Conclusion: Metaphysics, Psychology, and the Free Spirit

Emphasizing one theme from the first volume of Human, all too Human sees Nietzsche’s philosophy as represented by a metaphysician of truth, a psychologist, and a free spirit as a first culmination; doing so allows us to realize the extent of the work of a decade from 1869 to 1879 and how the struggle with his personal life and the dynamic of his thinking and writing led him to the inevitable decision to quit the university and devote his future life to one over-arching purpose. From the origins of himself as a philosopher and educator (for students, first, and then anonymous readers) Nietzsche formed himself by beginning with a confrontation with the theoretical man of morality, the most prominent figure in The Birth of Tragedy and someone who, today, has re-appeared—with a proverbial and quite literal vengeance. His philosophy was a traversal; he had to go through and beyond both the university as an institution and himself as a classical philologist in order to begin to recognize how the coming-to-be of nihilism was disguised by the most treacherous of rationalizations. To see through the self-deception of a certain kind of thinking was, for him, a victory in the decade-long confrontation with the theory/morality relation. The developments from out of his own resources have reached us, together, and as a three-part herald for the contemporary situation of a necessary confrontation. (Other theorists, from the last century, will have to also have to be confronted for misrepresenting him—but that project will be for another time.)