The Joyous Science Read online

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  * * *

  THE JOYOUS SCIENCE

  (‘la gaya scienza’)

  Translated and edited by

  R. KEVIN HILL

  Contents

  Note on the Text and Translation

  Introduction

  THE JOYOUS SCIENCE

  Preface to the Second Edition

  ‘Jest, Trick and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes

  Book I

  Book II

  Book III

  Book IV: Sanctus Januarius

  Book V: We Fearless Ones

  Appendix: ‘Songs of the Outlaw Prince’

  Excerpts from Idylls from Messina

  Nietzsche’s Description of The Joyous Science in Ecce Homo

  Notes

  Chronology

  Further Reading

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE JOYOUS SCIENCE

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE was born near Leipzig in 1844, the son of a Lutheran clergyman who died when Nietzsche was four. He attended the famous Pforta School, then went to university at Bonn and at Leipzig, where he studied philology and first became acquainted with Richard Wagner. When he was only twenty-four he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel University; he stayed there until his health forced him into retirement in 1879. While in Basel, he participated as an ambulance orderly in the Franco-Prussian War and published The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Untimely Meditations (1873–6) and the first volume of Human, All Too Human (1878). From 1880 until 1889, except for brief interludes, he divorced himself from everyday life and, supported by his university pension, lived mainly in France, Italy and Switzerland. Works published in the 1880s included Dawn, The Joyous Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals and The Case of Wagner. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on a street in Turin and was subsequently institutionalized in Basel and Jena. He spent the remaining years of his life in a condition of mental and physical paralysis, cared for by his mother and later his sister Elisabeth. The last works published during his lifetime were Twilight of the Idols (1889), The Anti-Christ (1895) and Nietzsche contra Wagner (1895). After Nietzsche’s death in 1900, Elisabeth assembled The Will to Power based on her brother’s notebooks and published it the following year; a greatly expanded edition appeared in 1906. Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s autobiography, was published in 1908.

  R. KEVIN HILL is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University. From 1994 until 2001 he taught in the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought, published by Oxford University Press (2003), and the editor and co-translator of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, published by Penguin Classics (2017).

  Nietzsche in Penguin Classics

  Beyond Good and Evil

  The Birth of Tragedy

  Ecce Homo

  Human, All Too Human

  The Joyous Science

  On the Genealogy of Morals

  A Nietzsche Reader

  The Portable Nietzsche

  Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  Twilight of Idols and The Anti-Christ

  The Will to Power

  Note on the Text and Translation

  The textual foundation of this translation is Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (‘la gaya scienza’), Neue Ausgabe mit einem Anhange: Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1887) and Idyllen aus Messina, published in Internationale Monatsschrift. Zeitschrift für allgemeine und nationale Kultur und deren Litteratur, vol. 1, no. 5 (May 1882), pp. 269–75 (Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner). I have also consulted Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 1967ff.).

  Although the translation of a book Nietzsche himself saw to press not once but twice scarcely poses the philological difficulties which were involved in the translation of The Will to Power (a text controversially assembled by editors from Nietzsche’s notebooks after his death), the same methodology of translation has been applied here as well. Translation is somewhat freer than is often the case with Nietzsche’s books, in part out of a commitment to the notion that the unit of meaning is the sentence and not the word. The overarching goal has been to present Nietzsche’s thought as clearly and as gracefully as possible, while striving to avoid anachronism. Also, considerable freedom has been needed to render the many poems in a manner which preserves both their sense and their prosody. Finally, no attempt has been made to foist a language of gender neutrality upon Nietzsche which would be alien to both his time and his own sensibility.

  Introduction

  When Nietzsche published Human, All Too Human in 1878, the first volume in his ‘Free Spirit’ trilogy (of which The Joyous Science is the triumphant conclusion), it was a declaration of independence from many things to which he had previously been committed, especially independence from German Romanticism in general and from the Wagner cult in particular, as well as from academic scholarship in classical literature. The effect on Wagner, his friend and ally, was immediate and overwhelmingly negative. Nietzsche’s resignation from his position at the University of Basel would come but a year later. The book was followed by two sequels, Mixed Opinions and Maxims in 1879 and The Wanderer and His Shadow in 1880, and a further entry, Dawn: Thoughts on Moral Prejudices, in 1881. Following the model of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche then began to work on what was initially conceived as an addition to Dawn. It was this text which ultimately became The Joyous Science and was published in 1882.

  That Nietzsche himself regarded the book in 1882 as the culmination of his authorship which had only truly begun with Human, All Too Human, is indicated by the blurb he wrote for its back cover, which read: ‘With this book we arrive at the conclusion of a series of writings by FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE whose common goal it is to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit. To this series belong: Human, All Too Human. With a Supplement: Mixed Opinions and Maxims; The Wanderer and His Shadow; Dawn: Thoughts on Moral Prejudices; The Joyous Science.’ Nietzsche then relegates The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Untimely Meditations (1873–6) to ‘earlier writings by the same author’.

