Distilling Nietzsche → Human, All Too Human
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Distilling Nietzsche → Human, All Too Human

Description

Distilling the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Here we unpack Human, All Too Human.

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Philosophy
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Part of my Distilling The Greats series.

Volume I

0. Preface

Passage
Distillation
Comments
I have been told often enough, and always with an expression of great surprise, that all my writings, from the Birth of Tragedy* to the most recently published Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, + have something that distinguishes them and unites them together: they all of them, I have been given to understand, contain snares and nets for unwary birds and in effect a persistent invitation to the overturning of habitual evaluations and valued habits. 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. And in fact I myself do not believe that anyone has ever before looked into the world with an equally profound degree of suspicion, and not merely as an occasional devil's advocate, but, to speak theologically, just as much as an enemy and indicter of God; and anyone who could divine something of the consequences that lie in that profound suspiciousness, something of the fears and frosts of the isolation to which that unconditional disparity of view condemns him who is infected with it, will also understand how often, in an effort to recover from myself, as it were to induce a temporary self-forgetting, I have sought shelter in this or that - in some piece of admiration or enmity or scientificality or frivolity or stupidity; and why, where I could not find what I needed, I had artificially to enforce, falsify and invent a suitable fiction for myself (- and what else have poets ever done? and to what end does art exist in the world at all?). What I again and again needed most for my cure and self-restoration, however, was the belief that I was not thus isolated, not alone in seeing as I did - an enchanted surmising of relatedness and identity in eye and desires, a reposing in a trust of friendship, a blindness in concert with another without suspicion or question-marks, a pleasure in foregrounds, surfaces, things close and closest, in everything possessing colour, skin and apparitionality. Perhaps in this regard I might be reproached with having employed a certain amount of 'art', a certain amount of false-coinage: for example, that I knowingly-willfully closed my eyes before Schopenhauer's* blind will to morality at a time when I was already sufficiently clearsighted about morality; likewise that I deceived myself over Richard Wagner's incurable romanticism, as though it were a beginning and not an end; likewise over the Greeks, likewise over the Germans and their future - and perhaps a whole long list could be made of such likewise? Supposing, however, that all this were true and that I was reproached with it with good reason, what do you know, what could you know, of how much cunning in self-preservation, how much reason and higher safeguarding, is contained in such self-deception - or of how much falsity I shall require if I am to continue to permit myself the luxury of my truthfulness?... Enough, 1 am still living; and life is, after all, not a product of morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception ... but there you are, I am already off again, am I not, and doing what I have always done, old immoralist and bird-catcher that I am - speaking unmorally, extra-morally, 'beyond good and evil?
• Nietzsche is saying that his writings are designed to make people question everything they take for granted, especially morality and traditional values. • His habit of radical skepticism often left him isolated, so he sometimes deliberately embraced illusions, heroes, friendships, and artistic fictions simply to make life bearable. • He admits that even his admiration for figures like Schopenhauer and Wagner involved a degree of self-deception that helped preserve him. • The deeper point is that human beings need some illusions to live, and even the pursuit of truth may require occasional falsehoods. • He ends by reaffirming his position "beyond good and evil," arguing that life itself depends more on creative deception than on moral purity.
• He wasn’t quite the pessimist as Schopenhauer was, but he’s very much pragmatic in his assessment of mankind. He has disdain for the structure as a whole, mainly cause it’s been left unquestioned.
Thus when I needed to I once also invented for myself the 'free spirits' to whom this melancholy-valiant book with the title Human, All Too Human is dedicated: 'free spirits' of this kind do not exist, did not exist - but, as I have said, I had need of them at that time if I was to keep in good spirits while surrounded by ills (sickness, solitude, unfamiliar places, acedia, inactivity): as brave companions and familiars with whom one can laugh and chatter when one feels like laughing and chattering, and whom one can send to the Devil when they become tedious - as compensation for the friends I lacked. That free spirits of this kind could one day exist, that our Europe will have such active and audacious fellows among its sons of tomorrow and the next day, physically present and palpable and not, as in my case, merely phantoms and hermit's phantasmagoria: 1 should wish to be the last to doubt it. I see them already coming, slowly, slowly; and perhaps I shall do something to speed their coming if I describe in advance under what vicissitudes, upon what paths, I see them coming?
