Nietzsche untimely meditations ebook

Friedrich Nietzsche ,. Hollingdale Translator ,. Daniel Breazeale Editor. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Unfashionable Observations Paperback. Published December 1st by Stanford University Press. Richard T. Gray Translator. Untimely Meditations German Philosophy.

Published January 27th by Cambridge University Press. Decision making remained something indecisive in many Germans as previously mentioned. With the few that could rise above, like Nietzsche himself, from the collective norm of 'imitated activity', as he called it, his exploring and vivid descriptions of Schopenhauer and Wagner were a splendor and great aid to those in high hopes to discover and master this genius within themselves.

Through this exploration of oneself, one can still become wary to learning the essentials of life, reluctant to accept the immoral realities of existence itself, and possibly even taciturn to the automated publicly opinionated once becoming sentient that they will perceive them as irreparably insane.

But this is the type of suffering and treatment required for one to give new culture to the people, to work on only themselves and then after reaching mastery teach those what man can only comprehend through rigorous solitude. Culture was also noted as something deadly and necessary at the same time for the becoming of life. It shouldn't be adulterated however, that it comes off as sly to those that suffer and are venturing for new and life-affirming objectives.

Nietzsche resumes with that thought to strongly display the adventurous pains Schopenhauer exemplified, as he noted him as 'educator' - one every spirit looking for cultivation can learn from. Schopenhauer developed an unfortunately predominant lifestyle of limitations on forever longing to not become anything like the genius Nietzsche prescribes with illumination. However, it is because Nietzsche understood Schopenhauer's disposition as a pessimist and an irrational radical, he employed himself to teach the few free-spirited and conscientious readers virtually through Schopenhauer's unalterable pattern of forever suffering.

As unfortunate it was for Schopenhauer, he understood his disposition to life and could not improve his introspective perception and that is what Nietzsche stratified. Speaking directly on Schopenhauer, he was very inclined to consume knowledge and make it applicable to his everyday living, but on his venture for this knowing, this way to become, he underestimated truth from the very beginning.

He held one facet of himself that forever willed through his own world of idealism; then there lies his other phase where he dangerously fought for truth but remained outweighed by his moralistic side of seeking a personal utopia.

He became synchronous with the abyss, forever floating in the dark passageways of nothingness but this deemed as beneficial to those aiming to overcome this almost impossible, but possible, surmountable adventure Schopenhauer never strayed from - it is why he deserves at least some merit. Art and music to Nietzsche, as described in this writing, already hold existence elsewhere before becoming envisaged and manifested in one's creation or edifice of work.

The same as art allows many to become ponderous, contemplative and reflective to sometimes other aspects of life is how one feels when dreaming. That precise assertion is more magnetic to those deliberate in mind of Nietzsche's assessment of life itself, as he dangerously spilled in The Birth of Tragedy, his first published book. His old friendship with the German musician Richard Wagner was an unexpected transfiguration.

Nietzsche goes to extreme and necessary levels of thought for the sake of art to explain his growing aversion of the music of Wagner and its moral placements. Wagner, like Schopenhauer, could also be viewed and embodied as an educator. Wagner was a man of education, general to be more candid, which comprised a 'tyrannical' side to him as Nietzsche specifically said. The other was the more artistic, free-going, intrepid and colorful side of Wagner that allowed him to understand his creations more realistically, personally in a naturalistic sense , profoundly and declare himself quietly as the tragic hero that will learn to overcome his former creations.

Nietzsche stated that through experiencing tragedy, hardships, suffering, baleful contortions through experimentation of life, then that is when one can equate themselves with nature and forever mobilize in repose. Wagner, according to Nietzsche, understood where the art of his music was heading as a theatrical performer. And the only way to grasp this greatness that is already within him, he immediately transferred the whole of himself to being solitary.

