Nietzsche's The Gay Science: An Introduction

Abstract

Michael Ure's introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science is a welcome contribution to the secondary literature. He provides a clear and coherent account of this complex text and situates his interpretation within Nietzsche's larger oeuvre and philosophical project. Ure advances an original thesis—GS is Nietzsche's attempt to revive an ancient understanding of philosophy as a way of life—that will be of interest to scholars more generally, and yet he still succeeds in introducing the text to the novice reader. Although I identify some points of disagreement below, Ure has nevertheless written the best introduction to GS currently available in the English language.The structure of Ure's text largely follows that of GS (although he forgoes any substantive discussion of the poetry that begins and ends the text). After an introduction in which he focuses on Nietzsche's understanding of philosophy, Ure moves through the contents of the five books of GS in step-by-step fashion. He devotes the first chapter, “Nietzsche's Tragicomedy,” to discussing the first aphorism alone and the important role that tragedy and comedy play in the work. The next four chapters cover the first four books of GS and so the entirety of the 1882 edition. After delving into the eternal recurrence in the sixth chapter, Ure dedicates his final two chapters to the preface and the fifth book, both of which were added to the 1887 edition of GS.Ure's interpretation of GS is clearly animated by the theme of his previous work, Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2008). There, he argues that Nietzsche practices the art of self-cultivation in the so-called middle or free spirit works (HH I and II, D, and GS). In this volume, Ure defends the view that “Nietzsche follows the ancients in conceiving philosophy as a way of life that entails a set of philosophical practices, disciplines and techniques that enable philosophers to transform and cure themselves” (2). According to Ure, GS is therefore central to Nietzsche's metaphilosophy, and the metaphilosophical position Nietzsche advances in this text harkens back to ancient philosophy and contrasts sharply with the current understanding of philosophy as primarily an academic or theoretical enterprise (4).One of the merits of Ure's work is that he tries to understand GS within the larger context of Nietzsche's free spirit works. He notes that Nietzsche conceived of these as a unified project, and Ure identifies a therapeutic motif that runs throughout a number of these texts. Another merit of Ure's work is that he presents GS as critiquing the therapeutic strategies that Nietzsche employs in earlier phases of the free spirit project. There, Nietzsche often borrows techniques from Hellenistic philosophers such as the Epicureans, Stoics, Cynics, and Skeptics. According to Ure, Nietzsche casts such therapies in GS as anti-erotic forms of optimism that are “continuations or refractions” of the very illness they try to treat (14). That is, by trying to control or extirpate the passions in a quest for ataraxia or apatheia, Hellenistic philosophers only make matters worse. In contrast, GS offers an “erotic pedagogy”—symbolized by Nietzsche's appeal to troubadours in the text—that embraces both passion and suffering and so counters the classical rationalism and scientific positivism that characterize earlier stages of the free spirit works (15). All of this is spot-on, and the prominent role that passion or eros plays in the text is an excellent way of marking the difference between GS and, with the possible exception of the final chapters of D, previous free spirit works.Ure's reading, however, is not without difficulties. First, if we agree with Ure that Nietzsche is critiquing, in GS, the very therapies he embraced in previous free spirit works, then we are left wondering in what sense the free spirit works are a unified project. Indeed, HH raises broader problems for Ure's claim that Nietzsche's conception of philosophy is primarily, if not exclusively, therapeutic. Although there is a therapeutic conception of philosophy in free spirit works like WS, D, and GS, the historical philosophy Nietzsche adopts in HH is clearly aligned with the natural sciences (see HH 1) and arguably opposed to the very therapies Nietzsche appropriates in the other free spirit works (see HH 6 and 7). Moreover, it seems that the philosopher of the future Nietzsche sketches in BGE (1886), which, as Ure explains, informs the argument of the fifth book of GS, is yet another conception of philosophy. Taken together, we may be forced to speak of Nietzsche's metaphilosophies, rather than a single metaphilosophy, and if Nietzsche has multiple metaphilosophies at work during this period, one wonders how they are supposed to fit together, if at all.Ure's emphasis on the therapeutic dimension of Nietzsche's philosophical project—at the expense of other metaphilosophical positions in Nietzsche's texts—can be seen in his treatment of the eternal recurrence in chapter 6. There, Ure focuses on Nietzsche's presentation of the eternal recurrence in GS 341. Downplaying the cosmological reading of a previous allusion to the doctrine in GS 109 (130), Ure casts the doctrine as a spiritual exercise for those engaged in the project of creating themselves as singular and immortal works of art (187), which he rightly identifies as the central motif of the fourth book of GS. There is no doubt that the eternal recurrence has the existential, educational, and therapeutic function Ure ascribes to it, and it is undoubtedly the primary thrust of the doctrine in GS. Indeed, Ure insightfully links the doctrine to Nietzsche's larger project of becoming who one is, and he draws an important connection between Nietzsche's ethics of self-cultivation and the pre-Socratic longing for immortality (191). However, Ure eschews any substantive discussion of the theoretical status of the eternal recurrence and, at times, employs language that suggests we need to choose between understanding it as a theoretical doctrine and understanding it “as a practice of self-cultivation” (197). To my mind, we needn't be forced to choose here, and a complete account of the eternal recurrence should take into consideration both its theoretical and self-cultivating dimensions.Ure's treatment of the eternal recurrence also raises questions around his relative neglect of Z; he mentions the text and its main character on only a few occasions. In terms of the eternal recurrence, it is