Human, All Too Human

Nietzsche’s first five books, The Birth of Tragedy and the four Untimely Meditations, were essays. All of them dealt, in one way or another, with questions of value: the value of art and life itself, the value of history and the problems whether there are supra-historical values, and the value of self-perfection. This last point was central in the third Meditation, in which Nietzsche proposed that a new picture of man was needed to counter the true but deadly Darwinian doctrine of the essential continuity of man and animal.

 
Being determined, however, to build on an empirical foundation, instead of falling back on dogma or intuition, Nietzsche found himself unable to do what he wanted. Then, roughly at the same time he decided to break with Wagner, he gave up his previous style and method and turned to writing books composed of aphorisms – largely concerned with human psychology or, in Nietzsche’s phrase, with the “human, all-too-human.”