Are We as Selfless as We Think?
Human, All Too Human — Essential Reading Path · Reading 2 of 10
Read: Volume I, §35, then §57 (1878). Read each in full, stopping before §36 and §58 respectively.
Allow: About 45–60 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response.
Preferred translation: R. J. Hollingdale. Free alternatives: I §35 · I §57 (Helen Zimmern).
I means Volume I; AOM means Assorted Opinions and Maxims (called Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions in the free edition); WS means The Wanderer and His Shadow. Numbers restart in each collection. The numbered 1886 prefaces are separate texts. If highlighting fails, use the collection and numbered heading.
Before you read
Someone gives up a weekend to help a friend move. They lose sleep, cancel something enjoyable, and spend money they had hoped to save. When thanked, they say that being there mattered more to them.
Have they just admitted that the sacrifice was selfish? Or have they explained what made it a sacrifice they wanted to make?
The answer depends on what we mean by selflessness. We might mean accepting a serious cost for someone else’s sake. We might mean acting without any attachment, wish, or satisfaction belonging to oneself. Those descriptions impose different conditions, although ordinary praise often moves between them.
Reading 1 asked how apparently opposed motives might be connected through development. These two aphorisms of Human, All Too Human, Volume I, bring that inquiry into psychological observation and sacrifice. Nietzsche challenges the second description of selflessness without denying the costs described by the first.
The main question: Does giving up something for another person require stepping outside everything that matters to oneself?
Read Volume I, §35 and §57 in full. The first explains why psychological observation deserves cultivation; the second gives us an unsettling example of its work.
Three things to notice
- The pleasure of observation. In I §35, how might understanding a painful experience lighten its burden? Notice the attention to practice and literary form.
- What each person sacrifices. In I §57, identify both the cost and the attachment that prevails in each of the four examples.
- The awkward fifth example. Why does Nietzsche place an obstinate person beside the author, lover, soldier, and mother? Ask what they share before deciding whether they deserve the same judgment.
A way to read the passages
Observation can change our relation to an experience
Volume I, §35 begins with a practical advantage. Psychological observation can lighten life’s burdens, help us remain collected in difficult surroundings, and let us extract an insight from an unpleasant experience. The subject of the book’s title becomes something we can study within ordinary life. Volume I, §35
Suppose a colleague’s approval has unexpectedly become very important to you. Their indifference hurts. With observation, you might discover that this person represents a kind of achievement you secretly want recognized in yourself. The discovery does not reverse their indifference. It changes the experience from an apparently inexplicable wound into something you can begin to understand.
The example is this guide’s illustration. Nietzsche’s point is that a painful period can yield material for thought. Observing a feeling creates a different relation to it; the person suffering also becomes someone capable of inquiry.
That is an attraction of this philosophical project, and also a possible temptation. Relief can make an explanation welcome before it has been tested. The demand from I §3 still applies: an interpretation’s usefulness or elegance does not establish its truth.
Talking about people is not yet psychological understanding
Nietzsche next diagnoses a poverty of psychological observation in his century. He acknowledges exceptions in literature and philosophy, then directs his complaint toward public judgments and ordinary conversation. People discuss particular individuals continually while saying little that helps them understand human beings.
Consider the difference between announcing that a colleague is an attention seeker and examining when their need for recognition becomes urgent, what threatens it, and how it coexists with genuine dedication to the work. A label can end an inquiry. A psychological observation should make a relation visible.
This also explains why the passage’s interest in conversation matters. Nietzsche imagines psychological understanding as a cultivated social practice, not solely the property of professional thinkers. What people notice, find discussable, and take pleasure in understanding shapes their capacity for judgment.
His generalization about the psychological poverty of Europe is a polemical diagnosis, rather than a demonstrated survey. We can nevertheless test the distinction it draws within a conversation we know: did we learn anything about how an attachment works, or only settle who deserved our approval?
