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Friedrich NietzscheThe Gay Science
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1882A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Light
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche develops light as a motif, in which light, or moving into the light, represents knowledge and awareness,while darkness represents a lack thereof. This motif culminates with Nietzsche’s image of individuals, and their knowledge, as a tree, which needs light to grow.
Nietzsche calls for individuals to dig out of the well of darkness that their lack of knowledge has led them down. As light and dark is a classic binary, Nietzsche only need hint at this motif now and again to strike up the epic, religious, and poetic references he wants to connect to his philosophy.
After declaring God dead, Nietzsche proposes an image of the kind of fearless, selfish thinker capable of transforming human knowledge, saying that such an individual does what’s in their power “to bring light to the earth, we want to be ‘the light of the earth!’” (128). In the closing pages of “Book Fourth,” Zarathustra states,“Therefore must I descend into the deep, as thou doest in the evening, when thou goest beyond the sea and givest light also to the netherworld, thou most rich star!” (153).
Nietzschecelebrates knowledge as light that penetrates the darkness of unintelligence, as though itcuts through layers. Indeed, in the final pages Nietzsche compares acquiring new knowledge to shedding old skin, and completes his metaphor that we are like trees:
We cast off old bark […] become younger, higher, stronger […] we thrust our roots always more powerfully into the deep–into evil–while at the same time we embrace the heavens […] suck in their light ever more eagerly with all our branches and leaves. We grow like trees […] not in one place, but everywhere […] upwards and outwards as well as inwards and downwards (188).
Here, Nietzsche relates evil as the place where our roots reach into darkness, and intelligence as the light of intelligence that causes individuals’ knowledge to grow like trees.
Man as God
A major motif in The Gay Science is Nietzsche’s vision of man as a symbol, and, also, that man is his own creator, or God. This motif sits at the heart of Nietzsche’s ideal of an individual empowered by the light of knowledge, who understands that the sum total of his knowledge is no more than an agreed upon set of symbols. Man’s journey through consciousness has been the exploration and interrogation of that consciousness, to the point individuals realize that consciousness grows out of human relations.
One example of the motif of man as symbol and man as God begins with Nietzsche’s interrogation of why Shakespeare chose to create a character like Brutus: “Was it actually political freedom that impelled the poet to sympathy with Brutus [...] and made him the accomplice of Brutus? Or was political freedom merely a symbol for something inexpressible?” (72). Here, Nietzsche touches on the concept of knowledge and man’s understanding of himself as understanding represented only through symbolic representation. Nietzsche proposes that a painful vital force in Shakespeare’s ego required he create Brutus; in turn, Brutus becomes a symbol of an innerfeeling and freedom over tyranny.
Nietzsche applies the concept of man as symbol to all ancient Greek mythology and human invention, from language to art to science, and, later, to modern German philosophy, drama, and music:
The inventing of Gods, heroes, and supermen of all kinds, as well as coordinate men and undermen–dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, devils–was the inestimable preliminary to the justification of the selfishness and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom which was granted to one God in respect to other Gods, was at last given to the individual himself in respect to laws, customs and neighbors (97).
All knowledge represents the result of a symbolic experience that an individual, for their own vitality, needs to create. The knowledge they create is a symbol, a shadow of the initial experience.
Dionysian Pessimism
Dionysian pessimism symbolizes the concept of Nietzsche’s ideal individual. It represents the overabundant passion to experience knowledge, art, poetry, eros, and wine (as symbolized for the ancient Greeks in the God Dionysius) in a romantic pessimist who experiences such abundant suffering it creates a personal need for healing. This ‘healing’often gives way to the destruction of old principles, as conventional wisdom failed to heal the figurative illnesses of the romantic pessimist.Through being healed, new knowledge is created.
Nietzsche proposes that the greatest knowledge of an era does not satisfy the Dionysian vitality of some individuals living in that era. These individuals’’ constant need for experience, when mixed with a deep romantic suffering, creates the ideal equation for the type of intellect brave and selfish enough to transcend one’s own conscience and push beyond societal norms, and towards new knowledge. This type of person will always change, since new eras discover new types of knowledge. Nietzsche writes:
The desire for destruction,change and becoming, may be the expression of overflowing power, pregnant with futurity,but it must also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, destitute and unfortunate, which destroys, and must destroy, because the enduring, yea, all that endures, in fact all being, excites and provokes it (187).
Dionysian passion merges with romantic suffering and creates the situation where an individual breaks from conventional knowledge in order to experience their own fulfillment.
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