Nietzsche’s “Monument of Crisis”: Human, All Too Human

Understanding this Often-Neglected Work from the “Free Spirit” Series

A modern-day image from Basel, the city in which Nietzsche was working as a professor of classical philology until his resignation in 1879, just a year after the publication of the first installment of “Human, All Too Human.” ( from | Free for use)

What? Everything only-human, all too human? It is with this sigh that one emerges from my writings, not without a kind of reserve and mistrust even in regard to morality, not a little tempted and emboldened, indeed, for once to play the advocate of the worst things: as though they have perhaps been only the worst slandered? My writings have been called a schooling in suspicion, even more in contempt, but fortunately also in courage, indeed in audacity. (HAH, Preface, 1)

Introduction

Nietzsche’s work can be characterised by a lot of things. It was a stunning campaign against traditional morality; it was concerned with protecting and elevating “culture” above all else, and it delineated the phenomenon of self-overcoming. Central to all this was an attempt to explain as much as possible through natural factors instead of being prematurely ascribed to metaphysical (or transcendent) causes.

By the time he wrote Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche was thoroughly disillusioned by the kind of romanticism under whose spell he wrote the brilliant work The Birth of Tragedy. Something else had to affirm human life, and before he (and humanity) could figure out what it…