"Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent"
About this Quote
Goethe lands a quiet reversal: creation is supposed to certify mastery, yet it ends by rewriting the creator. The line’s power comes from its sly grammar. “Upon” and “at last” do heavy lifting, turning dependence into an outcome we backed into, not a choice we proudly made. It’s a sentence shaped like a trapdoor: you start with “the creatures we have made” - a phrase that flatters human ingenuity - and you end with the humiliating realization that the maker is now held up by the made.
As a writer steeped in the early modern shock of systems - bureaucracies, markets, mechanization, even the emerging prestige of scientific method - Goethe is teasing out a modern condition before it had a name. The Enlightenment promised autonomy through reason and invention; Goethe’s subtext is that invention breeds new necessities. Tools don’t remain tools. Institutions acquire appetites. Technologies become infrastructures, and infrastructures become the floor you can’t step off without falling.
“Creatures” is the key word: it suggests not just products but quasi-living agents, things with momentum. That puts the line in the shadow of Goethe’s own Faustian preoccupations: the desire to remake the world without fully pricing in the downstream costs. It reads, now, like an uncannily early diagnosis of our relationship to finance, platforms, and energy - systems we built to extend our power, then organized our lives around until they started dictating terms. The sting is moral as much as practical: dependence means accountability, and Goethe is implying we don’t get to play innocent about what we’ve set loose.
As a writer steeped in the early modern shock of systems - bureaucracies, markets, mechanization, even the emerging prestige of scientific method - Goethe is teasing out a modern condition before it had a name. The Enlightenment promised autonomy through reason and invention; Goethe’s subtext is that invention breeds new necessities. Tools don’t remain tools. Institutions acquire appetites. Technologies become infrastructures, and infrastructures become the floor you can’t step off without falling.
“Creatures” is the key word: it suggests not just products but quasi-living agents, things with momentum. That puts the line in the shadow of Goethe’s own Faustian preoccupations: the desire to remake the world without fully pricing in the downstream costs. It reads, now, like an uncannily early diagnosis of our relationship to finance, platforms, and energy - systems we built to extend our power, then organized our lives around until they started dictating terms. The sting is moral as much as practical: dependence means accountability, and Goethe is implying we don’t get to play innocent about what we’ve set loose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|
More Quotes by Johann
Add to List
