The Joyous Science

In a marketplace, a madman runs through the crowd crying that God is dead — and that we have killed him. He is not triumphant. He is terrified. Because he understands what the death of God actually means: the collapse of the entire framework of values and meaning that Western civilisation has built over two thousand years. What replaces it? That is the question The Joyous Science — also known as The Gay Science — both poses and begins to answer.

This is the book in which Nietzsche first introduced the eternal recurrence — the thought experiment that asks: what if you had to live this life exactly as you are living it, again and again, forever? And it is the book in which his characteristic method — the aphorism, the short essay, the poem — finds its fullest early expression: a style of philosophy that is also a style of living, restless and provisional and alive on every page.

R.J. Hollingdale’s translation is the standard English text. Essential Nietzsche — and essential modern philosophy. Published by Penguin Classics.