It was there he found his 'true self', the honest and luminous soul that 'became' out of enforced solitude to deliver to the masses who probably never understood the vital transition in his music a bewildered and enriching style of expression. He was blown into realization once he experienced this necessary tragedy of experimentation with the inner complexities of his inner self and brought it to his outer self, shattering in him something 'tyrannical', overly moral and blemished.

No event possesses greatness in itself, though it involve the disappearance of whole constellations, the destruction of entire peoples, the foundation of vast states or the prosecution of wars involving tremendous forces and tremendous losses: the breath of history has blown away many things of that kind as though they were flakes of snow.

It can also happen that a man of force accomplishes a deed which strikes a reef and sinks from sight having produced no impression; a brief, sharp echo, and all is over. History has virtually nothing to report about such as it were truncated and neutralized events. And so whenever we see an event approaching we are overcome with the fear that those who will experience it will be unworthy of it. Whenever one acts, in small things as in great, one always has in view this correspondence between deed and receptivity; and he who gives must see to it that he find recipients adequate to the meaning of his gift.

This is why even the individual deed of a man great in himself lacks greatness if it is brief and without resonance or effect; for at the moment he performed it he must have been in error as to its necessity at precisely that time; he failed to take correct aim and chance became master over him - whereas to be great and to possess a clear grasp of necessity have always belonged strictly together.

It was fortunate up to that time for him to experience this self-rumination and position as a developing iconoclast that began to beseech the oppressed for necessary and pragmatic reasons, which eventually led to his solidified disposition to universal education, cultural reformation, the paradoxical complexities of art, the logical dissection of Christianity and the contriving will to overcome nihilism.

Dec 26, Gerrit G. Mostly polemics, the one about Schopenhauer is good, the one about history great. Jun 10, hmmm added it. Full disclosure i skimmed the end of the boring wagner one. View 2 comments.

May 22, Paul Adkin rated it it was amazing. There is very much passion here in these four essays on aesthetics, and enough fuel to pull any true but failed artist out of his or her despondency, an inspiration to find the energy and reasons to keep creating. Here also is Nietzsche's greatest contradiction to his most erroneous philosophical conclusion that nature is power, when he asks: "Which of you will renounce power, in the knowledge and experience that power is evil?

Nature loves change and evolution and it struggles constantly to survive and be better This is what the young Nietzsche believed and is expressed in these Untimely Meditations. Oct 09, Ian Stewart rated it liked it. A mixed bag and often hard read. The first two essays were hard to follow and keep up an interest in.

The second two were very engaging. Jun 19, Tom rated it it was ok. I did not bother with the fourth essay as the previous three were quite boring. I thought Nietzsche's 'three species of history' monumental, antiquarian and critical were interesting, and likewise for his discussions on being historical and unhistorical.

Unfortunately, I was not very interested in later sections of the text where he criticises his least favourite aspects of German cult I did not bother with the fourth essay as the previous three were quite boring. Unfortunately, I was not very interested in later sections of the text where he criticises his least favourite aspects of German culture.

I did not enjoy reading the other two essays; their only saving grace is Nietzsche's original metaphors. I have read several of Nietzsche's other texts, and these essays were by far the worst. I am always blown away by Nietzsche's psychological insights and thought.

The ideas of man vs animal living historically really gave me perspective about life It was a pleasure to read and by f "It is a matter for wonder, the moment, that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a spectre to trouble the quiet of a later moment" While I found the essays on Strauss and Wagner to be difficult to get through, it was all made worthwhile by The Use and Abuse of History.

The ideas of man vs animal living historically really gave me perspective about life It was a pleasure to read and by far my favourite of his longer non-aphorism type writings.

Finally through this tome, seven months later. His prose is addicting. My highlighter is dry. However, the points were drawn out to such extremes, sometimes it felt like a stream of consciousness and I was swimming in it… In short, I will certainly never think of Schopenhauer or Wagner the same way again after hearing their praises so highly sung!

