Adonis Borges graduated from Duke with a B.A. in Philosophy in December 2024. During the next year and a half—the period between graduate school application cycles—he plans to research Nietzsche and his psychology, writing weekly to biweekly posts of about five hundred to a thousand words. His Nietzsche-focused Substack can be found here.

A Close Reading of The Gay Science: Why Did Nietzsche Write Those Prefaces?

For my first project in the “Nietzsche Niche,” I will attempt a very slow, close, and deep reading of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, beginning with the Preface (from the Revised 1886 Edition). I decided to commit myself to one book for this project, and the one book I’ve chosen to get to know most deeply is The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s happiest and most beautiful work, and my favorite. 

Here’s the first sentence of the preface:

“This book may need more than one preface, and in the end there would still remain room for doubt whether anyone who had never lived through similar experiences could be brought closer to the experience of this book by means of prefaces.”

I think it’s best to begin our journey by picking three words—”preface”, “doubt”, and “experience”—as our incision points. Understanding the importance of the preface to Nietzsche requires an understanding of biographical context, a very important prism for appreciating the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose unique and unusual life shaped the nature of his ideas and insights.

In 1886, when this preface was written, Nietzsche was deeply troubled by the lack of appreciation he was receiving for his books. His readership was minuscule, nearly nonexistent, just a few admirers greatly outnumbered by a legion of reviewers who had called his oeuvre impenetrable, pathological, and full of contradictions. Lamenting his ill-reception in a letter to his close friend, Peter Ghast, Nietzsche laid his fears bare plainly: “No one wants my literature.”

How must the author of a masterpiece like Beyond Good and Evil have felt when the world repeatedly treated his books with negligence and contempt? Something had to be done. Immediately after that book’s publication, he began writing prefaces for all his previous works. A preface aims to prevent misunderstandings, but Nietzsche’s motivation for writing the prefaces was not so simple. As I mentioned earlier, the first line of the Gay Science preface actually questions whether a preface can effectively clear up misunderstandings in the first place. I believe that Nietzsche had a very specific plan in mind: he hoped to clarify his books for a certain kind of reader—and maybe, just maybe, for a more general audience. These new prefaces were not his only attempt to dispel confusion about his writings or himself. Indeed, in a substantive section of Ecce Homo, his last book and autobiography, Nietzsche reflects on almost all of his past works—their main ideas, their inspirations, and the circumstances in which they were written.  

In the preface of Ecce Homo, he says:

“Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.“

Above all, at the end of his life, Nietzsche felt misunderstood. Perhaps his style (a literary and poetic style that yields an inexhaustible and rich depth of often obscure meaning that, depending on the reader, is either seductive or repulsive) only made matters worse. Nietzsche had an internal struggle between his unwillingness to compromise his style and a craving for recognition—between the desire for acknowledgment and visibility and the urge to deceptive integrity. (Did Nietzsche, like truth, have reasons for not letting us see his reasons?)

We should listen to the plurality of voices in Nietzsche’s writings, the “multitudes” within him: 

There is the one who cries: 

Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.

And then there is another, one who flirts with his deliberate obfuscation: 

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.” All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against “the others.” All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid “entrance,” understanding, as said above—while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours.

Here, Nietzsche is still concerned with the inevitability of misunderstandings, but from a different perspective: he is struggling to develop a vocabulary and style of writing that can adequately communicate his experiences. 

Our original sentence again:

This book may need more than one preface, and in the end there would still remain room for doubt whether anyone who had never lived through similar experiences could be brought closer to the experience of this book by means of prefaces.

Now, two other passages which converge on our sentence and color its meaning:

“Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks from experience one will have no ear. Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events that lie altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent or even rare experience—that it is the first language for a new series of experiences. In that case, simply nothing will be heard, but there will be the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is there.”

“To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one’s experiences in common.”

