Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for life- the past itself suffers harm: whole segments of it are forgotten, despised,and flow away in an uninterrupted colourless flood, and onlyindividual embellished facts rise out of it like islands: the few personalitieswho are visible at all have something strange andunnatural about them, like the golden hip which the pupils ofPythagoras supposed they saw on their master. Monument31 historydeceives by analogies: with seductive similarities it inspires thecourageous to foolhardiness and the inspired to fanaticism; andwhen we go on to think of this kind of history in the hands and headsof gifted egoists and visionary scoundrels, then we see empires destroyed,princes murdered, wars and revolutions launched and thenumber of historical 'effects in themselves', that is to say, effectswithout sufficient cause, again augmented. So much as a reminderof the harm that monumental history can do among men of powerand achievement, whether they be good men or evil: what, however,is it likely to do when the impotent and indolent take possession ofitand employ it!Let us take the simplest and most frequent example. Imagine theinartistic natures, and those only weakly endowed, armoured andarmed by a monumentalist history of the artists: against whom willthey now tum their weapons? Against their arch..:enemies, the strongartistic spirits, that is to say against those who alone are capable oflearning from that history in a true, that is to say life-enhancing sense,and of transforming what they have learned into a more elevatedpractice. Their path will be barred, their · air darkened, if a halfunderstoodmonument to some great era of the past is erected as anidol and zealously danced around, as though to say: 'Behold, this istrue art: pay no heed to those who are evolving and want somethingnew!' This dancing mob appears to possess even the privilege ofdetermining what is 'good taste': for the creative man has alwaysbeen at a disadvantage compared with those who have only lookedon and taken no part themselves; just as the public house politicianhas at all times been cleverer, more judicious and more prudentthan the statesman who actually rules. But if one goes so far as toemploy the popular referendum and the numerical majority in thedomain of art, and as it were compels the artist to defend himselfbefore the forum of the aesthetically inactive, then you can take youroath on it in advance that he will be condemned: not in spite of thefact that his judges have solemnly proclaimed the canon of mohumentalart (that is to say, the art which, according to the given definition,has at all times 'produced an effect'), but precisely because they71