  From Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5) onwards, Nietzsche entered his mature period, and the ‘Free Spirit’ trilogy subsequently came to be regarded as (or consigned to) Nietzsche’s ‘middle’ or ‘positivistic’ period. However, The Joyous Science was to become more than just the third part of a trilogy. After completing Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche turned to the task of bringing out new editions of the middle works in 1886. Mixed Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow were consolidated into volume 2 of Human, All Too Human. New Prefaces were written for both volumes, as well as for Dawn and The Joyous Science. But the modifications of The Joyous Science were to prove far more extensive. First, Nietzsche added a fifth part to the original four, containing forty new aphorisms he had written in 1886 after the completion of Beyond Good and Evil. As a result, the book now came to straddle his middle and late phases, reflecting both his middle style and his final views. Second, although the original edition had a ‘prelude in German rhymes’ (sixty-three short poems), in the second edition Nietzsche appended fourteen more poems, six of which had previously appeared in his only published collection of verse, Idylls from Messina (1882), making the book into more of a synthesis of his analytical and lyrical sides than it had been before, and an epitome of his writing both in prose and in poetry. The end result contains the most important ideas that he would ever discuss in print in his lifetime, as well as some of his most ravishing prose (especially the Preface, of which he was so fond that
he reused it for the conclusion of the last book he worked on, Nietzsche contra Wagner).

  The title of the book has been the subject of some discussion. ‘Die fröhliche Wissenschaft’ has been variously translated as ‘The Joyful Wisdom’ (by Thomas Common), ‘The Gay Science’ (by Walter Kaufmann), ‘The Joyous Science’ (by Laurence Lampert) and ‘The Joyful Science’ (in the forthcoming Stanford University Press edition). It is now generally agreed that the implications of rigorous knowledge strongly suggest ‘science’ rather than wisdom, even if the German word for science is much broader than the English term would suggest (the sense of the German word would have it that Nietzsche was a ‘scientist’ by virtue of being a professor of classical languages and literature). Although these implications of rigour are fully intended, there is also an element of irony mixed with them. The phrase ‘die fröhliche Wissenschaft’ had been used in German to refer to the art of poetry since at least the eighteenth century, while ‘la gaya scienza’, which Nietzsche took as his subtitle, also historically referred to the art of poetry, especially as practised by the Provençal troubadours of the Middle Ages. Many other indications in the text show that Nietzsche intended the title not only to point forwards to his new conception of philosophical enquiry, but also backwards to the art of poetry. And there had always been a tinge of irony in referring to poetry as ‘the gay science’ or ‘the joyous science’, one slightly reminiscent of the expression ‘the sweet science’ for the sport of boxing (neither poetry nor boxing seem particularly ‘scientific’), an irony doubled by Nietzsche’s suggestion that philosophical enquiry can be both scientifically rigorous and poetic. One might have been encouraged to translate the title as ‘The Gay Science’ by the fact that the English usage contemporaneous with Nietzsche would also have referred to the art of poetry as ‘the gay science’, or, somewhat less frequently, as ‘the joyous science’ (it is almost never referred to in English as ‘the joyful science’).1 However, the term ‘gay’ is apt to mislead today. When Kaufmann’s translation was published in 1974, the English word was only just beginning its career as a more positive replacement for the adjective ‘homosexual’. Interestingly, Kaufmann regarded this association, which was clearly never a part of Nietzsche’s intention, as a strength, in so far as being ‘gay’ suggested to him ‘light-hearted defiance of convention’. Several decades later, the word has become a victim of its own success, and a living metaphor has become a dead one; ‘gay’ effectively denotes at least male homosexuality, and in a world in which widespread acceptance has replaced an older bigotry, for many people ‘gay’ no longer connotes ‘light-hearted defiance of convention’ at all.

  But what is this book actually about? In the first place, it is one of Nietzsche’s ‘aphoristic’ works, and thus draws on the models of French moralists like La Rochefoucauld, and their German imitator Schopenhauer (in his Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851). One can gain a sense of the topics and concerns of Nietzsche’s aphoristic works by a glance at the chapter titles of the first volume of Human, All Too Human: ‘Of First and Last Things’ (i.e. metaphysics and epistemology), ‘On the History of Moral Feelings’, ‘Religious Life’, ‘From the Soul of Artists and Writers’, ‘Signs of Higher and Lower Culture’, ‘Man in Society’, ‘Woman and Child’, ‘A Look at the State’, ‘Man Alone with Himself’. However, in the sequels to volume 1, as well as in Dawn and The Joyous Science, Nietzsche abandons any attempt to organize his remarks under rubrics in this way. But the superficial appearance of chaos is misleading, for beneath it there is both an underlying theory and something of a ‘narrative arc’. In fact, there is something of a protagonist of this narrative with whom we are meant to identify: Nietzsche himself.

