Walking the Tightrope

Rudiger Safranski’s book on Nietzsche is one of my favorites. He puts HH into its own perspective. I believe it is a great, independent work that needs to be judged on its own merits rather than simply in context for how it sets up Nietzsche’s mature thought. Safranski highlights what I believe to be the central nature of Nietzsche’s thought at this time. HH itself has several other philosophical threads, however, than the one presented here. That is what makes it such a great work. It is a loose association of indirectly connected things. “Thus, in Human, All Too Human , absolute reality was designated coolly as the logically ‘disclosed essence of the world.’ With this concept, Nietzsche sought to hold himself aloof from ‘religion, art, and morality,’ all of whose presentments, feelings, and states of ecstasy somehow drew him to the mystery of the world. These are illusions, he explained, and with them ‘we are not touching the ‘essence of the world in itself.’’ We remain in the real...