Excerpt from friedrich nietzsches the gay science meaning
Nietzsche’s Women in The Lgbtq+ Science
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Linda Williams spots jewels within Nietzsche’s aphoristic archive of sexism.
At the beginning of Publication Two of The Homosexual Science, Nietzsche presents a series of aphorisms on women. At the finish of this series, Walter Kaufmann writes in a footnote to his translation, “With this absurd aphorism the pages on women (sections 60-75) reach their nadir and end. The rest of Book Two (through section 107) deals with art.” Kaufmann’s footnote suggests that the aphorisms on women are not only an anomaly within the second book but a rather embarrassing anomaly at that. I wish to show that Nietzsche’s placement of these aphorisms is no mistake or embarrassment, if we hold a closer look at the role Book Two plays within the larger purpose of The Lgbtq+ Science.
The Gay Science is Nietzsche’s answer to the nineteenth century’s disease of nihilism.
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THIRD BOOK
108
New struggles. – After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead;* but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. – And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.
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Let us beware. – Let us beware of thinking that the society is a living creature. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and form of it something necessary, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a “machine” does it far too much honor. Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as stylish as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts w
God is Dead: Nietzsche’s Most Famous Utterance Explained
“God is dead,” the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declares in his 1882 work, The Gay Science: “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
By these words, Nietzsche does not so much signify that atheism is true — indeed, in the alley from which they’re taken, these words are presented as fresh news to a group of atheists — he more means that, because “the doctrine in the Christian God has change into unbelievable”, everything that “was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it”, including “the whole of our European morality,” is destined for “collapse.”
Nietzsche was writing, of course, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, a time in which science, mathematics, and philosophy arose across Europe to displace Christianity as the guiding command on truth about life and the universe. For centuries, Christianity’s teachings about reality — that there exists a Creator outside day and space, and that we should abide by the rules of this Creator to guarantee a good afterlife — were entirely dominant.
However, the scientific revolution and the separation of Church and State across Europe pulled the a
Friedrich Nietzsche Pronounces “God is Dead”: The Same-sex attracted Science (1882)
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Abstract
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) had a tremendous impact on German philosophy in the nineteenth century and was one of its most original, provocative thinkers. After studying theology and philology, he was offered a professorship in Basel in 1869, at the mere age of 24. He briefly participated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 as a military medic. In 1879, he was forced to provide up his professorship in Basel because of health problems (he suffered from poor eyesight and frequent migraines). In 1889, he had a mental breakdown (brought on by syphilis) from which he never fully recovered.
Nietzsche is often regarded as a key proponent of an irrationalist philosophy. But he was a powerful and eloquent cultural critic, eager to unmask the hypocrisy of the educated German middle classes [Bildungsbürgertum]. Nietzsche’s renowned pronouncement, “God is dead,” is from The Queer Science [Die fröhliche Wissenschaft] (1882). It appears proximate the end of the excerpt reprinted below, in section 25 (“The madman”). The argument advanced in the preceding sections makes the logic of Nietzsche’s s
The Gay Science
Excerpts
PREFACE FOR THE SECOND EDITION
This book may desire more than one preface, and in the end there would still last room for disbelieve whether anyone who had never lived through similar experiences could be brought closer to the experience of this book by means of prefaces. It seems to be written in the language of the wind that thaws ice and snow: high spirits, unrest, contradiction, and April weather are display in it, and one is instantly reminded no less of the proximity of winter than of the triumph over the winter that is coming, must come, and perhaps has already come.
Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened—the gratitude of a convalescent—for convalescence was unexpected. "Gay Science": that signifies the saturnalia of a energy who has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure—patiently, severely, coldly, without submitting, but also without hope—and who is now all at once attacked by hope, the dream for health, and the intoxication of convalescence. Is it any wonder that in the process much that is unreasonable and foolish comes to glow, much playful tenderness that is lavished even on problems that have