In 1876, Nietzsche broke with Wagner, and in the same year his increasingly bad health (possibly the early effects of a brain tumor)[4][5] compelled him to request a leave of absence from his academic duties at the University of Basel. In the autumn of 1876, he joined his friend Paul Rée in Sorrento, at the home of a wealthy patron of the arts, Malwida von Meysenbug, and began work on Human, All Too Human.[6]
Inspiration
The genre of the aphorism was already well established at the time of writing this book: in the German tradition, Nietzsche's most important predecessor was a figure of the Enlightenment, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whose writing Nietzsche greatly admired.[7]: xv Nietzsche's work is indebted also to Schopenhauer's, particularly his Aphorisms for Practical Wisdom (1851). Above all else is the "debt to the French tradition of the aphorism – for Nietzsche's work is a deliberate turn westward".[7]: xv Nietzsche cites the French aphorists Jean de La Bruyère and Prosper Mérimée, and in Aphorism 221 celebrates Voltaire.
At the beginning of the second section, Nietzsche mentions La Rochefoucauld—named here as a model, the epitome of the aphorist—and it is known that Nietzsche had a copy of La Rochefoucauld's Sentences et maximes (1665) in his library. He had been reading it shortly before beginning to write Human, All Too Human, on the train ride to Sorrento. More than that of the other French aphorists mentioned, it is La Rochefoucauld's work that lies behind that of Nietzsche.