Aug 01, Luke Nichol rated it it was amazing Shelves: philosophy. The middle period of Nietzsche's writings, but it is the seed of what becomes of his Zarathustra or 'Superman' concept. Nietzsche discusses the culture of his own time, himself as an educator and reflects on his relationship with Richard Wagner.

Oct 08, Nicholas Robinson rated it really liked it. Worth reading for the essay on history alone and to contrast with his later works. Jan 02, Roslyn rated it really liked it. Some good stuff but his later works are far better. His love letter to Schopenhauer was fantastic. The other essays? Apr 16, John rated it it was amazing Shelves: german , philosophy.

This is the same work that is more commonly translated as "Untimely Meditations"-- the editors here, ever the academic mincers, thought that conveyed too much of a sense of anachronism, whereas what Nietzsche was really getting at is that his observations were out of step with popular sentiments and tastes, contrary to what he saw as the self-satisfied zeitgeist of Bismarckian, post-Franco-Prussian-war Germania.

Something akin to "inconvenient truths" that neither the state nor the increasingly This is the same work that is more commonly translated as "Untimely Meditations"-- the editors here, ever the academic mincers, thought that conveyed too much of a sense of anachronism, whereas what Nietzsche was really getting at is that his observations were out of step with popular sentiments and tastes, contrary to what he saw as the self-satisfied zeitgeist of Bismarckian, post-Franco-Prussian-war Germania.

Something akin to "inconvenient truths" that neither the state nor the increasingly partisan German populus wanted to hear. The Nietzsche we all know and love is still figuring himself out in this early collection of 4 long essays. He's still a long way from his falling out with Wagner and his hagiography of Schopenhauer here is likewise unconditional. From a modern sensibility, the essays on these two luminaries are the least satisfying of the four. Indeed, as much as I find Nietzsche inspirational and recognize his profound impact on the development of modernist arts, I've always found his reflections on the arts among the most dated aspects of his thought.

Not entirely his fault, perhaps-- he is mired in tedious battles with midth century romanticism. Most moving, I think, and most suggestive of the later, fully emerged Nietzsche, are the ruminations on the psychology of our struggle to become fully emerged human beings.

Here, as in Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines an exacting freedom that any modern man needs to take full advantage of his opportunities. And most people will not be capable of it, so Nietzsche scandalously!

This is the root of all true culture, and if what I mean by this is the longing of human beings to be reborn as saints and geniuses, then I know that one does not have to be a Buddhist to be able to understand this myth. Wherever we find talent without this longing, as we do in scholarly circles or also among so-called cultivated people, it arouses revulsion and disgust, for we sense that such human beings, with all their intelligence, do not further, but instead hinder an emerging culture and the production of genius-- which is the aim of all culture.

Given our extreme ideological commitments, which had not yet permeated Nietzsche's Germany, we require the trappings of democracy and a baseline functionally meaningless justice for all so that the poverty and suffering of the vast majority does not disrupt the pleasures of the ordained elite. And Nietzsche did not yet foresee how we would come to view the development and accumulation of technological toys as an acceptable substitute for great undertakings or any mental or spiritual life whatsoever.

Jul 12, Nick rated it it was amazing. Wow, this is such an unsung gem that should be further explored by intellectual circles of Nietzsche. In fact I only heard of it from Nietzsche himself who mentioned it in Ecce Homo. This can be studied in everything that has life. For it ceases to have life if it be perfectly dissected, and lives in pain and anguish as soon as the historical dissection begins.

There are some who believe in the saving power of German music to [Pg 60] revolutionise the German nature. They angrily exclaim against the special injustice done to our culture, when such men as Mozart and Beethoven are beginning to be spattered with the learned mud of the biographers and forced to answer a thousand searching questions on the rack of historical criticism.

All living things need an atmosphere, a mysterious mist, around them. If that veil be taken away and a religion, an art, or a genius condemned to revolve like a star without an atmosphere, we must not be surprised if it becomes hard and unfruitful, and soon withers. Every people, every man even, who would become ripe, needs such a veil of illusion, such a protecting cloud.

