Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Style, Genoa, and the Poets of Life

Optional full-text route · Station 21 of 35

Read: Book IV, §§290–301, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at §290 and stop before §302.
Allow: About 70–90 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The twelve sections total about 3,350 words in the free edition; §§290, 291, 293, and 301 are the longest. If you need two sittings, stop after §294.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §290 · §293 · §296 · §299 · §301.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation, including his section titles. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here; this lesson has not been compared with Kaufmann’s text. Where a word drives the interpretation, this page notes the German, from the Projekt Gutenberg-DE text.

Before you read

Station 20’s wish was to see the necessary as beautiful. These twelve sections ask how beauty and value are made: in a character, a city, a morality, a science, a life. Two of them, §§290 and 299, are the assignments of Reading 5, which gives each a full close reading. This station reads them as the frame of a sequence and gives more time to what lies between them.

The main question: How does giving style to a life differ from an artist’s borrowed pose—and can a style survive the thinker’s duty to change his mind?

Keep using the marks: P, H, V, and ? for Nietzsche’s own hedge only.

What to notice

1. Builders. §290’s strong natures, who have “palaces to build and gardens to lay out,” reappear in §291’s Genoa.
2. Severity and appearance. §293 praises the “severity of science”; §299 teaches the artist’s ways of disguising things. Ask whether one person can practise both.
3. Change. §§295–297 praise short-lived habits, distrust of anything fixed in oneself, and “the ability to contradict.”

Close reading

One way to group the sections

These groups are this guide’s, not Nietzsche’s.

• Style and its builders: §§290, 291.
• Morality, science, and nature: §§292, 293, 294.
• Habits, reputation, and contradiction: §§295, 296, 297, 298.
• Poets of life: §§299, 300, 301.

Style and its builders

§290’s title, “One Thing is Needful,” echoes Jesus’s words to Martha in Luke 10:42 (King James Version: But one thing is needful); the German is Eins ist Noth. The identification is this guide’s. The section opens: “To ‘give style’ to one’s character—that is a grand and a rare art!” Reading 5 follows its operations (adding, removing, concealing, reinterpreting) and its two portraits of character. On this route, notice three details. §290, giving style

• Taste holds it together: “whether the taste was good or bad is of less importance than one thinks,—it is sufficient that it was a taste!”
• The strong natures build: when they have “palaces to build and gardens to lay out,” they will not “allow nature to be free.”
• The one thing needful is “that man should attain to satisfaction with himself—be it but through this or that fable and artifice.” The German is Dichtung und Kunst, poetry and art.

§291, “Genoa,” shows such builders in stone. In the villas and slopes the speaker sees “the images of bold and autocratic men,” whose houses were built “for centuries, and not for the passing hour.” The district is overgrown with “this superb, insatiable egoism of the desire to possess and exploit.” Against them stand the cities of the north, which reveal “the propensity to equality and submission” of their builders. Mark it H and V: a history read off architecture, and a preference for the builder “who is averse to law and to neighbour.” These men “recognised no frontiers” abroad and “placed a new world beside the old.” A modern reader may note what the section does not: that placing a new world beside the old also meant conquest. That observation is a modern evaluation, not the text’s. §291, Genoa

Morality, science, and nature

§292 advises “the Preachers of Morality.” If they speak of virtue “from morning till night,” its gold will turn to lead. “Try, just for once, another recipe”: “say that morality is something forbidden!” Perhaps that would win over “the heroic” (German Vielleicht; mark ?). The section ends by citing Meister Eckhart (Common spells it “Master Eckardt”): “I pray God to deliver me from God!” The German, ich bitte Gott, dass er mich quitt mache Gottes, asks God to make the speaker quit of God. Mark it P and V: advice about how values keep their worth, not a rejection of the good things themselves. §292, to the preachers of morality

§293, “Our Atmosphere,” praises science’s strictness, “its inexorability in small matters as well as in great.” It frightens the passing visitor who glances at science only now and then, “in the manner of women, and alas! also like many artists.” State that aside plainly: it attributes a casual relation to science to women as such (German nach Art der Frauen). For those who are used to it, science is “this manly atmosphere,” and they want to be “the light of the earth!” (in quotation marks in both texts). The section ends with a warning: “Let those fear us, who do not know how to warm and brighten themselves by our influence!” Mark it V. §293, the severity of science

§294 turns against “the Disparagers of Nature,” those in whom “every natural inclination forthwith becomes a disease.” They taught us that our impulses are evil, and so “there is so little nobility to be found among men.” Nobility is “to have no fear of oneself.” Compare station 15’s §139 on Paul’s “evil eye for the passions.”

