This assignment needs you to prepare at least 3 questions or comments. Read the article, transcribe the kinds of things you might write in the margins as notes to yourself as you’re working through the reading.

20190314232453nietzsche___the_gay_science_part_1

The Gay Science

(‘La gaya scienza’)

This house is my own and here I dwell,
I’ve never aped nothing from no one
and -laugh at each master, mark me well,
who at himself has not poked fun.

Over my front door.

The title is a translation into German (in our edition, into English) of the Proven~al subtitle.
Gaya scienza (‘joyful, cheerful, or gay science’) was a term used by the troubadours in the twelfth
to fourteenth centuries to refer to the art of poetry. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes that he has
used the term gaya scienza here to designate the specific unity of ‘singer, knight, and free spirit’
which was characteristic of early Proven~al culture.

Tim
Comment on Text
A few introductory notes (especially since I will be giving few throughout the reading!):
First off, “gay” here means, of course, “joyful” or “cheerful”. It has nothing to do with the modern convention of “gay” meaning “homosexual”. Nietzsche is referring to a special kind of inquiry that he is more or less taking himself as inventing. It is a way of trying to understand humanity and how to live best.
How we describe this is difficult because Nietzsche certainly doesn’t have in mind morality! And he doesn’t want to replace the old morality with a new one. Nietzsche finds morality a dead thing that creates dead people (to put it quickly), but even in this he is not entirely clear as to his evaluative attitude.
And this should be the glaring thing you will notice about Nietzsche and his writing: he is notoriously unclear, metaphorical, and hard to pin down. And he’s kinda a bitch too. HAVE PATIENCE. The purpose in giving you this writing is to get inspired in your thinking on ethical and moral matters. For the record: I don’t think that most of what Nietzsche says is actually true. This isn’t like last week where I really like the guy so I want you guys to take a look. Nietzsche is good as a person to be confronted by and to wrestle with, for two reasons:
1) He’s difficult to understand. Outside of very wonderful exceptions most ethical reasoning is like trying to understand Nietzsche. Most of us humans living our lives are not able to make our values about good or right living explicit and easy to digest. Having to dig to understand is part of the point here. It’s like weight-training for the real fight.

2) Nietzsche is crazy. If I gave you someone who argues for conclusions in ethics/morality that we already have strong intuitions for, that wouldn’t be very inspiring. Nietzsche isn’t so much like that. And trying to sort out for ourselves what part of Nietzsche is actually halfway decent, and what parts are just truckloads of horse shit is another good skill I want to give you some practice at.
[see next comment]

Book One

The teachers of the purpose of existence. – Whether I regard human beings
with a good or with an evil eye, I always find them engaged in a single
task, each and everyone of them: to do what benefits the preservation of
the human race. Not from a feeling of love for the race, but simply
because within them nothing is older, stronger, more inexorable and
invincible than this instinct – because this instinct constitutes the essence
of our species and herd. One might quickly enough, with the usual
myopia from five steps away, divide one’s neighbours into useful and
harmful, good and evil; but on a large-scale assessment, upon further
reflection on the whole, one grows suspicious of this tidying and
separating and finally abandons it. Even the most harmful person may
actually be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the
species; for he nurtures in himself or through his effects on others
drives without which humanity would long since have become feeble or
rotten. Hatred, delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust to rob and
rule, and whatever else is called evil: all belong to the amazing economy
of the preservation of the species, an economy which is certainly costly,
wasteful, and on the whole most foolish – but still proven to have
preserved our race so far. I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow
man and neighbour, are even capable of living in a way which is
damaging to the species, i.e. ‘unreasonably’ and ‘badly’. What might
have harmed the species may have become extinct many thousands of
years ago and may by now belong to the things that are no longer
possible even for God. 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 are thus entitled to your
eulogists – as well as to your mockers! But you will never find someone
who could completely mock you, the individual, even in your best
qualities, someone who could bring home to you as far as truth allows
your boundless, fly- and frog-like wretchedness! To laugh at oneself as
one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth – for that,
not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted
have had far too little genius! Perhaps even laughter still has a future –
when the proposition ‘The species is everything, an individual is always
nothing’ has become part of humanity and this ultimate liberation and
irresponsibility is accessible to everyone at all times. Perhaps laughter

