Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for life5The oversaturation of an age with history seems to me to be hostileand dangerous to life in five respects: such an excess creates that contrastbetween inner and outer which we have just discussed, andthereby weakens the personality; it leads an age to imagine that itpossesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a greater degree than anyother age; it disrupts the instincts of a people, and hinders theindividual no less than the whole in the attainment of maturity; itimplants the belief, harmful at any time, in the old age of mankind,the belief that one is a latecomer and epigone; it leads an age into adangerous mood of irony in regard to itself and subsequently intothe even more dangerous mood of cynicism: in this mood, however,it develops more and more a prudent practical egoism throughwhich the forces of life are paralyzed and at last destroyed.And now back to our first proposition: modern man'suffers from aweakened personality. As the Roman of the imperial era became un­Roman in relation to the world which stood at his service, as he losthimself in the flood of fo reigners which came streaming in anddegenerated in the midst of the cosmopolitan carnival of go ds, artsand customs, so the same mut happen to modern man who allowshis artists in history to go on 'preparing a world exhibition fo r him;he has become a strolling spectator and has arrived at a co ndition inwhich .even great wars and revolutions are able to influence him fo rhardly more than a moment. The war is not even over before it istransformed into a hundred thousand printed pages and set beforethe tired palates of the history-hungry as the latest delicacy. It seemsthat the instrument is almost incapable of producing a strong andfu ll note, no matter how vigorously it is played: its tones at once dieaway and in a moment have faded to a tender historical echo.Expressed morally: you are no longer capable of holding on to thesublime, your deeds are shortlived explosions, not rolling thunder.Though the greatest and most miraculous event should occur itmust nonetheless descend, silent and unsung, into Hades. For artflees away if you immediately conceal your deeds under the aw ningof history. He who wants to understand, grasp and assess in amoment that before wh ich he ought to stand long in awe as before anincomprehensible sublimity may be called reasonable, but only inthe sense in which Schiller speaks of the rationality of the reasonableman: there are things he does nOL see which even a child sees, thereare th ings he does not hear which even a child hears, and these