Human, All Too Human

Human, All Too Human (1878), a series of 638 stunning epigrams and essays on almost every subject under the sun, was described by Friedrich Nietzsche as ‘the monument of a crisis’.

The year 1876 marked a turning point. Nietzsche felt compelled to reject not only Richard Wagner, his former mentor, as a man and a thinker, but also their common intellectual influence, Schopenhauer. The onset of ill health in the same year led him to give up his secure professorship, attained at the extraordinarily young age of twenty four. Yet out of these upheavals he forged his mature philosophy. This book sketches in his key theories about the will to power, the need to transcend Christian morality and the elite Free Spirits who live untrammelled by convention. Rejecting the style and spirit of German romanticism and returning to sources in the French Enlightenment, Nietzsche sets out his unsettling, views on topics ranging from art, arrogance and boredom to passion, science, vanity, women and youth. The result is one of the cornerstones of his life’s work.