The Gay Science

⚖The case for it

The book where God dies. A madman runs into the marketplace at noon with a lantern, shouting that God is dead and we have killed him, and nobody understands him yet. Here too the eternal recurrence gets its first statement, put as a demon's question: would you live this life again, every pain and every joy, endlessly? Say yes and you have amor fati. Nietzsche called it his most personal book; he wrote it coming out of illness, and it shows. The prose is light, fast, almost happy. 'We possess art lest we perish of the truth.'

— the canon

✕The case against

Aphorisms are easy to quote and easy to misread, and this is the most quotable Nietzsche there is; 'God is dead' gets worn as a slogan by people who never noticed it is spoken in dread, not triumph. Book V was bolted on five years later, so the cheerful book carries a colder appendix that does not quite match its title. And the asides on women are the usual nineteenth-century bile, no better here for being brief.

— the honest librarian