But now men hate to become ripe, for they honour history above life. It is not such true life , and promises much less for the future than the life that used to be guided not by science, but by instincts and powerful illusions. But this is not to be the age of ripe, alert and harmonious personalities, but of work that may be of most use to the commonwealth.

Men are to be fashioned to the needs of the time, that they may soon take their place in the machine. But light, too clear, too sudden and dazzling, is the infamous means used to blind them.

The young man is kicked through all the centuries: boys who know nothing of war, diplomacy, or commerce are considered fit to be introduced to political history.

We moderns also run through art galleries and hear concerts in the same way as the young man runs through history. The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.

Where there is a [Pg 62] subtler and stronger self-consciousness we find another emotion too—disgust. The young man has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all moralities. It is not necessary for youth, as the ancients show, but even in the highest degree dangerous, as the moderns show.

Consider the historical student, the heir of ennui, that appears even in his boyhood. A little isolated period of the past is marked out for sacrifice. If he was what they call ripe as a boy, he is now over-ripe. You only need shake him and wisdom will rattle down into your lap; but the wisdom is rotten, and every apple has its worm.

Believe me, if men work in the factory of science and have to make themselves useful before they are really ripe, science is ruined as much as [Pg 63] the slaves who have been employed too soon. In spite of that they demand honour and profit for themselves, as if the state and public opinion were bound to take the new coinage for the same value as the old. The carters have made a trade-compact among themselves, and settled that genius is superfluous, for every carrier is being re-stamped as one.

And probably a later age will see that their edifices are only carted together and not built. They only require to take themselves less seriously to be able to open their little kingdom successfully to popular curiosity.

Rise to the conception of a people, you learned men; you can never have one noble or high enough. If you thought much of the people, you would have compassion towards them, and shrink from offering your historical aquafortis as a refreshing drink.

But you really think very little of them, for you dare not take any reasonable pains for their future; and you act like practical pessimists, men who feel the coming catastrophe and become indifferent and careless of their own and others' existence. This gave him a certain ironical view of his own nature. The knowledge gives a sceptical turn to their minds. To old age belongs the old man's business of looking back and casting up his accounts, of seeking consolation in the memories of the past,—in historical culture.

But the human race is tough and persistent, and will not admit that the lapse of a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, entitles any one to sum up its progress from the past to the future; that is, it will not be observed as a whole at all by that infinitesimal atom, the individual man. Does not this paralysing belief in a fast-fading humanity cover the misunderstanding of a theological idea, inherited from the Middle Ages, that the end of the world is approaching and we are waiting anxiously for the judgment?

Does not the increasing demand for historical judgment give us that idea in a new dress? The opposite message of a later time, memento vivere , is spoken rather timidly, without the full power of the lungs; and there is something almost dishonest about it.

For mankind still keeps to [Pg 67] its memento mori , and shows it by the universal need for history; science may flap its wings as it will, it has never been able to gain the free air.

A deep feeling of hopelessness has remained, and taken the historical colouring that has now darkened and depressed all higher education. A religion that, of all the hours of man's life, thinks the last the most important, that has prophesied the end of earthly life and condemned all creatures to live in the fifth act of a tragedy, may call forth the subtlest and noblest powers of man, but it is an enemy to all new planting, to all bold attempts or free aspirations.

It opposes all flight into the unknown, because it has no life or hope there itself. And if it cannot take the direct way—the way of main force—it gains its end all the same by allying itself with historical culture, though generally without its connivance; and speaking through its mouth, turns away every fresh birth with a shrug of its shoulders, and makes us feel all the more that we are late-comers and Epigoni, that we are, in a word, born with gray hair.

