coming-soon extended comment. Until then this entry may be considered of no value, except for drawing the reader’s attention to Nietzsche’s little-known, but very valuable text. In this latter sense it surely serves its edificational purpose.

THE RING ACCORDING TO NIETZSCHE

This is my second entry on Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: #4: Richard Wagner In Bayreuth.

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As an admirer of Wagner’s Ring (not just as a set of four operas, but as a monumental music drama), I find the following superlatively fascinating and enlightening. This is none other than Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Ring in Chapter XI of Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: Richard Wagner In Bayreuth. My commentary on this passage will follow at the next opportunity, but meantime let Nietzsche take the floor all by himself. The greatest and most delightful surprise, which is of course expected from Nietzsche, is that his main hero in the Cycle is Wotan, which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense, as soon as we are prepared to treat the Ring as a four-part whole, rather than as a collection of separate pieces.---

In the Ring of the Nibelung the tragic hero is a god whose heart yearns for power, and who, since he travels along all roads in search of it, finally binds himself to too many undertakings, loses his freedom, and is ultimately cursed by the curse inseparable from power. He becomes aware of his loss of freedom owing to the fact that he no longer has the means to take possession of the golden Ring—that symbol of all earthly power, and also of the greatest dangers to himself as long as it lies in the hands of his enemies. The fear of the end and the twilight of all gods overcomes him, as also the despair at being able only to await the end without opposing it. He is in need of the free and fearless man who, without his advice or assistance—even in a struggle against gods—can accomplish single-handed what is denied to the powers of a god. He fails to see him, and just as a new hope finds shape within him, he must obey the conditions to which he is bound: with his own hand he must murder the thing he most loves, and purest pity must be punished by his sorrow. Then he begins to loathe power, which bears evil and bondage in its lap; his will is broken, and he himself begins to hanker for the end that threatens him from afar off. At this juncture something happens which had long been the subject of his most ardent desire: the free and fearless man appears, he rises in opposition to everything accepted and established, his parents atone for having been united by a tie which was antagonistic to the order of nature and usage; they perish, but Siegfried survives. And at the sight of his magnificent development and bloom, the loathing leaves Wotan’s soul, and he follows the hero’s history with the eye of fatherly love and anxiety. How he forges his sword, kills the dragon, gets possession of the ring, escapes the craftiest ruse, and awakens Brunhilde; how the curse abiding in the ring gradually overtakes him; how, faithful in faithfulness, he wounds the thing he most loves, out of love; becomes enveloped in the shadow and cloud of guilt, and, rising out of it more brilliantly than the sun, ultimately goes down, firing the whole heavens with his burning glow and purging the world of the curse,—all this is seen by the god whose sovereign spear was broken in the contest with the freest man, and who lost his power through him, rejoicing greatly over his own defeat: full of sympathy for the triumph and pain of his victor, his eye burning with aching joy looks back upon the last events; he has become free through love, free from himself.

Now, once again. If you were to pick for yourself the main hero of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, who would it be? Putting this question in such a way, we come to the obvious conclusion that at least in this choice Nietzsche is perfectly correct… No wonder Wagner himself admittedly liked Nietzsche’s exposition.

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH

The title of my entry quotes the title of Nietzsche’s fourth installment in the Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen series, first published in 1876.

Richard Wagner was Nietzsche’s hero, until eventually he fell short of Nietzsche’s expectations and came crashing down from his lofty pedestal. This is not to suggest that it was Wagner’s fault at all, nor that Nietzsche was wrong in his later opinion. It is probably impossible for a mortal human being (Wagner, in this case) to sustain the high level of adoration, such as he had in Nietzsche’s eyes, at least for a while. Well, at least at the time of Richard Wagner In Bayreuth Nietzsche idealized and nearly idolized Wagner as not just a “reformer of the theater,” but as a cultural revolutionary, a man of the future. To be fair to Nietzsche, his idealization of Wagner did contain strong elements of personal “objectivity,” and was not entirely flattering to the man, as such strong words as “idolization” may otherwise suggest.

