Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Gay Science
    Unavailable
    The Gay Science
    Unavailable
    The Gay Science
    Ebook555 pages6 hours

    The Gay Science

    By Friedrich Nietzsche

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Although dour in appearance and formidable in reputation, Friedrich Nietzsche was an ardent practitioner of the art of poetry—called in twelfth-century Provencal "the gay science." This volume, which Nietzsche referred to as "the most personal of all my books," features the largest collection of his poetry that he ever chose to publish. It also offers an extensive and sophisticated treatment of the philosophical themes and views most central to his thinking, as well as the ideas that proved most influential to later philosophers.
    Dating from the era when Nietzsche was at the peak of his intellectual powers, most of this book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the rest of it five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. Zarathustra makes his first appearance in these pages, along with the author's well-known proclamation of the death of God—a concept to which much of the book is devoted—and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence. Readers will find this volume a wellspring for some of Nietzsche's most sustained and thought-provoking discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience, and the origin of logic.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMar 7, 2012
    ISBN9780486121147
    Unavailable
    The Gay Science
    Author

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and author. Born into a line of Protestant churchman, Nietzsche studied Classical literature and language before becoming a professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He became a philosopher after reading Schopenhauer, who suggested that God does not exist, and that life is filled with pain and suffering. Nietzsche’s first work of prominence was The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, which contained new theories regarding the origins of classical Greek culture. From 1883 to 1885 Nietzsche composed his most famous work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which he famously proclaimed that “God is dead.” He went on to release several more notable works including Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, both of which dealt with the origins of moral values. Nietzsche suffered a nervous breakdown in 1889 and passed away in 1900, but not before giving us his most famous quote, “From life's school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger.”

    Read more from Friedrich Nietzsche

    Related to The Gay Science

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy (Religion) For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Myth Of Sisyphus

      Aug 10, 2020

      The Myth Of Sisyphus
      10 min read

    • Article

      Thinking Makes It So: Ward Farnsworth Reframes the Stoics with Wit and Insight

      Aug 30, 2018

      Seneca’s suicide, at the order of the emperor Nero, presents a macabre scene. Previously adviser to the fickle, impetuous, paranoid, thin-skinned emperor, Seneca was erroneously implicated in an assassination plot and was ordered to take his own life

      9 min read

    • Article

      Death Is A Powerful Teacher

      Jul 29, 2019

      Death Is A Powerful Teacher
      6 min read

    • Article

      Poem Of The Week: Of Human Knowledge By Sir John Davies

      May 1, 2023

      If aught can teach us aught, Affliction’s looks, Making us look into ourselves so near, Teach us to know ourselves beyond all books, Or all the learned schools that ever were. This mistress lately plucked me by the ear, And many a golden lesson hath

      3 min read

    • Article

      Thug Life

      Jan 23, 2018

      Thug Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Burning World

      Sep 1, 2023

      CHRISTIAN WIMAN teaches at Yale Divinity School. He is the author most recently of Survival Is a Style. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, to be published in December by Farrar, Straus & G

      8 min read

    • Article

      ‘Happiness Can Be Ignited By Making Something Small Infinite’: What Makes Me Happy Now

      Jan 28, 2023

      It’s a nightmare, a barbaric farce. The city is first taken by Russians, then by Ukrainians, then by Russians again; foreign forces join the struggle, gangster hordes go on killing sprees, thousands are butchered, and a plague engulfs the survivors.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Tales Of A Fractured Mind

      Oct 28, 2021

      Tales Of A Fractured Mind
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Language Beyond Reason

      Feb 27, 2020

      I grew up in a scientific family. My grandmother Irene was the daughter of the physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and was a close friend of Albert Einstein. She was herself scientifically well educated and h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Ingenious: Albert Camus

      Jun 29, 2017

      I had always dreamed of meeting Albert Camus and so was thrilled when he appeared at Lucey’s Lounge, a dark and yellowy lit bar in Brooklyn. The Algerian writer had graciously agreed, or so it seemed, to be interviewed about absurdity, the concept in

      14 min read

    • Article

      SETI Dreams

      Aug 13, 2020

      Wade Roush MIT Press 2020 Pb, 221pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780262538435 If for some reason or another you feel the need to consume a history of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) – the effort to contact aliens over vast cosmic distances via

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Universe in a Sentence: On Aphorisms

      Sep 18, 2019

      “An aphorism,” Friedrich Nietzsche aphoristically wrote, “is an audacity.” Exploring the pithiest of phrases, from Ben Franklin to Susan Sontag. The post The Universe in a Sentence: On Aphorisms appeared first on The Millions.

