Review

My first introduction to Nietzsche was "The Gay Science," A book I bought purely for the title. I've continued to read his work over the years and find myself disagreeing with him more and more. All of his books are written as a series of aphorisms connected by a general theme, which makes reading his work very easy. Read one quote and move on to the next - reflect on what was read and form opinions: That is basically how I've read all of his books. This is one of his earlier works, and man does he have some terrible takes. "The mistakes of the greatest authors generally have their starting point in a wrong explanation of certain human actions and sensations (2.37)." Nietzsche presumes, as he does in his other works, that there is a higher culture man can strive for and this higher culture can be reached by discarding religion as the shackles of a dying culture, but also this higher culture is predicated on traditions built by previous generations. This contradiction has not been fully analyzed within this work, and it leads to several weird-ass claims. The most egregious tradition Nietzsche venerates is pedagogy: "The erotic relation of men to youths was the necessary and sole preparation... of all manly education (5.259)." In classic Nietzsche fashion, he somehow manages to make the claim even worse with a splash of misogyny: "The higher the light in which this relation [between man and youth] was regarded, the lower sank intercourse with women... The women had no other mission than to produce beautiful, strong bodies... (ibid.)." Women exist only for the use of reproduction and any state of higher culture is a patriarchical society.

This is, at its core, the absurdity of Nietzschean cultural philosophy: He has a materialist understanding of the world to a point, which is completely abandoned the moment religion has been dismissed. I am about to read a book which blends Marx with Nietzsche, and I don't understand how it is going to work out. Nietzsche saw socialism as decadent: "The socialists demand a comfortable life for the greatest possible number. If the lasting house of this life is comfort, the perfect state, had really been attained, then this life of comfort would have destroyed the ground out of which grow the greatest intellect... Were this state reached, mankind would have grown too weary to be still capable of producing genius (5.235)." Nietzsche also saw the state as "necessary and wise (ibid.)," which completely goes against everything Marx and Engels wrote. Also, elephant in the room, his philosophy directly influenced the ideology of the nazis. Maybe I accidentally bought a nazbol book that is inevitably going to make a nonsensical argument, I don't know.

All that being said, I'll be damned if Nietzsche doesn't have some banger quotes. Some favorites:

1. "A good author wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by representing the same thing in a clearer way and answering without more ado the problems therein proposed(2.57)."
2. "Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them(4.188)."
3. "Whoever has not 2/3 of his day for himself is a slave...(5.283)."
4. "A happy age is no longer possible, because men only wish for it but do not desire to have it(8.471)."
5. "Men can seldom hold on to a calling unless they believe or persuade themselves that it is really more important than any other(9.492)."