Tim
Comment on Text
So given the objectives described in the previous comment:
– I will not be providing much of my own commentary except where absolutely necessary.
– Your job is to struggle with understanding the text as much as you can. I will not be able to provide a 100% authoritative interpretation of what is going on and I’ve read me a lot of Nietzsche! This is something we’ll be going for discussion on. Pick out what you think are the main points. (and btw, don’t use Nietzsche as a model for how to write your final paper!)
– Your other job is to do this sorting out of what you think is useful to inform our thinking on what is the best way to live and what is total crap. As you do this, try to identify for what reasons you sort stuff out the way you do.

Tim
Comment on Text
Read this if you want, but I don’t think it is that crucial – it is more misleading then anything else. Here’s a summary of the philosophical content:
There are motives that guide our behavior in our lives that stem from what has been selected (via evolution) for the preservation of the human species. These include not just the conventionally “good” virtues of empathy etc but also the conventionally “bad” vices. (In other works, Nietzsche makes much more hay out of these points). All of these motives (or almost all) are part of something Nietzsche talks about as “herd” mentality (again, a concept he does more with in other places). In short Nietzsche’s attitude toward herd morality is contempt – he considers such life a miserable existence.

The Gay Science

will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only ‘gay
science’ will remain. At present, things are still quite different; at
present, the comedy of existence has not yet ‘become conscious’ of
itself; at present, we still live in the age of tragedy, in the age of
moralities and religions. What is the meaning of the ever-new appear-
ance of these founders of moralities and religions, of these instigators of
fights about moral valuations, these teachers of pangs of conscience and
religious wars? What is the meaning of these heroes on this stage? For
these have been the heroes thus far; and everything else, even if at times
it was all that we could see and was far too near, has always served only
to set the stage for these heroes, whether as machinery and backdrop or
in the role of confidant and servant. (The poets, for example, were
always the servants of some kind of morality.) It is obvious that these
tragedies, too, work in the interest of the species, even if they should
believe that they are working in the interest of God, as God’s emissaries.
They, too, promote the life of the species by promoting the faith in life.
‘Life is worth living’, each of them shouts, ‘there is something to life,
there is something behind life, beneath it; beware!’ This drive, which
rules the highest as well as the basest of human beings – the drive for
the preservation of the species – erupts from time to time as reason and
passion of mind; it is then surrounded by a resplendent retinue of
reasons and tries with all its might to make us forget that fundamentally
it is drive, instinct, stupidity, lack of reasons. Life ought to be loved,
because -! Man ought to advance himself and his neighbour, because -!
What names all these Oughts and Becauses have been given and may yet
be given in the future! The ethical teacher makes his appearance as the
teacher of the purpose of existence in order that what happens necessa-
rily and always, by itself and without a purpose, shall henceforth seem
to be done for a purpose and strike man as reason and an ultimate
commandment; to this end he invents a second, different existence and
takes by means of his new mechanics the old, ordinary existence off its
old, ordinary hinges. To be sure, in no way does he want us to laugh at
existence, or at ourselves – or at him; for him, an individual is always an
individual, something first and last and tremendous; for him there are
no species, sums, or zeroes. Foolish and fanciful as his inventions and
valuations may be, badly as he may misjudge the course of nature and
deny its conditions – and all ethical systems hitherto have been so
foolish and contrary to nature that humanity would have perished from

Tim
Comment on Text
Another word of warning:
Nietzsche is very sneaky at using rhetorical techniques. What you think he is saying at places may not be really what he means (why it is difficult to interpret him). He will do the Wittgensteinian-thing of taking on voices of people he actually disagrees with. Be on guard and be a critical reader!

