With Two Supplements
1
‘HUMAN, All Too Human’ is the memorial of a crisis. It calls itself a book for free spirits: almost every sentence in it is the expression of a victory − with this book I liberated myself from that in my nature which did not belong to me. Idealism does not belong to me: the title says: ‘where you see ideal things, I see − human, alas all too human things!’… I know humanity better… The expression ‘free spirit’ should here be understood in no other sense: a spirit that has become free, that has again seized possession of itself. The tone, the sound of the voice has completely changed: one will find the book sagacious, cool, sometimes harsh and mocking. A certain spirituality of noble taste seems to be in constant struggle to keep itself aloft above a more passionate current running underneath. In this connection there is significance in the fact that it is actually the hundredth anniversary of the death of Voltaire with which the book as it were apologizes for being published in 1878. For Voltaire is, in contrast to all who have written after him, above all a grandseigneur of the spirit: precisely what I am too. − The name of Voltaire on a writing by me − that really was progress − towards myself… If one looks more closely, one discovers a merciless spirit who knows every hiding-place in which the ideal is at home − where it has its castle-keep and as it were its last place of security. With a torch in hand which gives no trembling light I illuminate with piercing brightness this underworld of the ideal. It is a war, but a war without powder and smoke, without warlike attitudes, without pathos and contorted limbs − all this would still have been ‘idealism’. One error after another is calmly laid on ice, the ideal is not refuted − it freezes… Here for example ‘the genius’ freezes; on the next corner ‘the saint’ freezes; ‘the hero’ freezes into a thick icicle; at last ‘faith’, so-called ‘conviction’, freezes; ‘pity’ also grows considerably cooler − almost everywhere ‘the thing in itself freezes…
2
The beginnings of this book belong within the weeks of the first Bayreuth Festival; a profound estrangement from all that surrounded me there is one of its preconditions. Anyone who has any idea what visions had been flitting across my path even at that time can guess how I felt when I one day came to myself in Bayreuth. It was as if I had been dreaming… Where was I? I recognized nothing, I hardly recognized Wagner. In vain I scanned my memories. Tribschen − a distant isle of the blessed: not the shadow of a resemblance. The incomparable days of the foundation-stone laying, the little band of initiates who celebrated them and who did not lack fingers for delicate things: not the shadow of a resemblance. What had happened? − Wagner had been translated into German! The Wagnerian had become master of Wagner! − German art! The German master! German beer!… We others, who know only too well to how refined a species of artists, to how cosmopolitan a taste Wagner’s art alone speaks, were beside ourselves to rediscover Wagner bedecked with German ‘virtue’. − I think I know the Wagnerian, I have ‘experienced’ three generations of them, from the late Brendel, who confused Wagner with Hegel, to the ‘idealists’ of the Bayreuther Blätter, who confuse Wagner with themselves −I have heard every kind of confession about Wagner from ‘beautiful souls’. A kingdom for one sensible word! − Truly, a hair-raising crowd! Nohl, Pohl, Kohl charmingly in infinitum! Not an abortion was missing, not even the anti-Semite. − Poor Wagner! To what a pass had he come! − Better for him to have gone among swine! But among Germans!… For the instruction of posterity a genuine Bayreuther ought in the end to be stuffed, better still preserved in spirit, for spirit is what is lacking − with the inscription: this is what the ‘spirit’ was like upon which the ‘Reich’ was founded… Enough, I left in the midst of this for a couple of weeks, very suddenly, even though a charming Parisienne tried to console me; I excused myself to Wagner merely with a fatalistic telegram. At a place deeply buried in the Bohemian Forest, Klingenbrunn, I bore my melancholy and contempt for Germans about with me like an illness – and wrote a sentence in my pocket-book from time to time under the general title ‘The Ploughshare’, nothing but hard psychologica which can perhaps still be rediscovered in ‘Human, All Too Human’.
