Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsshould live as pale and stunted late descendants " of strong racescoldly prolonging their life as antiquarians and gravediggers. Latedescendants of that sort do indeed live an ironic existence: annihilationfo llows at the heels of the limping gait of their life; they shudderat it when they rejoice in the past, fo r they are embodied memory yettheir remembrance is meaningless if they have no heirs. Thus theyare seized by the troubled presentiment that their life is an injustice,since there will be no fu ture life to justify it.But suppose we imagine these antiquarian latecomers suddenlyexchanging this painfully ironic modesty for a state of shamelessness;suppose we imagine them announcing in shrill tones: the raceis now at its zenith, fo r only now does it possess knowledge of itself,only now has it revealed itself to itself - we should then behold aspectacle through which, as in a parable, the enigmatic significancefor German culture of a certain very celebrated philosophy would beunriddled. I believe there has been no dangerous vacillation or crisisof German culture this century that has not been rendered moredangerous by the enormous and stillocontinuing influence of thisphilosophy, the Hegelian. The belief that one is a latecomer of theages is, in any case, paralysing and depressing: but it must appeardreadful and devastating when such a belief one day by a bold inversionraises this latecomer to godhood as the true meaning andgoal of all previous events, when his miserable condition is equatedwith a completion of world-history. Such a point of view has accustomedthe Germans to talk of a 'world-process' and to justify theirown age as the necessary result of this world-process; such a point ofview has set history, insofar as history is 'the concept that realizesitself', 'the dialectics of the spirit of the peoples' and the · 'worldtribunal',in place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, asthe sole sovereign power.History understood in this Hegelian fashion has been mockinglycalled God's sojourn on earth, though the god referred to hasbeen created only by history. This god, however, became transparentand comprehensible to himself within the Hegelian craniumsand has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of hisevolution up to this self-revelation: so that for Hegel the climaxand terminus of the world-process coincided with his own existencein Berlin. Indeed, he ought to have said that everything thatcame after him was properly to be considered merely as a musicalcoda to the world-historical rondo or, even more properly, as superfluous.He did not say it: instead he implanted into the gener-104