Book One

everyone had it gained power over humanity – all the same! Every time
‘the hero’ appeared on stage, something new was attained: the gruesome
counterpart of laughter, that profound shock that many individuals feel
at the thought: ‘Yes, living is worth it! Yes, I am worthy of living!’ Life
and I and you and all of us became interesting to ourselves once again for
a while. There is no denying that in the long run each of these great
teachers of a purpose was vanquished by laughter, reason and nature:
the brief tragedy always changed and returned into the eternal comedy
of existence, and the ‘waves of uncountable laughter’ – to cite
Aeschylus! – must in the end also come crashing down on the greatest
of these tragedians. Despite all this corrective laughter, human nature
on the whole has surely been altered by the recurring emergence of such
teachers of the purpose of existence – it has acquired one additional need,
the need for the repeated appearance of such teachers and such
teachings of a ‘purpose’. Man has gradually become a fantastic animal
that must fulfil one condition of existence more than any other animal:
man must from time to time believe he knows why he exists; his race
cannot thrive without a periodic trust in life – without faith in the reason
in life! And ever again the human race will from time to time decree:
‘There is something one is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh at.’
And the most cautious friend of man will add: ‘Not only laughter and
gay wisdom but also the tragic, with all its sublime unreason, belongs to
the means and necessities of the preservation of the species.’ And
therefore! Therefore! Therefore! Oh, do you understand me, my
brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood? We, too,
have our time!

Intellectual conscience. – I keep having the same experience and keep
resisting it anew each time; I do not want to believe it although I can
grasp it as with my hands: the great majority lacks an intellectual
conscience – indeed, it has often seemed to me as if someone requiring
such a conscience would be as lonely in the most densely populated
cities as he would be in the desert. Everyone looks at you with strange

1 A mistranslation of lines 89-90 of Prometheus Bound formerly ascribed to the fifth-century (B c)
Athenian dramatist Aeschylus. The lines actually read: ‘countless laughter of the sea waves’.

The Gay Science

eyes and goes on handling their scales, calling this good and that evil;
nobody as much as blushes when you notice that their weights are
underweight – nor do they become indignant with you; perhaps they
laugh at your doubts. I mean: to the great majority it is not contemptible
to believe this or that and to live accordingly without first becoming
aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without
even troubling themselves about such reasons afterwards: the most
gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this ‘great majority’.
But what are goodheartedness, refinement, and genius to me when the
person possessing these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his believing
and judging and when he does not consider the desire for certainty to be
his inmost craving and deepest need – as that which separates the
higher human beings from the lower! I discovered in certain pious
people a hatred of reason and I was well disposed towards them for that:
at least this betrayed their bad intellectual conscience! But to stand in
the midst of this rerum concordia discors2 and the whole marvellous
uncertainty and ambiguity of existence without questioning, without
trembling with the craving and rapture of questioning, without at least
hating the person who questions, perhaps even being faintly amused by
him – that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling I look
for first in anyone. Some folly keeps persuading me that every person
has this feeling, simply as human. That is my type of injustice.

Noble and common. – For common natures all noble, magnanimous
feelings appear to be inexpedient and therefore initially incredible: they
give a wink when they hear of such things and seem to want to say,
‘Surely there must be some advantage involved; one cannot see through
every wall’ – they are suspicious of the noble person, as if he were
furtively seeking his advantage. If they become all too clearly convinced
of the absence of selfish intentions and gains, they view the noble person
as a kind of fool: they despise him in his pleasure and laugh at the
sparkle in his eye. ‘How could one enjoy being at a disadvantage? How
could one want with open eyes to be disadvantaged? Some disease of
reason must be linked to the noble affection’ – thus they think and look

2 ‘the discordant harmony of things’; from Horace, Epistles 1.12.19

Tim
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The Gay Science

that he wanted to think – it was probably a rare occurrence! – , that he
now wanted to become wiser and was preparing himself for a thought:
one would set one’s face as for prayer and stop walking; yes, one stood
still for hours on the street once the thought ‘arrived’ – on one or two
legs. The dignity of the matter required it!

