Human - All-Too-Human - A Book For Free Spirits [Hardcover]

HUMAN- ALL-TOO-HUMAN. Originally published in 1914. Contents include: INTRODUCTION .... Pagevii AUTHORS PREFACE ..... i FIRST DIVISION FIRST AND LAST THINGS . . 13 SECOND DIVISION THE HISTORY OF THE MORAL SENTIMENTS . . . . - 53 THIRD DIVISION THE RELIGIOUS LIFE . ui FOURTH DIVISIC. CONCERNING THE SOUL OF ARTISTS AND AUTHORS . . . .153 FIFTH DIVISION THE SIGNS OF HIGHER AND LOWER CULTURE ..... 207 SIXTH DIVISION MAN IN SOCIETY . . . 267 SEVENTH DIVISION WIFE AND CHILD . . 295 EIGHTH DIVISION A GLANCE AT THE STATE . 317 NINTH DIVISION MAN ALONE BY HIMSELF . . 355 AN EPODE - AMONG FRIENDS .... 409. INTRODUCTION: NIETZSCHES essay, Richard Wagner tn 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 Nietzsches 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 pic tured 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 Human y all-too-Human y 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. Ideal ism 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 under stood when it is remembered that at this period Nietzsche was beginning to suffer from stomach trouble and headaches. As a cure for his com plaints, 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 r , and several others, as we learn from his notebooks and post humous writings, date from the period of the Thoughts out of Season. It must be clearly understood, however, that Ecce HomO p. 75. Nietzsches 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...

Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche's remarkable collection of almost 1,400 aphorisms, is presented here in R. J. Hollingdale's distinguished translation, together with a new introduction by Richard Schacht. It remains one of the fundamental works for an understanding of his thought. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.