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:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~98,100 words · 466 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Human, All-Too-Human A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1. Digital reproduction: 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. Digital reproduction, 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. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/human-all-too-human-a-book-for-free-spirits-part-1.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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, but of this work 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.
of all have good reasons for mockery, as soon as the appreciation of unpretentious truths, and the scientific spirit, begin to obtain the mastery; but only because their eye has either not yet recognised the charm of the _simplest_ form, or because men educated in that spirit are not yet completely and inwardly saturated by it, so that they still thoughtlessly imitate old forms (and badly enough, as one does who no longer cares much about the matter). Formerly the spirit was not occupied with strict thought, its earnestness then lay in the spinning out of symbols and forms. This is changed; that earnestness in the symbolical has become the mark of a lower culture. As our arts themselves grow evermore intellectual, our senses more spiritual, and as, for instance, people now judge concerning what sounds well to the senses quite differently from how they did a hundred years ago, so the forms of our life grow ever more _spiritual,_ to the eye of older ages perhaps _uglier,_ but only because it is incapable of perceiving how the kingdom of the inward, spiritual beauty constantly grows deeper and wider, and to what extent the inner intellectual look may be of more importance to us all than the most beautiful bodily frame and the noblest architectural structure. 4. ASTROLOGY AND THE LIKE.--It is probable that the objects of religious, moral, æsthetic and logical sentiment likewise belong only to the surface of things, while man willingly believes that here, at least, he has touched the heart of the world; he deceives himself, because those things enrapture him so profoundly, and make him so profoundly unhappy, and he therefore shows the same pride here as in astrology. For astrology believes that the firmament moves round the destiny of man; the moral man, however, takes it for granted that what he has essentially at heart must also be the essence and heart of things. 5. MISUNDERSTANDING OF DREAMS.…