Form and Technology

Abstract

If we judge the significance of the individual areas of human culture primarily by their actual effectiveness, if we determine the value of these areas according to the impact of their direct accomplishments, there can hardly be any doubt that technology claims the first place in the construction of our contemporary culture. Likewise, no matter whether we reproach or praise, exalt or damn this ‘primacy of technology’, its pure actuality seems to be beyond question. All the formative energy in contemporary culture is increasingly concentrated on this one point. Even the strongest counter-forces to technology, even those intellectual forces that are the most distant from technology in their content and meaning, seem able to actualize themselves only insofar as they become conjoined with technology and, through this alliance, become imperceptibly subjected to it. Today many consider this subjugation the ultimate goal of modern culture and its inevitable fate. Yet even if we think it impossible to constrain or stop this course of things, a final question remains. It belongs to the essence and determination of mind² not to tolerate any external determination. Even where it entrusts itself to a foreign power and sees its progress determined by it, the mind must at least attempt to penetrate the core and meaning of this determination. Thereby mind reconciles itself with its fate and becomes free. Even if the mind is not able to repel and conquer the power to which it is subjected, it nevertheless demands to know this power and to see it for what it is. If this demand is made in earnest, it does not possess a purely ‘ideal’ significance and is not limited to the realm of ‘pure thought’. From the clarity and certainty of seeing follows a new strength, a power or efficacy, a strength with which mind strikes back against every external determination, against the mere fatality of matter and the effects of things. Insofar as mind considers the powers that seem to determine it externally, this consideration already contains a characteristic turning back and turning inward. Instead of grasping outwardly at the world of things, it now turns back onto itself. Instead of exploring the depths of effects, it returns to itself and, by means of this concentration, achieves a new strength and depth.

First published in Kunst und Technik, ed. Leo Kestenberg (Berlin: Wegweiser, 1930), 15–61. Our translation is based both on the essay’s first publication in Kunst und Technik and the later publication in Ernst Cassirer’s Gesammelte Werke, ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998–2009) (hereafter cited as ECW), vol. 17 Aufsätze und kleine Schriften (1927–1931), ed. Tobias Berben (2004), 139–83. We have translated the footnotes as they appear in the first edition, as well as some helpful footnotes from the second edition (shown in square brackets). We have followed the typography of the latter edition. Further comments added by us are marked as translators’ note.