Description:
God is Dead. God Remains Dead. And We Have Killed Him: Selected Aphorisms from The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche is a curated selection of twenty-four passages from Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, first published in 1882. The volume is built around the most famous single passage Nietzsche ever wrote - aphorism 125 of Book III, the parable of the madman who runs into the marketplace with a lantern in broad daylight and announces to the laughing crowd that God is dead, and that they are the murderers.
The Gay Science is the book in which Nietzsche first stated the thought that would define his reception in the twentieth century, and it is also the book in which he began to work out what a serious philosophical life might look like once the old certainties had gone. This edition follows the movement of that thought through Books III, IV, and the opening of Book V - beginning with the aphorisms that clear the ground for the madman's announcement, moving through the announcement itself, and then following Nietzsche as he begins to imagine a life on the other side of the catastrophe he has described.
The selection includes The Madman in full, alongside New Struggles, Let Us Guard Ourselves, the Origin of Knowledge sequence, In the Horizon of the Infinite, The Greatest Utility of Polytheism, For the New Year (with its famous formulation of amor fati), Preparatory Human Beings, Excelsior!, One Thing Is Needful, The Greatest Weight (the first appearance of the eternal recurrence), Incipit Tragoedia (which announces Zarathustra), and The Meaning of Our Cheerfulness. Each aphorism is a piece of Nietzsche at the height of his powers, and together they trace what he called the joyful, dangerous knowing that gives The Gay Science its name.
The famous line has been quoted for a century and a half, mostly by people who have not read it in context. Nietzsche did not mean to celebrate. The madman in the parable is not a triumphant atheist but a witness to a catastrophe - the slow, quiet withdrawal of belief from European life, and the failure of a comfortable, unbothered culture even to notice what it had lost. What Nietzsche is describing, and what he asks his reader to face, is not the loss of a Sunday habit but the loss of the ground on which good and evil, dignity and meaning, love and labor and death had all stood for two thousand years. The aphorisms gathered here are his attempt to look at that loss without either mourning or celebrating it, and to begin to imagine what a philosophy adequate to the situation might sound like.
This edition includes a substantial Editor's Introduction placing the aphorisms in the context of The Gay Science as a whole and of Nietzsche's career, a Note on the Text explaining the principles of selection, and a Translator's Afterword by S. R. Travers reflecting on what the passage has meant in the century since it was written. The translation is a fresh English rendering made directly from the German original.
A short, essential volume by one of the great original minds of modern philosophy - and one of the most famous single passages in the history of Western thought, restored to its context and to the movement of thought that surrounds it.
Available in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover.