The poesy of the Occident and European literature are two radically different essential forces in our history. Our ideas of the nature and significance of literature are probably still totally inadequate.
However, through literature, and in literature as their medium, poesy and thought and science are assimilated to one another. If thinking is set over against science, it looks by scientific standards as if it were miscarried poesy. If, on the other hand, thinking knowingly avoids the vicinity of poesy, it readily appears as the super-science that would be more scientific than all the sciences put together.
But precisely because thinking does not make poetry, but is a primal telling and speaking of language, it must stay close to poesy. And since science does not think, thinking must in its present situation give to the sciences that searching attention which they are incapable of giving to themselves.
In saying this, we have mentioned only the lesser relatedness of thought to the sciences. The essential relatedness is determined rather by a basic trait of the modern era of which the literature we have referred to also forms a part. It might be briefly described as follows: that which is, appears today predominantly in that object-materiality which is established and maintained in power by the scientific objectification of all fields and areas. This materiality does not stem from a separate and peculiar power-bid on the part of the sciences, but from a fact in the nature of things that we moderns still do not want to see. Three propositions will serve to indicate it.
1. Modern science is grounded in the nature of technology.
2. The nature of technology is itself nothing technological.
3. The nature of technology is not a merely human fabrication which, given an appropriate moral constitution,