Volume 4 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche contains two
works, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879) and The Wanderer and His
Shadow (1880), originally published separately, then republished
together in the 1886 edition of Nietzsche's works. They mingle aphorisms
drawn from notebooks of 1875-79, years when worsening health forced
Nietzsche toward an increasingly solitary existence. Like its
predecessor, Human, All Too Human II is above all an act of resistance
not only to the intellectual influences that Nietzsche felt called upon
to critique, but to the basic physical facts of his daily life. It turns
an increasingly sharply formulated genealogical method of analysis
toward Nietzsche's persistent concerns--metaphysics, morality, religion,
art, style, society, politics and culture. The notebook entries included
here offer a window into the intellectual sources behind Nietzsche's
evolution as a philosopher, the reading and self-reflection that
nourished his lines of thought. The linking of notebook entries to
specific published aphorisms, included in the notes, allows readers of
Nietzsche in English to trace for the first time the intensive process
of revision through which he transformed raw notebook material into the
finely crafted sequences of aphoristic reflection that signal his
distinctiveness as a philosophical stylist.