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Untimely Meditation #2
Friedrich Nietzsche
Hmm… what makes this essay Untimely? In one sense it has both everything and nothing to do with time. It’s basic theme is time but it is timeless. It is not to be digested immediately like all products of popular culture; in that sense it is untimely. Like anything that has substance and weight, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History was composed in order to serve a function beyond entertainment. Contact with it should change one’s life or it is a failure. Standard of value: the degree to which anything is capable of serving life. The paramount example is history.
Each person, nation, culture has a different critical point beyond which history is harmful. Too much can stunt and prevent life. Essentially, there are three ways history pertains to life: to a being who acts and strives; to a being who preserves and reveres; to a being who suffers and seeks deliverance. This corresponds to three Nietzschean species of history: the monumental, antiquarian, and critical.
Monumental: Those who flee resignation and need history as a specific against it. There is no reward but the chance that he in turn can serve the role of teacher, comforter, and admonisher to those who come after him. This commandment rules over him: that which in the past was able to expand the concept ‘man’ and make it more beautiful must exist everlastingly, so as to be able to accomplish this everlastingly. That the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that this chain unites mankind across the millennia like a range of human mountain peaks, that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great – that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in the demand for a monumental history.
If monumental rules over the other modes, damage is done to history because whole chunks go missing. The men seem to be effects in themselves without any causes. The few visible personalities are distorted. Further, the mediocre and all-too-many dance around their conception of the monuments and mock/ignore all who are trying to create new art without authority conferred to it by history. They do not desire to have new greatness; ‘greatness already exists!’ For them, monumental history is the masquerade costume in which their hatred of the great and powerful of their own age is disguised. They have no real respect for the monuments of the past but pretend in order to stunt those great around them, and because they despise strength, not having any.
Antiquarian: He who preserves and reveres, who looks back from where he has come – both as an individual and perhaps as a whole nation. Think pious. The antiquarian gives thanks for existence, and serves life by recording with love the conditions which brought him into existence – to preserve this for those to come. The history of his city, people, becomes his history. A tree content in its roots. But there is danger here: when no longer inspired by the fresh life of the present, this type of history becomes lifeless data collection. Also, by nature it only knows how to preserve – not engender life. It hints: because something is old, it is valuable. Warning!
Critical: Necessary at times for man to break up and dissolve part of the past. To examine and condemn. Sometimes things need to be spelled out: “this is utterly unjust!” Then take the knife to the roots. But there’s danger here too: we originate in earlier generations and therefore spring out of their aberrations, passions, and errors, indeed of their crimes. We can’t wholly be freed. And second pasts are weaker than first pasts (natures)… The plus to this is that the next generation will, in some very real ways, be the first.
These, according to N., are the three basic ways history can be of use to man. The majority of his essay is dedicated to the disadvantages of history (and for every use he gives at least one caution). The main trouble with history, it would seem, is that when used in overabundance it creates weak personalities. This is the problem of an ‘historical culture,’ or one—such as that of his Germany, or our America—which relies on history for the education of its youth. If ‘history’ could be understood and taught as mythology rather than as an exact science it would be of far greater use and possess far less danger. It seems we tried to do this in America but the demand that history be a science – that the ‘truth’ be uncovered – overpowered the stories on which we’d attempted to establish our national character.
Instead of teaching our youth from direct life experiences we inundate them with indirect information of past peoples and places, times, and in short – cultures. With all of this unapplied information the inside of a child becomes different from what is on the outside. Knowledge stores up rather than acting to transform the outside world; one’s knowledge then, rather than what one does, serves to create his identity. Because of this, modern culture is not actually culture but a knowledge of culture.
With all of this knowledge streaming in from all sides, what is man to do? What can he do but gloss over it as lightly as possible, avoid it, so as to not be overcome by it? This results, naturally, in a tendency to avoid anything of substance and to no longer take real things seriously. This is what Nietzsche means by a ‘weak personality.’