Something for the industrious. – Anyone who now wishes to make a study
of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All
kinds of passions have to be thought through separately, pursued
separately through ages, peoples, great and small individuals; their
entire reason and all their evaluations and modes of illuminating things
must be revealed! So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks
a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of
conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or
even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. Has anyone done research
on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a
regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? Do we know the moral
effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly
erupting clamour for and against vegetarianism proves that there is still
no such philosophy!) Has anyone collected people’s experiences of
living together – in monasteries, for example? Has anyone depicted the
dialectic of marriage and friendship? The customs of scholars, busi-
nessmen, artists, artisans – have they found their thinkers? There is so
much in them to think about! Everything that humans have viewed until
now as the ‘conditions of their existence’ and all the reason, passion,
and superstition that such a view involves – has this been researched
exhaustively? To observe how differently the human drives have grown
and still could grow depending on the moral climate – that alone
involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require
whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate
systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same
applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the variety of moral
climates (‘why does the sun of one fundamental moral judgement and
primary value-standard shine here – and another one there?’). Yet
another new project would be to determine the erroneousness of all
these reasons and the whole essence of moral judgements to date. If all

Tim
Comment on Text
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Tim
Comment on Text
What Nietzsche describes here is a central component of the ‘Gay Science’.
Notice how the kind of survey of forms of life that Nietzsche describes is not just a kind of anthropology – there is always looming in the background a kind of normative evaluation that this is used for (as he indicates toward the end of this aphorism)

Book One

these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in
the foreground: whether science is able to furnish goals of action after
having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and
then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of
heroism could find satisfaction – an experimenting that might last for
centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to
date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclops-buildings;5 but the time
for that will come, too.

Unconscious virtues. – All qualities of a person of which he is conscious –
and especially those he supposes to be visible and plain to others also –
are subject to laws of development entirely different from those qualities
which are unknown or badly known to him, which conceal themselves
by means of their subtlety even from the eye of a rather subtle observer
and which know how to hide as if behind nothing at all. This might be
compared to the subtle sculptures on the scales of reptiles: it would be a
mistake to take them for ornaments or weapons, since one sees them
only with a microscope, i.e. with an artificially sharpened eye, which
similar animals for whom they might signify something like ornaments
or weapons simply lack. Our visible moral qualities, and especially those
that we believe to be visible, take their course; and the invisible ones,
which have the same names but are neither ornaments nor weapons
with regard to others, also take their course: probably a totally different
one, with lines and subtleties and sculptures that might amuse a god
with a divine microscope. For example, we have our diligence, our
ambition, our acuteness – all the world knows about them – and in
addition, we probably also have our industry, our ambition, our acute-
ness; but for these reptile scales, no microscope has yet been invented!
At this point the friends of instinctive morality will say: ‘Bravo! At least
he considers unconscious virtues to be possible – and that’s enough for
us.’ Oh, how little you are satisfied with!

5 The Cyclopes, in ancient mythology, were one-eyed giants. Though represented in Homer as
wild creatures, they elsewhere appear as workmen of superhuman power, and were credited with
building massive ancient fortifications such as those of Tiryns.

