For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

by Nietzsche, Friedrich (2010)

Abstract

Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God—to which a large part of the book is devoted—and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published. Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.

Key Passage

Work.- How close work and the worker are now even to the most leisurely among us! The royal courtesy of the saying "We are all workers" would have been cynical and indecent as recently as the reign of Louis XIV.  (p.204)

Keywords

Nietzsche, Philosophy, Leisure

Themes

Nietzsche Citations

Links to Reference

Translator

Kaufmann, W.

Citation

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