The Essential Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Mann

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486121345
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Libero arbitrio e determinismo in filosofia

A prominent intellectual of the Weimar era, Heinrich Mann was a leading authority on Nietzsche. This volume consists of Mann's selections of highlights from the philosopher's works, along with an introduction that explains their significance to modern readers.
Key excerpts from Nietzsche's books include passages from The Birth of Tragedy, Thoughts Out of Season, The Dawn of the Day, The Joyful Wisdom, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and The Will to Power. For ease of reference, Mann has arranged the text in sections corresponding to Nietzsche's views on science, philosophy, and truth; his critiques of culture — the use and abuse of history, Europeans and Germans, Wagner, the genealogy of morals, and nihilism; his concept of the world without God, including the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music, the true and the apparent world, and eternal recurrence; and his confessions.

II

CRITIQUE OF CULTURE

I

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY

The unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture.

The fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of history hurts it ; this will be proved later. History is necessary to the living man in three ways : in relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance. These three relations answer to the three kinds of history — so far as they can be distinguished — the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical.

History is necessary above all to the man of action and power who fights a great fight and needs examples, teachers and comforters ; he cannot find them among his contemporaries. It was necessary in this sense to Schiller ; for our time is so evil, Goethe says, that the poet meets no nature that will profit him, among living men. To avoid being troubled by the weak and hopeless idlers, and those whose apparent activity is merely neurotic, he looks behind him and stays his course towards the goal in order to breathe. His goal is happiness, not perhaps his own, but often the nation’s, or humanity’s at large : he avoids quietism, and uses history as a weapon against it. For the most part he has no hope of reward except fame, which means the expectation of a niche in the temple of history, where he in his turn may be the consoler and counsellor of posterity. For his orders are that what has once been able to extend the conception “man” and give it a fairer content, must ever exist for the same office. The great moments in the individual battle form a chain, a high road for humanity through the ages, and the highest points of those vanished moments are yet great and living for men ; and this is the fundamental idea of the belief in humanity, that finds a voice in the demand for a “monumental” history.

Secondly, history is necessary to the man of conservative and reverent nature, who looks back to the origins of his existence with love and trust; through it, he gives thanks for life. He is careful to preserve what survives from ancient days, and will reproduce the conditions of his own upbringing for those who come after him ; thus he does life a service. The possession of his ancestors’ furniture changes its meaning in his soul : for his soul is rather possessed by it. All that is small and limited, mouldy and obsolete, gains a worth and inviolability of its own from the conservative and reverent soul of the antiquary migrating into it, and building a secret nest there. The history of his town becomes the history of himself ; he looks on the walls, the turreted gate, the town council, the fair, as an illustrated diary of his youth, and sees himself in it all — his strength, industry, desire, reason, faults and follies. “Here one could live,” he says, “as one can live here now — and will go on living ; for we are tough folk, and will not be uprooted in the night.” And so, with his “we,” he surveys the marvellous individual life of the past and identifies himself with the spirit of the house, the family and the city. He greets the soul of his people from afar as his own, across the dim and troubled centuries : his gifts and his virtues lie in such power of feeling and divination, his scent of a half-vanished trail, his instinctive correctness in reading the scribbled past, and understanding at once its palimpsests — nay, its polypsests. Goethe stood with such thoughts before the monument of Erwin von Steinbach : the storm of his feeling rent the historical cloud-veil that hung between them, and he saw the German work for the first time “coming from the stern, rough, German soul.” This was the road that the Italians of the Renaissance travelled, the spirit that reawakened the ancient Italic genius in their poets to “a wondrous echo of the immemorial lyre,” as Jacob Burckhardt says.

There is always the danger here, that everything ancient will be regarded as equally venerable, and everything without this respect for antiquity, like a new spirit, rejected as an enemy. The Greeks themselves admitted the archaic style of plastic art by the side of the freer and greater style ; and later, did not merely tolerate the pointed nose and the cold mouth, but made them even a canon of taste. If the judgment of a people harden in this way, and history’s service to the past life be to undermine a further and higher life ; if the historical sense no longer preserve life, but mummify it : then the tree dies, unnaturally, from the top downwards, and at last the roots themselves wither. Antiquarian history degenerates from the moment that it no longer gives a soul and inspiration to the fresh life of the present.