Habits, reputation, and contradiction

§295 declares, “I love short-lived habits.” Each one arrives with “the belief in everlasting duration” and then departs peaceably. What the speaker hates are permanent habits: they come “as if a tyrant came into my neighbourhood.” He is even grateful for “all my misery and sickness,” because they leave him “a hundred back-doors” out of permanence. Yet “the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits.” Mark it P. Compare station 14’s §120 on sickness. §295, short-lived habits

§296, “A Fixed Reputation,” gives a history. Where society is ruled by “the herd-instinct,” it praises the person who never changes: “One can rely on him, he remains the same.” That valuation “educates ‘characters,’” and it is “the mode of judging which is most injurious to knowledge,” because the thinker must be willing “to declare himself unhesitatingly as opposed to his former opinions.” The last sentence is hedged: “It is probable” that knowledge long had a bad conscience (German wahrscheinlich; mark ?). §296, a fixed reputation

§297 calls “the ability to contradict” “the step of all steps of the emancipated intellect.” §298, “A Sigh,” shows a thought dying in “these dry words” as soon as it has been caught.

Poets of life

§299 is Reading 5’s second section. On this route, read it right after §293’s praise of severity. Artists know how to make things attractive “when they are not so”: by distance, by framing, by partial concealment, by “coloured glasses,” and by a surface “which is not fully transparent.” “We should learn all that from artists, and moreover be wiser than they,” because their power “usually ceases with them where art ceases and life begins; we, however, want to be the poets of our life.” The German is die Dichter unseres Lebens. §299, what to learn from artists

§300, “Prelude to Science,” asks whether the sciences could have grown without “sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches” as forerunners. “Perhaps the whole of religion” will one day appear to a distant age as a similar prelude (German Vielleicht; mark ?). It ends with Prometheus, who had first to fancy that he had stolen the light “in order finally to discover that he had created the light,” and that “not only man, but also God had been the work of his hands.” Mark it H. Compare station 16’s §153, whose poet killed the gods in his fourth act, and station 15’s §135, where Prometheus’s theft had dignity. §300, prelude to science

§301, “Illusion of the Contemplative,” makes the station’s largest claim. “Higher men” (German die hohen Menschen) see and hear far more than others, and become “always at the same time happier and unhappier.” Their illusion is to think themselves spectators, when each is “a real creator, and continuous poet of life.” Then: “Whatever has value in the present world, has it not in itself, by its nature,—nature is always worthless:—but a value was once given to it, bestowed upon it, and it was we who gave and bestowed!” Mark it V and H. Notice the ranking it assumes: the practical men are “our actors,” who learn and practise what the contemplatives compose. §301, the contemplative as creator

A difficulty

Can a style survive the duty to contradict oneself?

§290 finds the achievement of style in “the constraint of the same taste” across a whole character. §§295–297 praise short-lived habits, distrust of “all that wants to be fixed in him,” and the ability to contradict. §293 wants science’s severity; §299 wants the artist’s disguises.

Three readings are possible.

• The taste is constant; the habits are material. One taste can govern a life of changing habits and opinions, as a composer’s taste governs changing themes.
• A real tension. §290 rewards unity, while §296 condemns “the petrifaction of opinions.” A thinker must sometimes break his own style.
• Different people. §290 itself makes room for characters who hate the constraint of style. The speaker of §295, with his hundred back-doors, may be closer to them than to §291’s builders.

Decide which the text best supports. Name one sentence from §290 and one from §§295–297.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Choose §293 or §299. Could the person it describes also live by the other section?

• Quote no more than two short phrases.
• Use §301’s claim that “we” give things their value, for or against your answer.
• Say whether §290’s “fable and artifice” counts as art, deception, or both.

A successful response states each section’s claim plainly, keeps the section’s own ranking of people in view, and does not assume that severity and appearance must either coincide or conflict.

Continue

Optional checkpoint: Reading 5. You have now read both of Reading 5’s sections (§§290 and 299). Its full close reading of them is a useful review; it takes about 50–65 minutes, an editorial estimate. Reading 5 belongs to the ten-session introduction, so its own Next link leads to Reading 6, not back to this route. Return here afterward.

Continue to station 22: Doing, Restraint, and the Wisdom of Pain →

Read next: Book IV, §§302–318. Its question: what disciplines interpretation and restraint?

Previous station: station 20, the Book IV verse and §§276–289. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 27, 2026.

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