Nietzsche’s Wagner is a huge cultural phenomenon, and as such he cannot be limited to the confines of one entry. There are at least three separate thoughts in connection with Richard Wagner In Bayreuth alone, and I am allotting this fairly short work three consecutive entries, rather than cramming them all into one. The reasons for Nietzsche’s disappointment in Wagner will be discussed in my future entries, according to their chronology, as it does not make sense to group all my Wagner entries in one place, in the first place.

This Wagner entry quotes a large excerpt from Chapter IV of Richard Wagner In Bayreuth. It discusses the place of Wagner in the development of Western culture. Fascinating stuff!---

“The history of the development of culture since the time of the Greeks is short enough, when we take into consideration the actual ground it covers, and ignore the periods during which man stood still, went backwards, hesitated or strayed. The Hellenizing of the world—and to make this possible, the Orientalizing of Hellenism—that double mission of Alexander the Great, still remains the most important event: the old question whether a foreign civilization may be transplanted is still the problem that the peoples of modern times are vainly endeavoring to solve. The rhythmic play of those two factors against each other is the force that has determined the course of history heretofore. Thus Christianity appears, for instance, as a product of Oriental antiquity, which was thought out and pursued to its ultimate conclusions by men, with almost intemperate thoroughness. As its influence began to decay, the power of Hellenic culture was revived, and we are now experiencing phenomena so strange that they would be hanging in the air as unsolved problems, if it were not possible, by spanning an enormous gulf of time, to show their relation to analogous phenomena in Hellenistic culture. Thus, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, Aeschylus and Wagner, there is so much relationship, so many things in common, that one is vividly impressed with the very relative nature of all notions of time. It would even seem as if a whole diversity of things were really all of a piece, and that time is only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyes to perceive the oneness of them. In the history of the exact sciences we are perhaps most impressed by the close bond uniting us with the days of Alexander and ancient Greece. The pendulum of history seems merely to have swung back to that point from which it started when it plunged forth into unknown and mysterious distance. The picture represented by our own times is by no means a new one: to the student of history it must always seem as though he were merely in the presence of an old familiar face, the features of which he recognizes. In our time the spirit of Greek culture is scattered broadcast. While forces of all kinds are pressing one upon the other, and the fruits of modern art and science are offering themselves as a means of exchange, the pale outline of Hellenism is beginning to dawn faintly in the distance. The earth which, up to the present, has been more than adequately Orientalized, begins to yearn once more for Hellenism. He who wishes to help her in this respect will certainly need to be gifted for speedy action and to have wings on his heels, in order to synthetize the multitudinous and still undiscovered facts of science and the many conflicting divisions of talent so as to reconnoiter and rule the whole enormous field. It is now necessary that a generation of anti-Alexanders should arise, endowed with the supreme strength necessary for gathering up, binding together, and joining the individual threads of the fabric, so as to prevent their being scattered to the four winds. The object is not to cut the Gordian knot of Greek culture after the manner adopted by Alexander, and then to leave its frayed ends fluttering in all directions; it is rather to bind it after it has been loosed. That is our task today. In the person of Wagner I recognize one of these anti-Alexanders: he rivets and locks together all that is isolated, weak, or in any way defective; if I may be allowed to use a medical expression, he has an astringent power. And in this respect he is one of the greatest civilizing forces of his age. He dominates art, religion, and folklore, what would then have been done towards the accomplishment of that higher and more distant mission? Yet he is the reverse of a polyhistor, or of a mere collecting and classifying spirit; for he constructs with the collected material, and breathes life into it, and is a Simplifier of the Universe. We must not be led away from this idea by comparing the general mission which his genius imposed upon him with the much narrower and more immediate one (namely, effecting a reform in the theatre world) which we are at present in the habit of associating with the name of Wagner."

See my next entry The Ring According To Nietzsche, which quotes another subject of great interest, in the presently discussed Nietzschean work: his interpretation of Wagner’s Ring.

SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR

In his third installment of Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: Schopenhauer als Erzieher (1874), Nietzsche continues his pet theme of the philistinization of German [read: Western!] culture, with ugly hypocritical pretenses and artificial social conventionalities concealing and destroying the absolute uniqueness of a once-given human individuality. Germany needs a good teacher to help her “find herself,” and she has found one in Schopenhauer. [There is nothing wrong with Schopenhauer, of course, and with Nietzsche, for that matter, but have they stopped the process of philistinization of Western culture? What would Nietzsche say today? Which teachers would he recommend?..]

Nietzsche commends Schopenhauer for his intellectual honesty: the sine qua non in a good teacher. But he has also found something else, something highly unexpected in this alleged epitome of philosophical pessimism. Here is an extended key passage from Nietzsche’s essay:

Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in common with Montaigne, besides honesty--- a joy that really makes others joyful. “Aliis laetus, sibi sapiens.” There are two very different kinds of joyfulness. The true thinker always communicates joy and life, whether he is showing his serious or comic side, his human insight or his godlike forbearance: without surly looks, or trembling hands, or watery eyes; but simply and truly, with fearlessness and strength, a little cavalierly perhaps, and sternly, but always as a conqueror: and it is this that brings the deepest and intensest joy to see the conquering god with all the monsters that he has fought. But the joyfulness one finds here and there in the mediocre writers and limited thinkers makes some of us miserable; I felt this, for example, with the “joyfulness” of David Strauss. We are generally ashamed of such a quality in our contemporaries, because they show the nakedness of our time, and of the men in it, to posterity. Such fils de joie do not see the sufferings and the monsters, that they pretend, as philosophers, to see and fight; and so their joy deceives us, and we hate it; it tempts us to the false belief that they have gained some victory. At bottom there is only joy where there is victory: and this applies to true philosophy as much as to any work of art. The contents may be forbidding and serious as the problem of existence always is; the work will only prove tiresome and oppressive, if the slipshod thinker and the dilettante have spread the mist of their insufficiency over it: while nothing happier or better can come to man's lot than to be near one of those conquering spirits whose profound thought has made them love what is most vital, and whose wisdom has found its goal in beauty. They really speak: they are no stammerers, or babblers. They live and move, and have no part in the danse macabre of the rest of humanity. And so in their company one feels a natural man again, and could cry out with Goethe—“What a wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature! How fitted to his surroundings, how true, and real!”

I have been describing nothing but the first, almost physiological, impression made upon me by Schopenhauer, the magical emanation of inner force from one plant of Nature to another, that follows the slightest contact. Analyzing it, I find that this influence of Schopenhauer has three elements--- his honesty, his joy, and his consistency. He is honest, as speaking and writing for himself alone; joyful, because his thought has conquered the greatest difficulties; consistent because he can’t help being so. His strength rises like a flame in the calm air, straight up, without a tremor or deviation. He finds his way, without our noticing that he has been seeking it: so surely, and cleverly, and inevitably does he run his course: as if by some law of gravitation. If anyone have felt what it means to find --- in our present world of Centaurs and Chimaeras --- a single-hearted and unaffected child of nature, who moves unconstrained on his own road, he will understand my joy and surprise in discovering Schopenhauer: I knew in him the educator and philosopher whom I had so long desired. Only, however, in his writings: which was a great loss. All the more did I exert myself to see behind the book the living man whose testament it was, and who promised his inheritance to such as could, and would, be more than his readers—his pupils and his sons.

This Nietzschean assessment of the intellectual legacy of Arthur Schopenhauer is a brilliant vindication of the latter’s place in history. Petty commercial philosophers of modern times notwithstanding, Schopenhauer’s place is not in the second rank, but in the foremost first rank of the greatest philosophers of history. My great pleasure is thus to share my own personal opinion with Nietzsche.

