Recursivity and Contingency 1786600544, 9781786600547

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Recursivity and Contingency

Media Philosophy Series Editors: Eleni Ikoniadou, Senior Tutor (Research) in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art; Scott Wilson, Professor of Cultural Theory at the London Graduate School and the School of Performance and Screen Studies, Kingston University.

The Media Philosophy series seeks to transform thinking about media by inciting a turn towards accounting for their autonomy and “eventness,” for machine agency, and for the new modalities of thought and experience that they enable. The series showcases the “transcontinental” work of established and emerging thinkers whose work engages with questions about the reshuffling of subjectivity, of temporality, of perceptions and of relations vis-à-vis computation, automation, and digitalization as the current twenty-first-century conditions of life and thought. The books in this series understand media as a vehicle for transformation, as affective, unpredictable, and non-linear, and move past its consistent misconception as pure matter-of-fact actuality. For Media Philosophy, it is not simply a question of bringing philosophy to bear on an area usually considered an object of sociological or historical concern, but of looking at how developments in media and technology pose profound questions for philosophy and conceptions of knowledge, being, intelligence, information, the body, aesthetics, war, death. At the same time, media and philosophy are not viewed as reducible to each other's internal concerns and constraints and thus it is never merely a matter of formulating a philosophy of the media; rather the series creates a space for the reciprocal contagion of ideas between the disciplines and the generation of new mutations from their transversals. With their affects cutting across creative processes, ethico-aesthetic experimentations and biotechnological assemblages, the unfolding media events of our age provide different points of intervention for thought, necessarily embedded as ever in the medium of its technical support, to continually re-invent itself and the world. “The new automatism is worthless in itself if it is not put to the service of a powerful, obscure, condensed will to art, aspiring to deploy itself through involuntary movements which none the less do not restrict it.” —Eleni Ikoniadou and Scott Wilson

Titles in the Series Software Theory, by Federica Frabetti Media after Kittler, edited by Eleni Ikoniadou and Scott Wilson Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media, by Wolfgang Ernst, translated by Anthony Enns The Changing Face of Alterity: Communication, Technology and Other Subjects, edited by David J. Gunkel, Ciro Marcondes Filho, and Dieter Mersch Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures, by Clemens Apprich, translated by Aileen Derieg Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics, by M. Beatrice Fazi Recursivity and Contingency, by Yuk Hui Sound Pressure: How Speaker Systems Influence, Manipulate and Torture, by Toby Heys (forthcoming) Media Arts in the XXI Century: Archaeologies, Theories, Preservation, by Valentino Catricalà, translated by Arabella Ciampi (forthcoming)

Recursivity and Contingency Yuk Hui

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2019 by Yuk Hui All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-052-3  PB 978-1-78660-053-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-052-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-053-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-054-7 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Julien

One can regard the history of the human species in the large as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an inwardly and, to this end, also an externally perfect state constitution, as the only condition in which it can fully develop all its predispositions in humanity. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim It might very well still take a considerable time to recognize that the “organism” and the “organic” present themselves as the mechanistic-technological “triumph” of modernity over the domain of growth, “nature.” Martin Heidegger, GA94 Ponderings XII–X

Contents

Acknowledgmentsxi Preface, by Howard Caygill

xiii

Introduction: A Psychedelic Becoming §1. Adventure of Reason §2. Invisible Nature, Visible Mind §3. Contingency and Finality §4. Beyond Mechanism and Vitalism §5. The Great Completion §6. The Conflict of Organs §7. After Ecology, before Solar Catastrophe §8. The Future Cosmologists

1 2 7 12 16 19 25 31 35

1 Nature and Recursivity 41 §9. Kant and the Model of System 42 §10. The Organic Condition of Philosophy 47 §11. Recursivity in Fichte’s Ich51 §12. Circularity in Soul and Nature 56 §13. Recursivity in Naturphilosophie63 §14. Organicist and Ecological Paradigm 68 §15. General Organism, Gaia, or Artificial Earth 78 2 Logic and Contingency 85 §16. Recursivity in the Phenomenology of Spirit86 §17. Organicist and Reflective Logic 90 §18. “Feebleness of the Notion in Nature” 94 ix

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§19. Death of Nature as Affirmation of Logic §20. General Recursivity and Turing Machine §21. Wiener’s Leibnizianism §22. Cybernetics of Cybernetics §23. Information of Dialectics §24. Incomputability and Algorithmic Contingency

