I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star….alas! The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars. alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself. behold! i shall show you the Last Man. ‘what is love? what is creation? what is longing? what is a star?’ thus asks the Last Man and blinks….’we have discovered Happiness,’ say the Last Men and blink.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Thus a naive optimism had led people to glorify science, or rather the techniques of mastering the problems of life based on science, as the road to happiness. but after Nietzsche’s annihilating criticism of those “last men” “who have discovered happiness,” i can probably ignore this completely. after all, who believes it–apart from some overgrown children in their professorial chairs or editorial offices?
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation
Release from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental premise of life in communion with the divine.
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation
What did science mean to these people on the threshold of modernity? for artistic experimenters like Leonardo and musical innovators of the sixteenth century, it meant the path to true art, and for them this meant the path to true nature.
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation
A work of art that truly achieves ‘fulfillment’ will never be surpassed; it will never grow old. the individual can assess its significance for himself personally in different ways. but no one will ever be able to say that a work that achieves genuine ‘fulfillment’ in an artistic sense has been ‘superseded’ by another work that likewise achieves ‘fulfillment.’
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation
In the absence of this strange intoxication that outsiders greet with a pitying smile, without this passion, this conviction that ‘millennia had to pass before you were born, and millennia more must wait in silence’ to see if your conjecture will be confirmed–without this you do not possess this vocation for science and should turn your hand to something else. For nothing has any value for a human being as a human being unless he can pursue it with passion.
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation
