Читать книгу Human All-Too-Human, Part 1 - Фридрих Вильгельм Ницше - Страница 1

Nietzsche's essay, Richard Wagner in 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 Nietzsche's 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 pictured 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:1 "Human, all-too-Human, 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. Idealism 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 understood when it is remembered that at this period Nietzsche was beginning to suffer from stomach trouble and headaches. As a cure for his complaints, 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 and several others, as we learn from his notebooks and posthumous writings, date from the period of the Thoughts out of Season.

It must be clearly understood, however, that Nietzsche's 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 rights 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. he has learnt by introspection the spiteful and revengeful spirit of the sick man and his religion. Secondly, in his moments of freedom from pain and gloom his thoughts will be all the more brilliant.

In support of this last statement, one instance may be selected out of hundreds that could be adduced. Heinrich Heine spent the greater part of his life in exile from his native country, tortured by headaches, and finally dying in a foreign land as the result of a spinal disease. His splendid works were composed in his moments of respite from illness, and during the last years of his life, when his health was at its worst, he gave to the world his famous Romancero. We would likewise do well to recollect Goethe's saying:

Thus neither the form of this book – so startling at first to those who have been brought up in the traditions of our own school – nor the treat all men as equals, and proclaim the establishment of equal rights:

so far a socialistic mode of thought which is based on justice is possible; but, as has been said, only within the ranks of the governing classes, which in this case practises justice with sacrifices and abnegations. On the other hand, to demand equality of rights, as do the Socialists of the subject caste, is by no means the outcome of justice, but of covetousness. If you expose bloody pieces of flesh to a beast, and then withdraw them again until it finally begins to roar, do you think that the roaring implies justice?

Theologians on the other hand, as may be expected, will find no such ready help in their difficulties from Nietzsche. They must, on the contrary, be on their guard against so alert an adversary – a duty which they are apparently not going to shirk; for theologians are amongst the most ardent students of Nietzsche in this country. Their attention may therefore be drawn to aphorism 630 of this book, dealing with convictions and their origin, which will no doubt be successfully refuted by the defenders of the true faith. In fact, there is not a single paragraph in the book that does not deserve careful study by all serious thinkers.

On the whole, however, this is a calm book, and those who are accustomed to Nietzsche the out-spoken Immoralist, may be somewhat astonished at the calm tone of the present volume. The explanation is that Nietzsche was now just beginning to walk on his own philosophical path. His life-long aim, the uplifting of the type man, was still in view, but the way leading towards it was once more uncertain. Hence the peculiarly calm, even melancholic, and what Nietzsche himself would call Apollonian, tinge of many of these aphorisms, so different from the style of his earlier and later writings. For this very reason, however, the book may appeal all the more to English readers, who are of course more Apollonian than Dionysian. Nietzsche is feeling his way, and these aphorisms represent his first steps. As such – besides having a high intrinsic value of themselves – they are enormous aids to the study of his character and temperament.

J. M. KENNEDY.