Dr. Ess - Philosophy and Religion - Drury University
Kaufmann's introduction: "the gay science" from gai saber or gaia sciensa of Provencial poetry.
"...light-hearted defiance of convention; it suggestions Nietzsche's 'immoralism' and his 'revalution of values.'" (4f)
Doctrine of eternal return:
1) his primary reaction is that no idea could be more gruesome. Nevertheless,(2) he takes for 'the most scientific of all possible hypotheses' [Will to Power, note 55] and feels that any refusal to accept it because it is such a terrifying notion would be a sign of weakness. Then
(3) he discovers that there are moments and perhaps even ways of life that make this idea not only bearable but beautiful, and
(4) he asks whether it might not serve a positive function. (17)
"Preface for Second Edition"
Para. 1: experience necessary to approach the experience of the book: "It seems to be written in the language of the wind that thaws ice and snow: high spirits, unrest, contradiction, and April weather are present 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 for convalescence; the intoxication of convalescence:
This whole book is nothing but a bit of merry-making after long privation and powerlessness, the rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again, of goals that are permitted again, believed again.
romanticism as an "incautious and pampering spiritual diet" leading to nausea.
out of this comes "more than a little foolishness, exuberance, and 'gay science'" -- including the added songs,
songs in which a poet makes fun of all poets in a way that may be hard to forgive. Alas, it is not only the poets and their beautiful "lyrical sentiments" on whom the resurrected author has to vent his sarcasm: who knows what victim he is looking for, what monster of material for parody will soon attract him? "Incipit tragoedia" we read at the end of this awesomely aweless book. Beware! Something downright wicked and malicious is announced here: incipit parodia, no doubt. (33)
What this means is:
a) Nietzsche is not to be read "literally" in the fashion of most philosophers -- but someone who writes "poetically," in a literary fashion with a whole host of literary devices at hand;b) Nietzsche writes out of his experience -- including the "arational" if not irrational "moves" which emerge, say, from the experience of convalescence: he is rational -- but he writes out of other sources as well;
c) N. is playful, sarcastic, and paradoxical: the poet who makes fun of all poets. This must, after all, include himself: how "seriously," then, are we to take Herr Nietzsche?
d) Along these lines, Zarathustra as a "tragedy" is also a parody.
Section 2:
the relationship between health and philosophy, considered from a psychological standpoint:
In some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, whether it be as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation. For the latter, it is merely a beautiful luxury -- in the best cases, the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually still has to inscribe itself in cosmic letters on the heaven of concepts. (33f.)
The example of the traveler who can (in my terms) "set his alarm" -- "...the traveler knows that something is not asleep, that something counts the hours and will wake him up, we, too, know that the decisive moment will find us awake, and that something will leap forward then and catch the spirit in the act...." -- i.e., so as to analyze whether it is acting out of weakness, repentance, etc.
It is the body which philosophizes:
...one can infer better than before the involuntary detours, side lanes, resting places, and sunny places of thought to which suffering thinkers are led and misled on account of their suffering; for now one knows whether the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push, and lure the spirit -- toward the sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense. Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, some final state of some sort, every predominately aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening lengths -- and often I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. (34f.)Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the history of thought, there are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution -- of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those bold insanities of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as the symptoms of certain bodies. [....]
[....] [his suspicion, which has yet to be pushed to its limits:] what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all "truth" but something else -- let us say, health, future, growth, power, life. (35)
Section 3:
A philosopher who has traversed many kinds of health, and keeps traversing them, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot keep from transposing his states every time into the most spiritual form and distance: this art of transfiguration is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood,heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life -- that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame -- also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other. (35f.)
Pain compels us to put aside all trust -- and put aside everything that would interpose a veil "things in which formerly we may have found our humanity." This does not make us "better": it makes us more profound.
The trust in life is gone: life becomes a problem. This does not, necessarily, make us gloomy: "Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman who causes doubts in us." (check translation). (36f.)
Section 4:
New pleasures - over against the musty brown pleasure of the educated, the wealthy, the powerful (including romanticism)
--> new art
Contra the Egyptian youths who attempted to unveil the statues;
"Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is -- to speak Greek -- Baubo?" (38)
["Baubo: a primitive and obscene female demon; according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, originally a personification of the female genitals.]
--> art as learning to live among the surfaces, because the depths are unreachable (Kant).
