Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Knowing, Learning to Love, and Pity

Optional full-text route · Station 24 of 35

Read: Book IV, §§333–338, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at §333 and stop before §339.
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 six sections total about 3,200 words in the free edition; §335 (about 1,200 words) and §338 (about 900) are among the longest in Book IV. If you need two sittings, stop after §335.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §333 · §334 · §335 · §337 · §338.

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

Six sections, two of them among the longest in Book IV. §§334 and 338 are the assignments of Reading 6, which reads them closely: learning to love, and pity that misreads the sufferer. This station reads them as the frame and gives its fullest reading to §335, “Cheers for Physics!,” on conscience and self-knowledge, which no introductory lesson assigns.

The main question: Can knowing, love, and pity be separated so readily?

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

What to notice

Impulses. §333 says that knowing is “only a certain relation of the impulses to one another.” Ask whether learning to love (§334) and pity (§338) are relations of impulses too.
Conscience. §335 asks for “A conscience behind your ‘conscience.’” Compare the intellectual conscience of station 2.
Grief that others cannot reach. §337 imagines one soul that carries all of history’s losses. §338 says that our deepest suffering “is almost incomprehensible and inaccessible to every one else.”

Close reading

One way to group the sections

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

What knowing is: §333.
Learning to love: §334.
Conscience and physics: §§335, 336.
A future humanity: §337.
Pity and joy: §338.

What knowing is

§333, “What does Knowing Mean?,” begins with Spinoza: “Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere!” Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand. The line comes from Spinoza’s Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus), chapter I, paragraph 4: sedulo curavi, humanas actiones non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere, I have carefully taken pains not to laugh at, lament, or detest human actions, but to understand them. The reference was checked in the primary Latin text (Gebhardt edition, vol. III, p. 274). Spinoza’s object is human actions; Nietzsche leaves the object out and makes the line a claim about knowing as such. §333, what knowing means

The section’s answer: intelligere is “the form in which the three other things become perceptible to us all at once,” a settlement among the impulses to deride, lament, and execrate. Knowledge is “only a certain relation of the impulses to one another.” Most thinking goes on unconsciously. The sudden exhaustion of thinkers “may have its origin here (it is the exhaustion of the battle-field),” and perhaps there is heroism in our struggling interior (German vielleicht; mark ?), “but certainly nothing divine.” The last sentence turns on philosophers: conscious thinking is the weakest kind, and so “it is precisely the philosopher who is most easily misled concerning the nature of knowledge.” Mark it P and H.

Learning to love

§334, “One must Learn to Love,” is Reading 6’s first section. Its model is music: we must first learn “to hear fully,” then show patience and good-will toward what is strange, until we become its “humble and enraptured lovers.” “Love also has to be learned.” On this route, set it beside §333: learning to love looks like another slow settlement among impulses, in which good-will holds the others back. That comparison is this guide’s. §334, learning to love

Conscience and physics

§335, “Cheers for Physics!,” begins with self-observation: “Everyone is furthest from himself.” It then imagines a speaker who is sure of his moral judgment. For him, “when a man decides that ‘this is right,’” and does it, “then the nature of his action is moral!” The reply: “you are talking to me about three actions instead of one.” Why do you listen to your conscience? “Do you know nothing of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your ‘conscience’?” Your judgment “has a previous history in your impulses, your likes and dislikes.” §335, a conscience behind conscience

The section lists ways of obeying conscience: “like a brave soldier who hears the command of his officer. Or like a woman who loves him who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward, afraid of the commander. Or like a blockhead.” State the second plainly: it pictures a woman’s obedience as love of the one who commands (German wie ein Weib, das Den liebt, der befiehlt). Then Kant. The categorical imperative “tickles my ear,” and Kant, who had broken open the cage, “strayed back again to ‘God,’ the ‘soul,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘immortality,’ like a fox which strays back into its cage.” To take one’s own judgment as universal law is “a blind, paltry and modest selfishness,” because it shows that “you have not yet created for yourself any individual, quite individual ideal.” Mark it V.

The positive programme follows. There “neither are nor can be similar actions,” and precepts reach only “the coarse exterior.” So: “Let us confine ourselves, therefore, to the purification of our opinions and appreciations, and to the construction of new tables of value of our own.” Judging others morally should be “opposed to our taste,” left “to the many, to the majority!” Then: “We, however, would seek to become what we are,—the new, the unique, the incomparable, making laws for ourselves and creating ourselves!” The German is Wir aber wollen Die werden, die wir sind: we want to become those who we are. To create in this sense, “We must be physicists,” and the section ends: “three cheers for physics! And still louder cheers for that which impels us to it—our honesty” (Redlichkeit). Mark it V. Station 2 introduced the intellectual conscience; here it becomes the ground for creating values. §335, cheers for physics

§336 asks why nature has not let great men shine “according to their inner abundance of light,” like the sun rising and setting. Mark it V: a wish that rank among people were visible.

