Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for lifemake them fo rget it - coming generations will know them only asfirst-born.9Is our age perhaps such a first-born? - The vehemence of its historicalsense is so great and is expressed in so universal and altogetherunrestrained a manner, that fu ture ages will in fact count it a firstbornat any rate in this respect - assuming, that is, that there will beany future ages in the cultural sense. But it is precisely this fact whichevokes in us a grave doubt. Close beside the pride of modern manthere stands his ironic view of himself, his awareness that he has tolive in an historicizing, as it were a twilight mood, his fe ar that hisyouthful hopes and energy will not survive into the fu ture. Here andthere one goes fu rther, into cynicism, and justifies the course of history,indeed the entire evolution of the world, in a manner especiallyadapted to the use of modern man, according to the cynical canon:as things are they had to be, as men now are they were bound tobecome, none may resist this inevitability. The pleasant feeling producedby this kind of cynicism is the refuge of him who cannotendure the ironical state; and the last decade has, moreover, madehim a present of one of its fairest inventions, a fu ll and roundedphrase to describe this cynicism: it calls his way of living in thefashion of the age and wholly without reflection 'the total surrenderof the personality to the world-process'. The personality and theworld-process! The world-process and the personality of the flea! Ifonly one were not compelled everlastingly to hear the hyperbole ofhyperboles, the word 'world, world, world' - when one ought morehonestly to speak of 'man, man, man'! Heirs of the Greeks andRomans? of Christianity? To these cynics that seems nothing; butheirs of the world-process! Summit and target of the world-process!Meaning and solution of all the riddles of evolution come to light inmodern man, the ripest fruit of the tree of knowledge! - that I call anecstatic feeling of pride; it is by this sign that one can recognize thefirst-born of all ages, even though they may have also come last.Contemplation of history has never flown so far, not even in dreams;fo r now the history of mankind is only the continuation of the historyof animals and plants; even in the profoundest depths of the sea theuniversal historian still finds traces of himself as living slime; gazingin amazement, as at a miracle, at the tremendous course mankindhas already run, his gaze trembles at that even more astonishingmiracle, modern man himself, who is capable of surveying this107