Of First and Last Things

The first thing that ought to be said about Human, All Too Human is that it is a forcefully scientific book. By this I mean that it is a book with which Nietzsche vehemently pushes the scientific pursuit of knowledge and discredits any form of knowledge that claims to possess truth without basing itself on solid reason. He finds it necessary to champion science (taken generally to encompass all investigations of truth that are logically rigorous) because he sees a widespread, and mostly unquestioned, acceptance of false notions in modern European society; he believes these false notions result from unscientific thinking and can be corrected by stricter adherence to scientific ideals. He blames two general tendencies in particular for the lack of truth in modern society. First, he blames people’s faith in metaphysical explanations for human phenomena. He writes that “all that has begotten [metaphysical] assumptions is passion, error, and self-deception; the worst of all methods of acquiring knowledge, not the best of all, have taught belief in them” (HAH, 15). Nietzsche’s concern lies primarily, if not 38 exclusively, in the knowledge people have of themselves as humans. While metaphysical beliefs, which include all supernatural religions, hold that man is the result of forces generated outside the perceived universe, Nietzsche contends that humans are simply human, all-too-human, in the sense that there has been no role of metaphysical forces in their formation. Consequently, to understand man one must deny the power of metaphysics to provide knowledge and rather look toward more empirical sources of information to construct theories concerning man.

Secondly, he blames superficial thinking, the power of feelings, and fallacious reasoning for producing and allowing the perseverance of much falsehood. Generally speaking, Nietzsche believes that there is much more to human phenomena than meets the eye. Consequently, he believes that careful psychological observation is required to make any ground in understanding enigmatic man. However, he realizes that, faced with the difficulty of actually understanding man, people have almost without exception lazily and comfortably chosen to accept underdeveloped notions of themselves. It is this realization that prompts him to suggest the following: It is the mark of a higher culture to value the little unpretentious truths which have been discovered by means of rigorous method more highly than the errors handed down by metaphysical and artistic ages and men, which blind us and make us happy. (HAH, 13)

Such higher culture is contrasted with modern culture, which has largely accepted the “forms and symbols” handed down by spirits “not engaged in rigorous thinking” (HAH, 13). He claims that modern man believes in his notions of morality because he “deludes 39 himself” into thinking that “what he has essentially at heart must constitute the essence and heart of things” (HAH, 14). Finally, he points out “bad habits in drawing conclusions” such as the common tendencies to conclude “a thing exists, therefore it has a right to” and “an opinion makes happy, therefore it is a true opinion” (HAH, 27). For all these reasons, Nietzsche does not presume it is a given that mankind should have a decent understanding of itself and he refutes that mankind does have such an understanding. Accordingly, he believes that knowledge would be enhanced greatly by so-called “free spirits” who avoid the common pitfalls and adhere to a strictly scientific method. Indeed, he not only wishes for science to become more prominent but suggests that science as a common mode of thought is already on the horizon. He contends that “the historical probability is that one day mankind will very possibly become in general on the whole skeptical” (HAH, 23). Furthermore, he suggests that the Age of Enlightenment will soon rise again in full force as a reaction to the unscientific “metaphysical need” of Schopenhauerian teaching, which pervaded European thought in the second half of the nineteenth century (HAH, 26). Nietzsche believes that to do his work successfully the free spirit must not be bound by any sort of obligation, and therefore suggests that we are already in an age more conducive to scientific thought when he asks rhetorically, “Who is there who still feels any attachment at all?” in an aphorism entitled “Age of comparison” (HAH, 24). There is another notion vital to Nietzsche’s idea of science and its ability to provide knowledge of man that should in one sense be familiar to the modern reader and yet in another quite unfamiliar. This is the notion that man is not an aeterna veritas 40 (“something everlastingly true”) but rather something that has been produced by a process of evolution (HAH, 12). He accuses philosophers of assuming that man has always been like he is today and, for that reason, of lacking an “historical sense” (HAH, 13). However, while Nietzsche certainly does not deny that we have evolved biologically from lower organisms, his emphasis is on the evolution that took place in man following his becoming human a long time ago. Accordingly, he claims that “everything essential in the development of mankind took place in primeval times, long before the four thousand years we more or less know about” (HAH, 13). While he believes that “during these years mankind may well not have altered very much,” he notes that “the most recent manifestation of man…has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events” (HAH, 13). Thus, his conviction is that “everything has become” carries the belief that man had developed over the millennia as the result of forces that are not necessarily biological but perhaps even more importantly social and environmental (HAH, 13). The appearance of this conviction at the beginning of Human, All Too Human foreshadows the historical explanation of morality that he provides unsystematically in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak and systematically in On the Genealogy of Morals.

Even without having considered Nietzsche’s theory of morality, we can anticipate how his theory will coincide with and differ from those of Schopenhauer and Rée. Nietzsche’s insistence that any metaphysical knowledge, were it even attainable, “would be the most useless of all knowledge” certainly refutes Schopenhauer’s grounding of compassion, and therefore morality, in a metaphysical will that underlies all forms of life (HAH, 15-16). On this point Nietzsche and Rée agree, as Rée sought an alternative to 41

Schopenhauer’s metaphysical foundation for compassion—an alternative he found in

Darwinian evolutionary theory—because he too was not persuaded by Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Nietzsche already seems to agree with Rée on a number of other points as well. Like Rée, Nietzsche acknowledges the need for psychological observation to truly understand mankind. While we have not seen how Nietzsche will direct his psychological observation, Rée primarily directed his toward uncovering the vanity that lay behind men’s actions. Nietzsche recognizes the need for a historical sense to understand how man became what he is. Rée’s philosophy is also historical in nature, as he provides an historical explanation of how the concepts of “good” and “evil” arose; he states at one point that “the nature of any sensation is clear only to the extent that the history of its origin is clear” (BW, 92). Thus, while Rée’s theory ultimately founds itself on Darwinian evolutionary theory and we do not yet have reason to believe that Nietzsche endorsed such a theory, it is already quite evident that both were dedicated to naturalistic philosophy. Yet, for all the similarities observed so far between Nietzsche and Rée, a startling —and fundamental—dissimilarity appears in the first aphorism of Human, All Too Human, which is entitled “Chemistry of concepts and sensations” (HAH, 12). Nietzsche addresses the issue of “opposites,” such as rationality and irrationality, the sentient and the dead, and logic and unlogic (HAH, 12). He claims that, whereas metaphysical philosophy “has hitherto…den[ied] that the one originates in the other…historical philosophy…has discovered…that there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of popular metaphysical interpretations” (HAH, 12). Thus, Nietzsche 42 believes that many things conventionally considered as opposites are actually not so different from one another. Furthermore, he contends that “a mistake in reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis” (HAH, 12). His refutation of opposites unearths the very roots of both Schopenhauer and Rée’s philosophies, which depend on a real distinction between egoism and unegoism for the basis of the concepts of good and evil. Unlike Schopenhauer and Rée, who believe in the existence of compassion and selfless behavior, Nietzsche contends that “there exists, strictly speaking, neither an unegoistic action nor completely disinterested contemplation; both are only sublimations [of egoism], in which the basic element seems almost to have dispersed and reveals itself only under the most painstaking observation” (HAH, 12). Thus, he swiftly refutes Schopenhauer’s theory of morality by denying the very existence of pure compassion; he also pushes Rée’s theory back on its heels by denying its Darwinian underpinnings, which hold that natural selection led to the development of an unegoistic drive in man.