Product Description

Nietzsche wrote The Gay Science, which he later described as "perhaps my most personal book", when he was at the height of his intellectual powers, and the reader will find it an extensive and sophisticated treatment of the philosophical themes and views most central to Nietzsche's own thought and most influential on later thinkers. This volume presents the work in a new translation by Josefine Nauckhoff, with an introduction by Bernard Williams that elucidates the work's main themes and discusses their continuing importance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133375 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

Review
The Gay Science deserves prominent attention from philosophers who study Nietzche's works, and indeed from anyone with an interest in moral psychology and the origin of our values. This new edition is a great achievement, which should for most purposes supersede Kaufmann as the standard translation, and which will have an important role to play in bringing this work into prominence and in furthering the study of Nietzche in the English-speaking world." Notre Dame Philosphical Reviews

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

About the Author
Bernard Williams is Deutsch Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His many publications include Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973), Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1986), Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993), and Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Customer Reviews

incredible, great translation, but a difficult read
"The best way to read Nietzsche is slowly," my professor said when we began studying this book. And I could not agree more. This book contains some of Nietzsche's central ideas, including the death of God, origin of morality, perspectivism, as well as the difference between the noble and common type. I love this translation because the translator seems to focus on what Nietzsche was trying to say in German, rather than some of the other translations where they only provide a basic and rough translation.

I would recommend this book if you're trying to understand the basics of Nietzsche's theories, since THE GAY SCIENCE was written during the height of his career (1882). However, do keep in mind that it will be difficult if this will be your first exposure to Nietzsche. You might also look at BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Hollingdale translation, since that one contains much of the same ideas, but the language is more understandable.

Announcement: God is dead
Nietzsche's announcement of God's death first appeared here, in The Gay Science. Also, this is the first book in which he mentions the Eternal Reccurence (see the second to the last aphorism of the fourth "book"). Zarathustra's prologue is also here (that's the last aphorism of the fourth book). Book 5 of the Gay Science was added in 1885, and covers Nietzsche's mature philosophy (post-Zarathustra period). Overall a good read.

Meet the ultimate stone.
Section 312 of this book is called "my dog" (on a combination of being faithful, obtrusive and shameless, "just as entertaining, just as clever as every other dog" (p. 177), but it is about Nietzsche's relationship to his pain. There is another book by Nietzsche, THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW, in which section 38 mentions "The bite of conscience" as a stupidity, like the bite of a dog into a stone. (Portable Nietzsche, p. 68). There is also a section in THE GAY SCIENCE about beggars using a stone to knock where there is no bell. This translation has an entry in the index for "beggars, and courtesy." The Walter Kaufmann translation listed section titles on pages ix-xviii, but Kaufmann didn't have an entry in the index for beggars or for bell, and though I may have rung Walter Kaufmann's bell a number of times, before and since I started writing reviews, my mental efforts to knock the war against the United Stoners of America has reached such a modern point of indifference in its approach to everything that what Walter Kaufmann thought about anything is of hardly any concern to those who would like an understanding of what is going on. I expect this book, which allows a comparison of minor differences on major matters, to be quite useful to me. I find it extremely comical when this translation makes something funny that in Walter Kaufmann's translation was only puzzling, but even the index of this book skips from women to words with no entry for wooden iron. There is no entry for iron between interruption, intuition, Islam, and Italian opera. But in the text itself, just before section 357 "On the old problem: `What is German?' " the end of section 356 raises the primary question any modern philosopher can face:

Free society? Well, well! But surely you know, gentlemen, what one needs to build that? Wooden iron! The famous wooden iron! And it need not even be wooden. (p. 217)