Friedrich Nietzsche — Human, All-Too-Human, Volume II, Preface
The Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions were in the first place, like The Wanderer and His Shadow, published separately as continuations and appendices to the above-mentioned human, all-too human Book for Free Spirits: and at the same time, as a continuation and confirmation of an intellectual cure, consisting in a course of anti-romantic self-treatment, such as my instinct, which had always remained healthy, had itself discovered and prescribed against a temporary attack of the most dangerous form of romantics. After a convalescence of six years I may well be permitted to collect these same writings and publish them as a second volume of Human, All-too Human. Perhaps, if surveyed together, they will more clearly and effectively teach their lesson — a lesson of health that may be recommended as a disciplina voluntatis to the more intellectual natures of the rising generation. Here speaks a pessimist who has often leaped out of his skin but has always returned into it, thus, a pessimist with goodwill towards pessimism — at all events a romanticist no longer. And has not a pessimist, who possesses this serpentine knack of changing his skin, the right to read a lecture to our pessimists of today, who are one and all still in the toils of romanticism? Or at least to show them how it is done?
A Patient Who Writes His Own Prescription
This text is not a literary preface but a medical chart. It has all the moments of one: the illness (an attack of “the most dangerous form of romantics”), the treatment (an anti-romantic cure), the convalescence (six years), the prescription (disciplina voluntatis) and, finally, the healed patient who takes the lecturer’s chair to teach others. Medical language is not foreign to the Fathers: the Lord Himself says that “those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Matthew 9:12), and the Church has been called, from antiquity, a hospital of souls. That is why the text deserves to be read seriously: it is a true diagnosis made by a man who suffered. The question is not whether he was ill, but who healed him and how deep the healing went.
Romanticism as Love of the Wound
What Nietzsche calls “romanticism” is not a literary school but an inclination of the soul: raising suffering to the rank of truth and feeling to the rank of argument. Here lies the danger. Plato had observed, in Book X of the Republic, that poetry which laments “waters” the passions instead of drying them, and the soul grows used to feeding on its own pain. Hegel called “beautiful soul” the soul that withdraws to keep itself pure and, from fear of being soiled by action, does nothing. And the Fathers know the same illness under another name: Evagrius speaks of lypē, the sadness that comes from the loss of a pleasure or the frustration of a desire, and Saint Maximus the Confessor shows its root: philautia, self-love, which suffers above all because it has not received what it believed was owed to it.
The romantic pessimist does not suffer from the world; he loves the suffering the world gives him, because it makes him deep, chosen, misunderstood. Clinical psychology has described the mechanism without guessing its root: Aaron Beck named “emotional reasoning” the slide from “I feel” to “it is”; Susan Nolen-Hoeksema showed that rumination, the repeated return to one’s own pain, does not resolve it but prolongs it. What looked like depth was often a loop.
Pessimism With Goodwill
Nietzsche presents himself as “a pessimist with goodwill towards pessimism,” and the formula is truer than he knew. Psychology has found something similar: anxious people who imagine the worst outcome in advance and prepare for it often do better than those who soothe themselves with illusions (Norem and Cantor called it “defensive pessimism”). Pessimism is not, then, the illness in itself; the illness is the explanatory style that turns every setback into something personal, permanent and universal (Seligman).
And Scripture itself has a pessimist with goodwill: Ecclesiastes, who says “vanity of vanities,” yet concludes with “fear God and keep His commandments” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). Saint Paul goes to the root: creation “was subjected to futility… in hope” (Romans 8:20). Here is the decisive difference: futility can be named without becoming despair if it has an end. The Apostle names the two kinds of sorrow: “godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation… but worldly grief produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). Saint John Climacus gives the first a name: joy-making mourning. The romantic feeds on the second half of the verse, the Christian on the first; both know the world is not enough, but only one of them turns toward Him who is.
Disciplina Voluntatis: The Will as the Place of Healing
Nietzsche’s prescription is a discipline of the will. Here he stands on known ground: Aristotle showed that virtue is formed by repeated habit, and today’s psychology has rediscovered the same truth: behavioral activation, that is, action taken before the mood changes, lifts a person out of depression more reliably than waiting for a good state; and “if X happens, I do Y” plans (Gollwitzer) tie the will to a concrete place instead of leaving it to the mood.
But the Fathers go deeper, because they name what discipline cannot do alone. Saint Maximus distinguishes the natural will, given by God, from the gnome, the will bent by the self’s choice; healing is bringing the latter back into accord with the will of Him who made it. That is why the model of asceticism is not the Stoic clenching his teeth but the Lord in Gethsemane: “not My will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). In Nietzsche, the discipline of the will remains that of a man governing himself; the Church’s asceticism is that of a man handing himself over. The first can take a man out of romanticism; only the second takes him out of the philautia that produced it.
The Skin and the Serpent
The image of the serpent changing its skin is the best part of the text and, at the same time, the part that betrays it. Paul uses the same language: “put off your old self… and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God” (Ephesians 4:22–24). But notice what Nietzsche says: he leapt out of his skin often, but always returned into it. This is the confession of a man who changed his clothes without changing his heart. The prophet Jeremiah asked with a painful irony: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23). And the Apostle Peter recalls the proverb of the dog returning to its vomit (2 Peter 2:22). Shedding is a change of skin; metanoia is a change of mind, and the Fathers ask for the second, which no shedding can give.
Nor is it accidental that the serpent appears here. The book of Genesis says it was the most shrewd of all the beasts (Genesis 3:1), and the Lord asks of us a wisdom of the same kind, but purified: “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). The serpent’s wisdom without the dove is the knack of changing one’s skin endlessly, without ever returning.
The Physician Who Cannot Prescribe Himself
The heaviest sentence is the first: the instinct “had itself discovered and prescribed” the cure. A patient who is his own physician. Psychology calls this blind spot the bias blind spot (Pronin): we see others’ biases easily but not our own. And Scripture says simply: “Be not wise in your own eyes” (Proverbs 3:7), and “a wise man listens to advice” (Proverbs 12:15). Saint John Climacus asks the disciple for a guide precisely because the subtlest illness hides in the one who treats himself: he has nothing with which to see it.
Then the last sentence: the healed pessimist “has the right” to lecture others, “or at least to show them how it is done.” Evagrius described this trap precisely: vainglory attacks the one who has been freed from other passions, and Climacus tracks it to its most hidden garment, that of the healed man who boasts of his healing. The convalescent becomes a teacher, and the teacher becomes a hero; and the hero risen from sickness is still a romantic figure, perhaps the subtlest of all. This is not an accusation against a man but a rule of the soul: any healing that does not end in humility begins, slowly, a new illness.
The Serpent Lifted Up
In the wilderness, the people bitten by fiery serpents cry out for deliverance, and Moses is commanded to make a serpent of bronze and lift it on a pole: “every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live” (Numbers 21:8–9). The Lord Himself gives the key: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). The remedy for the venom is not a shedding and not a cure; it is a gaze. A man does not look into his own skin, nor his instinct, nor his healing, but at the One lifted up, who “made Him to be sin who knew no sin” for us (2 Corinthians 5:21), to take the very venom upon Himself.
In this way everything true in the preface is reconciled. The good pessimism remains: the world passes and is not enough. The discipline of the will remains: no one is healed by sitting still. But the physician is no longer the man himself, and the lesson is no longer “how it is done” but Who does it. Today’s pessimists do not need a teacher who has shed his skin more skillfully; they need Him who, lifted on the wood, made the bitten alive.
