Contemporary Man and History

It is about half a century since Friedrich Nietzsche published his “Untimely Reflection”, which deals with the value of history for life. It had become a matter of life or death for him to consider whether the forces that work within the human soul and carry the human being through existence might not be paralyzed if he focuses too much on the past. One can understand how Nietzsche's consideration of this question led to an “unfashionable” contemplation when one considers the development that many views on the position of man in historical development have undergone in Central European thought in recent times.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, people spoke of “natural law”. It was thought that man could turn his attention to his own being, to his “nature”, and then he must find what “rights” were his in life. This “natural right” was also called the “right of reason”. Man believed that he could find his position in life from the legal point of view if he drew the ideas for it from what was laid in him by his own nature.

Gradually, people lost faith in this “rational law”. It was realized how “rights” have been formed habitually, half instinctively, in human coexistence. Attention was turned to the “historical” of legal life. In the face of the rule of this historical, man-made “natural law” was found to be meaningless. It was found that man is born into what instinctive developmental forces have brought into life. Only these could be adhered to, it was thought, when considering human rights. If one wants to arrive at ideas about the law, one must approach history.

Nietzsche felt that the view he encountered as he went through his own youthful development was a rape of the human soul. Man takes, he thought, his vital present if he does not pull himself together and get his will out of his immediate existence; and implants in himself a dead past that paralyzes his will. In this way, the man of the present loses himself.

It is understandable that Nietzsche came to such a view. He saw himself transported into an age in which man had little confidence in knowledge of the spiritual world. The creativity of one's own spiritual life had therefore become somewhat questionable. People doubted their ability to create something themselves, so they stuck to contemplating what had been done. The “historical school of law” took the place of the “school of the law of reason”.

Even today, feelings could still arise, albeit in a slightly different form, as Nietzsche expressed them. For man still turns his gaze backward when he is to say what he should introduce into his life in the present. One asks how it was in primitive conditions with this or that if one wants to understand the essence of “right,” “custom,” and the like. And it can be noticed how this gaze represses the directly creative aspect of the present.

And yet: a healthy sense will not allow that such a backward glance must weaken the human being. This sense suggests that it is not true history in the “historical school” that could have produced the disadvantage Nietzsche speaks of, but an erroneously conceived one.

It was namely parallel to the introduction of the historical into the consideration of the legal, of the moral, the question: what then actually the driving forces in the history of mankind are. Some said, man in his work brings forth the facts of life. The great personalities are the driving forces in history. Others thought, the activities of people are the results of external circumstances. One must consider these conditions in an era if one wants to understand it historically. This then led to a historical view that was increasingly inclined towards the material. And historical materialism arose, which believes that the actual effective forces are those active in human economy, and that what man does must be understood from these forces.

But just how views affect life is discussed by one of the most recent historians with regard to the immediate present. Heinrich Friedjung wrote in his book “The Age of Imperialism 1884-1914” (Verlag von Neufeld und Henius, Berlin, 2nd volume, 1922, page 356): “If any school of thought denies the importance of the great personality for events, then it will be lacking when it is most needed. ... the Marxist doctrine excludes the individual personality from the factors of historical calculation; no wonder that here as well as there the unusual figures disappeared, to make way for the mediocre and inferior.” — So it is admitted that schools of thought can intervene in historical life in a hindering or promoting way. But again, they can only do so through personalities.

And in personalities, ideas are brought to bear through the living spirit that dwells in man. But man loses this also for history if he cannot find it in his own nature. The “right of reason” at the beginning of the nineteenth (and in the eighteenth) century was not drawn from the living human spirit, but from “thought”, which, when it is merely intellectual, un-seen soul, only presents the dead from the spirit. On the other hand, “historical right” gave man nothing for his spiritual experience, because in history it did not penetrate to the spirit, but clung to the outer historical revelations of the spirit.

When man finds the living, creative spirit in himself, he also finds it in history. When he knows that his soul life reaches up into spiritual regions, he will also seek the driving forces of historical development in these spiritual regions. He will go as far as the historical personalities, but he will go beyond them to the ruling spiritual powers, which have worked from the spiritual world into the souls of people in the past as they do into his own. He will regard the personalities as the executors of the intentions of those spiritual powers. He does not reduce human beings to puppets of the spiritual world; he recognizes their free nature in their relationship with this world, just as he knows himself to be free in his connection with spiritual existence. In the light of a spiritually appropriate view of history, the “right of reason” and the present-day “customs that spring from the human soul” are seen to be a development from the past, but also a spiritual creativity in the present. And “historical right” as well as “custom that has become historical” do not undermine the present living and creative, for they prove themselves to come from the same source; they give the present the right to its own will, for they reveal themselves as this own will. A “natural law” that pays no heed to the past shrivels up into abstract thought-forms; an “historical school of legal thought” that refuses to recognize any “natural law” does not draw from the spirit, but only describes the external manifestation of the spirit.