About the Book
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
About The Author The philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Prussia in 1844. After the death of his father, a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche was raised from the age of five by his mother in a household of women. In 1869 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, where he taught until 1879 when poor health forced him to retire. He never recovered from a nervous breakdown in 1889 and died eleven years later.
Known for saying that “god is dead,” Nietzsche propounded his metaphysical construct of the superiority of the disciplined individual (superman) living in the present over traditional values derived from Christianity and its emphasis on heavenly rewards. His ideas were appropriated by the Fascists, who turned his theories into social realities that he had never intended