The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza"): Complete Works, Volume Ten — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza"): Complete Works, Volume Ten
Nietzsche · en
_Something for the Laborious.--_He who at present wants to make moral
questions a subject of study has an immense field of labour before him.
All kinds of passions must be thought about singly, and followed singly
throughout periods, peoples, great and insignificant individuals;
all their rationality, all their valuations and elucidations of
things, ought to come to light! Hitherto all that has given colour
to existence has lacked a history: where would one find a history of
love, of avance, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even
a comparative history of law, as also of punishment, has hitherto
been completely lacking. Have the different divisions of the day, the
consequences of a regular appointment of the times for labour, feast,
and repose, ever been made the object of investigation? Do we know the
moral effects of the alimentary substances? Is there a philosophy of
nutrition? (The ever-recurring outcry for and against vegetarianism
proves that as yet there is no such philosophy!) Have the experiences
with regard to communal living, for example, in monasteries, been
collected? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been set
forth? The customs of the learned, of trades-people, of artists, and
of mechanics--have they already found their thinkers? There is so much
to think of thereon! All that up till now has been considered as the
"conditions of existence," of human beings, and all reason, passion
and superstition in this consideration--have they been investigated to
the end? The observation alone of the different degrees of development
which the human impulses have attained, and could yet attain, according
to the different moral climates, would furnish too much work for the
most laborious; whole generations, and regular co-operating generations
of the learned, would be needed in order to exhaust the points of view
and the material here furnished. The same is true of the determining
of the reasons for the differences of the moral climates ("_on what
account_ does this sun of a fundamental moral judgment and standard of
highest value shine here--and that sun there?"). And there is again
a new labour which points out the erroneousness of all these reasons,
and determines the entire essence of the moral judgments hitherto made.
Supposing all these labours to be accomplished, the most critical of
all questions would then come into the foreground: whether science is
in a position to _furnish_ goals for human action, after it has proved
that it can take them away and annihilate them--and then would be the
time for a process of experimenting, in which every kind of heroism
could satisfy itself, an experimenting for centuries, which would
put into the shade all the great labours and sacrifices of previous
history. Science has not hitherto built its Cyclopic structures; for
that also the time will come.
8.