The Gay Science or occasionally translated as The Joyful Wisdom is a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1882 and followed by a second edition, which was published after the completion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, in 1887. This substantial expansion includes a fifth book and an appendix of songs. It was noted by Nietzsche to be "the most personal of all books", and contains the greatest number of poems in any of his published works.
Title
The book's title, in the original German and in translation, uses a phrase that was well-known at the time in many European cultures and had specific meaning. One of its earliest literary uses is in Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. It was derived from a Provençal expression for the technical skill required for poetry-writing. The expression proved durable and was used as late as 19th centuryAmerican English by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas. It was also used in deliberately inverted form, by Thomas Carlyle in "the dismal science", to criticize the emerging discipline of economics by comparison with poetry. The book's title was first translated into English as The Joyful Wisdom, but The Gay Science has become the common translation since Walter Kaufmann's version in the 1960s. Kaufmann cites The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary that lists "The gay science : the art of poetry." In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche refers to the poems in the Appendix of The Gay Science, saying they were This alludes to the birth of modern European poetry that occurred in Provence around the 11th century, whereupon, after the culture of the troubadours fell into almost complete desolation and destruction due to the Albigensian Crusade, other poets in the 14th century ameliorated and thus cultivated the gai saber or gaia scienza. In a similar vein, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche observed that, The original English translation as The Joyful Wisdom could be considered more comprehensible to the modern reader given changes in English usage for both "gay" and "science" in the second half of the twentieth century. However, it could be considered flawed in poorly reflecting the then still-current use of the phrase in its original meaning for poetry, which Nietszche was deliberately evoking, poorly reflecting the Provencal and French origins of the phrase, and in poorly translating the German. The German "fröhliche" can be translated "happy" or "joyful", cognate to the original meanings of "gay" in English and other languages. However Wissenschaft never indicates "wisdom", but a propensity toward any rigorous practice of a poised, controlled, and disciplined quest for knowledge. This word is typically translated to English as "science", both in this broader meaning and for the specific sets of discplines now called "sciences" in English. The term "science" formerly had a similarly broad connotation in English, referring to useful bodies of knowledge or skills, from the Latin "scientia".
Content
The book is usually placed within Nietzsche's middle period, during which his work extolled the merits of science, skepticism, and intellectual discipline as routes to mental freedom. The affirmation of the Provençal tradition is also one of a joyful "yea-saying" to life. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche experiments with the notion of power but does not advance any systematic theory.
Eternal recurrence
The book contains Nietzsche's first consideration of the idea of the eternal recurrence, a concept which would become critical in his next work Thus Spoke Zarathustra and underpins much of the later works.
"God is dead"
Here is also the first occurrence of the famous formulation "God is dead", first in section 108. Section 125 depicts the parable of the madman who is searching for God. He accuses us all of being the murderers of God. "'Where is God?' he cried; 'I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers..."
