The Joyful Wisdom

The Joyful Wisdom, “La Gaya Scienza” by Friedrich Nietzsche and translated by Thomas Common with Poetry Rendered by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre. The text is from The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Dr Oscar Levy, volume ten. Macmillan 1924. The Gay Science (German: Die frohliche Wissenschaft) or The Joyful Wisdom is a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1882 and followed by a second edition, which was published after the completion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, in 1887. This substantial expansion includes a fifth book and an appendix of songs. It was noted by Nietzsche to be “the most personal of all [his] books”, and contains the greatest number of poems in any of his published works. “The Joyful Wisdom,” written in 1882, just before “Zarathustra,” is rightly judged to be one of Nietzsche’s best books. Here the essentially grave and masculine face of the poet-philosopher is seen to light up and suddenly break into a delightful smile. The warmth and kindness that beam from his features will astonish those hasty psychologists who have never divined that behind the destroyer is the creator, and behind the blasphemer the lover of life. In the retrospective valuation of his work which appears in “Ecce Homo” the author him self observes with truth that the fourth book, “Sanctus Januarius,” deserves especial attention: “The whole book is a gift from the Saint, and the introductory verses express my gratitude for the most wonderful month of January that I have ever spent.” Book fifth “We Fearless Ones,” the Appendix “Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird,” and the Preface, were added to the second edition in 1887.