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Nietzsche's (1882/1974; 1887/1974b) The Gay Science comprises a series of aphorisms, poems, riddles, jokes, and songs in an attempt to overcome the dreary and systematic nature of traditional German philosophy. His central doctrine is usually labeled perspectivism, sometimes called perspectivalism. It holds that all our concepts, language, and culture represent perspectives that we impose on our experience to create a “world.” This world picture currently takes the form of the materialism or scientific realism that dominates our age; Nietzsche claims this to be a “prejudice,” just as a prejudice, he says, also underlies our internal conviction of having a real essential self.
Nietzsche's title, The Gay Science, derives from the Provençal gai saber, referring to the poetic art of the medieval troubadours that was so admired by Ezra Pound and was characterized by exuberance, lightness, and spirit. Cooper (1983) explained Nietzsche's point:
The pursuit of truth should, in various regards, emulate this gaya scienza, whether at the global level of systematic philosophizing, or at the level of particular detailed enquiries. The spinning of new metaphors, the refusal to be opposed by the weight of tradition and orthodoxy: these are some of the ways truth should be pursued and educators should encourage. (p. 88)
Nietzsche introduced his epistemological orientation of perspectivism in The Gay Science. Here he already described science as a “prejudice” (section 373). By reducing everything to what can be measured, the natural scientist, wrote Nietzsche, divests existence of its “rich ambiguity” (p. 335). This permits “counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more” (p. 335). According to Nietzsche, this “scientific” interpretation of the world might be one of the most stupid