Kaufmann dedicated this edition to his granddaughter Sophia ("My Joyful Sophia") in something like 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 strategy 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 have 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 great deal happened in Nietzsche's life. In particular, he wrote Untimely Meditations (1873-6), Human, All Too Human (1878-80), and Daybreak (1881) during this period. His relationship with Wagner came to an end, Nietzsche presenting Wagner with a draft of Human, All Too Human and Wagner presenting Nietzsche with a draft of Parsifal, at their last meeting in Sorrento, Italy, in November 1876. No two works could have demonstrated their separate trajectories more emphatically. Nietzsche's health had declined throughout this period and, having already taken several leaves-of-absence, he finally resigned his professorship in Basle in 1879. Having surrendered German citizenship to take the position at Basle and, now, having surrendered that position, Nietzsche was literally a man without a country or institutional foundation. In order to play to better health, he adopted an "annual round" --- spending summer in the Alps, spring and fall in Turin, and winter in Sorrento. Only on occasion did he travel back to see friends or family in Switzerland or Germany.
Nietzsche's health problems were very likely congenital (related to his father's brain maladies); at least, he had suffered from them as early as childhood. They affected his attention span, eyesight, and digestive system, and they gave him excruciating headaches that could completely shut down his work habits. At least for this reason, and probably for other reasons, it became easiest for Nietzsche to write or dictate his thoughts in relatively short "notebook" entries. The composition of his works after Untimely Meditations, then, was achieved by gathering together, organizing, and editing notes with relatable contents. This aphoristic style is fully evident in The Gay Science.
Granting that The Gay Science has many interesting things to say about moral values, religion, and psychology, as well as continuing his ongoing critique of European culture, it centers on a discussion of epistemology. It is, of course, a very different approach to epistemology than anything coming beforehand and it anticipates the more revolutionary approaches of the 20th Century. What Nietzsche wants is a "science" which is free-spirited, joyful, and life-affirming. At the same time, he has not changed his mind about modern theoretical science which he saw, in The Birth of Tragedy, to be borne of Socratism. To the degree that modern epistemology from Locke onward is an accommodation of modern theoretical science, Nietzsche's concept of "science" represents a revolution.
Book I. In the first aphorism and with an Existentialist twist, Nietzsche argues that humans need to fabricate beliefs about their existence, need to find purpose or meaning. This mood feeds directly into aphorism #2 which directly addresses "intellectual conscience." Most people possess no intellectual conscience and will belief what they will without really questioning and challenging it. This declaration, of course, gives Nietzsche the opportunity to suggest a nobler intellect and that feeds directly into aphorism #3 where he introduces a variety of dichotomies --- noble and common, higher and lower, individual and herd. The introduction is completed in aphorism #4 where Nietzsche calls our attention to the fact that the collective people place value in traditional wisdom and call it "good." What is newly advanced and speculative, then, is always "evil." The questioning noble individual is always viewed suspiciously as a bringer of evil. One should also be aware of the way in which Nietzsche uses animals, or natural history, in these introductory aphorisms. This establishes the way in which he will approach all issues of human development. There is a continuity between animal life and human life and he will assume no special status for humans.
Book I ends with another set of four related aphorisms that conclude the introduction. #54 is especially interesting in the light of his references to dreaming and dreamers. This must remind us that The Birth of Tragedy does not argue against Apollo and dreaming but rather for the cooperative inclusion of Dionysus. Appearance is a dream-state and, rather than damaging it, this elevates it. For us, the issue is understanding it as a dream and celebrating our dreaming as a dance. Finally, the noble person will make sacrifices, certainly; but one is not noble merely because of sacrifice. Nietzsche gives us some examples of sacrifices that are noble.
Book II. The first aphorism (#57) is a continuation of introductory material and will be directly addressed in Book III. The world is full of "realists" all of whom want to tell us the way things "really" are. Socrates is a classic example. The "realist" takes power over action because we would never want to act in a way that wasn't sanctioned by what "really" is. Nietzsche's point, of course, is that no one has an edge on reality; hence, no one has definitive power over action.
The remainder of Book II is divided into three parts. The first part, aphorisms #59 through #75 deals with women, though it is not clear that there is any uniform point. For example, while women are mentioned in the first sentence of aphorism #59 and in a somewhat uncomplimentary light, Nietzsche's point has nothing to do with women. He merely uses the harsh way that nature deals with women --- assuming that he means menstruation, PMS, pregnancy, etc. --- as an example of how we generally try to overlook physical nature in preference for a spiritual fantasy. This is art --- Apollinian art, in fact. Some of these aphorisms betray Nietzsche's painful relations with women --- his dominating grandmother, his mother, and his sister. But some are genuinely thoughtful --- e.g., aphorisms #68 and #71.
