Walking the Tightrope

Nietzsche completed The Gay Science at his mother’s home in Naumberg where he arrived by train in May 1882. “…there remained the irksome problem of preparing a legible manuscript. Elisabeth’s ‘girlish’ handwriting seemed to her brother ill-suited to the adult seriousness of the contents. She then hired the services of a Naumberg shopkeeper, who had recently gone bankrupt, Elisabeth and Fritz took turns dictating the text to an unsatisfactory and often shocked ‘scribe’.” ( Cate , page 335) The work is shocking to the extent that it is groundbreaking and outrageous philosophy. Whereas “St. Januarius” deals with how best to stylistically express oneself in a world without God, the first three Books of The Gay Science deal with, among other things, the “death of God” and some of the consequences of the death of God. Nietzsche begins his book with 63 short poems. Once more, these strike me as mediocre. Perhaps they are more interesting and clever in German. What is noteworthy, however, is...

In January 1882, as we now know, the weather was beautiful in Genoa. Fritz, always so psychosomatically affected by atmospheric conditions, felt jubilant. He had developed his version of eternal recurrence of the same just a few months before but had not yet fully comprehended his intent. His philosophy was taking on a wider view with more expansive ideas and he enjoyed expressing himself in a provocative fashion, perhaps reflecting the sense of joy and freedom he personally experienced at this time. He began the first three books of The Gay Science while still in the mountains at Sils-Maria the previous summer. Book Four was written entirely in Genoa and was subtitled “St. Januarius” in honor of the new year. Since it was conceived separately and specifically in the month of January I wanted to explore it first, coming back to the other books next. Book Five was written more or less as an addendum and placed in the 1887 edition of the work. I won’t consider it until much later in t...

Julian Young’s philosophical biography of Nietzsche gives good context for Fritz’s body of thought in 1882, ten years after publishing his first metaphysical affirmation . “ The Gay Science is about everything under the sun. There is, however, a central argument which, in spite of its aphoristic formulation, is remarkably, even rigorously, systematic.” (page 326) “Nietzsche’s first five books, the ‘Bayreuth” works , were written for the (of course literate) world at large, were contributions to the culture wars of the times. And some of them were indeed, wholly or in part, rants…. By Human, All-Too-Human , he had given up writing for ‘the people’ at large, writing now, explicitly, ‘for free spirits’ alone. These remain the target audience in The Gay Science . “ The Gay Science’s central argument can be divided, it seems to me, into three stages. First, it develops a general account of what it is to be a ‘thriving’ or ‘people’, a general theory of cultural ‘health’. This, theory of ...

Many of the more contemporary translators of The Gay Science prefer to use Nietzsche’s other intended title for the work, The Joyous Science . This is in some measure due to how the word “gay” is now commonly accepted in western culture, as homosexual. Regardless of which word you use, however, part of Nietzsche’s intent was to contrast the title against Thomas Carlyle’s famous phrase (at the time) in classifying economics as " The Dismal Science " . This in and of itself can be seen as rather humorous and I’m sure Fritz chuckled at his parody. Rudiger Safranski offers another interesting glimpse by a prominent Nietzsche scholar into The Gay Science . His perspectives integrate Nietzsche’s thought with his private life, thus reinforcing the important distinction that Nietzsche’s rational thinking was actually applied to his manner or style of Being. (Nietzsche doesn’t use the word “being,” that’s my projection.) “He composed it in a state of bliss. Weeks would pass that we...

The final proofs for The Gay Science were completed mid-June 1882 at Naumberg based upon Nietzsche’s work in Genoa and Messina. The book was published in August. It is traditionally seen as a transitional work, while remaining grouped with HH and Daybreak overall. But, in this work Nietzsche is much bolder and extravagant with his expression, reflecting the happy freedom in which he felt himself enwombed. Here is the first large-scale example of Nietzsche being outrageous in his acclamations, what he would call philosophizing “with a hammer” in a later work. “God is dead.” (from aphorism 108) There is probably no more famous quote or idea in all of Nietzsche’s writings. It easily ranks with Rene Descartes’ assertion “I think, therefore, I am” as one of the more commonly known contentions among those comparative few of us that know anything at all about the history of western philosophy. Nietzsche’s most infamous formulation in the book is also one of his most misunderstood. “Nietzs...

Nietzsche began taking notes for Morgenrote II during that first summer at Sils-Maria. These notes often reflect the inspired happiness of a free spirit. The intimate gaiety welling up in him became the basis for the title of his next great philosophic work, after he had given up on the idea of a sequel to Daybreak . The foundation for his happiness, however, lies in a singular idea that came to him one day while hiking in August 1881. Weather permitting, Fritz hiked several hours a day in the clean mountain air. What came to Fritz as he walked by a boulder along Lake Silvaplana was the idea and experience of “ the eternal return of the same .” A couple of scattered aphorisms touch on the basics of this concept in The Gay Science and I will discuss it in a later post. For now, he chose to be mysterious with his friends about his revolutionary philosophical idea. But, it filled him with extraordinary motivation and joy. In the world of Nietzsche scholarship there is disagreement abou...

“We have to learn to think differently – in order that at last, perhaps very late on, we attain even more: to feel differently .” ( Daybreak , from Aphorism 103) Nietzsche’s self-creation, the triumph of Becoming in an amoral universe indifferent to human Being, has some universal characteristics. First of all, it is not universal in the sense of being exactly the same for every person. Each individual must find their own way, as long as that way does not rely upon certain misguided traditions. “ Insofar as the individual is seeking happiness, one ought not to tender him any prescriptions as to the path to happiness: for individual happiness springs from one’s own unknown laws, and prescriptions from without can only obstruct and hinder it.” (from Aphorism 108) Secondly, as we have seen, self-creation takes place within a complexity of pre-conscious, instinctual drives that motivate human behavior. Thirdly, self-creation is inherently an intimate path of reflective living that shuns...