Product Description

Written after Nietzsche had ended his friendship with Richard Wagner and had been forced to leave academic life through ill health, Human, All Too Human (1878) can be read as a monument to his personal crisis. It also marks the point when he matured as a philosopher, rejecting the German romanticism espoused by Wagner and Schopenhauer and instead returning to sources in the French Enlightenment. Here he sets out his unsettling views in a series of 638 stunning aphorisms – assessing subjects ranging from art to arrogance, boredom to passion, science to vanity and women to youth. This work also contains the seeds of concepts crucial to Nietzsche’s later philosophy, such as the will to power and the need to transcend conventional Christian morality. The result is one of the cornerstones of his life’s work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65541 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-29
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Friedrich Nietzsche was born near Leipzig in 1844, the son of a Lutheran clergyman. At 24 he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basle University, where he stayed until forced by his health to retire in 1879. Here, he wrote all his literature, including Thus Spake Zarathustra, and developed his idea of the Superman. He became insane in 1889 and remained so until his death in 1900. Marion Faber is Professor German at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. Her work includes publications on Kafka, Nietzsche and Weimar film.

Customer Reviews

Nietzsche at his best
This is Nietzsche at his best. Dangerous, ferocious , cunning and ultimately devastating. Here Nietzsche bares his teeth at the world and rips apart covention but always, always with a demonic grin on his satirical face. 'Human all to Human - can any man create a title more apt? His criticism of humanity is so incisive and decisive that many may quail on reading this text. Yet let all you faint hearted people be assured that Nietzsche's intention was not ridicule, per se. He challenges all our concepts and forces us to question our behaviour and thoughts - both as individuals and as a society.
Nieztsche is, in this work, inherently contradictory but this is , as always, his aim. His view is that there are no such things as absolutes yet he openly asks us to question his own statement on the grounds that if this is the case then his ideas are themselves doubtfull.
Thus 'Human all to Human' is a book of tremendous power and one that gives a novice, as well as the expert, more than a litte to dwell on.

Nietzsche's Coming Of Age
In order to give form to his Overman, Nietzsche had to call to account many human failings and weaknesses, and then reveal their baseness to the world. Nietzsche identified so much that had to be rejected in human life and affairs, (and so much that constituted greatness), which is the reason for the sheer scope of "Human, All Too Human". In 638 short aphorisms it covers politics, warfare, ascetics, morals, art, poetry, marriage, crime & punishment, the soul, and the gamut of human feeling, emotion, motive, instinct, will to power, habit and need.

In Human, All Too Human", Nietzsche outlines the basis of his later, more focused works. It is distinguished from these by its lack of arrogance, lack of aggression and its lack of real direction. Chapters are harnessed together by titles such as "A Look At The State", "Man Alone With Himself", "Signs Of Higher And Lower Culture", Man In Society", and "Woman And Child".

The book was written just after Nietzsche gave up his professors chair at Basel in Switzerland, and around the time of his break from his erstwhile father-figure, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche had now lost the shackles of youth and employment and was at his most free-spirited and this book is testimony to that fact: "Human, All Too Human" is dedicated to deliciously-malicious free-spirits everywhere.

Less intense than some of his later work, this book evokes a walk in the mountains enjoying pleasant conversation with one of the most penetrating and enlightened minds in history. Less intense perhaps, but no less compelling or unsettling.

This is only the 'first edition'
Subsequent to the original publication of 'Human All Too Human', Nietzsche published two fairly lengthy supplements, 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims' and 'The Wanderer and His Shadow'. All three were combined in 1886 to produce the second edition of 'Human All Too Human'. This (Penguin) edition is only the first edition. Look instead on Amazon for the Cambridge edition, also translated by Hollingdale, which is the second edition and is much longer (and not much more expensive either).