Now, if there is anyone who might remember the title of this entry, and thus the title of Nietzsche’s essay, and raise this objection: “Wait a minute, Nietzsche is talking about Schopenhauer as an educator, and you seem to be confusing the issue talking about Schopenhauer as a philosopher!”--- to him I will say this:

But who else is a philosopher if not an educator of his contemporaries and of the posterity? Unless one is a teacher of humanity, one cannot pretend to be a good philosopher! Being a successful teacher is another story… But then, even the greatest genius of all time cannot win the battle for the soul of humanity.

UNHISTORICAL AND OTHER LIVING. PART II.

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!

UNHISTORICAL AND OTHER LIVING. PART I.

The main thrust of Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, and overwhelmingly so, belongs to his categorization of the historical, the unhistorical, and the superhistorical, which starts at the beginning of his first section and ends, with a few definitions, at the end of the tenth, last section.

The concept of unhistorical societies, where the so-called historical education would be considered absurd and superstitious, raises two important questions: What exactly is “historical” education and what exactly is an “unhistorical society”? Here are some excerpts from Nietzsche’s very important first section, which help us best to understand his meaning:

If, in any sense, it is some happiness or the pursuit of happiness, which binds the living being to life, and urges him to live, then, perhaps, no philosopher is closer to the truth than the cynic: for the happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of the truth of cynicism. With the smallest, as with the greatest happiness, however, there is always one thing, which makes it happiness: to be able to forget, or, to express it in a more learned fashion, the capacity to live unhistorically, while it endures. It is possible to live with almost no memories, even to live happily, as the animal shows; but without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all. Or, to say it simpler yet, there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense, which injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people, or a culture.

Apparently, the historical element lies within our memory of the past, and, with it, our fear of the future. It is well said that the best prescription for good health is bad memory. But the latter may be going too far, as the real life saver is not an absent memory, but a selective memory that perpetuates good things of the past and projects them into our future, while allowing us to forget everything that is painful, traumatic, causing us to fear its inevitable recurrence in the future, which is in many ways worse than the fear of natural death.

Curiously, the destructive effect of compassion, discussed by Nietzsche elsewhere, is equally caused not by a spontaneous emotional response to human misery, but by a memory that fails to be selective.

To determine this degree, one would have to know how great the plastic power of a man, a folk or a culture is. There are persons who will incurably bleed over one single experience, a single pain. On the other hand, there are those who are so little affected by the calamities of life, and even by their own malicious acts, that in the midst of them, or shortly thereafter, they achieve a tolerable degree of well-being and a kind of clear conscience. The stronger the roots of one’s innermost nature are, the more of the past will he appropriate or master. What such a nature cannot master, it knows how to forget; the horizon is closed and it is whole, and nothing can serve as a reminder that beyond this horizon there remain men, passions, doctrines, purposes. Cheerfulness in an individual, as well as in a people, depends on one’s being able to forget at the right time, as well as to remember at the right time; on discerning when there is a need to experience historically, and when, unhistorically.

The unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people, and a culture.

Everyone will have made the following observation: a man’s historical knowledge and perception may be very limited, his horizon restricted, and, despite all injustice and error, he stands firmly in good health and vigor, while right beside him the man of justice and learning crumbles. We have seen that the unhistorical animal is in a certain sense happy. Therefore, the capacity to perceive unhistorically is to a certain degree more important, as it provides the foundation upon which alone something right, healthy, and truly human may grow. As the man of action, in Goethe’s phrase, is always without a conscience, so is he also without knowledge. He forgets a lot, to do one thing, and knows only one right: of that which is to become.

