Human, All-Too-Human

Parts One and Two

Friedrich Nietzsche, Helen Zimmern, Paul V. Cohn

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486119298
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

"Offers dazzling observations of human psychology, social interaction, esthetics and religion."— New York Times Book Review
With Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche challenges the metaphysical and psychological assumptions behind his previous works. The philosopher reviews his usual subjects—morality, religion, government, society—with his characteristic depth of perception, unflinching honesty, and iconoclastic wit. His manner of expression, however, takes a new turn.
More than 1, 400 incisive and poetic aphorisms appear here. Subtitled "A Book for Free Spirits, " this volume marks the author's first use of the aphoristic approach, which he retained in his subsequent writings and elevated to new heights. The style is particularly suited to this book, which rejects overly systematic thinking and conventional wisdom, anticipating both existentialism and post-modernism. Many themes of Nietzsche's later works first appeared here, making Human, All-Too-Human fundamental to an understanding of the author's thought.

Human, All-Too-Human

PART ONE

Translated by
Helen Zimmern

With introduction by
J. M. Kennedy

INTRODUCTION

NIETZSCHE’S ESSAY, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, appeared in 1876, and his next publication was his present work, which was issued in 1878. A comparison of the books will show that the two years of meditation intervening had brought about a great change in Nietzsche’s views, his style of expressing them, and the form in which they were cast. The Dionysian, overflowing with life, gives way to an Apollonian thinker with a touch of pessimism. The long essay form is abandoned, and instead we have a series of aphorisms, some tinged with melancholy, others with satire, several, especially towards the end, with Nietzschian wit at its best, and a few at the beginning so very abstruse as to require careful study.

Since the Bayreuth festivals of 1876, Nietzsche had gradually come to see Wagner as he really was. The ideal musician that Nietzsche had pictured in his own mind turned out to be nothing more than a rather dilettante philosopher, an opportunistic decadent with a suspicious tendency towards Christianity. The young philosopher thereupon proceeded to shake off the influence which the musician had exercised upon him. He was successful in doing so, but not without a struggle, just as he had formerly shaken off the influence of Schopenhauer. Hence he writes in his autobiography:¹ “Human, All-Too-Human, is the monument of a crisis. It is entitled: ‘A book for free spirits,’ and almost every line in it represents a victory—in its pages I freed myself from everything foreign to my real nature. Idealism is foreign to me: the title says, ‘Where you see ideal things, I see things which are only—human alas! all-too-human!’ I know man better—the term ‘free spirit’ must here be understood in no other sense than this: a freed man, who has once more taken possession of himself.”

The form of this book will be better understood when it is remembered that at this period Nietzsche was beginning to suffer from stomach trouble and headaches. As a cure for his complaints, he spent his time in travel when he could get a few weeks’ respite from his duties at Basel University; and it was in the course of his solitary walks and hill-climbing tours that the majority of these thoughts occurred to him and were jotted down there and then. A few of them, however, date further back, as he tells us in the preface to the second part of this work. Many of them, he says, occupied his mind even before he published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and several others, as we learn from his notebooks and posthumous writings, date from the period of the Thoughts out of Season.

It must be clearly understood, however, that Nietzsche’s disease must not be looked upon in the same way as that of an ordinary man. People are inclined to regard a sick man as rancorous; but any one who fights with and conquers his disease, and even exploits it, as Nietzsche did, benefits thereby to an extraordinary degree. In the first place, he has passed through several stages of human psychology with which a healthy man is entirely unacquainted; e.g. he has learnt by introspection the spiteful and revengeful spirit of the sick man and his religion. Secondly, in his moments of freedom from pain and gloom his thoughts will be all the more brilliant.

In support of this last statement, one instance may be selected out of hundreds that could be adduced. Heinrich Heine spent the greater part of his life in exile from his native country, tortured by headaches, and finally dying in a foreign land as the result of a spinal disease. His splendid works were composed in his moments of respite from illness, and during the last years of his life, when his health was at its worst, he gave to the world his famous Romancero. We would likewise do well to recollect Goethe’s saying:

Zart Gedicht, wie Regenbogen,
Wird nur auf dunkelm Grund gezogen.²

Thus neither the form of this book—so startling at first to those who have been brought up in the traditions of our own school—nor the fact that the writer was in poor health (the average Englishman may be reminded that there may be mens nulla in corpore sano) should deter us from perusing it as carefully as we can. We may be sure of an adequate reward; for here no abstract philosopher is discoursing, no harmless dealer in “isms” and “ologies”—but a man of the world, who had previously to writing come into contact with some of the best men and women of his time; who had travelled a great deal, and especially in the south; and who had finally even reached the much-beloved home of all great Germans: Ancient Greece. From Greece Nietzsche brought back his standard measure, his infallible scales, which may be compared to those of the Goddess of Justice, and in which modern institutions, parliaments, states, and religions were weighed by him, found wanting, and severely censured.

Is Hellenism, however, an ideal suitable for everybody? Does not a commercial country like ours still stand in need of the earnest gloom of Puritanism rather than of the dazzling sun of Hellenic beauty? The darker and more strict creed has at least the advantage of keeping men in the narrow path leading to duty and honesty, and may help to turn them away from the success-at-all-costs hunt; while, on the other hand, the more human and beautiful ideal, if preached to the wrong congregation, may destroy the smaller virtues of Christianity and render it impossible to rear the higher virtues of Hellenism in its stead. The danger is worth pointing out: nothing, indeed, could be more fatal than a proposal which the Editor of this series has had from an American publisher, viz., to bring out a “Nietzsche in a Nutshell, so that the general public may know what it is all about.” No; it might be better that business people—the less educated of them, at all events—should not know what it is all about. The great exhaustion, necessarily brought about by the modern commercial death-and-life struggle for existence, is the worst possible condition in which a man can read Nietzsche. The aphorisms in this book are essentially for an order of minds which can afford otium; but sine dignitate if possible—for the British “dignity” is another obstacle in the path leading to a complete understanding of our author. Indeed, these aphorisms would be much out of place, and might be quite false, if applied in other directions. Take, for example, No. 434, containing the now celebrated dictum that women always intrigue in secret against the higher souls of their husbands. While this statement is correct as applied to artists, it is obviously not intended for business-men, whose wives in many instances spur them on—not to philosophy or art, but to money, comfort, and worldly success.

