The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science is one of Nietzsche’s most beautiful and important books. He describes it as “the most personal of all his books”.

Gay Science has the overtones of a light-hearted defiance of convention; it suggests Nietzsche’s “immoralism” and his “revaluation of all values”. In Nietzsche’s own words, one must strive to be an “artistic Socrates”, a philosopher with both an intellectual conscience and with a feeling for art.

The book contains Nietzsche’s first proclamation of the death of God, as well as the eternal recurrence, both of which are in response to nihilism. It also contains some of his most sustained discussions on knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience, and the miseries that accompany religion and morality, warning us against the “preachers of morality”.