Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 2
Nietzsche · en
INTELLECTUAL AND PHYSICAL TRANSPLANTATION AS REMEDIES.—The different
cultures are so many intellectual climates, every one of which is
peculiarly harmful or beneficial to this or that organism. History as a
whole, as the knowledge of different cultures, is the science of remedies,
but not the science of the healing art itself. We still need a physician
who can make use of these remedies, in order to send every one—temporarily
or permanently—to the climate that just suits him. To live in the present,
within the limits of a single culture, is insufficient as a universal
remedy: too many highly useful kinds of men, who cannot breathe freely in
this atmosphere, would perish. With the aid of history we must give them
air and try to preserve them: even men of lower cultures have their
value.—Add to this cure of intellects that humanity, on considerations of
bodily health, must strive to discover by means of a medical geography
what kinds of degeneration and disease are caused by each region of the
earth, and conversely, what ingredients of health the earth affords: and
then, gradually, nations, families, and individuals must be transplanted
long and permanently enough for them to become masters of their inherited
physical infirmities. The whole world will finally be a series of
sanatoria.
189.
REASON AND THE TREE OF MANKIND.—What you all fear in your senile
short-sightedness, regarding the over-population of the world, gives the
more hopeful a mighty task. Man is some day to become a tree overshadowing
the whole earth, with millions upon millions of buds that shall all grow
to fruits side by side, and the earth itself shall be prepared for the
nourishment of this tree. That the shoot, tiny as yet, may increase in sap
and strength; that the sap may flow in countless channels for the
nutrition of the whole and the parts—from these and similar tasks we must
derive our standard for measuring whether a man of to-day is useful or
worthless. The task is unspeakably great and adventurous: let us all
contribute our share to prevent the tree from rotting before its time! The
historically trained mind will no doubt succeed in calling up the human
activities of all the ages before its eyes, as the community of ants with
its cunningly wrought mounds stands before our eyes. Superficially judged,
mankind as a whole, like ant-kind, might admit of our speaking of
“instinct.” On a closer examination we observe how whole nations, nay
whole centuries, take pains to discover and test new means of benefiting
the great mass of humanity, and thus finally the great common fruit-tree
of the world. Whatever injury the individual nations or periods may suffer
in this testing process, they have each become wise through this injury,
and from them the tide of wisdom slowly pours over the principles of whole
races and whole epochs. Ants too go astray and make blunders. Through the
folly of its remedies, mankind may well go to rack and ruin before the
proper time.