• Nietzsche says that when he wrote Human, All Too Human, he felt so isolated in his way of thinking that he invented imaginary companions he called "free spirits." • These free spirits represented the kind of independent, courageous thinkers he wished existed around him and helped him endure loneliness and hardship. • Although they were initially a fiction, he came to believe that such people would one day become real and emerge in Europe. • He sees his writings as helping to create them by preparing the ground for a new type of person. • In essence, Nietzsche is saying: “I first imagined these people because I needed them, but now I write for them because I believe they are coming.”
One may conjecture that a spirit in whom the type 'free spirit will one day become ripe and sweet to the point of perfection has had its decisive experience in a great liberation and that previously it was all the more a fettered spirit and seemed to be chained forever to its pillar and corner. What fetters the fastest? What bonds are all but unbreakable? In the case of men of a high and select kind they will be their duties: that reverence proper to youth, that reserve and delicacy before all that is honoured and revered from of old, that gratitude for the soil out of which they have grown, for the hand which led them, for the holy place where they learned to worship - their supreme moments themselves will fetter them the fastest, lay upon them the most enduring obligation. The great liberation comes for those who are thus fettered suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: the youthful soul is all at once convulsed, torn loose, torn away - it itself does not know what is happening. A drive and impulse rules and masters it like a command; a will and desire awakens to go off, anywhere, at any cost; a vehement dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames and flickers in all its senses. 'Better to die than to go on living here' - thus responds the imperious voice and temptation: and this 'here', this 'at home' is everything it had hitherto loved! A sudden terror and suspicion of what it loved, a lightning-bolt of contempt for what it called 'duty', a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically erupting desire for travel, strange places, estrangements, coldness, soberness, frost, a hatred of love, perhaps a desecrating blow and glance backwards to where it formerly loved and worshipped, perhaps a hot blush of shame at what it has just done and at the same time an exultation that it has done it, a drunken, inwardly exultant shudder which betrays that a victory has been won - a victory? over what? over whom? an enigmatic, question-packed, questionable victory, but the first victory nonetheless: such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great liberation. It is at the same time a sickness that can destroy the man who has it, this first outbreak of strength and will to self-determination, to evaluating on one's own account, this will to free will: and how much sickness is expressed in the wild experiments and singularities through which the liberated prisoner now seeks to demonstrate his mastery over things! He prowls cruelly around with an unslaked lasciviousness; what he captures has to expiate the perilous tension of his pride; what excites him he tears apart. With a wicked laugh he turns round whatever he finds veiled and through some sense of shame or other spared and pampered: he puts to the test what these things look like when they are reversed. It is an act of willfulness, and pleasure in willfulness, if now he perhaps bestows his favour on that which has hitherto had a bad reputation - if, full of inquisitiveness and the desire to tempt and experiment, he creeps around the things most forbidden. Behind all his toiling and weaving - for he is restlessly and aimlessly on his way as if in a desert - stands the question mark of a more and more perilous curiosity. 'Can all values not be turned round? and is good perhaps evil? and God only an invention and finesse of the Devil? Is everything perhaps in the last resort false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? must we not be deceivers?' - such thoughts as these tempt him and lead him on, even further away, even further down. Solitude encircles and embraces him, ever more threatening, suffocating, heart-tightening, that terrible goddess and mater saeva cupidinum - but who today knows what solitude is?…
• Nietzsche argues that truly independent thinkers are often born from people who were once deeply committed to tradition, duty, and the values they inherited. • Their "great liberation" begins when they suddenly break free from those loyalties and feel compelled to question everything they once believed. • This freedom is exhilarating, but it is also dangerous: the newly liberated person may become reckless, cynical, and obsessed with overturning accepted truths. • As they push further into doubt and self-discovery, they find themselves increasingly isolated from society and from their former selves. • The path to becoming a "free spirit" is therefore not a peaceful awakening but a painful struggle through uncertainty, rebellion, and profound loneliness.
