Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsa very salutary ignorance and one most calculated to further theinterests of the community: a fact of which anyone must be awarewho knows the dreadful consequences of the desire for expeditionsand adventures, especially when it seizes whole hordes of nations,and who has seen from close up the condition a nation gets intowhen it has ceased to be faithful to its own origins and is given over toa restless, cosmopolitan hunting after new and ever newer things.The feeling antithetical to this, the contentment of the tree in itsroots, the happiness of knowing that one is not wholly accidental andarbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and thatone's existence is thus excused and, indeed, justified - it is this whichis today usually designated as the real sense of history.This notwithstanding, such a condition is certainly not one inwhich a man would be most capable of resolving the past into pureknowledge; so that here too, as in the case of monumental history,we perceive that, as long as the study of history serves life and isdirected by the vital drives, the past itself suffers. To employ a somewhatfree metaphor: the tree is aware of i roots to a greater degreethan it is able to see them; but this awareness judges how big they arefrom the size and strength of its' visible branches. If, however, thetree is in error as to this, how greatly it will be in error regarding allthe rest of the forest around it! - for it knows of the fo rest only that init which obstructs or favours it and nothing beside. The antiquariansense of a man, a community, a whole people, always possesses anextremely restricted field of vision; most of what exists it does notperceive at all, and the little it does see it sees much too close up andisolated; it cannot relate what it sees to anything else and it thereforeaccords everything it sees equal importance and therefore to eachindividual thing too 'great imponance. There is a lack of that discriminationof value and that sense of proponion which would distinguishbetween the things of the past in a way that would do truejustice to them; their measure and proportion is always that accordedthem by the backward glance of the antiquarian nation orindividual.This always produces one very imminent danger: everything oldand past that enters one's field of vision at all is in the end blandlytaken to be equally worthy of reverence, while everything that doesnot approach this antiquity with reverence, that is to say everythingnew and evolving, is rejected and persecuted. Thus even the Greekstolerated the hieratic style in their plastic ans beside the free andgreat; later, indeed, they did not merely tolerate the elevated nose74