Human, All-Too-Human A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~98,100 words · 466 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Human, All-Too-Human A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/human-all-too-human-a-book-for-free-spirits-part-1
- MLANietzsche. "Human, All-Too-Human A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/human-all-too-human-a-book-for-free-spirits-part-1.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Human, All-Too-Human A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/human-all-too-human-a-book-for-free-spirits-part-1.
What it is about
Human, All-Too-Human (1878), Part 1: the book where Nietzsche breaks with Wagner, with Schopenhauer and with himself.
Context and history
Everything changes: from treatise to aphorism, from romanticism to suspicion, from metaphysics to psychology. The new method is to ask where a noble feeling comes from instead of admiring it, and from this the whole later critique of morality follows. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
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 i