The short form asks something of its reader
The latter part of I §35 praises La Rochefoucauld and other writers of psychological maxims: brief, carefully shaped observations about human motives. Nietzsche says readers often fail to appreciate them because they have never practiced making anything similar.
Read this ending slowly. The complaint concerns more than agreement with an author’s conclusions. Without experience of shaping a maxim, a reader may underestimate its precision, fitness, and charm. Admiration stays polite and distant. Nietzsche compares such readers to viewers of cameos who readily praise the small artworks and quickly leave.
A maxim selects a relationship and compresses it. That economy can help us recognize something familiar with unexpected clarity. It can also conceal exceptions. Practicing the form means discovering how difficult it is to make a sentence both striking and accurate.
Try reducing the opening moving-house example to one sentence about friendship. Then ask what your sentence leaves out. This small exercise prepares you to read I §57 as a deliberately constructed comparison whose compression deserves both attention and resistance.
The author sacrifices a claim to personal distinction
Volume I, §57 begins with a good author willing to be superseded by someone who expresses the same subject more clearly and solves its problems. The attachment to the work can outrank the wish to remain its most impressive representative. Volume I, §57
This is a demanding opening example. Nietzsche does not begin with a supposedly generous person secretly expecting payment. His author welcomes something that could destroy personal standing. The explanation must accommodate that real loss.
Think of a researcher who wants a difficult problem solved even if another researcher gets the credit. Their commitment to the problem belongs to them, but its object exceeds their reputation. A desire can therefore carry a person against other important interests of their own.
Nietzsche locates the explanation within a divided person. One attachment becomes so important that other attachments yield to it. We need not imagine a unified self somehow disappearing from the action.
The lover, soldier, and mother expose different attachments
The lover’s example is more disturbing. Nietzsche describes a young woman wishing for her beloved’s unfaithfulness so that she could demonstrate her own sacrificial fidelity. Her attachment includes an image of the love she wants to enact. The imagined injury supplies an occasion for its display.
Do not turn this into a description of every loving relationship. Its particular force comes from the apparent reversal: the person desires a wound because it would make an admired form of devotion possible. An ideal of oneself as loving can compete with the ordinary wish for a faithful partner.
The soldier hopes to die in a victory for his country. Nietzsche explains this through the identification of the soldier’s highest desires with that victory. His argument needs no secret expectation of surviving to enjoy applause. A commitment can prevail over the wish to remain alive.
The mother gives up sleep, food, health, or resources for her child. Here the deprivation can be continuous and bodily. The child’s well-being occupies a higher place in her attachments than the interests she sacrifices.
The examples differ in object, circumstances, and consequences. Their shared structure is the victory of one cherished concern over others. The author cares about an intellectual achievement, the lover about a demonstration of fidelity, the soldier about national victory, and the mother about her child.
Why call this a division of the self?
Nietzsche asks whether these actions are moral miracles. His reference to Schopenhauer introduces the suggestion that a supposedly impossible departure from egoism somehow occurs. Nietzsche offers an explanation continuous with ordinary desire: a person loves a thought, wish, or product belonging to their life more than other parts of that life.
The closing contrast between Individuum and dividuum makes the point memorable. The person who appears to be an indivisible unit acts as something divisible. Different commitments can pull apart; one can command the sacrifice of the rest.
This does not mean that a mother literally owns her child as a piece of herself. It identifies the child’s place within her attachments. Her concern for another being is among the things through which her own life is organized.
Nor does Nietzsche require the sacrifice to feel pleasant overall. Grief, exhaustion, and danger remain possible. The desire being followed can prevail at enormous cost. Reducing the passage to a claim that people always choose immediate comfort would make its examples unintelligible.
His denial is nevertheless strong: following a desire, even through these costs, is not entirely unegoistic. He refuses to treat moral sacrifice as a break with the motivating conditions of ordinary action.
The obstinate person prevents an easy celebration
Near the end, Nietzsche introduces someone willing to be shot rather than move aside for another person. Pride or obstinacy can demand a sacrifice as extreme as devotion. This comparison prevents us from treating the mere willingness to suffer as proof of a unique moral source.
