The Gay Science

In "The Gay Science or, The Joyful Wisdom," Nietzsche experiments with the notion of power. The book contains Nietzsche's first consideration of the idea of the eternal recurrence, a concept, which would become critical in his next work Thus Spoke Zarathustra and underpins much of the later works. The book's title uses a phrase that was well-known at the time. It was derived from a Provençal expression (gai saber) for the technical skill required for poetry writing that had already been used by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas...