Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsmoment perceive only covered dishes that might well be empty:until one day they behold with surprise that the dishes are full andthat attacks, demands, life-drives, passions have lain mingled andpressed together in these generalities and that they could not lie thusconcealed for very long. Leaving these doubters to time, whichbrings all things to light, I turn in conclusion to that company of thehopeful to tell them in a parable of the course and progress of theircure, their delivery from the malady of history, and therewith theirown history, up to the point at which they will be sufficiently healthyagain to study history and, to the ends oflife, to employ the past in itsthree senses, namely monumental or antiquarian or critical. At thatpoint they will be more ignorant than the 'cultivated' people of thispresent, for they will have unlearned many things and even have lostall desire so much as to glance at that which these cultivated peoplewant to know most of all; from the point of view of these cultivatedpeople, their distinguishing marks are precisely their 'un culture' ,their indifference and reserve towards much that is of high repute,even towards much that is good. Hut atihis end-point of their curethey will have become human again and have ceased to be merelyaggregates of humanlike qualities - that is something! That is somethingto hope for! Do your hearts not laugh when you hope, youhopeful young people?And how can we attain that goal? you will ask. At the beginning ofa journey towards that goal, the god of Delphi cries to you his oracle:'Know yourself.' It is a hard saying: for that god 'conceals nothingand says nothing, but only indicates, as Heraclitus has said. Whatdoes he indicate to you?There were centuries during which the Greeks found themselvesfaced by a danger similar to that which faces us: the danger of beingoverwhelmed by what was past and foreign, of perishing through'history'. They never lived in proud inviolability: their 'culture' was,rather, fo r a long time a chaos of foreign, Semitic, Babylonian,Lydian, Egyptian forms and ideas, and their religion truly a battle ofall the gods of the East: somewhat as 'German culture' and religion isnow a struggling chaos of all the West and of all past ages. And yet,thanks to that Apollonian oracle, Hellenic culture was no mereaggregate. The Greeks gradually learned to organize the chaos byfollowing the Delphic teaching and thinking back to themselves, thatis, to their real needs, and letting their pseudo-needs die out. Thusthey again took possession of themselves; they did not long remainthe overburdened heirs and epigones of the entire Orient; after hard122