3
What then resolved itself within me was not merely a breach with Wagner – I sensed a total aberration of my instinct of which the individual blunder, call it Wagner or my professorship at Basel, was merely a sign. I was overcome with impatience at myself; I realized it was high time for me to think back to myself. It became of a sudden terribly clear to me how much time I had already squandered – how useless, how capricious my whole philologist’s existence appeared when compared with my task. I was ashamed of this false modesty… Ten years behind me during which the nourishment of my spirit had quite literally been at a stop, during which I had learned nothing useful, during which I had forgotten inordinately much over a trash of dusty scholarship. Creeping meticulously and with bad eyesight through antique metrists – that is what I had come to! − I was moved to compassion when I saw myself quite thin, quite wasted away: realities were altogether lacking in my knowledge, and the ‘idealities’ were worth damn all! – A downright burning thirst seized hold of me: thenceforward I pursued in fact nothing other than physiology, medicine and natural science – I returned to actual historical studies only when the task imperiously compelled me to. It was then too that I first divined the connection between an activity chosen contrary to one’s instincts, a so-called ‘calling’ to which one is called least of all – and that need for a stupefaction of the feeling of emptiness and hunger through a narcotic art – for example through Wagnerian art. A more careful survey has revealed to me that a large number of young men are in a like predicament: one piece of anti-nature downright compels a second. In Germany, in the ‘Reich’, to speak without ambiguity, all too many are condemned to decide too soon and then to sicken away beneath a burden they find they cannot throw off… Such people desire Wagner as an opiate – they forget themselves, they are free of themselves for a moment… What am I saying? for five or six hours! –
4
At that time my instinct decided inexorably against any further giving way, going along, confounding of myself with what I was not. Any kind of life, the most unfavourable conditions, sickness, poverty – all seemed preferable to that unworthy ‘selflessness’ into which I had first got out of ignorance, out of youth, in which I had subsequently remained out of lethargy, out of so-called ‘sense of duty’. – Here there came to my aid, in a way I cannot sufficiently admire and at precisely the right time, that had inheritance from my father’s side – fundamentally a predestination to an early death. Sickness liberated me slowly: it spared me any kind of breach, any violent or offensive step. I forfeited no goodwill at that time and gained much. Sickness likewise gave me a right to a complete reversal of my habits; it permitted, it commanded forgetting; it bestowed on me the compulsion to lie still, to be idle, to wait and be patient… But to do that means to think!… My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms philology: I was redeemed from the ‘book’, for years at a time I read nothing – the greatest favour I have ever done myself! – That deepest self, as it were buried and grown silent under a constant compulsion to listen to other selves (– and that is what reading means!) awoke slowly, timidly, doubtfully – but at length it spoke again. I have never been so happy with myself as in the sickest and most painful periods of my life: one has only to look at ‘Daybreak’ or perhaps the ‘Wanderer and his Shadow’ to grasp what this ‘return to myself’ was: a highest kind of recovery itself!… The other kind merely followed from this. –
5
Human, All Too Human, this memorial of a rigorous self-discipline with which I made a sudden end of every sort of ‘higher swindle’, ‘idealism’, ‘beautiful feelings’ and other woman-ishnesses that I had been infected with, was written chiefly in Sorrento; it received its conclusion, its final form during a Basel winter under far less favourable conditions than those in Sorrento. It is really Herr Peter Gast, then studying in Basel and very attached to me, who has the book on his conscience. I dictated, my head bandaged and painful, he wrote, he also corrected − he was really the actual writer, while I was merely the author. When the book finally arrived finished into my hands – to the profound astonishment of a serious invalid – I sent among others two copies to Bayreuth. Through a miracle of meaningful chance I received at the same time a beautiful copy of the Parsifal text, with Wagner’s dedication to me, ‘his dear friend Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ecclesiastical Counsellor’. – This crossing of the two books – it seemed to me to make an ominous sound. Was it not as though two swords had crossed?… At least we both felt it to be so: for we both kept silent. – About this time the first Bayreuther Blätter appeared: I grasped for what it had been high time. – Incredible! Wagner had become pious…
6
What I thought about myself at that time (1876), with what tremendous certainty I held in my hands my task and what was world-historic in it, the whole book, but especially a very explicit passage, bears witness: except that, with my instinctive cunning, I here too avoided the little word ‘I’, and this time it was not Schopenhauer or Wagner but one of my friends, the excellent Dr Paul Rée, whom I bathed in world-historic glory –who was happily far too refined a creature to… Others were less refined: I have always recognized the hopeless cases among my readers, the typical German professor for example, in that they have on the basis of this passage believed themselves compelled to understand the whole book as higher réealism… In fact it contains a contradiction of five or six propositions of my friend: a point discussed in the preface to the ‘Genealogy of Morals’. – The passage reads: But what is the main proposition arrived at by one of the boldest and coldest of thinkers, the author of the book ‘On the Origin of the Moral Sensations’ (lisez: Nietzsche, the first immoralisi), by virtue of his incisive and penetrating analysis of human behaviour? ‘Moral man is no closer to the intelligible world than physical man – for there is no intelligible world…’ This proposition, hardened and sharpened beneath the hammer-blow of historical knowledge (lisez: Revaluation of All Values), may perhaps at some future time –1890! – serve as the axe which is laid at the root of the ‘metaphysical need’ of man – whether more of a blessing or a curse to mankind who could say? But in any event as a proposition with the weightiest consequences, at once fruitful and fearful and looking out at the world with the Janus-face possessed by all great perceptions…