Nietzsche's Gay Science

Robert Miner is Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, Texas. He is the author of Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy (Routledge, 2004), Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Vico, Genealogist of Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002) and Nietzsche and Montaigne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Miner has achieved the remarkable feat of reading The Gay Science in a joyful manner. Poetic and profound, literary, playful and insightful, deeply cultured and challenging: if Nietzsche ever wished for an ideal reader, Miner cannot be far from it. Students and scholars have much to learn from his study of Nietzsche’s gai saber, not just of Nietzsche himself and his thought, but for how they should live their own lives after the ‘death of God’.

• ChronologyPrefaceBeginnings1.1. Diving into The Gay Science: the first two aphorisms1.2. The place of The Gay Science in Nietzsche’s corpus1.3. The idea of gay science before Nietzsche1.4. A Prelude in German rhymes1.5. Strategies for reading aphorismsThe Gay Science I: A New Ethics of the Noble2.1. Noble and common2.2. New values beyond good and evil2.3. Sacrificing on altars to an unknown god2.4. Courage with no desire for honors2.5. Self-sufficiency that overflows and givesThe Gay Science II: Women, Artists and Art3.1. Artists in love3.2. Aphorisms on women3.3. On the souls of artists3.4. For and against art3.5. Art for the free spiritThe Gay Science III: Finding the Real Killers4.1. News for atheists4.2. Tombs and sepulchers4.3. An inside job?4.4. Maxims and a catechism: The Gay Science 154–275The Gay Science IV: Affirming Life, Eternally5.1. The musicality of the Sanctus Januarius5.2. Negation5.3. Learning to love5.4. Life-Affirmation and ‘You Knowers’5.5. The eternal return in The Gay Science IVInterlude: Preface to the 1887 The Gay ScienceThe Gay Science V: Nietzsche as Psychologist7.1. Toward new seas7.2. The problem of science7.3. Religious types: three different ones7.4. The psychology of the scholarThe Gay Science V: ‘We Fearless Ones.’ Nihilism at the Door8.1. Our question mark8.2. Dancing between reverence and suspicion8.3. An elliptical ending…8.4. ‘Sing me a new song’Postlude: ‘The Story of the Next Two Centuries’ (?)Glossary of Key TermsGuide to Further ReadingBibliographyIndex