The gay science summary

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

June 2, 2016
The more mistrust, the more philosophy.

How to review Nietzsche? His writing is so well-off, so overabundant, so overflowing, that screening his works is like trying to drink up a waterfall. I cannot even decide whether Nietzsche was a philosopher, or something else. Perhaps he can be greater described as an essayist, a poet, a sage, a neurotic, a raving madman, a prescient visionary? The title hardly matters, I suppose; although without some benchmark of comparison, I am left in the dark for a way to measure Nietzsche and his writings. The only way open I can see is to weigh Nietzsche against himself.

In the context of his full corpus, The Gay Science is easily one of Nietzsche’s strongest works. It dates from his middle period, after his snap with Wagner and his renunciation of Schopenhauer, when he was still developing his most distinctive ideas. Indeed, in this book one finds Nietzsche’s first proclamation that “God is dead,” as well as the first mention of the Eternal Recurrence. Many of Nietzsche’s criticisms of science, humanism, liberalism, and above all morality can be set up in nascen

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There are many important ideas put forth by The Gay Science, but the publication seems to be a compendium of various ideas and conclusions. It includes songs.

In the commencement, Nietzsche discusses the way all animation seems related to power. He discusses various types of power, including social and economic dominance, but also the autonomy of free choice. He mentions the theme of recurrence, arguing that perhaps we are all locked in an infinite cycle of reincarnations into the same lives, over and over again, forever. These nightmarish meditations carry on until Nietzsche reaches his most celebrated conclusion for the first time in his published writings.

The famous line is, "God is dead." He discusses the way Buddhism survived as a religion, and he states God's death and points observes the fact that God will still be followed for millenniums yet. He urges his reader to abandon their attachment to divinity.

The Homosexual Science c

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 identity. First published in 1882, Nietzsche added a “Book Fifth” to The Homosexual Science five years later.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche declares God is deceased. By doing so, Nietzsche hopes to shake European thinking from the cloak of religion he proposes arrests intellectual development and weighs the individual thought down with received truth 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 reach , Nietzsche proposes that human knowledge still suffers from the millennium-old herd feeling of preserving the species. This need for survival gave rise to the human invention of gods, as evidenced by

The Gay Science

Kaufmann dedicated this edition to his granddaughter Sophia ("My Joyful Sophia") in something appreciate a rather confusing pun, 'sophia' being the Greek for "wisdom." At the same time, in his introduction, he assures us that Nietzsche's title, "Die Froeliche Wissenschaft," should not be translated as "joyful wisdom," since 'wissenschaft' always means "science." All of this is certainly sound plan for translation from German to English, but it is precarious nevertheless. Americans tend to interpret the word 'science' way too narrowly so, even though the German 'wissenschaft' means "science," the German sense of "science" is considerably more broad and does not involve the American tendency to exclude a good deal of scholarship as "soft." It is therefore highly erroneous to look upon this work as the front line of Nietzsche's "Positivist Period," as some possess done.

The original version of The Gay Science, which is what we will read, was published in 1882 and did not include the large Preface, Book V, or the Appendix of Songs. From 1872, when The Birth of Tragedy was published to 1882, a fantastic deal happened in Nietzsche's being. In particular, he wrote Un