The Joyful Wisdom · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
12.
_The Goal of Science._—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,"[7] must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?(ref. same footnote) 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 ye have still the choice: either the _least possible pain_, in short painlessness—and after all, socialists and politicians of all parties 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 ye decide for the former, if ye therefore want to depress and minimise man's capacity for pain, well, ye 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 pain-bringer_!—And then, perhaps, its counteracting force would be discovered simultaneously, its immense capacity for making new sidereal worlds of enjoyment beam forth!
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.