The “Hard Psychologica” of Human, all too Human

One more reference to a biographical confession gives us a sense of Nietzsche’s experience during one of the definitive periods in his life as he recalls the postponement and, finally, its end. No decision will be more important. The philosopher as an educator will have to abandon the university and his duties as both a reluctant philologist and a committed teacher. In Ecce Homo, he writes with the clarity of retrospection.The judgment is harsh, perhaps too one-sided; that does not forgive himself because he had to forget and, in place of memory, often so burdened and paralyzing, substitute the facts of a discipline for a unique kind of perception. He had been iconoclastic and, instead of living up the standards of a “hermit of culture,” he had compromised himself with a professional occupation in an institution. His sustained ideals for the individual, language, and truth, however, have been defended with tenacity; what stands in the way of their fulfillment, to be made real and more than as an emulation of the ancients, is to be realized in a different, more private way than as an educator in a university. The judgments of his autobiography are marked by a peculiar kind of relation; they are, one senses, disproportionate. Drawing back from 1888 and returning to the period of our concern takes us to the unavoidable decision and then what he calls, several times beginning in the “Preface” to Human, all too Human, a “great liberation.” The free spirit will emerge as the relation of the metaphysician of truth and the psychologist at the same time as he found the strength to remove himself from university life. Any observation of the kind—“his increased disinterest in philology caused him to leave academia forever”—can only ever be partial. He had, at least since 1872, transformed the classical idea of a discipline and made it his own; leaving the university had, near the end, very little to do with philology and much more to do with now acting on a vision of himself he had to put into practice. The university professor and former scholar was compelled to become a hermit in order to fully confront his culture. He did so, first, by writing the first volume of Human, all too Human in 1878 as a catalyst for the coming break.