Nietzsche: The Gay Science [Session 38]

While the Walter Kaufmann translation is preferred, a link to the free Cambridge translation is here. For this Meetup, we will read aphorisms 127-135, and discuss them one at a time and get as far as we get, carrying forward any undiscussed aphorisms to the following week.

It’s 1882, and a friend has just given you a copy and recommendation of a book by a former professor of philology named Friedrich Nietzsche. Your friend says that he seems to be a philosopher of some sort, even though he doesn’t write like one, and in this book he argues, among a lot of other provocative things, that God Is dead!

This Is the beginner’s mind that this Meetup will take with this book. You may know his contemporaries and antecedents, but you’re here to share YOUR thoughts, not those of subsequent critics.
Recordings and AI summaries of previous sessions are available here.
Suggested texts: The Portable Neitzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann and The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann
Syllabus (titles are linked to free PDF’s, most of which require a free academia.edu account)
The Gay Science (academia.edu)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Beyond Good and Evil (academia.edu)*
On The Genealogy of Morals (academia.edu)*
The Case of Wagner*
Twilight of the Idols** (academia.edu)
The Antichrist**
Ecce Homo*
Nietzsche Contra Wagner**
*The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann
**Walter Kaufmann’s, The Portable Nietzsche