But statesmen and politicians, who, no matter what may be thought to the contrary, require new ideas occasionally, will find much to interest them here. They seem to have a certain difficulty nowadays in meeting the argument of Socialism. In aphorism 451, Nietzsche gives them a hint. The governing classes, says he, can, if they choose, treat all men as equals, and proclaim the establishment of equal rights:

so far a socialistic mode of thought which is based on justice is possible; but, as has been said, only within the ranks of the governing classes, which in this case practises justice with sacrifices and abnegations. On the other hand, to demand equality of rights, as do the Socialists of the subject caste, is by no means the outcome of justice, but of covetousness. If you expose bloody pieces of flesh to a beast, and then withdraw them again until it finally begins to roar, do you think that the roaring implies justice?

Theologians on the other hand, as may be expected, will find no such ready help in their difficulties from Nietzsche. They must, on the contrary, be on their guard against so alert an adversary—a duty which they are apparently not going to shirk; for theologians are amongst the most ardent students of Nietzsche in this country. Their attention may therefore be drawn to aphorism 630 of this book, dealing with convictions and their origin, which will no doubt be successfully refuted by the defenders of the true faith. In fact, there is not a single paragraph in the book that does not deserve careful study by all serious thinkers.

On the whole, however, this is a calm book, and those who are accustomed to Nietzsche the outspoken Immoralist, may be somewhat astonished at the calm tone of the present volume. The explanation is that Nietzsche was now just beginning to walk on his own philosophical path. His lifelong aim, the uplifting of the type man, was still in view, but the way leading towards it was once more uncertain. Hence the peculiarly calm, even melancholic, and what Nietzsche himself would call Apollonian, tinge of many of these aphorisms, so different from the style of his earlier and later writings. For this very reason, however, the book may appeal all the more to English readers, who are of course more Apollonian than Dionysian. Nietzsche is feeling his way, and these aphorisms represent his first steps. As such—besides having a high intrinsic value of themselves—they are enormous aids to the study of his character and temperament.

J. M. KENNEDY.

PREFACE

1.

I HAVE been told frequently, and always with great surprise, that there is something common and distinctive in all my writings, from the Birth of Tragedy to the latest published Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. They all contain, I have been told, snares and nets for unwary birds, and an almost perpetual unconscious demand for the inversion of customary valuations and valued customs. What? Everything only—human—all-too-human? People lay down my writings with this sigh, not without a certain dread and distrust of morality itself, indeed almost tempted and encouraged to become advocates of the worst things: as being perhaps only the best disparaged? My writings have been called a school of suspicion and especially of disdain, more happily, also, a school of courage and even of audacity. Indeed, I myself do not think that any one has ever looked at the world with such a profound suspicion; and not only as occasional Devil’s Advocate, but equally also, to speak theologically, as enemy and impeacher of God; and he who realises something of the consequences involved, in every profound suspicion, something of the chills and anxieties of loneliness to which every uncompromising difference of outlook condemns him who is affected therewith, will also understand how often I sought shelter in some kind of reverence or hostility, or scientificality or levity or stupidity, in order to recover from myself, and, as it were, to obtain temporary self-forgetfulness; also why, when I did not find what I needed, I was obliged to manufacture it, to counterfeit and to imagine it in a suitable manner (and what else have poets ever done? And for what purpose has all the art in the world existed?). What I always required most, however, for my cure and self-recovery, was the belief that I was not isolated in such circumstances, that I did not see in an isolated manner—a magic suspicion of relationship and similarity to others in outlook and desire, a repose in the confidence of friendship, a blindness in both parties without suspicion or note of interrogation, an enjoyment of foregrounds, and surfaces of the near and the nearest, of all that has colour, epidermis, and outside appearance. Perhaps I might be reproached in this respect for much “art” and fine false coinage; for instance, for voluntarily and knowingly shutting my eyes to Schopenhauer’s blind will to morality at a time when I had become sufficiently clear-sighted about morality; also for deceiving myself about Richard Wagner’s incurable romanticism, as if it were a beginning and not an end; also about the Greeks, also about the Germans and their future—and there would still probably be quite a long list of such alsos? Supposing however, that this were all true and that I were reproached with good reason, what do you know, what could you know as to how much artifice of self-preservation, how much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception,—and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity? . . . In short, I still live; and life, in spite of ourselves, is not devised by morality; it demands illusion, it lives by illusion . . . but——There! I am already beginning again and doing what I have always done, old immoralist and bird-catcher that I am,—I am talking un-morally, ultra-morally, “beyond good and evil”? . . .

2.

Thus then, when I found it necessary, I invented once on a time the “free spirits,” to whom this discouragingly encouraging book with the title Human, all-too-Human, is dedicated. There are no such “free spirits” nor have there been such, but, as already said, I then required them for company to keep me cheerful in the midst of evils (sickness, loneliness, foreignness, —acedia, inactivity) as brave companions and ghosts with whom I could laugh and gossip when so inclined and send to the devil when they became bores,—as compensation for the lack of friends. That such free spirits will be possible some day, that our Europe wil...