Human, All Too Human

Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

In 1876, because of poor health, Nietzsche took a leave of absence from his teaching position. He spent most of this period in Sorrento at the home of Malwida von Meysenbug and was close to his long-term friend Paul Ree, a philosopher and psychologist, who was working on his book The Origin of Moral Sensations. With his Untimely Meditations behind him, Nietzsche began work on new material that was finally published in 1878 as Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits.

Nietzsche met Wagner in Sorrento, in the fall of 1876; Wagner was full of his new composition "Parsifal," except that, from Nietzsche's point of view, Wagner was converting a fine classic myth of moral and psychological recovery into a pedestrian Christian extravaganza. Meanwhile, Nietzsche himself had been going in quite a different direction. Nietzsche never saw Wagner again. Wagner died in 1883 and Nietzsche wrote to friends both that "Wagner was by far the fullest man I have ever known" and that "it was hard to be for six years the enemy of the man one most reveres." During Wagner's life, Nietzsche never published a critical word about him.

In the years immediately following, Nietzsche wrote two pieces --- Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow. In 1886, when Nietzsche bought up the rights to his published works and re-worked many of them, he combined these pieces with Human, All Too Human as Volume II, writing new prefaces to both volumes. I will discuss here only the original first volume.

In this work, Nietzsche adopted the aphoristic style that he continued throughout the rest of his life. He also broke entirely free of former associations --- Schopenhauer, Wagner, etc. This is truly the beginning of the Nietzsche that we know --- both in the ideas that he was developing and weighing but also in the reflections on human nature and the isolation of truth seekers.

The aphoristic style no longer presents an argumentative discussion of a particular topic. Instead, we have sections, chapters, or books holding numbered collections of text. An individual aphorism may be anything from a single word up to several paragraphs or even pages. Aphorisms are usually titled but need not be. Generally speaking, the aphorisms collected in a given section, chapter, or book aim in the direction of a particular topic; but this topic might be narrow or broad, depending on Nietzsche's intentions. Where there is an "argument" or "development" of Nietzsche's thought it is up to the reader to put this together on the basis of his/her interpretation of the texts.

Of First and Last Things

Nietzsche had been ambitious about becoming a philosopher ever since the early work on "The Birth of Tragedy." Here, for the first time, he begins a discussion of philosophy. What is it historically? Where is heading? What are the errors that lie in our path? In the very first aphorism, he finds an error in all traditional philosophy, namely, trying to solve the puzzle of things coming out of their opposites through metaphysical speculations. But the new philosophy, in the age of scientific study, "has discovered . . . that there are no opposites . . . and that a mistake in reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis." (#1)

On the History of the Moral Sensations

The Religious Life

From the Souls of Artists and Writers

Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture

Man in Society

Woman and Child

A Glance at the State

Man Alone with Himself

This section begins with the statement (#483) that "convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies," and it is to this idea that he returns at the end. "Are we obliged to be faithful to our errors, even when we realize that through this faithfulness we are injuring our higher self? --- No, there exists no law, no obligation, of this kind: we have to become traitors, be unfaithful, again and again, abandon our ideals. We cannot advance from one period of our life into the next without passing through these pains of betrayal and then continuing to suffer them." (#629)

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