118 NietzscheDoge's Palace, bourgeois living rooms contained Luther-style chairs,
pewter tankards, and Gutenberg Bibles that turned out to be sewing
chests. Once the "German Emperor" had been announced in
Versailles's Hall of Mirrors, which featured Talmi gold, political power
shone like gold as well. This will to power was not altogether genuine; it
was more will than power. The point was to stage things. No one knew
that better than Richard Wagner, who pulled out all the theatrical stops
to bring eady Germanic history onto the stage. All of this was consis-
tent with an efficient approach to reality, one requiring that everything
be prettified, ornamented, draped, and enshrined to look like something
and count for something.
Nietzsche could not shake the suspicion that historicism was trying to
compensate for a lack of vitality. Vitality had been weakened because it
had lost a meaningful societal anchor in the Socratic culture of knowl-
edge. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote: "Let us imagine a culture
that has no firm and consecrated primordial seat, but is condemned
instead to exhaust all possibilities and eke out nourishment from all cul-
tures—that is the current era, which results from Socratism bent on the
destruction of myth.... What can be the significance of the incredible
compulsion for history on the part of our malcontent modern culture,
our devoted amassing of coundess other cultures, our consuming desire
for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, the loss of a mythic homeland,
of a mythic womb?" (1,146; BT% 23).
This historicism provided Nietzsche with an imposing example of
the way in which knowledge and insight serve to undermine vitality. The
second Untimely Meditation, entided "On the Benefits and Drawbacks of
History for Life," describes the process by which life can fall ill from an
excess of historical consciousness. In this essay, Nietzsche developed a
bold concept that no longer seems so out of the ordinary to us today
only because it helped him achieve an important breakthrough. He real-
ized that life needs an "enveloping atmosphere" (1,323; HL § 9) of illu-
sions, passions, and love in order to stay alive. This notion drew on a
critique of realism, which submits to the supposed hard facts. Full of