Thoughts Out of Season, Part IINietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Thoughts Out of Season, Part II
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
History -- Study and teaching; Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788-1860
reproduced, and the weight of its authority is invoked from the past
to make it sure. They are connoisseurs of art, primarily because they
wish to kill art; they pretend to be physicians, when their real idea
is to dabble in poisons. They develop their tastes to a point of
perversion, that they may be able to show a reason for continually
rejecting all the nourishing artistic fare that is offered them. For
they do not want greatness, to arise: their method is to say, "See,
the great thing is already here!" In reality they care as little
about the great thing that is already here, as that which is about to
arise: their lives are evidence of that. Monumental history is the
cloak under which their hatred of present power and greatness
masquerades as an extreme admiration of the past: the real meaning of
this way of viewing history is disguised as its opposite; whether
they wish it or no, they are acting as though their motto were, "let
the dead bury the--living."
Each of the three kinds of history will only flourish in one ground
and climate: otherwise it grows to a noxious weed. If the man who
will produce something great, have need of the past, he makes himself
its master by means of monumental history: the man who can rest
content with the traditional and venerable, uses the past as an
"antiquarian historian": and only he whose heart is oppressed by an
instant need, and who will cast the burden off at any price, feels
the want of "critical history," the history that judges and condemns.
There is much harm wrought by wrong and thoughtless planting: the
critic without the need, the antiquary without piety, the knower of
the great deed who cannot be the doer of it, are plants that have
grown to weeds, they are torn from their native soil and therefore
degenerate.
III.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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