The deep and serious contemplation of the unworthiness of all past action, of the world ripe for judgment, has [Pg 68] been whittled down to the sceptical consciousness that it is anyhow a good thing to know all that has happened, as it is too late to do anything better. The historical sense makes its servants passive and retrospective. Only in moments of forgetfulness, when that sense is dormant, does the man who is sick of the historical fever ever act; though he only analyses his deed again after it is over which prevents it from having any further consequences , and finally puts it on the dissecting table for the purposes of history.

In this sense we are still living in the Middle Ages, and history is still a disguised theology; just as the reverence with which the unlearned layman looks on the learned class is inherited through the clergy.

What men gave formerly to the Church they give now, though in smaller measure, to science. But the fact of giving at all is the work of the Church, not of the modern spirit, which among its other good qualities has something of the miser in it, and is a bad hand at the excellent virtue of liberality. But you should always try to replace my hesitating explanations by a better one. History must solve the [Pg 69] problem of history, science must turn its sting against itself.

Even those who are opposed to it are continually breathing the immortal spirit of classical culture with that of Christianity: and if any one could separate these two elements from the living air surrounding the soul of man, there would not be much remaining for a spiritual life to exist on.

We might be allowed at some time to put our aim higher and further above us. But it is just there that we find the reality of a true unhistorical culture—and in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, an unspeakably rich and vital culture. Were we Germans nothing but followers, we could not be anything greater or prouder than the lineal inheritors and followers of such a culture.

This however must be added. The thought of being Epigoni, that is often a torture, can yet create a spring of hope for the future, to the individual as well as the people: so far, that is, as we can regard ourselves as the heirs and followers of the marvellous classical power, and see therein both our honour and our spur.

But not as the late and bitter fruit of a powerful stock, giving that stock a further spell of cold life, as antiquaries and grave-diggers. Such late-comers live truly an ironical existence. Annihilation follows their halting walk on tiptoe through life. They shudder before it in the midst of their rejoicing over the past. They are living memories, and their own memories have no meaning; for there are none to inherit them.

And thus they are wrapped in the melancholy thought that their life is an injustice, which no future life can set right again. Suppose that these antiquaries, these late arrivals, were to change their painful ironic modesty for a certain shamelessness. I believe there has been no dangerous turning-point in the progress of German culture in this century that has not been made more dangerous by the enormous and still living influence of this Hegelian philosophy.

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-comer 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. 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. 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?

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 [Pg 73] 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. 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.

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 calf than a god. Your apologies for history are helped by ignorance: for it is only because you do not know what a natura naturans like Raphael is, that you are not on fire when you think it existed once and can never exist again. How few living men have a right to live, as against those mighty dead!

For you may speak of what virtue you will, of justice, courage, magnanimity, of wisdom and human compassion,—you will find the virtuous man will always rise against the blind force of facts, the tyranny of the actual, and submit himself to laws that are not the fickle laws of history.

He ever swims against the waves of history, either by fighting his passions, as the nearest brute facts of his existence, or by training himself to honesty amid the glittering nets spun round him by falsehood. Not to drag their generation to the grave, but to found a new one—that is the motive that ever drives them onward; and even if they are born late, there is a way of living by [Pg 75] which they can forget it—and future generations will know them only as the first-comers.

Its historical sense is so strong, and has such universal and boundless expression, that future times will commend it, if only for this, as a first-comer—if there be any future time, in the sense of future culture. But here comes a grave doubt.

Close to the modern man's pride there stands his irony about himself, his consciousness that he must live in a historical, or twilit, atmosphere, the fear that he can retain none of his youthful hopes and powers. The world-process and the personality of the earthworm!

Heirs of the Greeks and Romans, of Christianity? All that seems nothing to the cynics. The historical imagination has never flown so far, even in a dream; for now the history of man is merely the continuation of that of animals and plants: the universal historian finds traces of himself even in the utter depths of the sea, in the living slime. He stands astounded in face of the enormous way that man has run, and his gaze quivers before the mightier wonder, the modern man who can see all this way!