Notes on Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One
As an example of Nietzsche's use of the aphorism, coupled with the "experimentalism" or experimentalist "flavor" of the aphorisms -- and the correlative "anti-Manichean" approach (as Kaufmann calls what I call N's complementarity logic) -- look especially at aphorisms 1-3 and 33-37
1. The teachers of the purpose of existence
Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct -- because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd.
This Darwinistic understanding -- which also anticipates Freud, insofar as it explores the notion that our conscious belief in a "purpose of existence" is rooted in some deep, instinctual drive towards preservation -- is clearly introduced as potentially qualified by the perspective from which the observation arises. Simply, N. begins by noting that he may contemplate "men" (sic) with either benevolence or malevolence. Depending on which standpoint is adopted, perhaps different perspectives or views of the same "Reality" will emerge. In this case, apparently not -- but see if more nuanced understandings of this drive towards preservation emerge.
Note as well the Kantian background presumed here: the standpoint from which we judge or "know" a thing contributes to the "appearance" of the thing, i.e., how that "reality" appears to us. N. will make this "appearance" character of human knowledge explicit by aphorism 54 -- but he presumes this Kantian understanding of human knowledge in the next aphorisms as well.
Note as well that observations such as:
Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species.
these are observations -- not prescriptions for how one ought to behave. (Cf. here his aphorism 51, "Truthfulness." "I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: 'Let us try it!' But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my 'truthfulness'; for there courage has lost its right." [115])
This initial observation, then, leads to a second:
I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbor, are at all capable of living in a way that would damage the species; in other words, "unreasonably" and "badly." What might have harmed the species may have become extinct many thousands of years ago and may by now be one of those things that are not possible even for God.
This immediately leads to the observation:
Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all perish! In both cases you are probably still in some way a promoter and benefactor of humanity and therefore entitled to your eulogists -- but also to your detractors.
That is, if it's true that we are no longer capable of harming the species -- we may pursue our "best" or our "worst": in terms of harming the species, neither is "prohibited." But we will also receive praise and blame (for what that's worth).
Note, however, a significant break between this and the next line of thought:
But you will never find anyone who could wholly mock you as an individual, also in your best qualities, bringing home to you to the limits of truth your boundless, flylike, frog-like wretchedness! To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth -- to do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth,and the most gifted had too little genius for that. Even laughter may yet have a future. I mean, when the proposition "the species is everything, one is always none" has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps only "gay science" will then be left.
That is: within the circle of current human views, pursuing either our "best" or "worst" desires -- as judged from the standpoint of a given "morality," cannot really harm the species; to do either will result simply in praise and blame. But -- not even those who would reproach us will move beyond the circle of a human "morality" -- to get to the truth Nietzsche thinks he's discerned -- namely that as individuals we are always subsumed to what is good for the preservation of the species: such a status, especially from the standpoint of a more common "morality," is "boundless, flylike, frog-like wretchedness" -- but it is also "ultimate liberation and irresponsibility."
[A KEY POINT IN READING NIETZSCHE: "THINGS" HAVE MORE THAN ONE "VALUE" OR "FACE"; THEY MAY APPEAR TO HAVE DIFFERENT, PERHAPS EVEN CONTRADICTORY "VALUES" TO US, DEPENDING ON THE STANDPOINT WE TAKE IN "KNOWING" OR JUDGING THEM. (REMEMBER KANT AND THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION!)]
It is this perspective on human beings:
-- this "truth," that our essential nature as a species is one of everything undertaken by the individual,while it may appear from within the standpoint of a more conventional or superficial view or morality to be either "good" or "evil,"
in fact, from N's larger perspective, these undertakings can only contribute to the good of the species, so that:
(a) "the species is everything, one is always none," -- a proposition which(b) most of humanity is currently unaware of, meaning
(c) there is a considerable contrast and tension between what we consciously believe or assume about ourselves (emphasizing the worth and importance of the individual -- a "modern" idea!), our value-systems, etc. AND what we really are (individuals entirely subsumed under the good of the species)
-- this currently unconscious tension between our "surface" beliefs and our underlying truth is, in N's view, an essential truth about human beings [the whole truth includes the conscious awareness of this tension], and
-- this fundamental situation is fundamentally comic -- this is what N means by "the comedy of existence": N. suggests that what is yet to come is our being mocked for living in such a tension between our appearances and our reality -- but this mocking is not necessarily malicious: rather, N. seems to be saying that laughter is the response to recognizing this situation -- a laughter which, however, no one has yet achieved, because they have neither penetrated to this truth, nor had the "genius" to respond to this truth with laughter.
