notes from underground

On the aim of Science.— What? The aim of science should be to give men as much please and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”? And that is how things may well be. At least the Stoics believed that this was how things were, and they were consistent when they also desired as little pleasure as possible, in order to get as little displeasure as possible out of life. (When they kept saying “The virtuous man is the happiest man,” this was both the school’s eye-catching sign for the great mass and a casuistic subtly for the subtle.)

To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief—and in the last analysis socialists and politicians of all parties has no right to promise their people more than that—or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet. If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy. Actually, science can promote either goal. So far it may still be better known for its power of depriving man of his joys and making him colder, more like a statue, more stoic. But it may yet be found to be the great dispenser of pain. And then its counterforce might be found at the same time: its immense capacity for making galaxies of joy flare up.