NIETZSCHE - THE GAY SCIENCE

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher, writer, poet, philologist, and musician, and is considered one of the most influential and important modern thinkers of the 19th century. The Gay Science (in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) is the last work of Nietzsche's positive phase, resembling "Dawn" and "Human, All Too Human" in its light, pleasant, and flowery style of composition. This is one of the author's most widely read works. It is also in this book that Nietzsche refers, for the first time, to Zarathustra, the ancient Persian prophet, creator of the doctrine called Zoroastrianism, whom Nietzsche made the herald of his philosophy in his book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".

Genres: Philosophy

370 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 7, 2024

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

[Jim Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was young, I think I liked Nietzsche more and understood Nietzsche less. It was sort of a summer tradition, I'd get back from college, open up some Nietzsche, read it in the break room of my minimum-wage kitchen job feeling very intense and superior. I wrote a song about those summers with one of my early bands. "Nietzsche Means Summer." It wasn't great. But it wasn't bad.

I'm 51 now. This is the first time I've picked up any Nietzsche in at least a few years, and this book is one I hadn't read before. (I didn't read the Kindle edition; the edition I read didn't show on the lists, so this is close enough).

I have mixed feelings about this book. I definitely enjoyed the reading of it. Partly, it brought back memories of diving into other books, of the things I took from those other books. I can't say I exactly relived those moments or would even quite want to, but I touched on the edges, and that was nice. And I like Nietzsche's writing, his style.

Some of what I liked most in his work back then is what I like least now. When you're 19 and building a new identity and you've recently rejected the religion you were raised in and you're sure you have all the answers that the world was too stupid to see until you came along, Nietzsche's condescension and arrogance are really, really cool. At this point in my life, not so much. He has a whole lot of criticism for everything-- from romance to music to religion to politics to morality--with almost nothing good to say and not a lot to offer, and it just gets old. I mean, I have a couple of coworkers like that. It's exhausting, right?

And this book is so incredibly scattered. He just doesn't dig into anything. There's no deep well, but rather hundreds of tiny holes.

His thoughts on women and Jews are cringeworthy. His commentary on romance is just painful. And his obsession with strength and self-reliance is sad, given that he was a frail, sickly man and spent the last 10 years of his fairly young life entirely unable to care for himself.

All that said, there is some good stuff in here.

I very much like his "beyond morality" or "beyond good and evil" ideas, and I tend to interpret them through Aristotle's "Nichomean Ethics" or even Taoism's "before there were good and evil" ethics. The strength stuff is typically interesting. I just finished reading "The Comfort Crisis" prior to picking this up and so definitely read this with that in mind. His discussion of "slave religion" is very interesting, if rather undeveloped here. And I really, really wish he's gone more into eternal recurrence, which is one of his most fascinating ideas but which he only touches on very briefly here.

[William Copps · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, precisely. A Gay Scientist