Science, Culture, and Free Spirit: A Study of Nietzsche's "Human, All-Too Human." (review)

Human, All Too Human began life as an unfashionable observation (entitled "The Free Spirit") and was originally to be titled The Ploughshare (which was also to become the working title of Dawn). According to Nietzsche, work on the text was begun in August 1876 and during his flight from the opening of the Bayreuth festival in the forests of Klingenbrunn. According to Gast, however, Nietzsche began dictating drafts of the book to him between May and July of that year and so before the festival. Whatever the facts, HH signals a radical departure from Nietzsche's previous writings in terms of both style and content. As with almost every book he now wrote, Nietzsche considered it his most important book to date. He wanted the book published in May to coincide with the centennial celebration of Voltaire's birthday (May 30), and he wanted the printing of the book to be a secret matter. He even considered publishing it under a pseudonym, Bernard Cron, about whom he devised a short biography. Nietzsche was concerned how the book would be received by Wagner and his old friends. He had lost his faith in the Wagner cause, and he no longer believed that a cultural regeneration could take place through his music. Now he was publishing a volume for free spirits and dedicated to a French thinker, an insult to Wagner that was too obvious to go undetected. The dedication to Voltaire was clear evidence of Nietzsche's new rationalist zeal. He also included on the same page a passage from Descartes's Discourse on Method, which was used in lieu of a preface celebrating the cultivation of reason and the joy of knowledge.

The book shocked many of its readers, including close friends such as Erwin Rodhe. This is a shock that is perhaps difficult for us to register today. Such is the extent to which we have assimilated the free-spirited thinking and naturalism Nietzsche espoused in the book. Coming to the book from the earlier writings, Rohde compared the experience to being chased from the calidarium, the steamy waters, into an icy frigidarium. As Nietzsche puts it himself in Ecce Homo, one error after another is calmly laid upon ice so that the ideal is not refuted but made to freeze to death (EH "HH"). Nietzsche was leaving behind the anchors in his life up to this point and was writing under the influence of new friend, philosopher, and psychologist Paul Rée, whom he had first met in 1873. Nietzsche termed Rée's psychological, materialist-inspired interpretations of religion and morality "Réealism."

In this close and detailed reading of the text, the first of its kind in English-speaking scholarship, Jonathan Cohen aims to show why HH is to be regarded as the crucial watershed in Nietzsche's intellectual development. In a wide-ranging treatment he analyzes the role of science and culture in HH, seeking to show on what precise points the text breaks with the valorization of culture and illusion over science in the early writings; illuminates the attack on metaphysics; probes the role and nature of free spirits, including their relation to culture; and brings to light the literary integrity of the text. Cohen ends with a final chapter on science, culture, and free spirits in the later works, where he locates structural similarities between HH and Beyond Good and Evil in particular, while acknowledging that Nietzsche's conception of free spirits has undergone some important alterations. He also notes in his final chapter that in some respects Morgenröthe has a claim to being conceived as the real start of Nietzsche's philosophical maturation since it is in this text, and not HH, that his immoralism is announced ("immoralism" understood here as entailing the decisive break with tradition and convention and an attachment to...