Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditations;: :IIII,then I will create a culture fo r you out of it! - Thus cries eachindividual of this generation and all those individuals will recognizeone another from this cry. Who is to give them this life?No god and no man: only their own youth: unchain this and youwill therewith have liberated life. For life was only lying hidden, inprison, it has not yet withered away and died ask yourselves ifit has!But it is sick, this unchained life, and needs to be cured. It is sickwith many illnesses and not only with the memory of its chains -what chiefly concerns us here is that it is suffering from the malady ofhistory. Excess of history has attacked life's plastic powers, it no longerknows how to employ the past as a nourishing food. The evil isdreadful, and yet! if youth did not possess nature's clairvoyant gift noone would know it is an evil or that a paradise of health has been lost.This same youth, however, also divines with the curative instinct ofthis same nature how this paradise is to be regained; it knows themedicine and balsam against the malady of history, against excess ofhistory: but what is this medicine called?Now, one must not be surprised to find that it is called by thenames of poisons: the antidote to the historical is called -the unhistoricaland the suprahistorical. And with these names we return to the beginningof our reflections and to its meditative calm.With the word 'the unhistorical' I designate the art and power offorgetting and of enclosing oneself within a bounded horizon; I call'suprahistorical' the powers which lead the eye away from becomingtowards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternaland stable, towards art and religion. Science - for it is science whichwould here speak of poisons - sees in these two fo rces hostile forces:for science considers the only right and true way of regarding things,that is to say the only scientific way, as being that which seeseverywhere things that have been, things historical, and nowherethings that are, things eternal; it likewise lives in a profoundantagonism towards the eternalizing powers of art and religion, for ithates forgetting, which is the death of knowledge, and seeks toabolish all limitations of horizon and launch mankind upon aninfinite and unbounded sea of light whose light is knowledge ofall becoming.If only man could live in it! As cities collapse and grow desolatewhen there is an earthquake and man erects his house on volcanicland only in fear and trembling and only briefly, so life itself caves inand grows weak and fearful when the concept-quake caused by science120