Williams - Nietzsche: The Gay Science

CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Gay Science

CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Series editors

KARL AMERIKS

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame

DESMOND M. CLARKE

Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork

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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

EDITED BY

BERNARD WILLIAMS

All Souls College, Oxford

TRANSLATED BY

JOSEFINE NAUCKHOFF

Wake Forest University

POEMS TRANSLATED BY

ADRIAN DEL CARO

University of Colorado at Boulder

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Cambridge University Press 2001

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First published 2001
12th printing 2013

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18441900.
[Frhliche Wissenschaft. English]
The gay science: with a prelude in German rhymes and an appendix of songs / Friedrich Nietzsche;
edited by Bernard Williams; translated by Josefine Nauckhoff; poems translated by Adrian Del Caro.
p. cm. (Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0 521 63159 9 (hardback) ISBN 0 521 63645 0 (paperback)
I. Philosophy. I. Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen. II. Nauckhoff, Josefine.
III. Del Caro, Adrian, 1952. IV. Title. V. Series.
B3313.F72 E5 2001
193dc2I 2001025408

ISBN 978-0-521-63159-4 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-63645-2 paperback

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The Gay Science is a remarkable book, both in itself and as offering a way into some of Nietzsches most important ideas. The history of its publication is rather complex, and it throws some light on the development of his thought and of his methods as a writer. He published the first edition of it in 1882. In that version, it consisted of only four books, and had no Preface, though it did have the Prelude in Rhymes. A second edition appeared in 1887, which added a fifth book, the Preface, and an Appendix of further poems. This is the work as we now know it, and which is translated here.

Between the two editions of The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote two of his best-known works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (18835) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886); the last section of Book Four of The Gay Science (342) is indeed virtually the same as the first section of Zarathustra. So the complete Gay Science brackets these two books, which are different from it and from each other. (Zarathustra, which is a peculiar literary experiment in a rhetoric drawn from the Bible, was once one of Nietzsches most popular works, but it has worn less well than the others.) Book Five of The Gay Science anticipates, in turn, some of the themes of another famous book which was to follow in 1887, On the Genealogy of Morality, which is again different in tone, sustaining a more continuous theoretical argument.

The Gay Science is a prime example of what is often called Nietzsches aphoristic style. It consists of a sequence of sections which are not obviously tied to one another except, sometimes, in general content, and which do not offer a connected argument. The second half of Book Three, in particular, consists of many very short paragraphs of this kind. Elsewhere, however, there are longer passages, and in fact the arrangement of the shorter sections is not as fortuitous as it may look. It is often designed to gather thoughts which will, so to speak, circle in on some central theme or problem.

In his earlier works, Nietzsche had moved gradually towards this style. He had been appointed in 1869 as a professor of classical philology at the University of Basle, at the extraordinarily early age of twenty-four. He served in this position for ten years, resigning in 1879 because of the ill health which was to persist throughout his life. (The last letter he wrote, when in 1889 he broke down into insanity and a silence which lasted until his death in 1900, was to his distinguished colleague at Basle, Jacob Burckhardt, in which he said that he would rather have been a Swiss professor than God, but he had not dared to push egoism so far.) In his years at Basle he published first The Birth of Tragedy, which has the form, if not the content or the tone, of a treatise, and a set of four long essays collected as Untimely Meditations. In 18789 he brought out two books forming Human, All Too Human, followed in 1880 by a further part called The Wanderer and his Shadow, and in these writings he moved from continuous exposition and argument to setting out a sequence of thoughts which were not necessarily tied discursively to their neighbours, a style that allowed him to approach a question from many different directions. In Daybreak, which came out in 1881, the style is fully developed. As late as 25 January 1882 he still referred to what were to be the first books of The Gay Science as a continuation of Daybreak; by June they had acquired their separate title.

When he made that decision, he sensed that Book Four, which is called Sanctus Januarius and invokes the spirit of the New Year, might be found obscure, and he was anxious about whether his correspondent, Peter Gast, would understand it. He knew that this was not just a set of penetrating, perhaps rather cynical,