From this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years of temptation and experiment, it is still a long road to that tremendous overflowing certainty and health which may not dispense even with wickedness, as a means and fish-hook of knowledge, to that mature freedom of spirit which is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought - to that inner spaciousness and indulgence of superabundance which excludes the danger that the spirit may even on its own road perhaps lose itself and become infatuated and remain seated intoxicated in some corner or other, to that superfluity of formative, curative, moulding and restorative forces which is precisely the sign of great health, that superfluity which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure: the master's privilege of the free spirit! In between there may lie long years of convalescence, years full of variegated, painfully magical transformations ruled and led along by a tenacious will to health which often ventures to clothe and disguise itself as health already achieved. There is a midway condition which a man of such a destiny will not be able to recall without emotion: it is characterized by a pale, subtle happiness of light and sunshine, a feeling of birdlike freedom, bird-like altitude, bird-like exuberance, and a third thing in which curiosity is united with a tender contempt. A 'free-spirit' - this cool expression does one good in every condition, it is almost warming. One lives no longer in the fetters of love and hatred, without yes, without no, near or far as one wishes, preferably slipping away, evading, fluttering off, gone again, again flying aloft; one is spoiled, as everyone is who has at some time seen a tremendous number of things beneath him - and one becomes the opposite of those who concern themselves with things which have nothing to do with them. Indeed, the free spirit henceforth has to do only with things - and how many things! - with which he is no longer concerned…
• After the painful period of breaking free from old beliefs and enduring loneliness, Nietzsche says a person can eventually arrive at a deeper kind of freedom and health. • This mature free spirit is no longer driven by rebellion for its own sake but possesses self-mastery, intellectual flexibility, and the ability to explore many perspectives without becoming trapped by any of them. • During the recovery from liberation, there is often a lighter period marked by curiosity, independence, and a growing detachment from old emotional entanglements. • The truly free spirit learns to rise above many of the concerns that once seemed urgent and gains the freedom to experiment with life without losing himself.
A step further in convalescence: and the free spirit again draws near to life - slowly, to be sure, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustfully. It again grows warmer around him, yellower, as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kind blow across him. It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. He is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they seem! what bloom and magic they have acquired! He looks back gratefully - grateful to his wandering, to his hardness and self alienation, to his viewing of far distances and bird-like flights in cold heights. What a good thing he had not always stayed 'at home', stayed 'under his own roof' like a delicate apathetic loafer! He had been beside himself: no doubt of that. Only now does he see himself - and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What unprecedented shudders! What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest, these convalescents and lizards again half turned towards life: - there are some among them who allow no day to pass without hanging a little song of praise on the hem of its departing robe. And, to speak seriously: to become sick in the manner of these free spirits, to remain sick for a long time and then, slowly, slowly, to become healthy, by which I mean 'healthier', is a fundamental cure for all pessimism (the cancerous sore and inveterate vice, as is well known, of old idealists and inveterate liars). There is wisdom, practical wisdom, in for a long time prescribing even health for oneself only in small doses.-
• Nietzsche describes the later stage of recovery after a person has broken free from old beliefs and endured a long period of isolation. • The free spirit begins to rediscover joy in ordinary life, appreciating simple things with a depth that was impossible before the journey. • He becomes grateful for his suffering and estrangement because they taught him to see both himself and the world more clearly. • Nietzsche argues that this process is a cure for pessimism: rather than escaping pain, one grows through it and emerges healthier, wiser, and more appreciative of life. • Health, like freedom, must often be regained gradually and in small doses.
At that time it may finally happen that, under the sudden illumination of a still stressful, still changeable health, the free, ever freer spirit begins to unveil the riddle of that great liberation which had until then waited dark, questionable, almost untouchable in his memory. If he has for long hardly dared to ask himself: 'why so apart? so alone? renouncing everything I once reverenced? renouncing reverence itself? why this hardness, this suspiciousness, this hatred for your own virtues?" - now he dares to ask it aloud and hears in reply something like an answer. 'You shall become master over yourself, master also over your virtues. Formerly they were your masters; but they must be only your instruments beside other instruments. You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal. You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgement - the displacement, distortion and merely apparent teleology of horizons and whatever else pertains to perspectivism; also the quantum of stupidity that resides in antitheses of values and the whole intellectual loss which every For, every Against costs us. You shall learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the sense of perspective and its injustice. You shall above all see with your own eyes where injustice is always at its greatest: where life has developed at its smallest, narrowest, neediest, most incipient and yet cannot avoid taking itself as the goal and measure of things and for the sake of its own preservation secretly and meanly and ceaselessly crumbling away and calling into question the higher, greater, richer - you shall see with your own eyes the problem of order of rank, and how power and right and spaciousness of perspective grow into the heights together. You shall' - enough: from now on the free spirit knows what 'you shall' he has obeyed, and he also knows what he now can, what only now he - may do.
