Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for liftexisted from of old, he wants to preserve fo r those who shall comeinto existence after him the conditions under which he himself cameinto existence - and thus he serves life. The possession of ancestralgoods changes its meaning in such a soul: they rather possess it. Thetrivial, circumscribed, decaying and obsolete acquire ·their owndignity and inviolability through the fact that the preserving andrevering soul of the antiquarian man has emigrated into them andthere made its home. The history of his city becomes for him the historyof himself; he reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules andregulations, its holidays, like an illuminated diary of his youth and inall this he finds again himself, his fo rce, his industry, his joy, hisjudgment, his folly and vices. Here we lived, he says to himself, fo rhere we are living; and here we shall live, fo r we are tough and not tobe ruined overnight. Thus with the aid of this 'we' he looks beyondhis own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be thespirit of his house, his race, his city. Sometimes he even greets thesoul of his nation across the long dark centuries of confusion as hisown soul; an ability to feel his way back and sense how things were,to detect traces almost extinguished, to read the past quickly andcorrectly no matter how intricate its palimpsest may be these arehis talents and virtues. Endowed with these talents and virtuesGoethe stood before Erwin von Steinbach's monumental work; inthe storm of his feelings the historical clouds which veiled the timebetween them were rent apart: it was his recognition, at first sight, ofthe German work of art 'exerting its power through a strong, roughGerman soul'. It was the same tendency which directed the Italiansof the Renaissance and reawoke in their poets the genius of ancientItaly to a 'wonderfu l new resounding of the primeval strings', asJakob Burckhardt puts it. But this antiquarian sense of veneration ofthe past is of the greatest value when it spreads a simple feeling ofpleasure and contentment over the modest; rude, even wretchedconditions in which a man or a nation lives; Niebuhr, for example,admits with honourable candour that on moor and heathland,among free peasants who possess a history, he can live contented andnever feel the want of art. How could history serve life better thanwhen it makes the less favoured generations and peoples contentedwith their own homeland and its customs, and restrains them fromroving abroad in search of something they think more worth havingand engaging in battles for it? Sometimes this clinging to one's ownenvironment and companions, one's own toilsome customs, one'sown bare mountainside, looks like obstinacy and ignorance - yet it is73