A character can be rich, but if it isn’t tied together then there is a disparity that remains between the inner and outer… and without a unified inwardness it is impossible to be productive.
There are five ways an over-saturation to history is dangerous to life:
1. It creates a contrast between inner and outer.
2. Leads an age to imagine it possesses the rarest virtue, justice, to a greater degree than any age ever.
3. Disrupts the instincts of a people; hinders maturity of individuals and nations.
4. Implants the belief that one is a latecomer, epigone.
5. Leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself and subsequently into cynicism… which results in a prudent practical egoism through which the forces of life are paralyzed and then destroyed.
Know all of this, because this is the way things are.
This is what we teach our children! The need to make history a science results in an ‘eternally objective’ view of everything. The results of such a ‘culture’?
Schools are designed to turn out profitable children. Rather than raise cultivated men—men of culture—we rear scholars and men of science, and ‘the most speedily employed man of science’ at that. These men stand aside from life so that they can view it objectively rather than actually living it. Think of what this does to the youth of a country, whose natural desire to mature slowly is forced to conflict with a new desire to be ‘ready, useful, fruitful as quickly as possible.’ Children are therefore born with gray hair. Is this a surprise, in a culture in which the final hour is deemed the most important? Check out Radiohead’s song The Reckoner off their latest release In Rainbows. Looking back is the most important? Sounds like disease…
The point is ‘not to bear this race to the grave, but to found a new generation out of this race.’ The current culture in our country produces hardly anything but cynics, if it produces thinking individuals at all. Cynics who say: as things are, so they must be, and therefore I sacrifice myself to the world-process. But what do we have to do with the world-process?
Man sees himself in the slime that crawled out of the ocean and sees the incredible distance ‘he’s’ traveled, shakes his head in disbelief and muses: the whole march of life for me. I am the finished product. I am the goal.’ What arrogance! We should train ourselves to believe in the march of mankind, rather than the world-process, and that only for the strongest souls. Really, we should occupy ourselves with one task: what is my purpose, why do I exist, and if no answer echoes, we shall create one and perish of it.
In the creation of a great future goal we will fill the present with the nutrients we need for action. Otherwise we will be stuck in an analytical mire that will make it hard to breathe. Without the illusion, without a dream, man is like ‘a star without an atmosphere.’ And everything that would create something out of itself needs illusion, atmosphere, dream, mythology. In that way history is the opposite of art. “Only if history can endure to be transformed into a work of art will it perhaps be able to preserve instincts or evoke them.”
Instead of actually reacting to events as one feels them, the tendency is to process what one is experiencing. In other words, events, which should be causes for action, become causes without effects, and people sit around and talk about them and try to get at what they mean, rather than taking part in them themselves. Such a culture is not actually a culture but a knowledge of culture. Nietzsche uses this image to help: a snake that swallowed some rabbits whole goes to rest in the grass to digest them. Culture becomes what is internal, what is going on inside the individual, rather than what is shared and tangible. How could a true culture – at its most basic definition a unity of style – exist when everyone has his own understanding, his own version of it? It’s impossible, unless you change the definition.
And this explains America’s voluminous collection of tertiary criticisms. When an ‘objective’ person comes across a great work of art the result is an essay – neither a change in lifestyle nor even an impassioned action. Henry Miller once said that whenever he came across a great passage in a book he closed the book and had done with it for the day. Since reading that I have followed that example, not religiously it is true, but I’ve found that otherwise reading becomes a task and the greatness inherent in the passages becomes just that less great… since they don’t actually affect me.
To appreciate something on an intellectual level is one thing, and does one good at times, but it should only be done when one is fascinated, enraptured—and even then if it doesn’t result in an action besides repeated admiration, what good has it really done? It’s become a mirror in which one can see one’s ‘self,’ but that self is nothing but the accumulated knowledge one doesn’t make use of.
Man can no longer do anything unless it is logical to himself, routine, practiced, known. He no longer has any instincts whatsoever so that when his reason falters he becomes unsure and fainthearted and sinks back into himself… which is, as said before, everything that accumulates because it did not lead to action.