The shared pattern does not by itself make stubbornness, intellectual devotion, and maternal care equivalent in worth. It does show why the amount someone gives up cannot settle what motivates them or whether the commitment is admirable.
Return to the friend helping with a move. The help might express affection, a need to remain indispensable, fear of disapproval, or several concerns at once. Their sacrifice alone does not choose among those explanations. We would need to understand the attachment and its history.
Pause here: Name one real cost and one prevailing concern in Nietzsche’s author example. Then explain why the obstinate person shares its structure without necessarily sharing its value.
A difficulty to keep in view
Does the fact that a desire is mine make its object my own advantage?
This is the strongest objection to the passage’s final inference. A person can desire another person’s recovery. The desire belongs to the person acting; its object is someone else’s welfare. It does not follow immediately that the person desires recovery only as a means to a separate benefit for themselves.
Nietzsche’s analysis is illuminating when it dissolves the picture of a single, undivided self confronting an utterly alien moral demand. Attachments to others can become central to a person’s own life. But if every action following any desire is called egoistic, the term risks losing distinctions we need between caring for someone and exploiting them.
His challenge remains sharper than the familiar observation that motives are sometimes mixed. He denies the complete absence of self-related desire in sacrifice. A serious reply must therefore distinguish concern that belongs to a self from concern directed exclusively toward that self’s advantage.
I §35 offers a standard for conducting the disagreement. Good observation should clarify particular motives and their relations. Calling every attachment concealed selfishness can become exactly the kind of facile judgment that substitutes a label for understanding.
Keep both questions available: what organizes this person’s sacrifice, and what does that sacrifice do for the people involved? The first can alter our answer to the second, but it cannot replace it.
Check your understanding
Try answering before opening each suggested response.
How does I §35 connect psychological observation with literary form?
It presents observation as a source of understanding and relief, then argues that readers need practice to appreciate the precision and charm of maxims. The short form requires skilled selection and shaping; its apparent simplicity can hide that work.
Why is the author an important first example in I §57?
The author accepts losing personal distinction if the work’s problems are better solved. Nietzsche explains a real sacrifice through a prevailing attachment. He does not need to uncover an expectation of payment or applause to connect it with the author’s desires.
What does the contrast between an individual and a divided person explain?
A person can value different parts of their life unequally. One attachment can become strong enough to command sacrifices from the others. This supplies an ordinary psychological explanation for conduct that otherwise seems to require the self’s complete disappearance.
Why compare sacrifice with someone’s refusal to step aside?
Obstinacy also allows one commitment to prevail over bodily safety. Shared willingness to suffer does not establish shared moral worth. The comparison challenges the inference from the size of a sacrifice to its supposedly extraordinary moral origin.
What objection distinguishes having a desire from pursuing personal advantage?
A desire necessarily belongs to someone, but it can be directed toward another person’s welfare. Nietzsche must explain why that first fact supports calling the action egoistic. Otherwise his account risks grouping together importantly different kinds of concern.
What should I write in my notes?
Choose one sacrifice you can discuss without guessing at a stranger’s private thoughts. Write 180–250 words:
- Describe what was given up and who benefited.
- Identify two attachments that could have conflicted. Separate what you know from your interpretation.
- Explain the action using I §57’s idea of a divided person.
- State whether your explanation establishes self-interest, another-directed concern, or leaves their relationship unsettled. Give a reason.
- End with a one-sentence maxim, then name one exception it must accommodate.
A successful response uses I §35’s demand for careful observation to test the explanation drawn from I §57. It preserves the sacrifice’s actual cost.
Continue the reading
Reading 3: What Becomes of Blame? →
The next session reads Volume I, §§39 and 107. Nietzsche moves from explaining how motives compete to asking whether anyone ultimately deserves blame or praise for the person they are and the actions that follow.
Carry this question forward: If an action follows from the attachments that have formed a person, what would make that person ultimately responsible for possessing those attachments?