Human, All-Too-Human With Two Sequels
1
Human, All-Too-Human is the monument of a crisis. It is subtitled “A Book for Free Spirits”: almost every sentence marks some victory—here I liberated myself from what in my nature did not belong to me. Idealism, for example; the title means: “where you see ideal things, I see what is—human, alas, all-too-human!”—I know man better.
The term “free spirit” here is not to be understood in any other sense; it means a spirit that has become free,1 that has again taken possession of itself. The tone, the voice, is completely changed: you will find the book clever, cool, perhaps hard and mocking. A certain spirituality of noble taste seems to be fighting continually against a more passionate current in order to stay afloat. In this connection it makes sense that it was actually the hundredth anniversary of the death of Voltaire that the book pleaded, as it were, as an excuse for coming out in 1878.2 For Voltaire was above all, in contrast to all who wrote after him, a grandseigneur3 of the spirit—like me.—The name of Voltaire on one of my essays—that really meant progress—toward me.
On closer inspection you discover a merciless spirit that knows all the hideouts where the ideal is at home—where it has its secret dungeons and, as it were, its ultimate safety. With a torch whose light never wavers, an incisive light is thrown into this underworld of the ideal. This is war, but war without powder and smoke, without warlike poses, without pathos and strained limbs:4 all that would still be “idealism.” One error after another is coolly placed on ice; the ideal is not refuted—it freezes to death.—Here, for example, “the genius” freezes to death; at the next corner, “the saint;” under a huge icicle, “the hero;” in the end, “faith,” so-called “conviction;” “pity” also cools down considerably—and almost everywhere “the thing in itself” freezes to death.
2
The beginnings of this book belong right in the midst of the first Bayreuther Festspiele;1 a profound alienation from everything that surrounded me there is one of its preconditions. Whoever has any notion of the visions I had encountered even before that, may guess how I felt when one day I woke up in Bayreuth. As if I were dreaming!
Wherever was I? There was nothing I recognized; I scarcely recognized Wagner. In vain did I leaf through my memories. Tribschen—a distant isle of the blessed: not a trace of any similarity. The incomparable days when the foundation stone was laid, the small group of people that had belonged, had celebrated, and did not need first to acquire fingers for delicate matters—not a trace of any similarity. What had happened?—Wagner had been translated into German! The Wagnerian had become master over Wagner.—German art. The German master. German beer.
We others, who know only too well to what subtle artists and what cosmopolitanism of taste Wagner’s art speaks, exclusively, were beside ourselves when we found Wagner again, draped with German “virtues.”
I think I know the Wagnerians; I have experienced three generations, beginning with the late Brendel2 who confounded Wagner and Hegel, down to the “idealists” of the Bayreuther Bl?tter3 who confound Wagner and themselves—I have heard every kind of confession of “beautiful souls” about Wagner. A kingdom for one sensible word!—In truth, a hair-raising company! Nohl, Pohl, Kohl—droll with charm, in infinitum!4 Not a single abortion is missing among them, not even the anti-Semite.—Poor Wagner! Where had he landed!—If he had at least entered into swine!5 But to descend among Germans!
Really, for the instruction of posterity one ought to stuff a genuine Bayreuther or, better yet, preserve him in spirits, for spirits are lacking—with the label: that is how the “spirit” looked on which the Reich was founded.
Enough; in the midst of it I left for a couple of weeks,6 very suddenly, although a charming Parisienne tried to console me; the only excuse I offered Wagner was a fatalistic telegram. In Klingenbrunn, a small town concealed in the woods of the B?hmerwald, I dragged around my melancholy and contempt for Germans like a disease—and from time to time I’d write a sentence into my notebook, under the general title ‘The Plowshare”—hard psychologica that can perhaps still be found in Human, All-Too-Human.
3
What reached a decision in me at that time was not a break with Wagner: I noted a total aberration of my instincts of which particular blunders, whether Wagner or the professorship at Basel, were mere symptoms. I was overcome by impatience with myself; I saw that it was high time for me to recall and reflect on myself. All at once it became clear to me in a terrifying way how much time I had already wasted—how useless and arbitrary my whole existence as a philologist appeared in relation to my task. I felt ashamed of this false modesty.