O thou too proud European of the nineteenth century, art thou not mad? Thy knowledge does not complete Nature, it only kills thine own nature! Measure the height of what thou knowest by the depths of thy power to do. Thou climbest the sunbeams of knowledge up towards heaven—but also down to Chaos. Thy manner of going is fatal to thee; the ground slips from under thy feet into the unknown; thy life has no other stay, but only spider's webs that every new stroke of thy [Pg 77] knowledge tears asunder.

The moralist, the artist, the saint and the statesman may well be troubled, when they see that all foundations are breaking up in mad unconscious ruin, and resolving themselves into the ever flowing stream of becoming; that all creation is being tirelessly spun into webs of history by the modern man, the great spider in the mesh of the world-net.

We ourselves may be glad for once in a way that we see it all in the shining magic mirror of a philosophical parodist, in whose brain the time has come to an ironical consciousness of itself, to a point even of wickedness, in Goethe's phrase.

Edward von Hartmann was at hand, with his famous Philosophy of the Unconscious—or, more plainly, his philosophy of unconscious irony. We have seldom read a more jovial production, a greater philosophical joke than Hartmann's book.

The beginning and end of the world-process, from the first throb of consciousness to its final leap into nothingness, with the task of our generation settled for it;—all drawn from that clever fount of inspiration, the Unconscious, and glittering in Apocalyptic light, imitating an honest seriousness to the life, as if it were a serious philosophy and not a huge joke,—such a system shows its creator to be one [Pg 78] of the first philosophical parodists of all time. Let us then sacrifice on his altar, and offer the inventor of a true universal medicine a lock of hair, in Schleiermacher's phrase.

For what medicine would be more salutary to combat the excess of historical culture than Hartmann's parody of the world's history? If we wished to express in the fewest words what Hartmann really has to tell us from his mephitic tripod of unconscious irony, it would be something like this: our time could only remain as it is, if men should become thoroughly sick of this existence. And I fervently believe he is right. The rogue let light stream over our time from the last day, and saw that it was very good,—for him, that is, who wishes to feel the indigestibility of life at its full strength, and for whom the last day cannot come quickly enough.

It is very pitiful to see, but it will be still more pitiful yet. The vineyard of the Lord! The process! To redemption! For what does the rogue mean by this cry to the workers in the vineyard? Or, to ask another question:—what further has the historically educated fanatic of the world-process to do,—swimming and drowning as he is in the sea of becoming,—that he may at last gather in that vintage of disgust, the precious grape of the vineyard?

He has nothing to do but to live on as he has lived, love what he has loved, hate what he has hated, and read the newspapers he has always read.

The only sin is for him to live otherwise than he has lived. We are told how he has [Pg 80] lived, with monumental clearness, by that famous page with its large typed sentences, on which the whole rabble of our modern cultured folk have thrown themselves in blind ecstasy, because they believe they read their own justification there, haloed with an Apocalyptic light.

The striving for the denial of the individual will is as foolish as it is useless, more foolish even than suicide The thoughtful reader will understand without further explanation how a practical philosophy can be erected on these principles, and that such a philosophy cannot endure any disunion, but only the fullest reconciliation with life.

The thoughtful reader will understand! Then one really could misunderstand Hartmann! And what a splendid joke it is, that he should be misunderstood! Why should the Germans of to-day be particularly subtle? But the world must go forward, the ideal condition cannot be won by dreaming, it must be fought and wrestled for, and the way to redemption lies only through joyousness, the way to redemption from that dull, owlish seriousness. The time will come when we shall wisely keep away from all constructions of the world-process, or even of the history of man; a time when we shall no more look at masses but at individuals, who form a sort of bridge over the wan stream of becoming.

They may not perhaps continue a process, but they live out of time, as contemporaries: and thanks to history that permits such a company, they live as the Republic of geniuses of which Schopenhauer speaks. One giant calls to the other across the waste spaces of time, and the high spirit-talk goes on, undisturbed by the wanton noisy dwarfs who creep among them.