      11 min read

    • Article

      Thomas Bernhard (1978)

      Dec 1, 2020

      WHEN, JUST over a month ago, Thomas Bernhard’s last play, Immanuel Kant, premiered in Stuttgart—a play in which the philosopher from Königsberg, accompanied by a servant, a parrot, and his wife, undertakes a long, long sea voyage to New York—most Ger

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

      Dec 23, 2020

      I’d been out of the hospital following (let’s call it) treatment for COVID-19 about a month. My hospital ward of 50 patients had one oxygen concentrator. Despite my blood-oxygen saturation levels of 90%, that device wasn’t coming my way anytime soon.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Books

      May 22, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Can PTSD Be Good for You?

      Jan 7, 2018

      Can PTSD Be Good for You?
      5 min read

    Reviews for The Gay Science

    4.5/5

    316 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer!

      While this wasn't my point of departure into Theory, though it should've been. Ideas bubbled and grew fecund in my youthful soul. Pints of Carlsburg and shit food from Hardees nourshed my wretched body, but it was Nietzsche's frisson which propelled me forward.
    • 4/5
      The Gay Science: the source of and solution to all your worries about lack of meaning in life. That is how it feels right now anyway.

      I came to this book to find out Nietzsche's interpretation of reality and framework of life; what was his answer to the question - what should one do? As to interpretation of reality it is hard to be disappointed; there are so many compelling conclusions on all aspects of humanity, language, morality and existence - delivered on the most part with wit and clarity. Here and there it is spoiled by the odd super long sentence or vague metaphor that tests the limits of comprehension, but it is still a gold-mine of ideas in bite-size chunks. Recipe for two: read a few pages on a low heat, set simmering for 20 minutes (perhaps go for a walk or bike ride) and serve immediately to a companion. For me its been the source of most of the best topics of conversation for the last half year.

      What about a framework of life? Philosophy for me is the attempt to concisely describe reality and help us decide how to live - to arrive at a theory/framework, relying on the most irreducible and unshakable axioms, which singles out some courses of action as the better ones. I did not find anything like this. After all the talk of his free spirit type, I arrive at perhaps contradictory conclusions: on the one hand I have many scattered ideas about the life he presents persuasively as a good one, but on the other hand I hear the louder message 'Be yourself!'.I wonder if such things as axioms and basic truths existed in Nietzsche's head and he chose not to present things that way - or whether he really did think as he wrote.

      He persuades me better than books on Buddhism did to mistrust dichotomies - I feel like he has succeeded where they failed because he reasoned more forcefully the many contradictions we can stumble upon when demanding clear reasoned black-and-white everlasting truths. I am left feeling more alone and lost than ever in my head, but more at peace and at home in the universe. I feel less secure of my ideas about how to live, but far less urgency to remedy that. I feel profoundly happier, and equally sad. Everything, everything, everything.
    • 5/5
      Next to Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, The Gay Science is my favorite source of clever soundbites about various topics, so invest in an edition with an index!
    • 5/5
      The majority if this book consists of just under 400 short pieces, between a few lines and couple of pages in length, in which Nietzsche delivers his profound reflexions and aphorisms. There are also a few poems at the beginning and the end. .The outlook of the pieces are quite varied, and if you flicked though, picked one, and read it, you might be cheered up, made to think about a miscellaneous issue, pushed towards an existential abyss, or just feel like going outside for walk. I will list a small selection of the varied headings of the pieces that stood out to me as I flicked through just now:"The Danger of Vegetarians", "Too Oriental", "The Origin of Religion", "Dignity of Folly", "Against Remorse", "Work and Ennui", "Epicurus","The Way to Happiness"There is quite a variety of things that are written about in this book, which might give it more appeal than some of his other ones. The way that Nietzsche writes is not technical, but his ideas will be more easily received by some people than others. I happen to agree with a lot of it, but some of it is also subversive, he entices us with the poetic sentiment, but after analysis we realise it is callous, or amoral.Due to the structure of the book, and the fact that a lot seems to be said in each of the pieces, it will probably be a book that the reader will come back to, and re-read, after the initial reading. I did read the book right through, but it would be easy to read one piece and then spend five minutes thinking about it, over a cup of tea, then move onto another.But if you don't like to think about deep issues, are intellectually squeamish, or don't like philosophy, then you will probably want to avoid this book. But for anyone who likes to think, then this is a book that will be quite enjoyed.
    • 4/5
      Imagine, if you will, that you (and everyone else) had to keep living the same life over and over again for eternity. What changes would you make? Nietzsche’s theory of the Eternal Recurrence should make us all stop and examine the lives we are leading. A must read!
    • 4/5
      Nietzsche considered this "the most personal of all my books." It includes many aphorisms the denote themes central to his work; notably the proclamation of the death of God is in this book. Along with Also Sprach Zarathustra, this is among his most poetic works.