The Joyful Wisdom - Softcover

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1533409501 ISBN 13: 9781533409508

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

Synopsis

The Gay Science (German: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) or The Joyous 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 [his] books", and contains the greatest number of poems in any of his published works. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche experiments with the notion of power but does not advance any systematic theory. 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. What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'

About this title

About the Author:

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. Beginning his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy, he became the youngest-ever occupant of the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at age 24. He resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother (until her death in 1897) and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and died in 1900. Nietzsche's body of writing spanned philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction, and drew widely on art, philology, history, religion, and science. His writing displayed a fondness for aphorism and irony while engaging with a wide range of subjects including morality, aesthetics, tragedy, epistemology, atheism, and consciousness. Some prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of reason and truth in favor of perspectivism; his notion of the Apollonian and Dionysian; his genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality, and his related theory of master-slave morality; his aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; and his characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. In his later work, he developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal recurrence, and became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome social, cultural, and moral contexts in pursuit of aesthetic health.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1533409501
• ISBN 13: 9781533409508
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168