"Science knows only one commandment - contribute to science"
About this Quote
Brecht compresses a whole critique of modern knowledge into the stark line: science recognizes only a single duty, to add to science. The commandment sounds pure and ascetic, yet it is edged with irony. By choosing the language of commandments, he treats scientific progress as a kind of secular religion whose highest good is its own expansion. The moral horizon shrinks to a feedback loop: discovery justifies more discovery, technique serves technique, the lab becomes its own temple.
That self-referential ethic sits at the center of Brechts Life of Galileo, a play that alternately celebrates critical inquiry and interrogates its consequences. Written on the eve of the Second World War and revised after Hiroshima, the drama traces how knowledge moves through courts, churches, and markets. Galileo recants under pressure, then continues in secret; his triumphs and compromises mirror the broader question of whether science can remain innocent when power and profit stand ready to weaponize it. Within that world, the injunction to contribute to science can describe a real, admirable discipline of attention and rigor, but it also exposes a blindness: progress detached from purpose.
Brecht repeatedly pits two aims against each other. One is the internal imperative of research communities to push the frontier, to count any addition to the archive as a good. The other is the humanist claim, voiced at key moments in the play, that knowledge ought to ease the burdens of life. The first promises momentum; the second demands responsibility. When the only commandment is to enlarge the storehouse of facts, moral questions arrive late, if at all, and usually in the form of fallout.
That tension has not faded. The 20th century made the stakes explicit with the bomb; the 21st does so with data and biology. Brecht’s line presses a simple test: is the devotion to discovery matched by a commitment to how discoveries are used, by whom, and for whom?
That self-referential ethic sits at the center of Brechts Life of Galileo, a play that alternately celebrates critical inquiry and interrogates its consequences. Written on the eve of the Second World War and revised after Hiroshima, the drama traces how knowledge moves through courts, churches, and markets. Galileo recants under pressure, then continues in secret; his triumphs and compromises mirror the broader question of whether science can remain innocent when power and profit stand ready to weaponize it. Within that world, the injunction to contribute to science can describe a real, admirable discipline of attention and rigor, but it also exposes a blindness: progress detached from purpose.
Brecht repeatedly pits two aims against each other. One is the internal imperative of research communities to push the frontier, to count any addition to the archive as a good. The other is the humanist claim, voiced at key moments in the play, that knowledge ought to ease the burdens of life. The first promises momentum; the second demands responsibility. When the only commandment is to enlarge the storehouse of facts, moral questions arrive late, if at all, and usually in the form of fallout.
That tension has not faded. The 20th century made the stakes explicit with the bomb; the 21st does so with data and biology. Brecht’s line presses a simple test: is the devotion to discovery matched by a commitment to how discoveries are used, by whom, and for whom?
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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