Note 78 — Chapter III · THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY

“Anti-historical,” the expression which we apply to a decidedly systematic valuation, is to be carefully distinguished from “ahistorical.” The beginning of the IV Book (53) of Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung affords a good illustration of the man who thinks anti-historically, that is, deliberately for theoretical reasons suppresses and rejects the historical in himself—something that is actually there. The ahistoric Greek nature, on the contrary, neither possesses nor understands it.