Nietzsche's The Gay Science: An Introduction by Michael Ure

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nietzsche's The Gay Science: An Introductionby Michael Ure Jordan Rodgers Michael Ure. Nietzsche's The Gay Science: An Introduction. Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 273. Paper, $28.99. The works of Nietzsche's middle period tend to be neglected by Nietzsche scholars. Already, Michael Ure's first book, Nietzsche's Therapy(Lexington Books, 2008) was a welcome exception, and he continues his exploration in this new book, a study of the work Nietzsche called his most personal, The Gay Science(hereafter, GS). Nietzsche is right to call GSpersonal, and Ure is right to emphasize it. Its preface explains that Nietzsche wrote the text while recovering from long illness, and many of the first edition's 342 aphorisms allude to his personal experiences. Calling it a "philosophical autobiography" (1), as Ure does, is perhaps an overstatement. Nietzsche wrote one of those— Ecce Homo—and wild as that book is, it did at least attempt to narrate Nietzsche's life and works, which cannot be said of GS. "Self-portrait," another of Ure's metaphors for GS(163), is better, especially since successful self-portraits can be selective and impressionistic, even formless. Though personal experience clearly informs GSdeeply, its form is indeed difficult to discern. Ure tackles that problem by proposing two big interpretive strategies: first, that Nietzsche is a proponent of a metaphilosophical claim, familiar from the Stoics and Epicureans, that philosophy is an "art of living" (8); second, that Nietzsche puts distinctive emphasis on that word "art»it refers not just to techniques, but to an aesthetic account of the overall goal of the process. That goal, to appeal to one of GS's most famous aphorisms, is to "'give style' to one's character" ( GS290). GS's "fundamental significance for modern philosophy and culture lies in its claim that the consequences of the death of God extend into the very fabric of our lives" (21). Thus, Nietzsche's goal in the book, on Ure's reading, is to diagnose like a good physician what ails late modernity, and what techniques of life are to be prescribed in response. Like the Hellenistic philosophers, he conceives of himself as a kind of physician, and like them his aim is the health and flourishing of his subjects. But Nietzsche's prescription is different: he rejects the Hellenistic ideal of passionless ataraxiaand avoidance of suffering, placing in its stead an "ethics of self-cultivation" (154) that involves the embrace of passion and suffering as necessary parts of a flourishing life. More obviously, he rejects their universalism: "if Stoics are necessarily uniform and unvaried, Nietzscheans must be irregular and varied" (200). That is because the goal of the process is not conformity to some set of rules, but appreciation and development of one's own singular self. The thought of eternal recurrence, put forward first in GS341, is meant to help this process along, because "only a life that bears the monogram of our own existence… is worthy of repetition" (198). Ure conceives of this thought in terms of the Hadotian conception of "spiritual exercises": it is not a doctrine, but a practice in directed meditation. Just as Epictetus invites you, with regard to every impression, to ask whether it is under your control or not, Nietzsche invites you to ask whether your life thus far is one whose eternal recurrence would be desirable. I am skeptical of how much the analogy with the Hellenistic philosophers helps. GSclearly aims to be a call to action, but, as Ure himself notes, what Nietzsche gives us is "a [End Page 624]series of notes sketching his personal wishes, habits and quirks" (163). Not only that, but he seems not to be a realist about the flourishing that is apparently the goal of his ethics of self-cultivation (see GS301). And so one naturally wonders what the success conditions are, and what value the goal is supposed to possess. Ure says that the success of the process lies "in creating a life that we wish to repeat eternally" (202), but that "we" is just each individual "I," whose...