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What is our Neighbour?—What do we conceive of our neighbour except his limits: I mean that whereby he, as it were, engraves and stamps himself in and upon us? We can understand nothing of him except the changes which take place upon our own person and of which he is the cause, what we know of him is like a hollow, modelled space. We impute to him the feelings which his acts arouse in us, and thus give him a wrong and inverted positivity. We form him after our knowledge of ourselves into a satellite of our own system, and if he shines upon us, or grows dark, and we in any case are the ultimate cause of his doing so, we nevertheless still believe the contrary! O world of phantoms in which we live! O world so perverted, topsy-turvy and empty, and yet dreamt of as full and upright!
What is our Neighbour?—What do we conceive of our neighbour except his limits: I mean that whereby he, as it were, engraves and stamps himself in and upon us? We can understand nothing of him except the changes which take place upon our own person and of which he is the cause, what we know of him is like a hollow, modelled space. We impute to him the feelings which his acts arouse in us, and thus give him a wrong and inverted positivity. We form him after our knowledge of ourselves into a satellite of our own system, and if he shines upon us, or grows dark, and we in any case are the ultimate cause of his doing so, we nevertheless still believe the contrary! O world of phantoms in which we live! O world so perverted, topsy-turvy and empty, and yet dreamt of as full and upright!
Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
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- Author or tradition
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1844–1900); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- The Dawn of Day (1911 English edition) (1911 AD)
The Dawn of Day, complete printed unit 118; John McFarland Kennedy translation; New York: The MacMillan Company,1911
A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.
The voice behind the words.
Author of Human, All-Too-Human, here represented by complete numbered passages in Helen Zimmern’s 1909 and Paul V. Cohn’s 1913 English editions. Catalogue lifetime 1844–1900; historical philosophical arguments and dated viewpoints require context, rather than treating every sentence as general advice.
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