Grey Days for a Gay Science

Abstract

Chapter 14 tracks a divine and mythic parentage that relates the Red Sea to la vie de bohème. It shows the living and gay science as pitted against a deathly dismal science. Greying thoughts are shown as spreading in cities, streets, gardens, and homes where, most of all at home, the thinker rarely feels at home. The thinker, with many names, soon lands with Nietzsche, who, as I show, deliberately borrowed thoughts as untimely for his own times. Nietzsche’s contribution to a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit is presented, after which the discussion turns to the role of birds and of ladders in the pursuit of truth and error. This pursuit, always bearing on philosophical method, prepares for the subsequent critique of monochromatic formalism.