Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Foreword'In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me withoutaugmenting or directly invigorating my activity.' These words arefrom Goethe, and they may stand as a sincere ceterum censeo* at thebeginning of our meditation on the value of history. For its intentionis to show why instruction without invigoration, why knowledge notattended by action, why history as a costly superfluity and luxury,must, to use Goethe's word, be seriously hated by us - hated becausewe still lack even the things we need and the superfluous is theenemy of the necessary. We need history, certainly, but we need it forreasons different from those for which the idler in the garden ofknowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on ourrough and charmless needs and requirements. We need it, that is tosay, for the sake of life and action, not so as to turn comfortably awayfrom life and action, let alone for the purpose of extenuating the selfseekinglife and the base and cowardly action. We want to serve historyonly to the extent that history serves life: for it is possible to value thestudy of history to such a degree that life becomes stunted anddegenerate - a phenomenon we are now forced to acknowledge,painful though this may be, in the face of certain striking symptomsof our age.I have striven to depict a feeling by which I am constantly tormented;I revenge myself upon it by handing it over to the public.Perhaps this depiction will inspire someone or other to tell me thathe too knows this feeling but that I have not felt it in its pure andelemental state and have certainly not expressed it with theassurance that comes from mature experience. Someone, I say, mayperhaps do so: most people, however, will tell me that this feeling isaltogether perverse, unnatural, detestable and wholly impermissible,and that by feeling it I have shown myself unworthy of themighty historical movement which, as is well known, has been inevidence among the Germans particularly for the past two generations.Whatever the case, however, that I should venture a descriptionof my feeling will promote rather than injure general decorum,'1 ceterum censeo: but I'm of the opinion59