Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632
In spite of the usefulness we think we derive from them, the sciences cannot make us happy, because man is a speaking being, who needs to express in words joy and pain, pleasure and affliction, while science, in the last analysis, aims at a mute being, which it is possible to know in number and measure, like all the objects of the world. The natural languages that men speak are, at the limit, an obstacle to knowledge and, as such, must be formalised and corrected, eliminating as “poetic” those redundancies to which, instead, we mainly pay attention when expressing our desires and thoughts, our affections as well as our aversions.
Precisely because it is addressed to a dumb man, science can never produce an ethic. That illustrious scientists have unscrupulously carried out experiments on the bodies of deportees in the Lager or of convicts in American prisons in the interests of science should not, in this sense, surprise us. Science is in fact based on the possibility of separating at all levels the biological life of a living being from its relational life, the mute vegetative life that man has in common with plants from his spiritual existence as a speaking being. It is good to remember this, today when men and women seem to have abandoned everything they believed in, to entrust to science an expectation of happiness that can only be disappointed and betrayed. As recent years have shown beyond any doubt, men who look at their own lives with the eyes of their doctor are therefore ready to renounce their most elementary political liberties and to submit without limits to the powers that rule them. Happiness can never be separated from the simple and trite words we exchange, from the shout and laughter of joy or from the shock that makes us weep, we do not know whether from grief or from delight. Let us leave the scientists in the silence and solitude of numbers, let us watch lucidly and attentively so that they do not invade the realm of ethics and politics, which is the only one that can really satisfy us.
Giorgio Agamben: Science and Happiness
In spite of the usefulness we think we derive from them, the sciences cannot make us happy, because man is a speaking being, who needs to express in words joy and pain, pleasure and affliction, while science, in the last analysis, aims at a mute being, which it is possible to know in number and measure, like all the objects of the world. The natural languages that men speak are, at the limit, an obstacle to knowledge and, as such, must be formalised and corrected, eliminating as “poetic” those redundancies to which, instead, we mainly pay attention when expressing our desires and thoughts, our affections as well as our aversions.
Precisely because it is addressed to a dumb man, science can never produce an ethic. That illustrious scientists have unscrupulously carried out experiments on the bodies of deportees in the Lager or of convicts in American prisons in the interests of science should not, in this sense, surprise us. Science is in fact based on the possibility of separating at all levels the biological life of a living being from its relational life, the mute vegetative life that man has in common with plants from his spiritual existence as a speaking being. It is good to remember this, today when men and women seem to have abandoned everything they believed in, to entrust to science an expectation of happiness that can only be disappointed and betrayed. As recent years have shown beyond any doubt, men who look at their own lives with the eyes of their doctor are therefore ready to renounce their most elementary political liberties and to submit without limits to the powers that rule them. Happiness can never be separated from the simple and trite words we exchange, from the shout and laughter of joy or from the shock that makes us weep, we do not know whether from grief or from delight. Let us leave the scientists in the silence and solitude of numbers, let us watch lucidly and attentively so that they do not invade the realm of ethics and politics, which is the only one that can really satisfy us.
Source: Quodlibet ( 08/09/2024)