Tim
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Book Two

To the realists. – You sober people who feel armed against passion and
phantastical conceptions and would like to make your emptiness a
matter of pride and an ornament – you call yourself realists and
insinuate that the world really is the way it appears to you: before you
alone reality stands unveiled, and you yourselves are perhaps the best
part of it – oh, you beloved images of Sais! 1 But aren’t you too in your
unveiled condition still most passionate and dark creatures, compared to
fish, and still all too similar to an artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ to
an artist in love! You still carry around the valuations of things that
originate in the passions and loves of former centuries! Your sobriety
still contains a secret and inextirpable drunkenness! Your love of
‘reality’, for example – oh, that is an old, ancient ‘love’! In every
experience, in every sense impression there is a piece of this old love;
and some fantasy, some prejudice, some irrationality, some ignorance,
some fear, and whatever else, has worked on and contributed to it. That
mountain over there! That cloud over there! What is ‘real’ about that?
Subtract just once the phantasm and the whole human contribution from
it, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your
background, your past, your nursery school – all of your humanity and
animality! There is no ‘reality’ for us – and not for you either, you sober
ones – we are not nearly as strange to one another as you think, and
perhaps our good will to transcend drunkenness is just as respectable as
your belief that you are altogether incapable of drunkenness.

Only as creators! – This has caused me the greatest trouble and still does
always cause me the greatest trouble: to realize that what things are called
is unspeakably more important than what they are. The reputation,
name, and appearance, the worth, the usual measure and weight of a
thing – originally almost always something mistaken and arbitrary,
thrown over things like a dress and quite foreign to their nature and
even to their skin – has, through the belief in it and its growth from
generation to generation, slowly grown onto and into the thing and has

I See above, ‘Preface’, footnote 5, p. 8.

The Gay Science

become its very body: what started as appearance in the end nearly
always becomes essence and effectively acts as its essence! What kind of a
fool would believe that it is enough to point to this origin and this misty
shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts as ‘real’, so-
called ‘reality’! Only as creators can we destroy! – But let us also not
forget that in the long run it is enough to create new names and
valuations and appearances of truth in order to create new ‘things’.

We artists. – When we love a woman, we easily come to hate nature
because of all the repulsive natural functions to which every woman is
subject; we prefer not to think about it at all, but when our soul for once
brushes against these matters, it shrugs impatiently and, as just said,
casts a contemptuous look at nature: we feel insulted; nature seems to
intrude on our property and with the most profane hands at that. In
cases like this one refuses to hear anything about physiology and decrees
secretly to oneself, ‘I will hear nothing of the idea that the human being
is anything other than soul and form!’ ‘The human being under the
skin’ is an abomination and unthinkable to all lovers, a blasphemy
against God and love. Now, the way lovers still feel about nature and
naturalness is how every worshipper of God and his ‘holy omnipotence’
formerly felt: in everything that was said about nature by astronomers,
geologists, physiologists, and doctors, he saw an intrusion on his
choicest property and thus an attack – and a shameless one at that! Even
the ‘law of nature’ sounded to him like a slander against God; he would
basically much rather have seen all of mechanics traced back to moral
acts of will and choice – but since no one could do him that service, he
concealed nature and mechanics from himself as best he could and lived
in a dream. Oh, these people of former times knew how to dream and
didn’t even need to fall asleep first! – and we men of today also still
know it all too well, despite all our good will towards waking and the
day! We need only to love, to hate, to desire, simply to feel – at once the
spirit and power of the dream comes over us, and we climb with open
eyes, impervious to all danger, up the most dangerous paths, onto the
roofs and towers of fantasy, and without any vertigo, as though born to
climb – we sleepwalkers of the day! We artists! We who conceal
naturalness! We who are moon- and God-struck! We untiring wan-

Tim
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The Gay Science

the female character is related: these are male mothers. – Among
animals the male sex is considered the beautiful one.

Holy cruelty. – A man holding a newborn in his hand approached a holy
man. ‘What should I do with this child?’ he asked; ‘it is wretched,
misshapen, and doesn’t have life enough to die’. ‘Kill it!’ shouted the
holy man with a terrible voice; ‘kill it and hold it in your arms for three
days and three nights to create a memory for yourself: thus you will
never again beget a child when it is not time for you to beget’. When the
man had heard this, he walked away disappointed; and many people
reproached the holy man because he had advised a cruelty; for he had
advised killing the child. ‘But is it not crueller to let it live?’ said the
holy man.