difficult to see how one can give a complete interpretation of the doctrine without mentioning its central role in Z. More broadly, it is difficult to see how GS as a whole can be divorced from any substantive discussion of Z. Not only do we know that Nietzsche had plans for Z prior to writing GS (see KSA 9:11[195]), we also know that Nietzsche had Zarathustra making a number of appearances in drafts for GS; this includes announcing the death of God in GS 125 (KSA 14, pp. 256–57) and titling the final chapter “Zarathustra's Leisure” (KSA 9:12[225]). In the final version of the text, Zarathustra's appearance is reduced to the opening lines of Z in GS 342. Nevertheless, the fact that the 1882 edition ends with the opening lines of Z is enough evidence to show that just as Ure is right to stress the connection between GS and the free spirit works that precede it, Nietzsche also wants to establish a connection between GS and his subsequent work.The connection between these two texts can be strengthened by noting that Nietzsche introduces Z in GS under the title of “incipit trageodia” (GS 342). As Ure stresses, the theme of tragedy, as well as comedy, is central to the opening aphorism of GS and plays a prominent role in other key aphorisms, especially following the death of God and the elimination of his shadow in the third book. This suggests that Nietzsche's talk of tragedy throughout GS is meant to foreshadow the appearance of Zarathustra at the end of the book, and therefore these aphorisms—along with the motto that begins the fourth book (see KSB 6:401)—can be understood only in relation to Nietzsche's subsequent project. Ure, however, breaks the potential link between Nietzsche's references to tragedy and Z by interpreting GS itself as both a tragedy and “a parody of all earthly seriousness” (248). Although it is true that Nietzsche discusses both tragedy and comedy throughout GS, “incipit tragoedia” in GS 342 indicates that the tragedy does not start until the end of the 1882 edition of GS and therefore the beginning of Z.The relative absence of any substantive discussion of Z is notable because one of the merits of Ure's interpretation is that he goes to great lengths to situate the fifth book and the 1887 preface of GS within the context of Nietzsche's post-Z writings. In so doing, Ure highlights two important themes. First, he argues that in both BGE and the fifth book of GS, Nietzsche revises the figure of the free spirit: rather than an Enlightenment critic of superstition and fanaticism, the free spirit is now cast as one who embodies “Dionysian self-affirmation against Christian self-denial.” In this way, the free spirit prepares the ground for the emergence of future philosophers who engage in an artistic refashioning of mankind (204). Second, Ure finds in Nietzsche's later reflections a critique of the very asceticism that animated much of the free spirit project (most exemplified by Nietzsche's commitment to unfettered truth-seeking in HH [see also KSB 6:427]), and he argues that Nietzsche's critique of asceticism goes hand in hand with a renewal of the aesthetic justification of existence Nietzsche originally sketched in BT (221 and 238). Based on these points, Ure claims that the trajectory of Nietzsche's thinking from a free spirit work like HH to a later work like BGE comes “full circle” (115 and 220).Even though I agree with much of what Ure has to say here, I do want to quibble with one aspect of Ure's account of Nietzsche's supposed reassessment of asceticism and the corresponding will to truth. Ure claims that “Nietzsche defends the unconditional will to truth as the free spirit's ideal” in the third and fourth books of the 1882 edition of GS (135). However, Ure goes on to claim that Nietzsche “significantly revises both his genealogy of the drive to truth and his assessment of its value for life” from 1882 to 1887 such that he “comes to see his preliminary assessment of the value of the will to truth as an overblown moralistic misinterpretation of this phenomenon” (114). There are two potential problems with this reading. First, Nietzsche had already critiqued the idea that the drive to truth is a moral phenomenon in his 1873 unpublished essay, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” Thus, it would be odd if Nietzsche came to realize only in his later writings that the unconditional will to truth driving the free spirit project was a moralistic misinterpretation. Second, there are a number of Nachlass notes from 1881 and 1882 in which Nietzsche alludes to the way in which the free spirit project undermines the very asceticism that characterizes its initial stages (see KSA 10:1[75], 1[76], 2[5–6], 4[16], 6[1–4]). Most notably, Nietzsche describes, in an 1881 note, a process by which the morality of truth and honesty undermines morality, which includes the morality of truth and honesty. This process culminates in what Nietzsche calls the “suicide of morality” (KSA 9:15[15]) (or elsewhere the self-defeat (Selbstbesiegung) of morality (KSA 10:2[6])). Taken together, these notes parallel Nietzsche's description of a self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung or Selbstaufhebung) of morality that he implicitly ascribes to the free spirit project in the final sections of GM (GM III:27) and recall the self-undermining character of the Socratic project that Nietzsche describes as early as BT. For these reasons, I resist Ure's claim that Nietzsche is revising his assessment of the drive to truth in his 1886–87 works (137). Instead, I think that the Selbstaufhebung of the will to truth is baked into the narrative of GS such that the text is designed to transition, via the elimination of God's shadow in the third book, from the asceticism characteristic of the earlier phases of the free spirit project to the aestheticism that is unleashed in the fourth and final book of the 1882 edition.Despite the differences I have with certain features of Ure's interpretation, the above criticisms are certainly not decisive, and my engagement with Ure's reading only attests to the way in which this introductory volume is also worthy of scholarly consideration. He has a clear grasp of Nietzsche's broader project and the important influences on Nietzsche's thinking, and he employs this knowledge to provide an interpretation that stays close to the original text and yet does not devolve, as some introductions are wont to do, into a mere paraphrasing of the ideas found therein. For these reasons, I highly recommend Ure's introduction to GS to students and scholars alike.