Here we see clearly how necessary a third way of looking at the past is to man, beside the other two. This is the “critical” way; which is also in the service of life. Man must have the strength to break up the past ; and apply it too, in order to live. He must bring the past to the bar of judgment, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn it. Every past is worth condemning : this is the rule in mortal affairs, which always contain a large measure of human power and human weakness. It is not justice that sits in judgment here ; nor mercy that proclaims the verdict ; but only life, the dim, driving force that insatiably desires — itself. Its sentence is always unmerciful, always unjust, as it never flows from a pure fountain of knowledge : though it would generally turn out the same, if Justice herself delivered it. “For everything that is born is worthy of being destroyed : better were it then that nothing should be born.” It requires great strength to be able to live and forget how far life and injustice are one.

This is how history can serve life. Every man and nation needs a certain knowledge of the past, whether it be through monumental, antiquarian, or critical history, according to his objects, powers, and necessities. The need is not that of the mere thinkers who only look on at life, or the few who desire knowledge and can only be satisfied with knowledge ; but it has always a reference to the end of life, and is under its absolute rule and direction. This is the natural relation of an age, a culture and a people to history ; hunger is its source, necessity its norm, the inner plastic power assigns its limits. The knowledge of the past is only desired for the service of the future and the present, not to weaken the present or undermine a living future. All this is as simple as truth itself, and quite convincing to anyone who is not in the toils of “historical deduction.”

And now to take a quick glance at our time ! We fly back in astonishment. The clearness, naturalness, and purity of the connection between life and history has vanished ; and in what a maze of exaggeration and contradiction do we now see the problem ! Is the guilt ours who see it, or have life and history really altered their conjunction and an inauspicious star risen between them ? Others may prove we have seen falsely ; I am merely saying what we believe we see. There is such a star, a bright and lordly star, and the conjunction is really altered — by science, and the demand for history to be a science. Life is no more dominant, and knowledge of the past no longer its thrall : boundary marks are overthrown and everything bursts its limits. The perspective of events is blurred, and the blur extends through their whole immeasurable course. No generation has seen such a panoramic comedy as is shown by the “science of universal evolution,” history ; that shows it with the dangerous audacity of its motto — “Fiat veritas, pereat vita.”

An excess of history seems to be an enemy to the life of a time, and dangerous in five ways. Firstly, the contrast of inner and outer is emphasised and personality weakened. Secondly, the time comes to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a higher degree than any other time. Thirdly, the instincts of a nation are thwarted, the maturity of the individual arrested no less than that of the whole. Fourthly, we get the belief in the old age of mankind, the belief, at all times harmful, that we are late survivals, mere Epigoni. Lastly, an age reaches a dangerous condition of irony with regard to itself, and the still more dangerous state of cynicism, when a cunning egoistic theory of action is matured that maims and at last destroys the vital strength.

You can only explain the past by what is highest in the present. Only by straining the noblest qualities you have to their highest power will you find out what is greatest in the past, most worth knowing and preserving. Like by like ! otherwise you will draw the past to your own level. Do not believe any history that does not spring from the mind of a rare spirit. You will know the quality of the spirit, by its being forced to say something universal, or to repeat something that is known already ; the fine historian must have the power of coining the known into a thing never heard before and proclaiming the universal so simply and profoundly that the simple is lost in the profound, and the profound in the simple.

The unrestrained historical sense, pushed to its logical extreme, uproots the future, because it destroys illusions and robs existing things of the only atmosphere in which they can live. Historical justice, even if practised conscientiously, with a pure heart, is therefore a dreadful virtue, because it always undermines and ruins the living thing: its judgment always means annihilation. If there be no constructive impulse behind the historical one, if the clearance of rubbish be not merely to leave the ground free for the hopeful living future to build its house, if justice alone be supreme, the creative instinct is sapped and discouraged. A religion, for example, that has to be turned into a matter of historical knowledge by the power of pure justice, and to be scientifically studied throughout, is destroyed at the end of it all. For the historical audit brings so much to light which is false and absurd, violent and inhuman, that the condition of pious illusion falls to pieces. And a thing can only live through a pious illusion. For man is creative only through love and in the shadow of love’s illusions, only through the unconditional belief in perfection and righteousness. Everything that forces a man to be no longer unconditioned in his love, cuts at the root of his strength : he must wither, and be dishonoured. Art has the opposite effect to history : and only perhaps if history suffer transformation into a pure work of art, can it preserve instincts or arouse them. Such history would be quite against the analytical and inartistic tendencies of our time, and even be considered false. But the history that merely destroys without any impulse to construct, will in the long run make its instruments tired of life ; for such men destroy illusions, and “he who destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the ultimate tyrant, Nature.”

