Science and happiness
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 8, 2024
In spite of the usefulness we believe we derive from it, 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 ultimately aims at a mute being that can be known numero et mensura (by number and measure), like all the objects in the world. The natural languages that men speak are, if anything, an obstacle to knowledge and, as such, must be formalised and corrected, eliminating as “poetic” those redundancies about which, instead, we care most when we express our desires and our thoughts, our affections as well as our aversions.
Just because it addresses a mute man, science can never produce an ethic. The fact that illustrious scientists performed without any scruples in the interests of science experiments on the bodies of deportees to Lagers or condemned men in American prisons should not, in this sense, surprise us. Science is indeed founded upon 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 well to remember it, now that men seem to have put aside 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 consequently willing to give up their most elementary political liberties and to subject themselves without limits to the powers that govern them. Happiness can never be separated from the simple, trite words we exchange, from the scream and laughter of joy, nor from the emotion that makes us cry, who knows whether of pain and delight. Let us leave scientists to the silence and solitude of numbers, let us lucidly watch that they do not invade the sphere of ethics and politics, which is the only one that can truly fulfil us.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 8, 2024
In spite of the usefulness we believe we derive from it, 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 ultimately aims at a mute being that can be known numero et mensura (by number and measure), like all the objects in the world. The natural languages that men speak are, if anything, an obstacle to knowledge and, as such, must be formalised and corrected, eliminating as “poetic” those redundancies about which, instead, we care most when we express our desires and our thoughts, our affections as well as our aversions.
Just because it addresses a mute man, science can never produce an ethic. The fact that illustrious scientists performed without any scruples in the interests of science experiments on the bodies of deportees to Lagers or condemned men in American prisons should not, in this sense, surprise us. Science is indeed founded upon 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 well to remember it, now that men seem to have put aside 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 consequently willing to give up their most elementary political liberties and to subject themselves without limits to the powers that govern them. Happiness can never be separated from the simple, trite words we exchange, from the scream and laughter of joy, nor from the emotion that makes us cry, who knows whether of pain and delight. Let us leave scientists to the silence and solitude of numbers, let us lucidly watch that they do not invade the sphere of ethics and politics, which is the only one that can truly fulfil us.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Jan Toorop, The Desire and the Satisfaction, 1893. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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