The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

by Friedrich Nietzsche, Bernard Williams (Editor), Josefine Nauckhoff (Translator)

Genres: Philosophy

277 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2001

About the author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Nietzsche's work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.

Reviews

[Dan Eickmeier · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a book on philosophy from a famously curmudgeonly philosopher, I found this quite easy to read and pretty uplifting. I don’t get people’s complaint that Nietzsche is nihilistic. In this book (which is midlife so he is still adapting his thought), he seems to suggest to me a life that grabs hold of things for oneself and really experiences life. It’s a. It rough around the edges and I can see where some of his power structure stuff from his later work comes from, but at this point he seems to renounce following and embrace living life to its fullest for its own sake. I quite enjoyed reading it.

[Imlac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Up-to-date and accurate translation of this middle-period book of Nietzsche's, superceding Walter Kaufmann's (which many consider his best translation of Nietzsche). The introduction by Bernard Williams, though somewhat general and detached from the main text, is well worth reading.

This is the Nietzschean text that is the locus classicus of the themes of the death of God, amor fati and self-creation, and eternal recurrence of the same. It immediately precedes Zarathustra, which presents those themes in a richer allegorical setting. Book V was written after Zarathustra and contains some of Nietzsche's deeper meditations of consciousness (sec. 354) and art (sec. 370).