The Goal of Science

Friedrich Nietzsche * Track #12 On The Gay Science

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Friedrich Nietzsche

1882

The Goal of Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Goal of Science Annotated

What? The ultimate goal of science is to create the most pleasure possible to man, and the least possible pain? But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"? And it is so, perhaps! The Stoics at least believed it was so, and they were consistent when they wished to have the least possible pleasure, in order to have the least possible pain from life. (When one uses the expression: The virtuous man is the happiest," it is as much the sign-board of the school for the masses, as a casuistic subtlety for the subtle.) At present also you have still the choice: either the least possible pain, in short painlessness and after all, socialists and politicians of all pareies could not honourably promise more to their people, or the greatest possible amount of pain, as the price of the growth of a fullness of refined delights and enjoyments rarely tasted hitherto! If you decide for the former, if you therefore want to depress and minimise man’s capacity for pain, well, you must also depress and minimise his capacity for enjoyment. In fact, one can further the one as well as the other goal by science! Perhaps science is as yet best known by its capacity for depriving man of enjoyment, and making him colder, more statuesque, and more Stoical. But it might also turn out to be the great dispenser of pain! And then, perhaps, its counteracting force might at the same time be discovered : its immense capacity for making new galaxies of Joy!

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