Untimely Meditations by Nietzsche

Author:Nietzsche
Language: eng
Format: epub

IX

Is our age perhaps such a first comer? In fact, the vehemence of its historical sense is so great and expresses itself in such a universal and simply unlimited way that at least in this the coming ages will assess its quality as a first comer, if in fact there are going to be coming ages at all, understood in the sense of culture. But right here there remains a serious doubt. Close by the pride of the modern man stands his irony about his very self, his consciousness that he must live in a historicising and, as it were, a twilight mood, and his fear that in future he will be totally unable to rescue any more of his youthful hopes and powers. Here and there people go even further, into cynicism, and justify the passage of history, indeed, of the whole development of the world as essentially for the use of modern man, according to the cynical rule that things must turn out just as they are going right now, that man must be nothing other than what people now are, and that against this Must no one may rebel. In the sense of well being of such a cynicism a person who cannot maintain that view with irony curses himself. In addition, the last decade offers him as a gift one of its most beautiful inventions, a rounded and sonorous phrase for such cynicism: it calls his style of living mindlessly with the times, “the full dedication of the personality to the world process.” The personality and the world process! The world process and the personality of the turnip flea! If only people did not have to hear the eternal hyperbole of all hyperboles, the word World, World, World, when really each person should speak in all honesty only of Men, Men, Men. Heirs of the Greeks and Romans? Of Christianity? That all appears as nothing to this cynic. But heirs of the world process! The high points and targets of the world process! High points and targets of the world process! Sense and solution of all riddles of becoming in general, expressed in the modern man, the ripest fruit of the tree of knowledge—I call that a swollen feeling of elation. By this symbol are the first comers of all ages known, even if they have come along right at the end.

Historical considerations have never flown so far afield, not even in dreams. For now the history of human beings is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants. Indeed, even in the furthest depths of the sea the historical universalist finds the traces of himself, as living mucus; he gazes in astonishment (as if at a miracle) at the immense route which human beings have already passed through and trembles at the sight of the even more astonishing miracle, modern man himself, who has the ability to survey this route. He stands high and proud on the pyramid of the world process. As

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