Third Lecture

This was, in fact, an even more tragic state of mind than the previous one, because in the previous one he believed that he could find comfort in the illusions of life about the world of perception, which imposed itself as reality despite its one-sidedness. Now, however, he could no longer even cling to these illusions as a consolation, and in a certain sense he became a fanatic for truth, telling himself: However deeply this reality presented by the external senses may tear the soul apart with inner pain, it is the reality that is immediately before us. — This enormous burden was exerted on Friedrich Nietzsche by his agnostic attitude. From then on, he could no longer bear this burden, and so he sighed out what he wrote in his book of aphorisms, Human, All Too Human: O you poor human being—that is how Nietzsche felt—O you poor human being, you imagine ideals, illusions, in which you escape from the sensual into a supersensual realm; you want to rise from the human to the divine; by developing powers that seduce you into such illusions, you fall even deeper into the human underworld, and what you initially developed in a naive way as your humanity becomes subhuman, all-too-human. Examine your instincts, examine your egoism, and you will see how you conjure up selflessness as an illusion, as a moral ideal! The truth is that you talk about selfless ideals, but basically you only worship a finer, an all-too-human egoism; in your subconscious there lives an element that is deeply beneath your humanity, not only beneath what you want to raise yourself up to, as to a divine being. — It was from this mood that the writings “Human, All Too Human” arose for a true seeker of truth.