‘Human, All Too Human is the monument of a crisis.’ With these apt words Nietzsche began his own reflection, in his autobiographical Ecce Homo (1888), on this remarkable collection of almost 1,400 aphorisms published in three instalments, the first of which had appeared in 1878, ten years earlier. The crisis to which he refers was first and foremost a crisis of multiple dimensions in his own life. Human, All Too Human was the extended product of a period of devastating health problems that necessitated Nietzsche's resignation in 1879 from his professorship in classical philology at Basel University. These problems were to plague him for the remaining decade of his brief productive life (which ended with his complete physical and mental collapse in January 1889, at the age of 44, from which he never recovered in the eleven years of marginal existence that remained to him before his death in 1900). Human, All Too Human also marked Nietzsche's transition from the philologist and cultural critic he had been into the kind of philosopher and writer he came to be.

But the crisis was above all a crisis in Nietzsche's intellectual development; and although it was very much his own, it presaged the larger crisis toward which he came to see our entire culture and civilization moving, and subsequently came to call ‘the death of God’. In his own case, this crisis was precipitated not only by his deepening appreciation of the profound and extensive consequences of the collapse of traditional ways of thinking, but also – and more immediately – by his growing recognition of the insufficiency of the resources of both the Enlightenment and the Romanticism to which he had been so strongly attracted to fill the void. The three instalments of Human, All Too Human are no less important for the insight they yield into the kind of struggle in which Nietzsche was engaged than they are for the many sparks that fly in the course of his efforts to find new ways to go on.