In tone and content, the volume deserves its title. After having struggled through a period of some years of intellectual crisis, its author has attained a new philosophical and spiritual health, of the sort he describes at the fifth book's end (382). He has become profoundly and joyfully affirmative of life and the world and has discovered that “all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again” (343). He is in love with knowledge and with life and the world, and with the humanity emerging out of them; for, having earlier become hard and disillusioned by them, he has now become newly appreciative of them. Thus he cheerfully and confidently sets out to explore them as they stand revealed in the “new dawn” that has broken in the aftermath of “the news that ‘the old god is dead’.” (343)

Schacht, I want to suggest in this chapter, has been duped. In spite of its title, The Gay Science, it seems to me, is a work in which the only kind of gaiety its author achieves is a kind of manic frivolity which is really no more than a symptom of desperation and despair.