Reading Nietzsche

Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Work, Distress, and the Dreamer Who Must Dream On

Optional full-text route · Station 7 of 35

Read: Book I, §§41–56, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at §41 and read to the end of Book I, stopping at the title of Book II.
Allow: About 65–85 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The sixteen sections total about 3,100 words in the free edition. If you need two sittings, stop after §48.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §41 · §48 · §54 · §55.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation, including his section titles. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here.

Before you read

These sixteen sections close Book I. They move between work and idleness, laws and customs, pain and pessimism, and the thinker’s place in a world of appearance. Two sections look back to station 2. §55 returns to the “noble” nature of §3 and revises it. §54, the second assignment of Reading 2, returns to the dream of existence that §1 called a comedy.

The main question: What do work, truth, and appearance demand of a life—and what does Book I finally say about suffering?

Mark each section with P, H, V, or ? (Nietzsche’s own hedge only). Several of the most important sentences here are hedged with “perhaps.”

What to notice

  1. Distress. §48 and §56 both speak of it. Compare who suffers in each, and who chooses the suffering.
  2. Scales again. §55 speaks of “scales” not yet invented. Recall §2’s weights.
  3. The last sentence of Book I. Whose happiness is painted “on the wall”?

Close reading

One way to group the sections

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

Work without delight

§41 treats the thinker’s actions as experiments: “success and failure are answers to him first and foremost.” Remorse he leaves to those who act on command. §42 then divides workers. Almost everyone works for pay. But there are “rarer men who would rather perish than work without delight in their labour”: artists, contemplatives, and also idlers, hunters, and lovers. For thinkers, ennui is “the unpleasant ‘calm’ of the soul which precedes the happy voyage.” §42, work and ennui

Mark §42 V. It ranks people by their relation to work, much as §40 ranked soldiers above workmen. It ends with a comparison: it “perhaps distinguishes the Asiatics above the Europeans” that they can rest longer and more deeply. That is a hedged H about whole peoples. It also shows that Nietzsche’s generalizations about peoples are not always to Europe’s advantage.

§45 imagines Epicurus’ happiness: an eye gazing at the calm surface of the sea. “Such happiness could only have been devised by a chronic sufferer.” Keep this for Book V’s “Why we Seem to be Epicureans” (§375) and the later preface’s praise of surfaces.

What laws betray

§43 argues that penal laws do not show what a people is, but “what appears to them foreign.” Its examples are anecdotes. Among the Wahabites, the only two mortal sins are having another God and smoking. Among the Romans, a woman could sin mortally only by adultery or by drinking wine, and old Cato claimed that kinsmen’s kisses were a check on wine. Nietzsche explains the Roman fear partly by the claim that women drinking wine “sometimes unlearn altogether the art of saying No.” He then gives his main reason: the Romans feared the “Dionysian” spirit of the south as something foreign. §43, what the laws betray

Mark the anecdotes H. They are reported without sources, and the section’s thesis depends on them. The remark about women and wine is a sexual generalization, made in passing. §44 adds that the believed motive matters more to human happiness than the real one: “the belief in this or that motive.” Compare station 3’s §5 and station 4’s §13, which explained other people’s motives with confidence.

The remedy for distress

§48 is the longest section of the station and one of its most troubling. People and ages differ, Nietzsche writes, by their “knowledge of distress.” We moderns are inexperienced in pain compared with “the men of the age of fear,” who had to be violent to survive, trained themselves to endure torture, and “saw the most frightful things of this kind happen to others” with feeling only for their own security. Because pain is now rare, “people now hate pain far more than earlier man did.” §48, knowledge of distress

Pessimistic philosophies, Nietzsche claims, are “not at all the sign of great and dreadful miseries.” They appear when life has become refined enough that small pains seem unbearable. There might be a remedy for this “distress of the present,” but it “perhaps” sounds too cruel. The section’s last words give it anyway: “the remedy for ‘the distress’ is distress.” §48, the remedy

Mark the history of the “age of fear” H and the account of pessimism P. Put the ? where Nietzsche hedges: on the section’s tentative lead-in (“Perhaps there is nothing by which men and periods are so much separated”) and on his guess that the remedy “perhaps” sounds too cruel. The final statement, that distress is the remedy, is not hedged; mark it V. The German is equally flat: Das Recept gegen “die Noth” lautet: Noth. State the claim plainly: it prescribes more experience of distress as a cure for modern oversensitivity. It does not say whose distress, or at whose hands. That is exactly what a reader should ask. Station 3 read §12, which proposed that greater capacity for joy and for pain might go together; §48 is harder. Book IV (§338) will warn against the pity that hurries to relieve all suffering.