The unsuccessful. – Those poor women are always unsuccessful who, in
the presence of the one they love, become restless and insecure and talk
too much: for men are most surely seduced by a certain secret and
phlegmatic tenderness.

The third sex. – ‘A small man is a paradox, but still a man; but small
women seem to me, when compared to tall women, to belong to another
sex’, said an old dancing master. A small woman is never beautiful- said
old Aristotle. 7

The greatest danger. – Had there not always been a majority of men who
felt the discipline of their heads – their ‘rationality’ – to be their pride,
their obligation, their virtue, and who were embarrassed or ashamed by
all fantasizing and debauchery of thought, being the friends of ‘healthy
common sense’, humanity would have perished long ago! The greatest

7 Aristotle doesn’t actually say exactly this, but see his Nichomachean Ethics I 123b.6-8 and Rhetoric
136Ia. 6-7·

Tim
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Book Two

danger that hovered and still hovers over humanity is the outbreak of
madness – that is, the outbreak of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and
hearing; the enjoyment in the lack of discipline of the head, the joy in
human unreason. The opposite of the world of the madman is not truth
and certainty but the generality and universal bindingness of a faith; in
short, the non-arbitrary in judgement. And man’s greatest labour so far
has been to reach agreement about very many things and to lay down a
law of agreement – regardless of whether these things are true or false.
This is the discipline of the head which has preserved humanity – but
the counter-drives are still so powerful that it is basically with little
confidence that one may speak of the future of humanity. The picture of
things still moves and shifts continually, and perhaps more and faster
from now on than ever before; continually, the most select minds bristle
at this universal bindingness – the explorers of truth above all! Con-
tinually this faith, as a commonplace belief shared by everyone, breeds
nausea and a new lust in subtler minds; and the slow tempo for all
spiritual processes which this faith makes necessary, this imitation of the
tortoise that is recognized as the norm here, would by itself be sufficient
to turn artists and poets into deserters: it is these impatient minds in
whom a veritable delight in madness breaks out, because madness has
such a cheerful tempo! What is needed, then, are virtuous intellects –
oh, I’ll use the most unambiguous word – what is needed is virtuous
stupidity; what is needed are unwavering beat-keepers of the slow spirit,
so that the believers of the great common faith stay together and go on
dancing their dance: it is an exigency of the first order which commands
and demands. We others are the exception and the danger – we stand
eternally in need of defence! – Now there is certainly something to be
said for the exception, provided it never wants to become the rule.

The animal with a good conscience. – The vulgar element in everything
that pleases in Southern Europe – be it Italian opera (e.g. Rossini and
Bellini)8 or the Spanish adventure novel (most readily accessible to us in

8 Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) wrote thirty-six operas in the years between 18IO and 1829, then
retired, devoting the remaining forty years of his life to culinary pleasures in Paris. Vincenzo
Bellini’s (1801-35) most famous opera is Norma. The music of Rossini and Bellini was very
highly regarded by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the modern philosopher who influenced
the young Nietzsche most deeply.

Tim
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The Gay Science

our aesthetic and moral judgements apply to it! It also has no drive to
self-preservation or any other drives; nor does it observe any laws. Let
us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only
necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one
who transgresses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also
know that there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does
the word ‘accident’ have a meaning. Let us beware of saying that death
is opposed to life. The living is only a form of what is dead, and a very
rare form. Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates
new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as
much of an error as the god of the Eleatics. 1 But when will we be done
with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of god no longer
darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature? When may
we begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly
redeemed nature?