  The underlying theory is one which Nietzsche had expressed clearly enough some years before, in Schopenhauer as Educator, the third part of Untimely Meditations. In its first few pages, Nietzsche articulates a virtue ethic, but with some twists which distinguish it from its ancient Greek antecedents. The first is that, instead of emphasizing a kind of human essence which all human beings share and which must be actualized (and from which one might derive ethical standards), Nietzsche stresses the uniqueness of each individual, almost as if each of us is a species unto ourselves. Accordingly, the conditions for flourishing and self-actualization will vary widely from one person to the next. This in turn means that individuals cannot rely unthinkingly on their own socialization or inherited traditions in order to determine how best to actualize their own potential, since the customs and traditions in question are not sufficiently tailored to the individual case. Consequently, the discovery of the means to self-actualization must be left to the individual’s own experimentation. Second, precisely because social customs and inherited traditions are geared to collective flourishing, they tend to demand self-sacrifice from the individual and can even be quite harmful. Finally, since Nietzsche from the beginning abandons any justification for interpersonal morality couched in terms of religion, intrinsic rights or collective interests, leaving him with no normative standard at all other than the desirability of individual self-actualization, a better understanding of the ways society obstructs this development acquires some urgency – an urgency only intensified by the fact that in our age of democratization, the suffocating character of public life and public opinion has made matters for the individual even worse. As an aside, it is striking that this overall picture closely resembles the concerns John Stuart Mill expressed in chapter three of On Liberty, ‘Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being’, despite Nietzsche’s frequent condemnations of Mill in his notebooks and later writings.

  In the text of The Joyous Science itself, the critique of religion, morality, the arts and modernity proceeds as if we are on a voyage of discovery, accompanying Nietzsche as his insights occur to him, for Nietzsche is not merely adopting the stance of the cold and cynical outsider who stands above or apart from society, as a too-rigorous adherence to the French moralist model might have suggested. Rather, he develops his criticisms with an eye to his own self-emancipation, and the self-emancipation of others who, though they may have very different individual ‘essences’, share a common enemy in the things being critiqued. However, with each new discovery, with each new toppled idol, the personal dangers of this voyage increase as well. In particular, the terrifying realization that God is ‘dead’, announced for the first time in Nietzsche’s writings in Joyous Science § 108 and discussed more fully in §§ 125 and 343, poses profound dangers not only for the culture in which the beliefs and precepts of Christianity are thoroughly intertwined, but for aspiring individuals as well, given the ways in which they remain formed by and dependent upon it.

  Yet the overall message of The Joyous Science remains a positive one. At the climax of Book III, Nietzsche offers a bracing but hopeful catechism of sorts for his self-emancipating individuals:

  268

  What Makes You Heroic?

  To face at the same time your greatest suffering and your greatest hope.

  269

  What Do You Believe?

  In this: that the weights of all things must be determined anew.

  270

  What Does Your Conscience Say?

  ‘You shall become who you are.’

  271

  What Is Your Greatest Danger?

  Pity.

  272

  What Do You Love in Others?

  My hopes.

  273

  Whom Do You Call Bad?

  Those who always want to put others to shame.

  274

  What Is Most Humane?

  To spare someone shame.

  275

  What is the Seal of Liberation?

  To no longer be ashamed of oneself.

  As we turn the page from the end of Book III to the beginning of Book IV, we notice that something important is afoot, because for the first time the Book has its own title: ‘Sanctus Januarius’. This is a reference to the miracle of St Januarius, a sample o
f whose blood was allegedly saved in a vial after his martyrdom and stored as a holy relic in Naples Cathedral. For centuries the blood is said to have miraculously liquified. Nietzsche’s suggestion, implied by the title and its accompanying poem, and carefully spelled out in the Preface of 1887, is that during his middle phase he had experienced a kind of inner frozenness, lifelessness and rigidity as he turned his back on the things that had formerly moved him and took up the stance of the cynical observer of common life from the outside, the solitary ‘wanderer’ whose only friend is his own shadow. But as Nietzsche’s pursuit of self-emancipation begins to reach fulfilment, he feels his ‘blood’, his inwardness and emotional life, ‘liquifying’, warming into a new hopefulness. It is in part this new zest for life that leads him to use the phrase ‘the joyous science’ to title his book. This new fulfilment is accompanied, and perhaps occasioned, by a new discovery which sets The Joyous Science apart from its aphoristic predecessors: the doctrine of the eternal recurrence.

  The final four sections of Book IV represent the climax of the book as a whole and, in its first edition of 1882, its conclusion. In ‘Vita Femina’ Nietzsche mourns the fact that while the world is rich in beautiful things, it is poor in ‘beautiful moments’ in which these things are revealed to us. A part of this mourning is contained in the observation that the best things reveal themselves only once. This claim is contrasted with the Greeks’ prayer that beautiful things be repeated ‘twice, or three times!’, laying the foundation for the idea that, ideally, these ‘beautiful moments’ should be repeated an infinite number of times. Nietzsche then eroticizes the notion of beautiful things being veiled, and ‘beautiful moments’ rarely revealing themselves to us with the striking claim that ‘life is a woman’. The implication is clear: life is not to be observed from without, dutifully borne or vitriolically condemned. Life is to be loved.