• Nietzsche says that the ultimate purpose of the free spirit's journey is not simply to reject old values, but to gain mastery over himself. • Instead of being controlled by his beliefs, virtues, or moral commitments, he learns to use them as tools in service of higher goals. • He comes to see that every perspective is limited and that all judgments contain some degree of bias, distortion, and injustice. • This broader perspective allows him to understand how different values arise and to recognize the difference between narrow, life-preserving viewpoints and more expansive, life-enhancing ones. • True freedom, for Nietzsche, is the ability to see from many perspectives while consciously choosing one's own path.
This is how the free spirit elucidates to himself that enigma of liberation, and inasmuch as he generalizes his own case ends by adjudicating on what he has experienced thus. 'What has happened to me', he says to himself, 'must happen to everyone in whom a task wants to become incarnate and "come into the world".' The secret force and necessity of this task will rule among and in the individual facets of his destiny like an unconscious pregnancy - long before he has caught sight of this task itself or knows its name. Our vocation commands and disposes of us even when we do not yet know it; it is the future that regulates our today. Given it is the problem of order of rank of which we may say it is our problem, we free spirits: it is only now, at the midday of our life, that we understand what preparations, bypaths, experiments, temptations, disguises the problem had need of before it was allowed to rise up before us, and how we first had to experience the most manifold and contradictory states of joy and distress in soul and body, as adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world called 'man', as surveyors and guagers of that 'higher' and 'one upon the other' that is likewise called 'man' - penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining nothing, losing nothing, asking everything, cleansing everything of what is chance and accident in it and as it were thoroughly sifting it - until at last we had the right to say, we free spirits: 'Here - a new problem! Here a long ladder upon whose rungs we ourselves have sat and climbed - which we ourselves have at some time been! Here a higher, a deeper, a beneath-us, a tremendous long ordering, an order of rank, which we see: here - our problem!'
• Nietzsche argues that the struggles, detours, and transformations of a person's life are often preparing them for a deeper task long before they consciously recognize it. • What feels like random suffering or wandering may actually be the work of an emerging vocation shaping the individual from within. • Looking back, the free spirit realizes that all of his experiences: contradictory beliefs, joys, hardships, and explorations, were necessary preparation for understanding a profound question about human greatness and the hierarchy of values. • Only after climbing many rungs of life's ladder can he finally see the larger structure that connects them all. • What once seemed like chaos is revealed as preparation for a higher purpose.
No psychologist or reader of signs will have a moment's difficulty in recognizing to what stage in the evolution just described the present book belongs (or has been placed -). But where today are there psychologists? In France, certainly; perhaps in Russia; definitely not in Germany. There is no lack of reasons as to why the Germans of today could even regard this fact as redounding to their honour: an ill fate for one who in this matter is by nature and attainment un-German! This German book, which has known how to find its readers in a wide circle of lands and peoples - it has been on its way for about ten years - and must be capable of some kind of music and flute-player's art by which even coy foreign ears are seduced to listen - it is precisely in Germany that this book has been read most carelessly and heard the worst: why is that? - 'It demands too much', has been the reply, 'it addresses itself to people who are not oppressed by uncouth duties, it wants refined and experienced senses, it needs superfluity, superfluity of time, of clarity in heart and sky, of otium in the most audacious sense: - all of them good things that we Germans of today do not have and therefore also cannot give'. - After so courteous a reply my philosophy advises me to keep silent and to ask no more questions; especially as in certain cases, as the saying has it, one remains a philosopher only by - keeping silent.
• Nietzsche says that Human, All Too Human was written for a particular type of reader: someone with the leisure, experience, independence, and psychological insight needed to follow its arguments. • He complains that although the book found readers across Europe, it was often misunderstood in Germany because Germans were too burdened by duty, busyness, and convention to appreciate it. • The book requires not just intelligence but a certain freedom of spirit and abundance of time. • He ends with a touch of irony, suggesting that rather than argue with his critics, a philosopher sometimes does best to remain silent.

