Throughout his writings Nietzsche highlights the dangers of oppositional thinking, which, in his view, has characterised the history of metaphysical thought. In Human, All Too Human he writes, ‘Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two thousand years ago: how can something originate in its opposite.’ One such opposition that exercises Nietzsche is that between self and world. The difficulty centres on what Nietzsche sees as the ‘opposition’ between the world as it is known ‘by us’ and the world considered in itself and apart from human interpretations. Nietzsche contends that philosophical responses to this question have tended to oscillate between realism and idealism, appealing to a dogmatic God's Eye View on the one hand, or reducing the world to the forms of our knowledge on the other. He writes, ‘Metaphysical philosophy has hitherto surmounted this difficulty by denying that the one originates in the other and assuming for the more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the “thing in itself”’, or else, denying the human forms of our knowledge change and evolve ‘some of them would have it that the whole world is spun from out of this faculty of cognition’. Consequently, when Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science that ‘We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of “man and world,” separated by the sublime presumption of the little word “and”’, he highlights as an issue of philosophical importance the overcoming of this opposition.