The Gay Science

The Gay Science is a book of poems and collection of 383 aphorisms in five sections that interrogates the origins of the history of knowledge. It celebrates philosophy as a medicine capable of renewing the intellect, and perceives of philosophy as inspiration for individual freedom, and thereby capable of renewing culture. First published in 1882, Nietzsche added a “Book Fifth” to The Gay Science five years later.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche declares God is dead. By doing so, Nietzsche hopes to shake European thinking from the cloak of religion he proposes arrests intellectual development and weighs the individual mind down with received knowledge that in part incorrectly describes man as flawed while presenting false virtues that only deepen human suffering.

Nietzsche adopts the provincial, plainspoken voice of a medieval poet in The Gay Science. After opening the book with a prelude in verse that alludes tothe artful, playful, brief episodes to come, Nietzsche proposes that human knowledge still suffers from the millennium-old herd instinct of preserving the species. This need for survival gave rise to the human invention of gods, as evidenced by the Greeks. Centuries of Christian indoctrination and rule lead to a corrupt, vulgar church and community in the Middle Ages. Nietzsche writes into this history and against it. This is why Nietzsche declares God is dead, just before halfway through the book. The question of how to go on, and interrogations deconstructing various European developments (the Lutheran Reformation, science, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer) culminate in Nietzsche’s ideal of a Dionysian pessimist, the character of Zarathustra, an argonaut of knowledge. This interrogation occupies the second half of The Gay Science.

The Gay Science presents Nietzsche’s methods for healing society. He writes:

When the maxim, ‘The race is all, the individual is nothing,’ […] has incorporated itself into humanity […] when access stands open to everyone at all times to this ultimate emancipation and responsibility […] [p]erhaps then laughter will have reunited with wisdom, perhaps then there will be only ‘gay science.’ Meanwhile […] it is still the period of tragedy, the period of morals and religions (18). 

Also at play throughoutThe Gay Science is the artifice of knowledge. If all humans understand themselves through ideas and in relation to others, is not all understanding artifice and the invention of man? That humans can never know absolute truth yet crave knowledge is a contradiction Nietzsche loves to exploit. Indeed, he finds much joy in his interrogations, and in fact these explorations, failures, and analyses, these journeys through storms of confusion onto shores of clarity, are exactly the type of fearless individual interrogations Nietzsche celebrates as essential towards breaking through falsely-received knowledge and renewing human intellect.

Nietzsche concludes it requires great wellness to achieve his philosophic ideals. One must constantly sacrifice this healthiness for the sake of knowledge and discovery, despite its artifice. This journey through consciousness, Nietzsche proposes, is a beautiful comedy:

We Argonauts of the idealwho are more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless, as said above, healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, always healthy again […] we have a still undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our thirst for possession thereof, have got out of hand–alas! that nothing will now any longer satisfy us! (197).

Born outside Leipzig, Germany in 1844, Nietzsche, whose father was a Lutheran minister, published numerous books in his lifetime, including The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). His work interrogates and critiques the architecture of received conventional knowledge, proposes the artifice of reality, consciousness, and morality, and celebrates individual freedom of thought. Many of his ideas impact twentieth-century thought, such as the psychological theories of Carl Jung, and the work of writers including Borges and Beckett, which call attention to the artifice of language and the concept of reality as human invention. Nietzsche died in 1900.