97 106 115 124 130 140

3 Organized Inorganic 145 §25. From Organicism to Organology 146 §26. Form and Fire, or Life 150 §27. Descartes and the Mechanical Organs 153 §28. Kant as Philosopher of Technology 157 §29. Organology in Creative Evolution163 §30. Norms and Accidents 175 §31. The Uncanny Fire 181 4 Organizing Inorganic §32. Universal Cybernetics, General Allagmatic §33. Recursivity in Psychic and Collective Individuation §34. An Organology of Contingency §35. Nature or Art §36. Tertiary Protention and Preemption §37. Inorganic Organicity or Ecology §38. The Principle of Ground

185 187 193 200 207 210 215 220

5 The Inhuman That Remains §39. Postmodernity and Recursivity §40. Technosphere or Christogenesis §41. Inhuman contra System §42. Contingency after System, or Technodiversity §43. Sensibility and Passibility §44. Organicism, Organology, and Cosmotechnics

233 235 245 250 256 264 270

Bibliography279 Index297 About the Author 

319

Acknowledgments

Ever since I was a computer engineering student at the University of Hong Kong, the concept of recursion has appeared to me as something almost magical. With recursion in mind, a complex phenomenon or process can be reduced to several lines of code with a strange form of looping. Upon completing On the Existence of Digital Objects, I was convinced that the way to develop a philosophical inquiry into algorithms was to approach it in terms of the notion of recursivity. The current writing project began in 2013 and has undergone several transformations during the course of its development. My research on the concept of recursivity led me to undertake a reconstruction of its position in philosophy and the role of contingency in the recursive genesis. Through the concepts of recursivity and contingency, I have attempted to outline a historical trajectory of the concept of the organic since Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, covering the philosophy of nature, organicism, cybernetics, systems theory, organology, and ecology. At times this book may appear to be a historical-critical exposition of the subject, but I would not want to pretend that it is a work of history. It is first and foremost a study in the philosophy of technology. It aims to provide a critical analysis of Martin Heidegger’s assertion that cybernetics marks the historical culmination of metaphysics and the end of philosophy, and suggests ways of moving beyond the current technological paradigm toward what I call a multiple cosmotechnics. The current book is the third in a series reflecting on the philosophy of technology, a series that has followed a sequence from objects to cosmos to systems. It is also an attempt to address two major questions that xi

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Acknowledgments

I left unanswered in the previous two books: first, the Kantian category of relation that I promised to deal with in On the Existence of Digital Objects, and second, the notion of organicism that Joseph Needham developed in relation to his studies of Chinese thought of science and technology, which I touched upon but did not elaborate further in The Question Concerning Technology in China. In this respect, this book could have been titled Specters of Needham. I terminated this book during a difficult moment of life, when academic precarity and health issues had to become the quasi causes of its completion. I want to thank Howard Caygill, to whom I once promised a book on Kant, for the preface and encouragement; as well as friends and colleagues who have read and commented upon various drafts of chapters of this book, in particular Pieter Lemmens, Michäel Crevoisier, Brian Kuan Wood, Paul Willemarck, Charles Wolfe, Kirill Chepurin, Martijn Buijs, Louis Morelle, Harry Halpin, Armin Schneider, and Damian Veal, who decided to leave this world soon after he helped edit the first version of the current work and to whom this book is forever in debt. I also want to thank the series editors and the editorial team of Rowman & Littlefield International for having taken care of this book. Lastly I want to express my gratitude to the support of my family and friends over the past years, in particular Matthew Fuller, Bernard Stiegler, and Johnson Chang.



Yuk Hui Berlin, Summer 2018

Preface

Odysseus’s Oar Yet again Thou shalt a voyage make, and come to men That know no sea, nor ships, not oars that are Wings to a ship     [there] assume ashore Up to thy royal shoulder a ship oar, With which, when thou shalt meet one on the way That will in country admiration say, ‘What does thou with that wan upon thy neck?’ There fix that wan thy oar, and that shore deck With sacred rites to Neptune

(Odyssey, Book 11, Golding translation) Tiresias’s admonitory prophesy to Odysseus gives the lie to the engrained view that the Odyssey is a figure of perfect recursion, a return enriched in spite of the obstacles and contingencies posed by the enraged god of sea and earthquakes. It tells us that Odysseus after returning to Ithaca must depart again, that the circle is but a loop in an incomplete and perhaps uncompletable voyage. And the conditions of the redeparture are framed in terms of the oar, probably the most versatile technological object of the ancient world. The oar translated the energy of the oarsmen into motion, giving “wings to a ship” through xiii

