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start with the theoretical or cognitive function, but with language and the technical function. The reasons for this is that man is not first of all somebody who looks at reality, who contemplates reality, and then makes signs out of it, but man is first of all a being who uses tools for ends. The technical function is, so to speak, metaphysically older than the theoretical or cognitive function. Therefore, the existentialist philosopher Heidegger ^chas rightly emphasized that man meets reality first in terms of tools, of things for something, but not as objects of contemplation.¹

2.5 Outline - Cognitive function

But of course, the moment in which you make tools, you must have the participation of the material which you deal with, and of the ends which you want to reach. And so, the cognitive element develops. Here we come to the cognitive function (or, in a more larger sense, participative function) of human culture. In order to use reality, we must discover the behavior of reality. So the cognitive function is connected with the technical, and both together are always at work, as we know it from our own experience. They are partly dependent and partly independent of each other. The greatest advances in technical power have been made by pure cognition, by pure theory, and it is a right complaint of many educators in this country, in the technical sciences, that one goes much too quickly to the applied science before developing, independently, without asking the question, “For what?,” pure scientific knowledge. This is another function which we must keep clear, in spite of the pragmatic interdependence with techniques. This function is based on the eros, the love, towards knowing, even if it is not connected with practical purposes. So in spite of my emphasis on techniques, I must also emphasize the comparative independence of the will-to-knowledge from any special application of this knowledge. And those of you who in some way or other have to do with technical things, in any realm—not only physical techniques but also psychological and biological—don't forget what I said today, namely that the more science works first of all independently, driven by pure eros, in the Platonic^h sense—by the pure love of knowledge—the more it can be applied later on to technical purposes. But if from the very beginning ... it asks “How can that be used?"—which means, in a deteriorized form, “How can the factory make money out of it?"—then never a great discovery will happen.

There are realms of cognition which are completely independent of technical