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Written in a burst of recovered health and high spirits, this book of aphorisms, songs and poems, also known as The Gay Science, is Nietzsche at his most…
Written in a burst of recovered health and high spirits, this book of aphorisms, songs and poems, also known as The Gay Science, is Nietzsche at his most playful and lyrical. It contains the parable of the madman who runs into the marketplace with a lantern in broad daylight crying 'God is dead... and we have killed him', the first statement of the idea of eternal recurrence, and the first appearance of Zarathustra, as well as reflections on knowledge, art and how to live joyfully without illusions.
Context and significance
Published in 1882 and enlarged in 1887, the book prepared the way for Thus Spake Zarathustra. This translation, by Thomas Common, with the verse translated by Paul Cohn and Maude Petre, comes from the complete English edition of Nietzsche's works edited by Oscar Levy. See Nietzsche's life.
About the author
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.