Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

HUMAN,

ALL TOO HUMAN

A BOOK FOR FREE SPIRITS

By

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Translated By

ALEXANDER HARVEY

First published in 1878

This edition published by Read Books Ltd.

Copyright © 2019 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library

Contents

Friedrich Nietzsche

PREFACE.

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OF THE FIRST AND LAST THINGS.

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HISTORY OF THE MORAL FEELINGS.

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THE RELIGIOUS LIFE.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15th October 1844, at Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He attended a local boy’s school, and moved to the Domgymnasium in Naumburg at the age of ten, but since he showed particular talents in music and language, the internationally-recognized Schulpforta admitted him as a pupil. After graduation in 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn. It was during this time that Nietzsche lost his Christian faith, and as early as his 1862 essay Fate and History, Nietzsche argued that historical research had discredited the central teachings of Christianity. In 1865, at the age of twenty, Nietzsche wrote to his (deeply religious) sister Elizabeth that ‘if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.’ This was the start of Nietzsche’s philosophical career, and he spent a great deal of time studying the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, especially his Magnum Opus, The World as Will and Representation. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist however (a scholar of Greek and Roman textual criticism) before turning to philosophy in earnest.

In 1869, at age twenty-four, he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, the youngest individual to have held this position. He resigned in the summer of 1879 due to health problems that plagued him for most of his life. It was only after this resignation that Nietzsche really became an independent philosopher in his own right though. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book or major section of a book each year until 1888.

In this year, his last year of real writing, he completed five books. One of Nietzsche’s key ideas was the Apollonian / Dionysian dichotomy; a contrast based on the features of ancient Greek mythology; Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represents harmony, progress, clarity and logic, whereas Dionysus represents disorder, intoxication, emotion and ecstasy. Nietzsche used these two forces because, for him, the world of mind and order on one side, and passion and chaos on the other formed principles that were fundamental to the Greek culture. Some of Nietzsche’s other philosophical concepts include ‘the Will to Power’; what he saw as the motivator of human or animal behaviour and the ‘death of God’; The statement God is dead, occurs in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in The Gay Science), and has become one of his best-known remarks.

The possibilities and dangers of nihilism were a problem to which Nietzsche was particularly alive, and he developed his thinking in the concept of the ‘Übermensch’; the superhuman - who does not follow morality of common people since it favours mediocrity but instead rises above the notion of good and evil and above the herd. Central to his philosophy is the idea of ‘life-affirmation’, which involves questioning of any doctrine that drains one's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those ideas might be. Nietzsche’s radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary and his influence remains substantial, particularly in the fields of existentialism and postmodernism.

In 1889, at age forty-four, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. The breakdown was later ascribed to atypical general paresis due to tertiary syphilis, but today, it is suspected to have been the result of brain cancer. Nietzsche lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, after which he fell under the care of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, until his death on 25th August 1900. Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken bei Lützen, Germany. His friend and secretary gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: ‘Holy be your name to all future generations!’ Ironically, Nietzsche had written in Ecce Homo (at that point still unpublished) of his fear that one day his name would be regarded as ‘holy’.

PREFACE.

1

It is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me that there is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings, from the Birth of Tragedy to the recently published Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: they all contain, I have been told, snares and nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs. What!? Everything is merely—human—all too human? With this exclamation my writings are gone through, not without a certain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a disposition to ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simply misrepresented. My writings have been termed a school of distrust, still more of disdain: also, and more happily, of courage, audacity even. And in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as I do, not simply the timely advocate of the devil, but, to employ theological terms, an enemy and challenger of God; and whosoever has experienced any of the consequences of such deep distrust, anything of the chills and the agonies of isolation to which such an unqualified difference of standpoint condemns him endowed with it, will also understand how often I must have sought relief and self-forgetfulness from any source—through any object of veneration or enmity, of scientific seriousness or wanton lightness; also why I, when I could not find what I was in need of, had to fashion it for myself, counterfeiting it or imagining it (and what poet or writer has ever done anything else, and what other purpose can all the art in the world possibly have?) That which I always stood most in need of in order to effect my cure and self-recovery was faith, faith enough not to be thus isolated, not to look at life from so singular a point of view—a magic apprehension (in eye and mind) of relationship and equality, a calm confidence in friendship, a blindness, free from suspicion and questioning, to two sidedness; a pleasure in externals, superficialities, the near, the accessible, in all things possessed of color, skin and seeming. Perhaps I could be fairly reproached with much art in this regard, many fine counterfeitings; for example, that, wisely or wilfully, I had shut my eyes to Schopenhauer's blind will towards ethic, at a time when I was already clear sighted enough on the subject of ethic; likewise that I had deceived myself concerning Richard Wagner's incurable romanticism, as if it were a beginning and not an end; likewise concerning the Greeks, likewise concerning the Germans and their future—and there may be, perhaps, a long list of such likewises. Granted, however, that all this were true, and with justice urged against me, what does it signify, what can it signify in regard to how much of the self-sustaining capacity, how much of reason and higher protection are embraced in such self-deception?—and how much more falsity is still necessary to me that I may therewith always reassure myself regarding the luxury of my truth. Enough, I still live; and life is not considered now apart from ethic; it will [have] deception; it thrives (lebt) on deception ... but am I not beginning to do all over again what I have always done, I, the old immoralist, and bird snarer—talk unmorally, ultramorally, beyond good and evil?

2

Thus, then, have I evolved for myself the free spirits to whom this discouraging-encouraging work, under the general title Human, All Too Human, is dedicated. Such free spirits do not really exist and never did exist. But I stood in need of them, as I have pointed out, in order that some good might be mixed with my evils (illness, loneliness, strangeness, acedia, incapacity): to serve as gay spirits and comrades, with whom one may talk and laugh when one is disposed to talk and laugh, and whom one may send to the devil when they grow wearisome. They are some compensation for the lack of friends. That such free spirits can possibly exist, that our Europe will yet number among her sons of to-morrow or of the day after to-morrow, such a brilliant and enthusiastic company, alive and palpable and not merely, as in my case, fantasms and imaginary shades, I, myself, can by no means doubt. I see them already coming, slowly, slowly. May it not be that I am doing a little something to expedite their coming when I describe in advance the influences under which I see them evolving and the ways along which they travel?

3

It may be conjectured that a soul in which the type of free spirit can attain maturity and completeness had its decisive and deciding event in the form of a great emancipation or unbinding, and that prior to that event it seemed only the more firmly and forever chained to its place and pillar. What binds strongest? What cords seem almost unbreakable? In the case of mortals of a choice and lofty nature they will be those of duty: that reverence, which in youth is most typical, that timidity and tenderness in the presence of the traditionally honored and the worthy, that gratitude to the soil from which we sprung, for the hand that guided us, for the relic before which we were taught to pray—their sublimest moments will themselves bind these souls most strongly. The great liberation comes suddenly to such prisoners, like an earthquake: the young soul is all at once shaken, torn