1. Of First and Last Things

Passage
Distillation
Comments
Chemistry of Ideas and Sensations. Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two thousand years ago: how can something originate in its opposite, for example rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic, disinterested contemplation in covetous desire, living for others in egoism, truth in error? Metaphysical philosophy has hitherto surmounted this difficulty by denying that the one originates in the other and assuming for the more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the 'thing in itself'.* Historical philosophy, on the other hand, which can no longer be separated from natural science, the youngest of all philosophical methods, has discovered in individual cases (and this will probably be the result in every case) that there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of popular or metaphysical interpretations, and that a mistake in reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis: according to this explanation there exists, strictly speaking, neither an unegoistic action nor completely disinterested contemplation; both are only sublimations, in which the basic element seems almost to have dispersed and reveals itself only under the most painstaking observation. All we require, and what can be given us only now the individual sciences have attained their present level, is a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone: what if this chemistry would end up by revealing that in this domain too the most glorious colours are derived from base, indeed from despised materials? Will there be many who desire to pursue such researches? Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind: must one not be almost inhuman to detect in oneself a contrary inclination?
• Nietzsche challenges the traditional belief that noble things: such as truth, morality, reason, and selflessness, come from a separate, higher realm. • Instead, he argues that these qualities often emerge gradually from more basic and even seemingly undesirable origins, just as complex chemicals are formed from simpler elements. • What appears pure or elevated may be a refined version of instincts like self-interest, desire, or error. • He calls for a "chemistry" of human values that traces lofty ideals back to their real psychological and historical roots. • Most people resist this kind of investigation because they prefer inspiring myths about origins to uncomfortable truths.
Inherited Faults of Philosophers. All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of 'man' as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestation of man, such as has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become; while some of them would have it that the whole world is spun out of this faculty of cognition. Now, everything essential in the development of mankind took place in primeval times, long before the four thousand years we more or less know about; during these years mankind may well not have altered very much. But the philosopher here sees 'instincts' in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole of teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.
• Nietzsche criticizes philosophers for assuming that human nature is fixed and eternal rather than something that has evolved over time. • They study modern man and mistakenly treat his instincts, values, and ways of thinking as universal truths. • In reality, both humanity and our capacity for knowledge have developed through a long historical process. • Because everything has become what it is, rather than existing eternally, philosophy must become historical and recognize its own limitations. • The proper response is intellectual humility, not confidence in absolute truths.
Appreciation of Unpretentious Truths. 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. At first the former are regarded with scorn, as though the two things could not possibly be accorded equal rights: they stand there so modest, simple, sober, so apparently discouraging, while the latter are so fair, splendid, intoxicating, perhaps indeed enrapturing. Yet that which has been attained by laborious struggle, the certain, enduring and thus of significance for any further development of knowledge is nonetheless the higher; to adhere to it is manly and demonstrates courage, simplicity and abstemiousness. Gradually not only the individual but all mankind will be raised to this manliness, when they have finally become accustomed to valuing viable, enduring knowledge more highly and lost all faith