And now comes the superhistorical category:

If someone could discern and breathe again the unhistorical atmosphere, in which every historical event came to be, he might elevate himself to a superhistorical standpoint. One who adopts it can no longer be tempted to continue to live and cooperate in making history, since he understands blindness and injustice in the soul of each agent, as the condition of all activity. He is even cured of taking history seriously, as he has learned, with regard to each person and each experience, to answer his question about how and why people live, whether among Greeks, or Turks, in the first century, or in the nineteenth. Whoever asks his acquaintance whether they would want to relive the last twenty years, will notice readily which of them is prepared for the superhistorical standpoint. They will all answer No, of course, but for different reasons. Some may take comfort in the hope that the next twenty years are better. Let us call them the historical men. Looking into the past urges them toward the future. They believe that ever more light is shed on the meaning of existence in the course of its process, and they look back only to understand the present better and learn to desire the future more vehemently. They do not know how unhistorically they think and act, despite all their history, and how even their concern with historiography does not serve pure knowledge, but life.

But the No of the superhistorical man does not see salvation in the process, the world is complete and achieves its end at every single moment. What could the new years teach that the past were incapable of teaching! The past and present are one and the same, a static structure of unchanged value and eternally the same meaning.

To be continued…

THREE KEY NOTES IN PASSING

 

Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben is a remarkable work, in the sense of how many notes of the highest value it manages to strike in the course of its relatively few pages. Three of them in particular I wish to mention here in passing, as their intense discussion has already taken place elsewhere, that is, in other sections..

The first of them is Nietzsche’s original and exciting subdivision of history into three principal categories: monumental, antiquarian, and critical, which is discussed in my personal-historical entry Antiquarian Of The Monumental, which is the peculiar Nietzsche-based name I am giving to myself as a historian. There is no reason to repeat his or mine argument here (otherwise, it would defy the meaning of “in passing”!), but a short reminder to the reader, in the form of the following paragraph, may be of some use:

“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 Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, 2-4.)

Mind you, of these three types I consider monumental history to be superior, and critical history inferior to the other two for basically the same reasons that Nietzsche offers. Paraphrasing my father for the purpose of translation into English, a smoking gun can be planted, in other words, historical facts oftentimes belong not to what really happened, but to the conscientious angle of the writers of history, which makes such facts largely worthless, and the work of the critical historian largely futile and occasionally misguided. On the other hand, monumental history is based not so much on fact as on myth, having an ethical and pedagogical value, thus demonstrating its unquestionable worth.

My second key note in passing concerns Nietzsche’s bold assertion that only a history maker has the right to write history. (“Only the builder of the future has the right to judge the past.” [!]). For much more on this I will direct the reader to the proper place in my Sources & Comments, but in general terms, this is a logical development of the “monumental history” argument, with everything that it entails.

Now, here is that essential Nietzschean passage for the reader’s reference:

“Only from the standpoint of the highest strength of the present may you interpret the past: only in the highest exertion of your noblest qualities will you discern what is worthy of being known and preserved, what is great in the past. Like by like! Otherwise you will draw the past down to yourselves. Do not believe any historical writing if it does not issue from the heads of the rarest minds; but you will always notice the quality of mind of such writing whenever it is required to assert something general or to repeat something generally known: the genuine historian must have the strength to recast the well-known into something never heard before and to proclaim the general so simply and profoundly that one overlooks its simplicity because of its profundity and its profundity because of its simplicity.

“So, history is written by the experienced and superior man. If you have not had some higher and greater experiences than all others, you will not know how to interpret anything great and high in the past. Only the builder of the future has the right to judge the past.”

My complete agreement with Nietzsche here results from my knowledge of precisely such people that he is writing about, and appreciating their rendering of history far above all armchair historians, even the best of them. Without false modesty, I’d like to consider myself such a historian, in the best Nietzschean sense of this word.

And finally Nietzsche’s immortal one-liner: “Fiat veritas pereat vita.” (From Vom Nutzen #4.) I have made an extensive use of it throughout this book, occasionally even reversing this adage to read “Fiat vita pereat veritas.” I cannot imagine any other aphoristic wisdom which in just four words conveys such a complexity of ideas, emotions, and subtlest nuances. Had he written just these four words in all his life, his philosophical greatness would already have been assured.

And here we are now moving on to other things, having touched three incomparable gems of his casually, in passing, as he has so many more in store for us…