Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsindeed, that which was once possible could present ' itself as apossibility for a second time only if the Pythagoreans were right inbelieving that when the constellation of the heavenly bodies isrepeated the same things, down to the smallest event, must also berepeated on earth: so that whenever the stars stand in a certain relationto one another a Stoic again joins with an Epicurean to murderCaesar, and when they stand in another relation Columbus willagain discover America. Only if, when the fifth act of the earth'sdrama ended, the whole play every time began again from the beginning,if it was certain that the same complex of motives, the samedeus ex machina, the same catastrophe were repeated at definite intervals,could the man of power venture to desire monumental history in fullicon-like veracity, that is to say with every individual peculiaritydepicted in precise detail: but that will no doubt happen only whenthe astronomers have again become a trologers. Until that time,monumental history will have no use for that absolute veracity: it willalways have to deal in approximations and generalities, in makingwhat is dissimilar look similar; it will alwaysmave to diminish the differencesof motives and instigations so as to exhibit the effectusmonumentally, that is to say as something exemplary and worthy ofimitation, at the expense of the causae: so that, since- it as far as possibleignores causes, one might with only slight exaggeration call it acollection of ' effects in themselves', of events which will produce aneffect upon all future ages. That which is celebrated at popular festivals,at religious or military anniversaries, is really such an 'effect initself': it is this which will not let the ambitious sleep, which thebrave wear over their heans like an amulet, but it is not the truly historicalconnexus of cause and effect - which, fully understood, wouldonly demonstrate that the dice-game of chance and the future couldnever again produce anything exactly similar to what it produced inthe past.As long as the soul of historiography lies in the great stimuli that aman of power derives from it, as long as the past has to be describedas worthy of imitation, as imitable and possible fo r a second time, itof course incurs the danger of becoming somewhat distorted,beautified and coming close to free poetic invention; there havebeen ages, indeed, which were quite incapable of distinguishing betweena monumentalized past and a mythical fiction, because preciselythe same stimuli can be derived from the one world as fromthe other. If, therefore, the monumental mode of regarding historyrules over the other modes - I mean over the antiquarian and critical70