The meaning of an event is understood by such people as the way it will go down in history, how it will be understood by the masses. In this way there seems to be only history for more history. Seldom does one take off running at the clash of a symbol; rare is he who bends the past to his own needs and uses. But that’s exactly what Nietzsche urges. Can one be wrong? Factually, sure. But – and this is one of the main dicta of the essay – history can only be ‘borne’ by strong personalities – only by the strongest, rarest of lives. It is they who so completely contain the present and know the soul—the true spirit—well enough to know what is not necessary to the future.
“Only when you put forth your noblest qualities in all their strength will you divine what is worth knowing and preserving in the past,” he says, and goes on to add: “Only he who constructs the future has a right to judge the past.” In that sense history is only the understanding of the past that best suits the growth of the present and, by extension, the future. This, I think, is to Nietzsche the only desirable form of history.
He explicates the three types mentioned at the beginning of this essay—monumental, antiquarian, and critical—almost as foils to his argument. There is a place for all three of these… in smaller lives. If one were truly strong he would not need to harbor monumental giants; the place one grew up would only serve as a lens for the concept ‘home’; and clearly, critical history is actually a part of shaping the future – the reason Nietzsche calls it ‘necessary.’ But even this has its dangers: if one cuts part of the past out to catalyze well-being and future growth; if in the future one needs that past to change the meaning of the event – to change his history – it will no longer be there. Like ‘trashing’ files on your computer: gone. It is my opinion that man records everything he can for this very reason, out of an innate fear that he will need to know it some day. Blind to the meaning of anything, he records everything, so that the meaning will not be lost. No, man has not abandoned his post as guardian of the flame – he cannot. He just no longer knows how to do it. So each man is a walking version of the truth – but that truth dies with each man.
History should have taught man to be honest. What is really important? This is what we should learn as we go: to simply drop what we don’t need and to take care of that which we do. When we’re deceitful we lose track of our actual needs, and culture is really the way in which we go about fulfilling our real needs. Art and religion form out of true need. When we deceive ourselves into lack of fear and lack of hardship; when we make life easy by blinding ourselves to reality and everything becomes familiar and quantified, we don’t need anything, we don’t feel anything, we simply are. For no reason. Is it any wonder we go quietly? Death is the fear we all push away. Live with fear and what is death? We shall create a meaning and perish from it.
The applications of this essay! Think personal history. Nietzsche talks about the unhistorical being as important for an individual as the historical. Sometimes it is necessary to be able to disregard the past entirely, to start afresh, to put oneself into his surroundings and grow from there. But sometimes one gathers one’s strength from an understanding of himself through the years. If he has worked toward something, for instance, and sees himself as a culmination of those efforts, naturally that would be beneficial. It is a delicate balance that one must be strong enough to bear.
Many people live their lives in a partially blind disposition. ‘What is good,’ they wonder, and once they’ve decided, they grow comfortable and continue to consume what they consider unconditionally good. On the other hand, some see life as, at the very basic level, a process of improvement. As time goes by they apply the knowledge they learn to live better, more natural and healthy lives. Whether or not one has a concrete goal in mind or is solely in the process of forming one, and no matter what one is doing in his or her life, one can always improve on the way one lives.
This is the only power man has. To change the way he lives. Therefore he should always be striving to live the best life he can, and as his understanding of life changes, so should he. This applies to relationships, routines, tendencies, preferences. ‘Know thyself?’ Yes, indeed. Know what you need and find the best way to get it. Consider what you have that you don’t really need and see how easy it is to just let it go. Miller asks: ‘have you stopped to consider what is really worth saving?’ Apply that to your history; apply it to your daily life. It is baffling, that one needs hardly nothing to live the richest life in the world. And the reason we have so much that we don’t need? The culture we grew up in fed it to us.
Be strong enough to outgrow this wretched ‘culture’ and strip yourself down. Spend a Fall awake. You’ll find, I think, if you’re honest, that even that’s more than you need.
