Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for liftcisely the most vigorous nations, vigorous in deeds and works, liveddifferently from this and raised their children differently. But thatabsurdity and superstition is suited to us - so runs the scepticalobjection - to us, the latecomers, the last pale offspring of mightierand happier races, to us who are the fulfilment of Hesiod's prophesythat men would one day be born already grey-haired an4 that assoon as he saw that sign Zeus would eradicate this race. Historicalculture is indeed a kind of inborn grey-hairedness, and those whobear its mark from childhood must instinctively believe in the old ageof mankind: to age, however, there pertains an appropriate senileoccupation, that of looking back, of reckoning up, of closingaccounts, of seeking consolation through remembering what hasbeen, in short historical culture. But the human race is a tough andpersistent thing and will not permit its progress - fOIwards or backwards- to be viewed in terms of millennia, or indeed hardly in termsof hundreds of millennia; that is to say, it will not be viewed as awhole at all by thar infinitesimal atom, the individual man. What isthere in a couple of thousand years (or in other words the space of 34consecutive generations of 60 years each) which permits us to speakof the 'youth' of mankind at the beginning and the 'old age' of mankindat the end? Is there not concealed in this paralysing belief thathumanity is already declining a misunderstanding of a Christiantheological idea inherited from the Middle Ages, the idea that theend of the world is coming, that we are fearfully awaiting the LastJudgment? Is the increasing need for historical judgment not thatsame idea in a new dress, as though our age, being the ultimate age,were empowered to exercise over all the past that universal judgmentwhich Christian belief never supposed would be pronouncedby men but by 'the Son of Man'? In earlier times this 'memento mori'addressed to mankind as a whole as well as to individual men was anever-painful goad and as it were the high point of medieval learningand conscience. Its modern antithesis, 'memento vivere', is, to speakfrankly, still a somewhat modest little sound rather than a fullthroatedone, and has something almost dishonest about it. Formankind continues to treasure its memento mori and reveals the factthrough its universal need for history: knowledge, its mightiest wingbeatsnotwithstanding, has not been able to soar aloft, a profoundsense of hopelessness remains and has assumed that historicalcolouring with which all higher education and culture is now saddenedand darkened. A religion which of all the hours of a man's lifeholds the last to be the most important, which prophesies an end to101