Adonis Borges graduated from Duke with a B.A. in Philosophy in December 2024. This summer he is studying German at the Middlebury Language School immersion program with an eye towards further study of Nietzsche in graduate school. This piece was originally published in Adonis’ Nietzsche-focused Substack, which can be found here. The first entry in this series was published in February.
A Close Reading of The Gay Science: In Defense of Winter
I apologize for my long absence.
I promised weekly to biweekly postings, but it’s been over a month since my last. I also promised to dedicate a portion of this installment to Nietzsche’s paganism. For the sake of brevity, I can’t come through on the latter, and as for the former, unfortunately, I “went under” with a stubborn cold. The writing has been slow.
In our last discussion, we began our investigation of The Gay Science by paying special attention to the first sentence of its preface. We touched on Nietzsche’s peculiar attitude toward prefaces, his doubts, and most importantly, his experiences, but skipped over “the experience of this book.” How could a book be an experience?
Nietzsche is a materialist. For him, reality is entirely made up of matter and natural forces. Everything is a force in dynamic combat and interplay—the world, the body, and the thoughts that emerge from it. Experiences—sensations that impact the body and influence thought—are also forces.
A book is no different. It’s a bundle of thoughts, a container of forces born from certain experiences. If ontology is the area of philosophy that studies the most general and essential elements of reality, then I have just described a materialist ontology.
Let’s move on.
“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. It seems to be written in the language that thaws ice and snow: high spirits, unrest, contradiction, and April weather are present in it, and one is instantly reminded no less of the proximity of winter than of the triumph over the winter that is coming, must come, and perhaps has already come.“
In the second sentence, Nietzsche uses natural metaphor to tell us the story of his convalescence. His debilitating physical and spiritual sickness, the wintry depression of his body and soul, is ending. Spring is coming, and with it, the return of hope, vitality, and strength.
Note, however, the “proximity of the winter.” Nietzsche’s sickness is still near and lingering in the background. His convalescence does not mark a complete recovery but an infinitely long bridge between sickness and health that he can never cross. Healing, for him and for us, is a never-ending process.
Nietzsche’s crucial insight is that the world is a mirror of the soul, and that the coexistence of decaying and rejuvenating processes without is also occurring within, on the inside of that sensitive and permeable membrane called the body, which pretends to divide the outer from the inner.
From the fact that health and sickness are not opposite but blended and interrelated concepts, it follows that we are never entirely healthy; some part of us is always sick. Those we call healthy are merely those in whom the traces of sickness are faint or imperceptible.
Nietzsche discovered this because, in the last years of his sane life, he was susceptible to states of extremis in rapid and alternating succession: health and sickness, joy and melancholia, winter and spring. The proximity of these experiences made a discrete relation between them impossible: their fusion along a continuous curve became manifest. And their contrasts, heightened by every sudden alternation, accentuated their commonalities and essential differences, granting Nietzsche a kind of knowledge that only total immersion could attain.
“It is the value of all morbid states that they show us under a magnifying glass certain states that are normal—but not easily visible when normal.” [Will to Power, 47].
Compare Freud, who would express a similar idea over fifty years later:
“Pathology has always done us the service of making discernible by isolation and exaggeration conditions which remain concealed in a normal state.“
The April weather metaphor expresses this perfectly. Anyone who has experienced the weather’s vacillating moods in that cruelest of months knows how indecisive and erratic the transition from winter to spring can seem, how each season retains qualities of the other as it slides back and forth along the circumference of its cyclical development. A week of bright suns, warm afternoon breezes, and kaleidoscopic gardens lapses into a weekend of cold air, fog, and gray skies, and budding lilies and rhododendrons shiver on icy nights that stunt their bloom.
Health and sickness are not opposite concepts; they don’t have opposite values either. So “negative” experiences are really necessary experiences that are fundamentally connected to and responsible for the possibility of positive ones, like the necessary connection between winter and spring. For, as Marcuse says in Eros and Civilization, “pain is a link in the chain of joy.”
Sickness and health reverse the direction of our vision. Sickness looks inward and backward, toward ourselves and the past; health looks outward and forward, toward the world and the future. The former allows us to reflect and introspect, to mine our memories for patterns and the sources of our pain, and to confront the people, places, and things that harmed us. But it also makes us too preoccupied with ourselves and too focused on the past. Exploiting sickness to our advantage would mean achieving some sort of catharsis through reflection—ideally, through artistic expression—without becoming petty or resentful. We would remember everything, and then forget it all for good.
Health is advantageous for more obvious reasons, which Nietzsche will put his unique spin on in the coming paragraphs, and which we’ll continue to work through in the next segment.
Until then, I hope what I’ve said so far paints Nietzsche’s thought and his person in a brighter, more optimistic light that deviates from the popular conception. Despite being a “pessimist,” the man tried with superhuman effort to find meaning in his suffering.