in inspiration and the acquisition of knowledge by miraculous means. - Worshippers of form, with their standards of the beautiful and sublime, will, to be sure, at first have good ground for mockery once estimation of unpretentious truths and the scientific spirit begins to dominate: but only because either their eye has not yet discovered the charm of the simplest form or because those raised in that spirit are as yet very far from being thoroughly permeated by it, so that they still thoughtlessly imitate old forms (and do so badly, as does everyone to whom a thing no longer matters very much). Formerly the spirit was not engaged in rigorous thinking, its serious occupation was the spinning out of forms and symbols. That has now changed; serious occupation with the symbolic has become a mark of a lower culture. As our arts themselves grow ever more intellectual, our senses more spiritual, and as for example we now adjudge what is pleasant sounding quite differently from the way we did a hundred years ago: so the forms of our life will grow ever more spiritual, perhaps to the eye of earlier ages uglier, but only because it is incapable of seeing how the realm of inner, spiritual beauty is continually growing deeper and wider, and to what extent we may all now accord the eye of insight greater value than the fairest structure or the sublimest edifice.
• Nietzsche argues that a mature culture values hard-won truths more than beautiful illusions, even when those illusions are inspiring or comforting. • Scientific discoveries often appear plain and unimpressive compared to the grand myths, symbols, and metaphysical stories of the past, but they are more valuable because they are reliable and enduring. • He believes that humanity will gradually learn to prize intellectual honesty over inspiration, revelation, and wishful thinking. • As this happens, our sense of beauty itself will change, shifting from admiration of outward forms to appreciation of deeper understanding and insight. • In Nietzsche's view, the highest beauty is not found in comforting appearances but in seeing reality clearly.
Astrology and What Is Related To It. It is probable that the objects of the religious, moral and aesthetic sensations belong only to the surface of things, while man likes to believe that here at least he is in touch with the world's heart; the reason he deludes himself is that these things produce in him such profound happiness and unhappiness, and thus he exhibits here the same pride as in the case of astrology. For astrology believes the starry firmament revolves around the fate of man; the moral man, however, supposes that what he has essentially at heart must also constitute the essence and heart of things.
• Nietzsche argues that people often mistake the intensity of their feelings for evidence that they have discovered some deep truth about reality. • Just as astrology assumes the stars revolve around human destiny, moral and religious thinkers assume that their deepest values and emotions reveal the true nature of the universe. • In both cases, human beings place themselves at the center of things and project their concerns onto the world. • The fact that something feels profoundly meaningful does not mean it reflects the fundamental structure of reality.
Misunderstanding Of The Dream. The man of the ages of barbarous primordial culture believed that in the dream he was getting to know a second real world: here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without the dream one would have had no occasion to divide the world into two. The dissection into soul and body is also connected with the oldest idea of the dream, likewise the postulation of a life of the soul, thus the origin of all belief in spirits, and probably also of the belief in gods. 'The dead live on, for they appear to the living in dreams': that was the conclusion one formerly drew, throughout many millennia.
• Nietzsche argues that metaphysics began with a misunderstanding of dreams. • Early humans believed that the dream world was just as real as the waking world, leading them to conclude that there must be a separate realm beyond ordinary experience. • From this arose ideas such as the soul, spirits, gods, and life after death, since people encountered deceased loved ones in dreams and assumed they continued to exist. • In Nietzsche's view, many of humanity's deepest religious and metaphysical beliefs originated from mistaken interpretations of a common psychological experience.

2. On the History of the Moral Sensations

3. The Religious Life

Volume II