The Gay Science

"It cannot be denied that in the long run laughter and reason and nature have mastered every single one of these great teachers of an aim. In the end, the brief tragedy always turned back into the eternal comedy of existence, and the ‘waves of uncountable laughter,’ to use Aeschylus’ expression, must finally crash over even the greatest of these tragedians. But despite all this corrective laughing, human nature has nevertheless been changed, on the whole, by this constant reappearance of these teachers of aim of existence... The most careful friend of humanity will add, ‘Not only laughter and gay wisdom, but also the tragic with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of preserving the species!’"

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Gay Science.” Existentialism: Basic Writings, edited by Charles B. Guignon and Derk Pereboom, Second ed., Hackett, 2001, pp. 131. 

This quote is a small part of the longer work by Friedrich Nietzsche entitled The Gay Science that I’m reading for my Existential Philosophy class. While I honestly could not tell you what gay science is, this paragraph stuck out to me since it talks about laughter that preserves the human species. The “great teachers of an aim” are the people in society, namely philosophers and religious leaders, who try to give meaning to existence. They tell people why living is great and precisely how one should live and think. It gives the weak and feeble-minded human species a way to go about life so that they themselves don’t have to come up with a way or a reason. Nietzsche is, in large part, criticizing religion throughout his entire work as something that society came up with to combat their feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, and that the only purpose it served at one point in time was to structure society. He claims numerous times that God is dead, which is why “laughter and reason and nature have mastered every single one of these great teachers of an aim.”

While I disagree with Nietzsche on most of his arguments, I do like the idea that one can laugh at their own existence. I like that along with the inevitable tragedy of living, laughter can and does combat the negative to make life a little more worth living. One doesn’t need God or high priests to tell them why life is meaningful, because all the emotions that come along with life like sadness, anger, frustration, happiness, and joy give it meaning. We have to feel the tears running down our cheeks in order to enjoy the “corrective laughing,” and I think that’s beautiful. I also think it’s beautiful that this is what preserves the human species. All of these emotions are what has made humans outlast the many species that came before us, and will probably help us live for many many years to come.