critical history

Here it becomes clear how badly man needs, often enough, in addition to the monumental and the antiquarian ways of seeing the past, a thrid kind, the critical: and this again in the service of life as well.

We must drag history to the bar of judgment, interrogating it metiuclously and finally condemning it...

occasionally, however, the same life which needs forgetfulness demands the temporary destruction of this forgetfulness; then it is to becoe clear how unjust is the existence of some thing, a privilege, a caste, a dynasty for example, how much this thing deserves destruction.

Since we hapen to be the results of the earlier generations we are also the results of their aberratios, passions and errors, even crimes; it is not possible quite to free oneself from this chain.

...It is an attempt, as it were, a posteriori to give oneself a past from which one would like to and be descended in opposition to the past from which one is descended:--always a dangerous attempt becuse it is so difficult to find a limit in denying the past and because second natures are mostly feebler than the first. Too often we stop at knowing the good without doing it because we also know the better without being able to do it. Yet here and there a victory is achieved nevertheless, and for the fighters who use critical history for life there is even a remarkable sonsolation: namely, to know that this first nature was, at some time or other, a second nature and that very victorious second nature becomes a first.

(we must use all three of these histories [when each form is required] and as long as we remain active and do history for the sake of life and not for knowledge...we must make history purposeful)