§56, which ends Book I, looks at the same theme from the other side. Millions of bored young Europeans want something to suffer “in order to derive from their suffering a worthy motive for acting.” Hence the politicians’ cries and the readiness to believe in “false, trumped-up, exaggerated ‘states of distress.’” If these “distress-seekers” had the power to do something from within, “they would also understand how to create a distress of their own.” §56, the desire for suffering

Then Book I ends: “Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.” The distress-seekers paint others’ misfortune on the wall. The speaker paints his own happiness, and apologizes. It is a small joke at the end of a hard section, and it answers §1’s demand that the thinker laugh at himself.

“Let us put it to the test!”

§51, “Sense for Truth,” is three sentences long and sets a limit. “Commend me to all scepticism where I am permitted to answer: ‘Let us put it to the test!’” Things that cannot be tested do not interest the speaker: that is “the limit of my ‘sense for truth’: for bravery has there lost its right.” Station 6 left open what place argument has if opinions follow taste. §51 offers one answer: testing. §51, sense for truth

§50 names what tests often cannot overcome. Even the strongest person fears the cold glance of those among whom he was raised. “Isolation!” is the argument that “demolishes even the best arguments.” “It is thus that the gregarious instinct speaks in us.” Book III takes this up as herd instinct (§116, station 13).

The dreamer who must dream on

§54 is the second assignment of Reading 2, which reads it closely. On this route, read it as Book I’s answer to §1. The speaker finds “the old humanity and animality” still thinking and loving in him. He wakes within the dream only to learn “that I must dream on in order not to perish.” Appearance is not a mask over an unknown essence; it is “the operating and living thing itself.” The thinker is one dancer among the dreamers, “a means of prolonging further the terrestrial dance.” §54, the thinker’s dance

At station 2, §1 said the teachers of purpose serve the species while believing they serve something higher. §54 places the thinker inside the same dream, serving its continuation. The consistency of all knowledge is “perhaps” the best means of keeping the dream going.

The advocate of the rule

§55 asks what makes a person noble. It is not sacrifice, not following one’s passions, not unselfishness. It is a passion that is “a peculiarity, without his knowing that it is so”: the use of “a rare and singular measuring-rod,” “a divining of values for which scales have not yet been invented.” So far this repeats §3’s portrait of the noble nature. §55, noble measures

Then it turns. By this standard, everything ordinary and “most preservative of the species” has been judged unreasonable and slandered in favour of exceptions. “To become the advocate of the rule—that may perhaps be the ultimate form and refinement in which nobility of character will reveal itself on earth.” §55, the advocate of the rule

Put this beside §3, which ended with “the eternal unrighteousness of noble natures” toward average people. §55 proposes a remedy from within nobility itself: the most refined nobility would defend the ordinary it has despised. Mark it V and ?. It is hedged with “perhaps,” and it does not abolish the rank of the noble, who remains the one doing the advocating.

A difficulty

Whose distress is the remedy?

§48 prescribes distress as the remedy for modern oversensitivity, after describing an “age of fear” in which people watched others suffer with feeling only for themselves. §56 criticizes young Europeans who need others’ misfortune and praises those who could “create a distress of their own.” §55 imagines a nobility that would defend the ordinary.

These can be read together in more than one way.

Decide which the text best supports, naming the sentence that tips it, and do not settle it by quoting only §56’s joke.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

According to §43, what do a people’s penal laws reveal?

Not what the people is, but “what appears to them foreign.” The severest punishments fall on acts that match the customs of neighbouring peoples. The examples are unsourced anecdotes about the Wahabites and the Romans.

What does §48 say pessimistic philosophies are a sign of?

Not of great miseries, but of refinement: they appear when life has become so alleviated that small pains seem unbearable. The section ends by offering distress itself as the remedy.

What limit does §51 set on the “sense for truth”?

Testability. The speaker welcomes any scepticism that allows the answer “Let us put it to the test!” and loses interest in questions that cannot be tested, because, as the speaker puts it, “bravery has there lost its right.”

How does §55 revise §3?

§3 described noble natures as unjust toward average people, because they take their singular standard for a universal one. §55 keeps the portrait of nobility as a rare measure, then suggests that the highest nobility might be to become “the advocate of the rule”: to defend the ordinary it has slandered.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

What does Book I finally say about suffering?

A successful response states §48’s remedy plainly, distinguishes self-chosen distress from suffering imposed on others, and notices which claims are hedged.

Continue

End of Book I. The route’s optional checkpoint for §54, Reading 2, comes after station 12, once you have also read §107. Reading 2’s own Next link leads to Reading 3, not back to this route.

Continue to station 8: Artists, Realists, and Women Seen from a Distance →

Read next: Book II, §§57–75. Its question: where does artistic seeing become a claim about women?

Previous station: station 6, §§24–40. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised .

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