The task of history is to be the mediator between these, and even to give the motive and power to produce the great man.

The aim of mankind can lie ultimately only in its highest examples. Our low comedian has his word on this too, with [Pg 82] his wonderful dialectic, which is just as genuine as its admirers are admirable. Both would raise the conception of evolution to a mere ideal And again rogue! The complete victory of the logical over the illogical O thou complete rogue!

For it is still too joyful on this earth, many an illusion still blooms here—like the illusion of thy contemporaries about thee. We are not yet ripe to be hurled into thy nothingness: for we believe that we shall have a still more splendid time, when men once begin to understand thee, thou misunderstood, unconscious one!

But if, in spite of that, disgust shall come throned in power, as thou hast prophesied to thy readers; if thy portrayal of the present and the future shall prove to be right,—and no one has despised them with such loathing as thou,—I am ready then to cry with the majority in the form prescribed by thee, that next Saturday evening, punctually at twelve o'clock, thy world shall fall to pieces.

And our decree shall conclude thus—from to-morrow time [Pg 83] shall not exist, and the Times shall no more be published. Perhaps it will be in vain, and our decree of no avail: at any rate we have still time for a fine experiment.

There are some who believe they weigh equally; for in each scale there is an evil word—and a good joke. When they are once understood, no one will take Hartmann's words on the world-process as anything but a joke. And it will be to the credit of the philosopher of the Unconscious that he has been the first to see the humour of the world-process, and to succeed in making others see it still more strongly by the extraordinary seriousness of his presentation. Ask thyself to what end thou art here, as an individual; and if no one can tell thee, try then to justify the meaning of thy existence a posteriori , by putting before thyself a high and noble end.

Perish on that rock! At first it will fall asunder and cease to be a people. In its place perhaps individualist systems, secret societies for the extermination of non-members, and similar utilitarian creations, will appear on the theatre of the future.

Are we to continue to work for these creations and write history from the standpoint of the masses ; to look for laws in it, to be deduced from the needs of the masses, the laws of motion of the lowest loam and clay strata of society?

The masses seem to be worth notice in three aspects only: first as the copies of great men, printed on bad paper from worn-out plates, next as a contrast to the great men, and lastly as their tools: for the rest, let the devil and statistics fly away with them! How could statistics prove that there are laws in history?

Yes, they may prove how common and abominably uniform the masses are: and should we call the effects of leaden folly, imitation, love and hunger—laws? We may admit it: but we are sure of this too—that so far as there are laws in history, the laws are of no value and the history of no value either. And least valuable of all is that kind of history which takes the great popular movements as the most important events of the past, and regards the great men only as their clearest expression, the visible bubbles on the stream.

When the brutish mob have found some idea, a religious idea for example, which satisfies them, when they have defended it through thick and thin for centuries then, and then only, will they discover its inventor to have been a great man. The highest and noblest does not affect the masses at all. For between him and the historical success of Christianity lies a dark heavy weight of passion and error, lust of power and honour, and the crushing force of the Roman Empire.

From this, Christianity had its earthly taste, and its earthly foundations too, that made its continuance in this world possible. Greatness should not depend on success; Demosthenes is great without it. The world has become skilled at giving new names to things and even baptizing the devil.

It is truly an hour of great danger. Their study has taught them that the state has a special mission in all future egoistic systems: it will be the patron of all the clever egoisms, to protect them with all the power of its military and police against the dangerous outbreaks of the other kind. There is the same idea in introducing history—natural as well as human history—among the labouring classes, whose folly makes them dangerous.

For men know well that a grain of historical culture is able to break down the rough, blind instincts and desires, or to turn them to the service of a clever egoism. Publisher Springer International Publishing. Release 03 November Subjects History Politics Nonfiction. Search for a digital library with this title Search by city, ZIP code, or library name Learn more about precise location detection. View more libraries