A future humanity

§337, “Future ‘Humanity,’” looks at the present “with the eye of a distant future” and finds its most remarkable feature to be “the historical sense,” its “peculiar virtue and sickness.” To some the historical sense is cold; to others it looks like old age. But someone who could feel “the history of man in its entirety as his own history” would carry the grief of the invalid, the old man, the lover, the martyr, and the defeated hero, and still greet the next day’s dawn. He would be “the heir of all nobility” and “the first of a new nobility.” That would give “a God’s happiness, full of power and love, full of tears and laughter,” which, “like the sun in the evening,” gives of its riches until “even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars!” “This divine feeling might then be called—humanity!” The quotation marks around “Humanity” in the title are Nietzsche’s (Menschlichkeit). Mark it V, and keep its evening sun for §342. §337, future humanity

Pity and joy

§338, “The Will to Suffering and the Compassionate,” is Reading 6’s second section, and that lesson follows its argument closely. On this route, notice four details. §338, the religion of pity

The word. Common’s “religion of compassion” renders Religion des Mitleidens, the religion of pity.
A confession. The section admits its own weakness: “I need only give myself over to the sight of one case of actual distress, and I, too, am lost!” It chooses, “to select for once bad examples for good reasons,” the sight of “a small, mountain people struggling for freedom.”
War. It says that when a war breaks out, “the noblest class of the people” may rush to it, because war is for them “a detour to suicide, a detour, however, with a good conscience.” That is a psychological claim (P), offered without evidence.
A morality of concealment. “Live in concealment in order that thou mayest live to thyself.” The German, Lebe im Verborgenen, recalls Epicurus’s maxim lathe biōsas, live unnoticed; the identification is this guide’s. The section ends with “fellowship in joy” (Mitfreude).

A difficulty

Can knowing, love, and pity be separated?

§333 makes knowing a truce among the impulses to deride, lament, and curse. §334 makes love something learned through patience with the strange. §338 says that pity strips another’s suffering of its “properly personal character,” so pity fails as knowledge. Yet §338’s alternative, help only for friends “whose distress thou entirely understandest,” needs knowledge and love together.

Three readings are possible.

Separable. Each section isolates one thing: knowing as a relation of impulses, love as a learned taste, pity as a misreading. The book keeps them apart.
Entangled. §334’s patient hospitality toward the unfamiliar is exactly what §338 says pity lacks. Love is the condition of knowing another’s suffering.
Limited. The sections separate them only for strangers. With friends (§338), knowing, loving, and helping coincide.

Decide which the text best supports. Name one sentence from §333 or §334 and one from §338.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

According to §333, what is intelligere?

Not something opposed to the impulses, but a settlement among the impulses to deride, lament, and execrate: “only a certain relation of the impulses to one another.”

What does §335 mean by “A conscience behind your ‘conscience’”?

An intellectual conscience that asks where one’s moral judgment came from (impulses, upbringing, advantage) and why one listens to it.

Why does §335 call the categorical imperative selfish?

Because taking one’s own judgment as universal law shows that one has not yet created an individual ideal of one’s own, and has not yet discovered oneself.

What does §338 propose instead of the religion of pity?

Living in concealment, at a distance from what the age thinks most important; helping only friends whose distress one fully understands; and teaching them fellowship in joy.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Choose §333 or §335. Does its account of knowing leave room for §334’s learned love or §338’s help to friends?

Quote no more than two short phrases.
Say whether the claims you use are psychological (P), historical (H), or valuations (V).
Keep §335’s imagined interlocutor distinct from the section’s own voice.

A successful response states each section’s claim plainly, notices where §335 ranks people (“the many”), and does not treat Reading 6’s answers as settling the question.

Continue

Optional checkpoint: Reading 6. You have now read both of Reading 6’s sections (§§334 and 338). Its full close reading of them is a useful review; it takes about 55–75 minutes, an editorial estimate. Reading 6 belongs to the ten-session introduction, and its own Next link leads to Reading 7, which pairs §276 with §341. You have not yet read §341, so return here instead of following that link; Reading 7 has its own checkpoint after station 25.

Continue to station 25: The Heaviest Burden and the End of 1882 →

Read next: Book IV, §§339–342, the end of the original book. Its question: why end the original book with a dramatic departure?

Previous station: station 23, §§319–332. Return to the route list in the book guide.

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