Nietzsche expects his readers to have experiences in common with him, which means possessing a certain emotional predisposition (without which his books would be incomprehensible). We must feel along with Nietzsche the problems he is dealing with—they must be our problems, too. This is partly because, for Nietzsche, it is impossible for ideas to be emotionless—understanding and comprehension are not strictly mental processes, and the “mental” as such does not exist. Knowledge probes deeper than consciousness into the realm of unconscious emotion, into the body and its instincts, drives, and affects. Consequently, ideas must be felt to be understood. This was a unique contribution of Nietzsche’s to philosophy. Other philosophers had severed the connection between thought and emotion—for example, Plato, whose tri-partite model of the soul separates reason from spirit and appetite, assigning the soul the task of dominating the other two. There’s also Descartes, whose mind-body dualism explicitly divides the mind and body into separate entities, and had an enormous influence on the later Western conviction in the supremacy of reason. Nietzsche subverts the preeminence of intellect and reason in psychology and reverses the chain of command—he replaces top-down divisions with bottom-up continuums and turns psychology on its head. Thoughts rise from below. Emotions precede and condition thoughts, which are relegated to a secondary epiphenomenon, like a seismograph that records shifts in the depths of the body beneath the surface of consciousness. 

Nietzsche says that thinking “is merely a relation of the drives to each other.“

Those who chafe against this incorporation of emotion into philosophy, and those who believe that Nietzsche’s philosophy is mere pathos, fundamentally misunderstand his psychology and its effect on his style. His writings are poetic, yes—and to some, poetry is obscure and unrigorous—but poetry also has the power to transform the individual by speaking to their unconscious self. Nietzsche says his psychology is profound—not because he is “deep” and pretentious, but because that word refers poetically to a physiopsychology in which the psyche contains the mind and the body. The “profound” probes deep into our literal selves. And this is reflected in his style: the sensory qualities of his prose engage the body—the metaphors engage the unconscious—they are the means he uses to stir, unsettle, irritate, excite, and raise its contents. Why is that important? To pick the most practical of reasons, because a person who lives unconsciously remains the same forever—or worse, repeats past mistakes. The eternal recurrence—the primary experience Nietzsche means in our sentence—is, on a micro-individual level, the unconscious compulsion to repeat the past.

Erlebnis is the German word Kaufmann translates as experience—a correct one, except that Erlebnis can also suggest “adventure.” Therefore, the Erlebnisse dieses Buches means “the experience of this book” and “the adventure of this book.” Choosing that phrasing previews a motif running through The Gay Scienc, namely that the quest for knowledge is an adventure on open seas (The Gay Science was written in Genoa, the birthplace of Columbus). It’s also the first of several instances in the preface in which Nietzsche plays on the double meaning of a word to perform a thematic function.

But the adventure wasn’t only in Nietzsche’s imagination. The experience of the eternal recurrence struck him as a revelation and shuddering ecstasy in the mountains of Sils Maria in August 1881. There, he self-medicated and self-experimented in solitude. Nietzsche suffered from headaches, vomiting, and insomnia, for which he took choral hydrate and numerous other narcotics, signing his own prescriptions as Dr. Nietzsche because he was, after all, a doctor . . . in philosophy. He also suffered from intense and chaotic mood fluctuations that, thanks to his extraordinary intuition and penetrating inward gaze, he was able to observe scientifically. Nietzsche lived a dangerous inner life, constantly undergoing revolutions and painful transformations—subject to a multiplicity of warring inner drives. The body—not separated from the soul but imbricated with it—became the site of his psychological experiments.

Next week, we’ll work through another sentence from the preface and attempt a minor gloss on Nietzsche’s “most abysmal thought”—the eternal recurrence of the same—and discuss how he tries to communicate it through metaphor, natural imagery, and references to pagan cult rituals and mysteries. We’ll also see how the autobiographical element I’ve touched upon here informs Nietzsche’s attacks on binary categories and his adherence to the principle of the identity of opposites.