Further, in the future, as this status of the individual vis-a-vis the species becomes conscious of the whole truth (=a part of our knowledge or "wisdom") -- perhaps learning to respond to this status and tension with laughter will be "the gay science."
Moralities and religions work as 'tragedies" -- but they too promote the life of the species,by promoting the faith in life: "life is worth living!"
The instinct of preservation can emerge as both reason and passion, vs. their underlying reality of "instinct, drive, folly, lack of reasons."
We cannot laugh at the teachers of morality. Morality achieves the "gruesome counterpart of laughter" -- the shock "life is interesting," "I am worthy of living."
There is no denying that in the long run every one of these great teachers of a purpose was vanquished by laughter, reason, nature: the short tragedy always gave way again and returned into the eternal comedy of existence; and "the waves of uncountable laughter" - to cite Aeschylus - must in the end overwhelm even the greatest of these tragedians. In spite of all this laughter which makes the required corrections, human nature has nevertheless been changed by the ever new appearance of these teachers of the purpose of existence: It now has one additional need -- the need for the ever new appearance of such teachers and teachings of a "purpose."Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life -- without faith in reason in life. (75)
[The perspectivism suggested by the opening sentence in the first paragraph is instantiated in the second and third aphorisms, as N explores the temptation of the "noble" to impose his own definition of humanity (= philosopher, the one who searches for reasons) upon others (2) -- and to pursue knowledge for its own sake, not for the sake of utility (3). We then return to the them of "what preserves the species" in 4.]
2. The intellectual conscience. I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, call this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not acount the deire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress -- as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing -- that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading methat every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice. (76f.)
3. Noble and common -- Common natures consider all noble, magnanimous feelings inexpedient and therefore first of all incredible. [The common type "never loses sight of its advantage....not to allow these instincts to lead one astray to perform inexpedient acts -- that is their wisdom and pride."] (Accordingly, the first expect magnanamity to be disguised selfishness -- and if it's demonstrated that it's not, then they take the noble person for a fool: "they despise him in his joy and laugh at his shining eyes.")
Compared to them, the higher type is more unreasonable, for those who are noble, magnanimous, and self-sacrificial do succumb to their instincts, and when they are at their best, their reason pauses. (Like the mother protecting its young, "the animal becomes more stupid than usual.")
The unreason or counterreason of passion is what the common type despises in the noble, especially when this passion is directed toward objects whose value seems quite fantastic and arbitrary. One is annoyed with those who succumb to the passion of the belly, but at least one comprehends the attraction that plays the tyrant in such cases. But one cannot comprehend how anyone could risk his health and honor for the sake of a passion of knowledge. The taste of the higher type is for exceptions, for things that leave most people cold and seem to lack sweetness; the higher type has a singular value standard. Moreover, it usually believes that the idiosyncrasy of its taste is not of a singular value standard; rather, it posits its values and disvalues as generally valid and thus becomes incomprehensible and impractical.
[and we're back to the theme of Aphorism 2: what N calls here the eternal injustice of those who are noble towards the common type -- their failure to recognize that different persons operate by different instincts and values.] (78)
4- Conception of evil (vis-a-vis England, Spencer)
What preserves the species -- The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they relumed the passions that were going to sleep -- all ordered society puts the passions to sleep -- and they reawakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried: they compelled men to pit opinion against opinion, model against model....What is new...is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit -- the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is exploited, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.
[Contra the English utilitarian view which identifies the good with the expedient, and the evil with the inexpedient: "In truth, however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely different."
Cf. Gilligan's complementary ethics -- and Kaufmann's comment here on N's "anti-Manichaean subtlety, w/ reference to sections: 14, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 35-37, 49.]
5. Unconditional duties
6. Loss of dignity (the postures of reflection)
7. Something for the Industrious.
[a study of moral matters from a "genetic" point of view]
If all these jobs were done, the most insidious question of all would emerge into the foreground: whether science can furnish goals of action after it has proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then experimentation would be in order that would allow every kind of heroism to find satisfaction -- centuries of experimentation that might eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclopic buildings but the time for that, too, will come. (82)
[that is: N's formulation of the modern crisis: whether science, with its "will-to-truth" (inherited from Christianity), after exposing our real situation -- the whole truth of our situation as expressed in Aphorism 1 -- whereby we come to recognize our Kantian stance of living in self-created worlds, not the worlds of reality, including values and purposes defind from external sources which "appear" to us -- whether science will now return meaning to our existence by giving us purposes again. {Remember from Aphorism 1 as well -- that we are, precisely from the "scientific" view of evolution, the fantastic animal who has come to need purposes!} And, N seems to be suggesting -- the very project of determining whether science can give us purposes again is in fact itself a new purpose!
