one that found it fitting to take shelter behind those objections? Perhaps well-intentioned, but nonetheless a great self-delusion that shelters behind the objections; shelters behind, precisely in order to shelter itself from ever becoming actually exposed to those early times? It is of course a self-delusion.
c) What the self-delusion consists in
What does that self-delusion consist in, one with which we have long been stricken? In the fact that humans have convinced themselves that the old is the antiquated, the antiquated the past, the past what no longer is, and what no longer is, as nonbeing, sheer nullity. What could be more obvious than this conviction that the old is the antiquated, and what is easier to cast off than the antiquated, since indeed, as past, it passes away of itself?
Is this self-delusion accidental? If it is, then how does it come to be so widespread? It derives from a firmly seated prejudice about humans and about their relation to history; the prejudice is that this relation consists in and is based on historiological cognitions. We take ourselves to be disposed and authorized, without further ado, to judge what history, and especially the past, can mean to us and is allowed to mean to us.
The four objections stem from a single prejudice, one so well-guarded today that it faces not even the least danger; on the contrary, at most it is increasingly advancing. For what age has ever acquired so many and such varied historiological cognitions as has ours? When were past “cultures” and human types ever rummaged through and psychologically-analytically probed to such an extent? When were these constantly accumulating cognitions ever served up with such a shameful topdressing than in today’s journalism, a journalism whose very successes do not allow this science to sleep? Must not finally such an excess of historiological cognitions show us the full totality of history and prompt us to believe we had a relation to history! Or is this monstrous amount of historiology precisely what rivets us to the prejudice about our supposedly genuine and authoritative relation to history? Can historiological cognition create at all originarily a relation to history? No; on the contrary, historiological cognition is itself possible only on the basis of an originary relation to history. Historiology can explain and expand this relation but can just as much also undermine and slacken it and, above all, can delude us precisely about the endangering, destruction, and thus the complete lack of any basic relation to history.
That is how matters stand today. Therefore, we can without scruples believe ourselves justified in bringing forward objections against the possibility and intrinsic value of the project of seeking out the beginning