Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister (Human all too Human. A Book for Free Spirits)

Chemnitz: Schmeitzner, 1878. First Edition. contemporary boards. Very good. Nietzsche’s First “Aphoristic” Work and His Introduction of “Perspectivism”

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister (Human all too Human. A Book for Free Spirits). Schmeitzner, Chemnitz, 1878. 1 blank leaf + half title + TP + 1 leaf = Vorrede + 1 leaf = Inhalt + 1 leaf = half title + [3] – 377 + [378]= Printer’s information + 1 leaf = publisher's advertisements + 1 blank leaf. Octavo. First Edition, First Issue, Schaberg 29.


Includes initial half title before the full title page and the “eere” correction, cut and pasted by Schmeitzner over “menon” (a non-word) to create “meere” (sea) on p290 aphorism 431, and advertisements.

Only 489 copies of this first edition, first issue, as the remaining 511 of the original 1000 first edition copies were sold to E. W. Fritzsch in 1886 for use in a new edition with new title page and without the ads. Thus, this copy is extremely rare in any state.

This is the first book by Nietzsche where he is listed simply as Friedrich Nietzsche rather than as “prof.” In fact, Human, All Too Human constituted such a radical departure in style and content for Nietzsche that he first proposed to his publisher that it be released anonymously or with a pseudonym. Schmeitzner, however, would not allow it.

Reluctant to construct a philosophical “system,” and sensitive to the importance of style in philosophic writing, Nietzsche composed these works as a series of several hundred aphorisms, a departure from his style up to this point. Much of the work is devoted to what one might now call "psychoanalytical" insights into the nature of common human experience and the origins of our human valuations. At the time, serious inquiry into such things as the nature of dreams, the meaning of pity or the phenomenon of laughter had no place in the field of philosophy.

Human All Too Human also contains Nietzsche’s reflections upon cultural and psychological phenomena in reference to individuals' organic and physiological constitutions. The idea of power sporadically appears as an explanatory principle, but Nietzsche tends at this time to invoke hedonistic considerations of pleasure and pain in his explanations of cultural and psychological phenomena. It is here, too, that Nietzsche's famous epistemological "perspectivism" is first broached: the view that "truths" are nothing more than interpretations of reality, formed from different perspectives and more or less successful in their struggle against competing "truths."

Like the four books to follow, the present work is addressed to the "free spirits of Europe." It was the present work that finally divided Nietzsche from his greatest friend, Richard Wagner, more and more in Nietzsche's mind motivated by only the most simplistic greed for power, and betraying the promise of his art.

CONDITION: Very good in contemporary marbled boards with cloth spine, ltitle ettered in gilt. Light edgewear and some sunning to top inch or so of marbled boards. Pages clean and bright throughout.

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