The belief that one is a late-comer in the world is, anyhow, harmful and degrading : but it must appear frightful and devastating when it raises our late-corner to godhead, by a neat turn of the wheel, as the true meaning and object of all past creation, and his conscious misery is set up as the perfection of the world’s history. Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to talk of a “world-process,” and justify their own time as its necessary result. And it has put history in the place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the one sovereign ; inasmuch as it is the “Idea realising itself,” the “Dialectic of the spirit of the nations,” and the “tribunal of the world.”

History understood in this Hegelian way has been contemptuously called God’s sojourn upon earth, — though the God was first created by the history. He, at any rate, became transparent and intelligible inside Hegelian skulls, and has risen through all the dialectically possible steps in his being up to the manifestation of the Self : so that for Hegel the highest and final stage of the world-process came together in his own Berlin existence. He ought to have said that everything after him was merely to be regarded as the musical coda of the great historical rondo, — or rather, as simply superfluous. He has not said it ; and thus he has implanted in a generation leavened throughout by him the worship of the “power of history,” that practically turns every moment into a sheer gaping at success, into an idolatry of the actual : for which we have now discovered the characteristic phrase “to adapt ourselves to circumstances.” But the man who has once learnt to crook the knee and bow the head before the power of history, nods “yes” at last, like a Chinese doll, to every power, whether it be a government or a public opinion or a numerical majority ; and his limbs move correctly as the power pulls the string. If each success have come by a “rational necessity,” and every event show the victory of logic or the “Idea,” then — down on your knees quickly, and let every step in the ladder of success have its reverence ! There are no more living mythologies, you say ? Religions are at their last gasp ? Look at the religion of the power of history, and the priests of the mythology of Ideas, with their scarred knees ! Do not all the virtues follow in the train of the new faith ? And shall we not call it unselfishness, when the historical man lets himself be turned into an “objective” mirror of all that is ? Is it not magnanimity to renounce all power in heaven and earth in order to adore the mere fact of power ? Is it not justice, always to hold the balance of forces in your hands and observe which is the stronger and heavier ? And what a school of politeness is such a contemplation of the past ! To take everything objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything — makes one gentle and pliable. Even if a man brought up in this school will show himself openly offended, one is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the artistic sense of ira et studium, though it is really sine ira et studio.

What old-fashioned thoughts I have on such a combination of virtue and mythology ! But they must out, however one may laugh at them. I would even say that history always teaches — “it was once,” and morality — “it ought not to be, or have been.” So history becomes a compendium of actual immorality. But how wrong would one be to regard history as the judge of this actual immorality ! Morality is offended by the fact that a Raphael had to die at thirty-six ; such a being ought not to die. If you came to the help of history, as the apologists of the actual, you would say : “he had spoken everything that was in him to speak, a longer life would only have enabled him to create a similar beauty, and not a new beauty,” and so on. Thus you become an advocatus diaboli by setting up the success, the fact, as your idol : whereas the fact is always dull, at all times more like a calf than a god.

Excess of history has attacked the plastic power of life, that no more understands how to use the past as a means of strength and nourishment. It is a fearful disease, and yet, if youth had not a natural gift for clear vision, no one would see that it is a disease, and that a paradise of health has been lost. But the same youth, with that same natural instinct of health, has guessed how the paradise can be regained. It knows the magic herbs and simples for the malady of history, and the excess of it. And what are they called ?

It is no marvel that they bear the names of poisons : — the antidotes to history are the “unhistorical” and the “super-historical.” With these names we return to the beginning of our inquiry and draw near to its final close.

By the word “unhistorical” I mean the power, the art of forgetting, and of drawing a limited horizon round one’s self. I call the power “super-historical” which turns the eyes from the process of becoming to that which gives existence an eternal and stable character, to art and religion. Science — for it is science that makes us speak of “poisons”...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• NIETZSCHE
• PRESENTING - NIETZSCHE
• THE WORKS OF - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
• I - SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, TRUTH
• II - CRITIQUE OF CULTURE
• III - THE WORLD WITHOUT GOD
• IV - CONFESSIONS
• ONCE MORE - UNTO ALL ETERNITY