110

Origin of knowledge. – Through immense periods of time, the intellect
produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and
species-preserving; those who hit upon or inherited them fought their
fight for themselves and their progeny with greater luck. Such erro-
neous articles of faith, which were passed on by inheritance further and
further, and finally almost became part of the basic endowment of the
species, are for example: that there are enduring things; that there are
identical things; that there are things, kinds of material, 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 and for itself. Only very late did the deniers and
doubters of such propositions emerge; only very late did truth emerge
as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live
with it; that our organism was geared for its opposite: all its higher
functions, the perceptions of sense and generally every kind of sensa-
tion, worked with those basic errors that had been incorporated since
time immemorial. Further, even in the realm of knowledge those
propositions became the norms according to which one determined
‘true’ and ‘untrue’ – down to the most remote areas of pure logic. Thus

1 Group of philosophers in the early fifth century Be who argued that the world of change was a
mere appearance of an underlying unchanging being

110

Tim
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Book Three

the strength of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth, but in its age, its
embeddedness, its character as a condition of life. Where life and
knowledge seem to contradict each other, there was never any serious
fight to begin with; denial and doubt were simply considered madness.
Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics, who still posited and clung
to the opposites of the natural errors, believed in the possibility of also
living this opposite: they invented the sage as the man of unchange-
ability, impersonality, universality of intuition, as one and all at the same
time, with a special capacity for that inverted knowledge; they had the
faith that their knowledge was at the same time the principle of life. But
in order to be able to claim all this, they had to deceive themselves about
their own state: they had fictitiously to attribute to themselves imper-
sonality and duration without change; they had to misconstrue the
nature of the knower, deny the force of impulses in knowledge, and
generally conceive reason as a completely free, self-originated activity.
They closed their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their
propositions in opposition to what was considered valid or from a desire
for tranquillity or sole possession or sovereignty. The subtler develop-
ment of honesty and scepticism finally made also these people impos-
sible; even their life and judgements proved dependent on the ancient
drives and fundamental errors of all sentient existence. This subtler
honesty and scepticism arose wherever two conflicting propositions
seemed to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the
basic errors, and thus where it was possible to argue about the greater or
lesser degree of usefulness for life; also wherever new propositions
showed themselves to be not directly useful, but at least also not
harmful, as expressions of an intellectual play impulse, and innocent
and happy like all play. Gradually the human brain filled itself with such
judgements and convictions; and ferment, struggle, and lust for power
developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight, but also every
kind of drive took part in the fight about the ‘truths’; the intellectual
fight became an occupation, attraction, profession, duty, dignity –
knowledge and the striving for the true finally took their place as a need
among the other needs. Henceforth, not only faith and conviction, but
also scrutiny, denial, suspicion, and contradiction were a power; all ‘evil’
instincts were subordinated to knowledge and put in its service and took
on the lustre of the permitted, honoured, useful and finally the eye and
the innocence of the good. Thus knowledge became a part of life and, as

I II

The Gay Science

life, a continually growing power, until finally knowledge and the
ancient basic errors struck against each other, both as life, both as
power, both in the same person. The thinker – that is now the being in
whom the drive to truth and those life-preserving errors are fighting
their first battle, after the drive to truth has proven itself to be a life-
preserving power, too. In relation to the significance of this battle,
everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about
the condition of life is posed here, and the first attempt is made here to
answer the question through experiment. To what extent can truth
stand to be incorporated? – that is the question; that is the experiment.

III

The origin of the logical. – What is the origin of logic in man’s head?
Surely it arose out of the illogical, the realm of which must originally
have been immense. But innumerable beings drew inferences in a way
different from that in which we do now perished; nonetheless, they
might have been closer to the truth! He, for instance, who did not know
how to find ‘identity’ often enough, both with regard to nourishment
and to hostile animals – that is, he who subsumed too slowly and was
too cautious in subsumption – had a slighter probability of survival
than he who in all cases of similarity immediately guessed that they
were identical. The predominant disposition, however, to treat the
similar as identical – an illogical disposition, for there is nothing
identical as such – is what first supplied all the foundations for logic.
Similarly, in order for the concept of substance to originate, which is
indispensable to logic though nothing real corresponds to it in the
strictest sense, it was necessary that for a long time changes in things
not be seen, not be perceived; the beings who did not see things exactly
had a head start over those who saw everything ‘in a flux’. As such,
every great degree of caution in inferring, every sceptical disposition, is
a great danger to life. No living being would be preserved had not the
opposite disposition – to affirm rather than suspend judgement, to err
and make things up rather than wait, to agree rather than deny, to pass
judgement rather than be just – been bred to become extraordinarily
strong. The course of logical thoughts and inferences in our brains
today corresponds to a process and battle of drives that taken separately
are all very illogical and unjust; we usually experience only the outcome