Ten years lay behind me in which the nourishment of my spirit had really come to a stop; I had not learned anything new that was useful; I had forgotten an absurd amount for the sake of dusty scholarly gewgaws. Crawling scrupulously with bad eyes through ancient metrists—that’s what I had come to!—It stirred my compassion to see myself utterly emaciated, utterly starved: my knowledge simply failed to include realities, and my “idealities” were not worth a damn.
A truly burning thirst took hold of me: henceforth I really pursued nothing more1 than physiology, medicine, and natural sciences—and I did not return even to properly historical studies until my task compelled me to, imperiously. It was then, too, that I first guessed how an activity chosen in defiance of one’s instincts, a so-called “vocation” for which one does not have the least vocation, is related to the need for deadening the feeling of desolation and hunger by means of a narcotic art—for example, Wagnerian art.
Looking about me cautiously, I have discovered that a large number of young men experience the same distress: one antinatural step virtually compels the second. In Germany, in the Reich—to speak unambiguously—all too many are condemned to choose vocations too early, and then to waste away under, a burden they can no longer shake off.—These people require Wagner as an opiate: they forget themselves, they are rid of themselves for a moment.—What am I saying? For five or six hours!
4
It was then that my instinct made its inexorable decision against any longer yielding, going along, and confounding myself. Any kind of life, the most unfavorable conditions, sickness, poverty—anything seemed preferable to that unseemly “selflessness” into which I had got myself originally in ignorance and youth and in which I had got stuck later on from inertia and so-called “sense of duty.”1
Here it happened in a manner that I cannot admire sufficiently that, precisely at the right time, my father’s wicked heritage came to my aid—at bottom, predestination to an early death.2 Sickness detached me slowly: it spared me any break, any violent and offensive step. Thus I did not lose any good will and actually gained not a little. My sickness also gave me the right to change all my habits completely; it permitted, it commanded me to forget; it bestowed on me the necessity of lying still, of leisure, of waiting and being patient.—But that means, of thinking.—My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness—in brief, philology: I was delivered from the “book;” for years I did not read a thing—the greatest benefit I ever conferred on myself.—That nethermost self which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent under the continual pressure of having to listen to other selves (and that is after all what reading means) awakened slowly, shyly, dubiously—but eventually it spoke again. Never have I felt happier with myself than in the sickest and most painful periods of my life: one only need look at The Dawn or perhaps The Wanderer and His Shadow to comprehend what this “return to myself” meant—a supreme kind of recovery.—The other kind merely followed from this.
5
Human, All-Too-Human, this monument of rigorous self-discipline with which I put a sudden end to all my infections with “higher swindle,” “idealism,” “beautiful feelings,” and other effeminacies, was written in the main in Sorrento; it was finished and received its final form during a winter in Basel, under conditions incomparably less favorable than those in Sorrento. Ultimately, Herr Peter Gast, who was then studying at the University of Basel and very devoted to me, has this book on his conscience. I dictated, my head bandaged and in pain; he wrote and also corrected: fundamentally, he was really the writer while I was merely the author.
When the book was finally finished and in my hands—a profound surprise for one so seriously ill—I also sent two copies, among others, to Bayreuth. By a miraculously meaningful coincidence, I received at the very same time a beautiful copy of the text of Parsifal, with Wagner’s inscription for me, “for his dear friend, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Church Councilor.”—This crossing of the two books—I felt as if I heard an ominous sound—as if two swords had crossed.—At any rate, both of us felt that way; for both of us remained silent.—Around that time the first Bayreuther Bl?tter appeared: I understood for what it was high time.—Incredible! Wagner had become pious.
6
How I thought about myself at this time (1876), with what tremendous sureness I got hold of my task and its world-historical aspect—the whole book bears witness to that, above all a very explicit passage. Only, with my instinctive cunning, I avoided the little word “I” once again and bathed in world-historical glory—not Schopenhauer or Wagner this time but one of my friends, the excellent Dr. Paul Rée—fortunately far too refined a creature to—1
Others were less refined: I have always recognized who among my readers was hopeless—for example, the typical German professor—because on the basis of this passage they thought they had to understand the whole book as higher Réealism.—In fact, the contents contradicted five or six propositions of my friend—a point discussed in the Preface to my Genealogy of Morals.