The second part of Book II deals with artists and art. This includes aphorisms # 76 through #98. Aphorism #76, "The Greatest Danger," should be especially noted, given the fact that Nietzsche went mad almost seven years later. "We others are the exception," Nietzsche notes; and then he says, "there actually are things to be said in favor of the exception." While madness in artists in not the rule, it is not exceptional either --- the poet Hoelderlin, for instance. Note how Nietzsche defines rationality in contrast to madness --- "man's greatest labor so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to submit to a law of agreement --- regardless of whether these things are true or false." (my emphasis) The rationally real, in other words, is a socially constructed world that we construct in language in response to our collective experiences with appearance. Nietzsche acknowledges that it is important for humans to struggle to construct and maintain this system of thinking. But the value of the exception should not be ignored either.
The third part of Book II, aphorisms #99 through #107, deals with the German people, Wagner, Voltaire, and Schopenhauer. It's all interesting but doesn't particularly add to the general theme of the whole book. Nietzsche was clearly far from ever being a German nationalist! Also, we see his position relative to Schopenhauer very clearly. Aphorism #107 returns to the general thesis of The Birth of Tragedy that art (fantasy) makes life healthy (possible to bear) while "honesty would lead to nausea and suicide."
Book III. Aphorism #108 begins a remarkable tour de force that brings the central material of The Gay Science into focus. "God is dead," declares Nietzsche, but what does this mean. Three aphorisms mark the basic divisions of this book. They are #108, #125, and #153. All deal with the "death of god." The first announces that god is dead; the second announces that we have killed god; and the third takes personal responsibility (in the name of homo poeta) for creating "the tragedy of tragedies" and inquires whether a comic solution would be better than a tragic one.
In #109, Nietzsche points out the manifold ways in which we construct our concepts of the world in analogy with ourselves, as a "living being." These are all errors, false attributions. The project here is to "naturalize humanity" and to "de-deify nature." Moving on, in aphorism #110, Nietzsche addresses knowledge and truth, but in order to understand this we have to capture Nietzsche's minimalist metaphysical vision. Humans are confronted by a chaos of appearances within which life is an effort of putting together a "world." A fundamental portion of appearance is what we should call "social," and language develops out of this social experience. Successful communication through an evolving language leads gradually to concepts that must de facto possess utility. Nietzsche sees all of this as a "natural history" and evolutionary process. That there are such stable concepts is a token of their utility to human survival, but questions about why they possess this utility cannot be answered. We have no organ for seeing back into the primordial experiences out of which such concepts emerged. Knowledge, then, is fundamentally determined by its natural-historic age. How, then, do the concepts of truth and falsehood arise? These, in fact, are very young conceptions, in Nietzsche's mind. Because they are young, they are necessarily weak or experimental. We don't know, at this stage, whether the impulse for truth will ultimately have survival utility.
It is in the core of this discussion that Nietzsche sets up some notions that persist painfully among analytic philosophers as Nietzsche's "problem of perspectivism." As introduced here, the concept of truth is a genuinely "interior" concept, merely an after thought in a discourse that began long ago. Truth and falsehood are ways of expressing or asserting doubts about various beliefs and their emergence signals the emergence of a new personality, the "thinker." "A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for the first fight." But if this is how truth/falsehood emerges, what does Nietzsche mean by "errors?" In fact, in Nietzsche's view not only is everything conceived about "world" in error but every human has his/her own perspective on these errors. As an interior conception, truth/falsehood has nothing to do with the origin of knowledge; hence, all knowledge remains essentially erroneous and perspectival. The thinker is an emerging person who attempts to work on the systematic consistency of knowledge, but we do not know how this will play out in the evolution of human life. Nietzsche does not imply a correspondence theory when he suggests that life-preserving knowledge is all errors; in fact, calling them errors is precisely his way of saying that there is nothing real or stable to which knowledge can be compared or referred. The German word here is 'irrthuemer' which is formed out of the adjective 'irre' and which means "astray," "on the wrong track," "confused," and even "mad." It is different from 'unwahr' or "false." It is important to take note of where Nietzsche stands on this experiment. It would be easy to assume that it is yet another aspect of modernity that he intends to criticize; however, The Gay Science is really about this quest for truth.
The sense in which God is dead is intimately related to this epistemology. In aphorism #343 (written four years later), Nietzsche says, "The greatest recent event --- that 'God is dead,' that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable." Yet throughout this book he has given us images of God's shadow continuing to live onward through centuries, etc. In other words knowing God is one of those epistemological errors that has possessed some kind of utility, cannot be explained, and will linger over a long period. The idea of belief is connected with the young movement of thinkers; that is, belief is connected with finding truth and falsehood in an analysis and comparison of knowledge. Thus, while we (thinkers) have made God unbelievable, it is reasonable to expect that many people will continue to know God.