112

Book Three

of the battle: that is how quickly and covertly this ancient mechanism
runs its course in us.

112

Cause and effect. – We call it ‘explanation’, but ‘description’ is what
distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. We are
better at describing – we explain just as little as all our predecessors. We
have uncovered a diverse succession where the naive man and investi-
gator of older cultures saw only two different things, ’cause’ and ‘effect’,
as they said; we have perfected the picture of becoming but haven’t got
over, got behind the picture. The series of ’causes’ faces us much more
completely in each case; we reason, ‘this and that must precede for that
to follow’ – but we haven’t thereby understood anything. The specifically
qualitative aspect for example of every chemical process, still appears to
be a ‘miracle’, as does every locomotion; no one has ‘explained’ the
push. And how could we explain! We are operating only with things that
do not exist – with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times,
divisible spaces. How is explanation to be at all possible when we first
turn everything into a picture – our picture! It is enough to view science
as an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible; we learn to
describe ourselves more and more precisely as we describe things and
their succession. Cause and effect: there is probably never such a
duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few
pieces, just as we always perceive a movement only as isolated points,
i.e. do not really see, but infer. The suddenness with which many effects
stand out misleads us; it is a suddenness only for us. There is an infinite
number of processes that elude us in this second of suddenness. An
intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as
arbitrary division and dismemberment – that saw the stream of the
event – would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all
determinedness.

113

On the doctrine of poisons. – So much has to come together in order for
scientific thought to originate, and all these necessary forces have had to
be separately invented, practised, cultivated! In their separateness they

II3

Tim
Comment on Text
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Book Three

and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the
body; and the more one allows the particular and incomparable to rear
its head again, the more one unlearns the dogma of the ‘equality of
men’, the more the concept of a normal health, along with those of a
normal diet and normal course of an illness, must be abandoned by our
medical men. Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and
illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its
health – which of course could look in one person like the opposite of
health in another. Finally, the great question would still remain whether
we can do without illness, even for the development of our virtue; and
whether especially our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge do not
need the sick soul as much as the healthy; in brief, whether the will to
health alone is not a prejudice, a cowardice and a piece of most refined
barbarism and backwardness.

121

Life not an argument. – We have arranged for ourselves a world in which
we are able to live – by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects,
motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one
could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an
argument; the conditions of life might include error.

122

Moral scepticism in Christianity. – Christianity, too, has made a great
contribution to enlightenment: it taught moral scepticism in an extre-
mely trenchant and effective way – accusing, embittering, but with
untiring patience and refinement; it annihilated in every single man the
faith in his ‘virtues’. It caused those great virtuous men, of whom there
was no dearth in antiquity, to disappear forever from the face of the
earth – those popular men who with a faith in their own perfection went
about with the dignity of a toreador. When we now, educated in this
Christian school of scepticism, read the moral books of antiquity, e.g.
those of Seneca or Epictetus,4 we feel an amusing superiority and are
full of secret insights and overviews, as if a child were speaking before

4 Two stoic philosophers: Seneca (first century AD) was a wealthy member of the Roman ruling
class. Epictetus (late first/early second century) was a freed Greek slave.

117

Tim
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Tim
Comment on Text
This might sound familiar to the Naturalistic Fallacy – that’s cause it is! It is the same point again here that natural doesn’t equal good or right.

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