NIETZSCHE AND THE PRESENT
25
The study of these three is for each of us a kind of initiation
into the depths of actuality. Without them we would be asleep. They
open up the modem consciousness. They cast their light and they
cast their growing shadow upon our time, whereas their own time
was not open to their influence.
To take these men seriously is in itself a decision, the decision
to renounce the absolute claims of the European, humanistic spirit
with its roots in the Latin Middle Ages. This spirit then ceases to
be anything more than a stage of development, a necessary foundation;
it ceases to be a living content of faith. Even before these men,
this spirit contained within it what we can discern sharply only now,
in
retrospect: the germ of the new.
Nevertheless these three are the spiritual threshold. In them the
breach of continuity, unconsciously begun long before, was com–
pleted; in them it became a high, spiritual impulse.
The crossing of the threshold that became manifest in them
may mean catastrophe or the beginning of a new creation; it may be
ruinous and evil or it may mean the possibility of a new authentic
humanity-but anyone who since their time evades them, who re–
jects them without having come to know them in their essence, must
necessarily remain unclear in his own being; he falls a victim to
something that he does not know but might know, and is defenseless
in the modern world.
But these three are by no means the leaders of a new humanity.
They are prophets, but prophets through their own sacrifice in
allowing themselves to be drawn into the terrible distress of a
humanity that was losing itself, the distress of alienated man-not
prophets as founders of a new world. For this reason they are
dangerously ambiguous people. They have shown a unique power to
set things in motion, they promote and create integrity, but they
also bring destruction. They are indispensable educators, but also an
immense danger. For we have still to learn how to be educated by
them in the right and not the ruinous way. Their intellectual activity
does not merely disclose the ruin that has already befallen, but is in
itself a continuing process of destruction. True, they prepare our
consciousness for the awakening of new potentialities-but at the
same time they bring with them the ideas, fascinating to many, which
immediately submerge this consciousness. They seem by their insight
to bring destruction or new dogmatism.