The passage reads: “What is after all the main proposition that one of the boldest and coldest thinkers, the author of the book On the Origin of Moral Feelings [read: Nietzsche, the first immoralist] has reached on the basis of his incisive and penetrating analyses of human activity? ‘The moral man is no closer to the intelligible world than the physical man—for there is no intelligible world …’ This proposition, grown hard and sharp under the hammer blow of historical insight [read: revaluation of all values], may perhaps one day, in some future—1890!—serve as the ax swung against the ‘metaphysical need’ of mankind—but whether that will be more of a blessing or a curse for mankind, who could say? But in any case as a proposition of immense consequences, fruitful and terrible at the same time, looking into the world with that Janus face which all great insights share …”2
1Cf. Twilight, section 49 (Portable Nietzsche).
2The first edition bore the following dedication: “To the memory of Voltaire, in commemoration of his death, May 30, 1878.”
3Nobleman.
4Cf. section? of the first chapter, above; also the first footnote for that section.
1The Wagner opera festivals at Bayreuth.
2Karl Franz Brendel (1811–1868) was editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (new journal for music), 1845-1868, and of Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft (stimulations for art, life and science), 1856-61. He became a champion of Wagner in 1851.
3Wagner’s new periodical.
4Karl Friedrich Ludwig Nohl (1831–1885) was a professor of music at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg, a prolific writer, especially on Mozart and Beethoven, and a dedicated Wagnerian. His publications include R. Wagners Bedeutung für die nationale Kunst (R. Wagner’s significance for national art; Vienna, 1883) and Das moderne Musikdrama (the modern music drama; Vienna, 1884).
Richard Pohl (1826–1896) became co-editor (with Brendel) of Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft, in 1857. A Wagnerian since 1846, he was sometimes called “the oldest Wagnerian.”
Kohl, emphasized by Nietzsche, means drivel or twaddle as well as cabbage, and “drivel” is clearly the primary meaning intended here (“droll” represents an attempt to capture something of the spirit of the passage). This does not preclude the possibility that there may also have been some individual with this unfortunate name; e.g., a young man named Otto Kohl was a member of a small circle of philology students to which Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde had belonged in Leipzig.
A superseded draft for this section contains two short passages worth quoting here: “Typical was the old Kaiser [i.e., Wilhelm I] who applauded with his hands while saying loudly to his adjutant, Count Lehndorf: ‘Hideous! hideous!’ [scheusslich! scheusslich!]” And: “In the music of Wagner, which persuaded by means of its secret sexuality, one found a bond for a society in which everybody pursued his own plaisirs [pleasures]. The rest and, if you will, also the innocence of the matter, its ‘idealists’ were the idiots, the Nohl, Pohl, Kohl—the latter, known to me, the genius loci [minor local deity] in Bayreuth …” (Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke, 1961).
5Luke 8:33.
6Podach’s vitriolic attack on Nietzsche’s account of his break with Wagner, and on Ecce Homo generally, is often out of touch with the facts—as when he says of Nietzsche’s sister, ignoring these words: “After all, it was scarcely feasible to blow down the story in Ecce Homo like a house of cards, by stating that her brother, in spite of financial difficulties, had soon returned to Bayreuth …” (p. 196).
1… nichts mehr getrieben als …: if the accent falls on nichts, the meaning is “pursued nothing any more except,” which is palpably false as a matter of biographical fact. If the accent falls on mehr, the meaning is that suggested above, which may still be considered a rhetorical exaggeration.
1This splendid sentence illuminates Nietzsche’s ideas about “self-love” and “selflessness.”
2Nietzsche collapsed a few weeks after writing this. This paragraph illustrates beautifully what Nietzsche says about amor fati, freedom from ressentiment, and saying Yes even to suffering.
1Presumably: to have misunderstood and taken this literally.
2In the various German editions of Ecce Homo this quotation is not printed in quotation marks, and Nietzsche’s insertions are placed in parentheses rather than brackets; nor is there any reference to the source of the quotation: Human, All-Too-Human, section 37. As a result, it is left unclear what exactly is quoted and what is not. Of course, “—1890!—” is also an insertion not found in the text of 1878. Nietzsche’s other deviations from the original text are so slight that they are not worth listing here, except that the quotation from Rée’s book originally read as follows: “The moral man,” says he, “is no closer to the intelligible (metaphysical) world than the physical man.” The next six words were not quoted in Human, All-Too-Human.