Untimely Meditations 123into machinelike developments and factory-style institutions in his own
scholarly field of philology. We educate young people to supply them to
the scientific 'labor market." Each worker is there assigned a picayune
topic and a petty issue to belabor. The whole enterprise is a "scientific
factory." No one can tell what the products of this zeal are good for, but
their practitioners make a good living. In describing these circumstances,
Nietzsche paused at one point to question the terms he was employing:
"but we cannot help letting the words 'factory,' 'labor market,' 'supply,'
'productivity^—and whatever auxiliary verbs of egoism there are—spring
to mind when we wish to describe the latest generation of scholars"
(l,300f.; HL § 7).
Nietzsche considered Eduard von Hartmann, a widely read philoso-
pher of the time, to be a caricature of this busy-bee approach to the
historical process. Hartmann sought to augment the doctrines of
Schopenhauer by demanding a complete surrender of personality to the
historical process. Nietzsche, who gready admired Schopenhauer, found
Hartmann's approach offensive. Curiously, Hartmann's historical
process was one long course of denial. Eduard von Hartmann, a dis-
charged officer, was determined to systematize denial of the will, which
to Schopenhauer was a mystery to be fathomed only by great ascetics
and saints. Hartmann looked to Hegel to develop such a system. The
result of this synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel was a massive work,
Die Philosophie des Unbewußten (The Philosophy of the Unconscious,
1869), which laid out an intricate three-stage theory of the disillusion-
ment of the will to live. The book's essential argument was that the
individual will to live would be incapable of negating itself of its own
accord, and this task would have to be left to the historical process, in
good Hegelian fashion. Hartmann hailed the strength of the pessimistic
consciousness of mankind, predicting that although it was now still
operating on an unconscious level, this pessimistic oudook would come
into its own as soon as it had eliminated all illusions of happiness—the
illusion of happiness in the beyond, in the future, and in the here and
now—and thereby would reclaim the world for itself and vanish. In