In sum: from N's scientific view: we realize that we need purposes, we realize that our previous sense of purpose (as deriving from an external source) is illusory -- but the scientific quest of determining whether science can restore to us some project or purpose itself may become our new project or purpose!]
8. Unconscious virtues. [compares unconscious virtues -- which are apparently idiosyncratic -- to the microscopic features of reptile scales which cannot be explained in the usual evolutionary way, because of their scale: they cannot serve as weapon or ornament, because only a god with a microscope could see them. Then N comments on his reader, "the friends of instinctive morality," who will be satisfied with this observation, as an indication that he believes such unconscious virtues to be possible. Instead of greeting these readers -- he criticizes them for being satisfied with so little!
--> N. is not "understood" at the conclusion of a single aphorism! He is not writing for people who seek simply to have their own views reaffirmed.)
9. Our eruptions. (gradual acquisitions emerge in subsequent generations)
--> 10. A kind of atavism: " the rare human beings of an age as suddenly emerging late ghosts of past cultures and their powers.
Further, the value of conservative castes and generations: they maintain the right tempo for the development of peoples.)
11. Consciousness. Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, "exceeding destiny," as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity -- in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would long have disappeared.Before a function is fully developed and mature it constitutes a danger for the organism, and it is good if during the interval it is subjected to some tyranny. Thus consciousness is tyrannized -- not least by our pride in it....
[Note the value of tyranny -- it serves a purpose for a particular time, a purpose further recalling the organizing theme of the 1st and 4th aphorisms, i.e., what preserves the species. At the same time, this -- and the remainder of the aphorism, point both backward to the tensional problem articulated in Aphorism 1 [consciousness as caught up in appearance] and forward to N's critique of science as resting on errors.]
This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an all too fast development of consciousness. Believing that they possess consciousnes, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it; and things haven't changed much in this respect. To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task that is seen only by those who have comprehended that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness relates to errors. (85)
12. On the aim of science. (Here N explores the utilitarian claim that science should maximize pleasure and minimize pain.)
But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other -- that whoever wanted to learn to "jubilate up to the heavens" would also have to be prepared for "depression unto death"?
N seems to take this view -- and uses it to criticize "socialists and politicians of all parties," who, he argues, can only promise either as little pleasure as possible, "or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet." To decide for the former is to decide to diminish the level of the human capacity for joy.
As he points out, science can promote either goal, but: "So far it may still be better known for its power of depriving man of his joys and making him colder, more like a statue, more stoic." --> the modern crisis
But, he sugests, it may also be yet found to be the great dispenser of pain -- thus capable of making new galaxies of joy flare up. (86)
Gay Science -- Book 3 notes
Opening theme in 108 -- the shadow of Buddha in a cave: probably a conscious parallel to Plato's cave? Clearly tied to Death of God -- even the shadow of God must eventually be vanquished. (Shadow = notion that "value" must come from an external, divine source.)
109. Against human images drawn from partial perspectives -- imposed/projected on a whole. But
None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. (ETC - 168)
110. Origin of knowledge. - Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors....
These "erroneous articles of faith" have now become part of the make-up of our species and include:
that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late that truth emerged -- as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it. (169)
[I.e., a statement of out "Post-Kantian condition."]
--> Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power -- until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers, both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation [Einverleibung]? That is the question; that is the experiment. (171)
111. Origin of the logical -- see 171
112. Cause and effect
But how could we possibly explain anything? We operate only with things that do not exist; lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces. How should explanations be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image, our image! (172)
(the "duality" of cause and effect vs. the "reality" of continuum)
114. All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception.
115-117 passim
120, 121
122. The contribution of Christianity
283 - Preparatory Men - /live dangerously - vis-a-vis Nietzsche's
285 - Excelsior! - highest vision of humanity, autonomy
- but notice that this freedom does not mean lack of discipline - 290 "living style" to one's character
341 - "The Greatest Stress" - eternal recurrence as vehicle of affirming life vs. critique of Western dualisms