Abstract
What is thinking? An ambitious question, to be sure. Yet this precise question was tackled by Ernst Cassirer in a highly suggestive and thought-provoking way in his essay ‘Form and Technology’ from 1930. This essay, delivered as a supplement to his three-volume magnum opus on the philosophy of symbolic forms (1923–29), sets out to determine the ‘being’ of technology. Cassirer poses the question concerning technology on the grounds that the philosophical depth and significance of this question has not been sufficiently acknowledged in the existing literature on the topic. So what, then, has technology to do with thinking? Viewed through the optics of the essay under discussion: everything.
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Notes
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, trans. John Michael Krois, eds John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996 ).
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1: Language, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 78, original emphasis.
Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 78. See also Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957 ), 315.
The ‘Kant’ referred to is the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason (first published in German in 1781/87), and the ‘Husserl’ referred to is the Husserl who has just made a ‘transcendental turn’ in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Book 1: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (first published in German in 1913). This interpretation of Kant and Husserl is disputed. In the reception of Husserl, especially, there is much discussion concerning the status of the ‘noemata’: Husserl distinguished between two correlated aspects of intentionality, ‘noesis’ which refers to the very process of cogitation and ‘noema’ which refers to that which this process is about (what is cogitated). The discussion centres on whether ‘noema’ should be understood as an ideal meaning (a conceptual or propositional representation) or whether it should be understood as the intended object itself as appearing. See Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), chapter 2.
Ernst Cassirer, ‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’, Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York 1 (1945), 99–120, 114.
See Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy ( Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004 ), 38.
Christiane Schmitz-Rigal, ‘Ernst Cassirer: Open Constitution by Functional A Priori and Symbolical Structuring’, in Michel Bitbol, Pierre Kerszberg and Jean Petitot (eds), Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics ( Dordrecht: Springer, 2009 ).
See the English translation of the Davos encounter record, Carl H. Hamburg, ‘A Cassirer-Heidegger Seminar’, Philosophy and Phenomenology Research 2 (1964), 208–22, 214.
Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (first published 1794). See especially letters 14, 15 and 21.
Carl Mitcham, Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 ).
Evan Selinger, ‘Introduction’, in Evan Selinger (ed.), Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006 ), 9;
Don Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science ( Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998 ).
Johan Schot and Arie Rip, ‘The Past and Future of Constructive Technology Assessment’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 54, (1996), 263.
Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 194–5 and 200–1. See also Clark’s chapter on language.
Abner Shimony, Search for a Naturalistic World View, vol. 1: Scientific Method and Epistemology ( Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ), 24.
Ihde mentions Hubert Dreyfus, Patrick Heelan, Robert Ackermann and Ian Hacking. Don Ihde, Instrumental Realism: The Interface between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), xii.
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Hoel, A.S. (2012). Technics of Thinking. In: Hoel, A.S., Folkvord, I. (eds) Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007773_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007773_4
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