While the aphorisms from #154 onward to the end of this book are short and seemingly disorganized, they are, nevertheless, of considerable interest. They seem to represent examples of "the gay science," that is, examples of how the perceptive thinker would see through our standard views of things to see them in a truer light. Of special note, consider aphorisms #173, #180, #265, and #270 through #275.
Book IV As Kaufmann notes, the dedication of this book to Sanctus Januarius celebrates Nietzsche's recovery from a long period of depression, loneliness, and dark thinking. By this point in writing The Gay Science, Nietzsche feels his blood running strong. Thus, the opening aphorism is a powerful statement of where he sees himself going. #276 announces Nietzsche's famous embrace of amor fati, or "love of fate," but what does this mean. In particular, is this some kind of determinism? Clearly, it has a very different point. For Nietzsche, the issue is the fact that the whole tendency of civilization has been the construction of "counter-realities," denial of natural necessity through the assertion of these constructions. In Nietzsche's naturalization and de-deification, he seeks to accept natural necessity as beautiful, indeed, to be able to say "yes" to it. His argument against Christianity will become increasingly clear as a condemnation of the ways in which Christianity has said "no" to life. This spirit is echoed in #278, "The thought of death," where Nietzsche concludes, "I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them." (my emphasis)
At #283 we find an extremely important statement of Nietzsche's ethical project, and this continues through #290. This project will carry us from the few noble souls of his own age to an age of "preparatory humans" who will themselves be replaced by a race of such beings. He even emphatically uses the word 'overcome' in this context. What is it in each of us, indeed in all things, that needs to be overcome? Nietzsche continually uses rhetorical language aimed at heroism, waging war, living dangerously, etc. But it is extremely important to recognize that these are wars of the mind. It is hard to see through the cultural crust that clothes us in habit; therefore, we need to go to ourselves ready for warfare and ready to take the risks of original thought and skepticism. As the theme continues in #285, Nietzsche stresses the constancy of energy necessary in the kind of existence that he is proposing and suggests that, "you will the eternal recurrence of war and peace." And finally, "perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god." Note at #292 his hostility toward morality as such. Nietzsche's project is an ethical system to be taken up by brave and adventurous individuals, not a formula to be laid down over individuals to stifle their own activity. At #301, again, he makes the crucial point that, while we always think ourselves to be "observers" of life, I suppose that "life happens to us," we are really the poets who keep creating life. This is especially true of values. Natural things have no intrinsic value, for Nietzsche, for we are the ones who bestow value. "Only we have created the world that concerns man!"
In #293 and #300, the project is again connected with science, as per the title of this work, and #300 is especially telling in his connection between the rise of science out of magic and the need for a gay science out of an heroic conquest in overcoming. Nietzsche mentions Prometheus, but it is relevant that Native American people of the Western US all associated knowledge and ethical flexibility (sometimes to an outrageous extent) with trickster figures --- Coyote in much of the West and Raven in the Northwest --- all of whom were associated with the creation. This theme culminates with #335, "Long live physics!" As Kaufmann writes in his footnote #67, we have to wonder what Nietzsche meant by "physics." To remain consistent with his earliest discussions, he cannot mean "theoretical physics" or theoretical science generally. Throughout The Gay Science he consistently uses terms like "observation" and "experiment" but never "theory." The kind of science that Nietzsche seems to hold in mind is a daringly critical, carefully observational, and creatively experimental truth-seeking. Nor does Nietzsche restrict this truth-seeking merely to the classic subjects unfolding in 19th Century natural science. As Kaufmann suggests, it is much more likely that Nietzsche means "physics" in the broad Greek sense of Aristotle's "Physics" which is a study of all observable natural things, including human beings and their attributes, such as psychology.
The final aphorisms rap up the collected themes of The Gay Science and lay the groundwork for Zarathustra, though one must recognize that Book I of Zarathustra was an entire year in the future and that Nietzsche experienced an extreme trauma in the meantime. Note, in #339, his declaration that "Yes, life is a woman," and compare this in a later work to "if truth were a woman, what then?" I do not believe that either of these is intended in a negative way; indeed, he seems to be saying that life and truth are beautiful things, though not always easy to understand. His disappointment with Socrates's death scene lies in Socrates's continuing denial of life as a value, and his introduction of the "Eternal Recurrence of the Same," in #341, represents an important step in taking life seriously. Indeed, in living life, we should always ask, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" And finally, the figure of Zarathustra comes forward as the true profit. Elsewhere, Nietzsche observes that he has great admiration for Christ but that he died too young and immature, as well as inexperienced. Zarathustra is mature and experienced, as well as being in contact with the natural world.