Wisser: Again and again you call two things into question and render them questionable: the claim to domination advanced by science and an understanding of technology that sees in it nothing but a useful means for arriving more quickly at whatever goal one desires. Precisely in our age, in which most people expect everything from science, and in which worldwide—even world-remote—television broadcasts demonstrate to them that through technology the human being achieves whatever he sets out to achieve, your reflections on science and on the essence of technology cause many headaches. What do you mean, first of all, when you assert: science does not think?
Heidegger: To begin with the headaches: I find that entirely healthy! There is far too little genuine perplexity in the world today, and a great deal of thoughtlessness, which indeed belongs together with the forgetfulness of Being.
And this sentence—“science does not think”—which caused considerable uproar when I uttered it in a Freiburg lecture, means: Science does not move within the dimension of philosophy. Yet without knowing it, it remains dependent upon this dimension.
For example: physics moves within space, time, and motion. What motion is, what space is, what time is—the sciences as sciences cannot decide. Science therefore does not think; it cannot think in this sense with its own methods.
For example, I cannot say by means of physical methods what physics is. What physics is, I can only think through in the mode of philosophical questioning. The sentence “science does not think” is not a reproach; it is merely a statement concerning the inner structure of science: it belongs to the essence of science that it remains dependent upon what it itself cannot ground. That, on the one hand, it is dependent upon what philosophy thinks, while, on the other hand, it itself forgets and fails to heed that which is to be thought.