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collective and sometimes forced labor, but it also served to steer and navigate the ship until the invention of the rudder in the thirteenth century. It was the technical object of the helmsman, or cubernetis, who combined physical skill with information and intelligence in cutting a path through the sea. Odysseus’s oar was the technical condition for the capture of energy and for the exercise of the complex skill that is navigation or the governing of the vessel. Tiresias’s words also trouble the privilege given to recognition in the model of recursion. Odysseus will know that he has arrived at his destination when his oar is not recognized for what it is, when it is mistaken for a wan or winnowing fan, a technical object used to separate wheat and chaff in agriculture. In an agrarian culture ignorant of the sea and its technical objects the oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan. Something is not quite right, and the countryman sees a mistake—no one carries a winnowing fan on their shoulder like that—but mistakes the mistake; it is not so much Odysseus carrying the fan in a strange way as the oar being mistaken for a fan. And it is here, where the oar sacred to Poseidon is taken for the winnowing fan sacred to Dionysus—a maritime for an agrarian technology—that Odysseus is required through sacrifice to remove the technical object from its contexts and to found a cult to Poseidon that will surely be confused with one to Dionysus . . . thus commencing a new and unpredictable history for himself and for the culture that mistook his oar. The return to where he could not ever possibly have been gives an air of comedy to Odysseus’s task; he will have to keep moving, carrying his oar, until he becomes so unfamiliar that he and his technology can be understood and explained otherwise. Yuk Hui’s book works within the parameters of this other recursion; it explores uncompletable returns and resumptions through the role of contingency in these movements. Through a looping recursive series of readings of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, physiology and cybernetics, Gaia theory and Anthropocene discourse, he makes unfamiliar what we thought we knew and describes settings and sequences that disrupt the canons and protocols of reading with which we are familiar. He hints that we don’t know what we thought we knew—systematicity and protocols of recursive argumentation—and that we need to know other things—the philosophy of organism and organology—in other ways. In all this contingency is paramount, but it is not Louis Pasteur’s chance favoring a prepared mind, but one for which there can be no preparation and that cannot be easily anticipated or captured.

Preface

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As with Odysseus taking to the land with his oar, there is a certain renunciation, even embrace of absurdity at play here, a refusal to feel at home that extends even to technics itself. The cosmotechnics that is the object of this and other of Yuk Hui’s works is exemplified by the surprise of the countryman who sees the oar differently. The technical object or Odysseus’s oar becomes questionable in intense, uncanny, and disturbing ways. There is finally an emancipatory impulse informing these open-ended movements driven by contingent events and errors that keeps open a future for Yuk Hui’s thought. Yet it is beleaguered, for when faced with James Hutton’s deep time with its annals of past worlds, the contingency of journeying with an oar through the countryside sinks into an insignificance from which not even the moral law can save us. Yuk Hui knows that the sediment left by the human occupation of the planet will barely register on the geological record and is rightly skeptical of the hubris on anthropocene discourse that imagines that human technology can ever match the levels of destructive havoc that the planet has regularly visited upon itself. Yet this is the occasion not for an apocalyptic despair but for a measured and hopeful approach to technology, a new way of putting the question concerning technology. Recursivity and Contingency takes the remarkable adventure of thought begun in On the Existence of Digital Objects and The Question Concerning Technology in China in unexpected and astonishing directions, leaving its readers with much to think about and to take further themselves.



Howard Caygill

Introduction A Psychedelic Becoming

It is law, too, to obey the counsel of one (ἑνός). —Heraclitus, Fragment 33

The current work is primarily a treatise on cybernetics. It aims to understand the evolution of systems in general, and the emergence of technical systems in particular, by interrogating the concept of the organic, a concept that marks a rupture with the dominating mechanical worldview of early modernity. We will attempt to study the genesis of systems according to two guiding concepts: recursivity and contingency. Both conceptually and materially, these concepts lead to the emergence and constant improvement of technical systems. This reading of technical systems will be accompanied by an evolving concept of nature, one that traces a trajectory from a Romantic first nature to a second nature in which nature is considered as “standing-reserve” in the sense of Heidegger, and probably also a third nature in which nature is understood neither as Romantic nature nor as standing-reserve, but is rather inscribed in the concept I call cosmotechnics.1

 Different periodizations of nature are possible. For example, R. G. Collingwood suggests three periods: Greek nature (nature as single intellectual organism), Renaissance nature (nature as mechanism), and modern science. See The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 3–12.

1

1

2

Introduction

With recursivity and contingency we hope to sketch a historicalcritical exposition regarding the theorization of the organic in philosophy, which gives rise to two major lines of twentieth-century thought: organicism (ecology and cybernetics) and organology. We attempt to demonstrate that it is necessary to take up again the concept of the organic and to shed new light on the condition of philosophizing in view of the “becoming organic” of digital machines on a planetary scale, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the “omega point” or “final point of Noospheric reflection.”2 This new condition will oblige us to reflect anew on the tension between system and freedom taken up by the philosophers of German idealism. While most of them largely neglected the Industrial Revolution, as we know, this leads to the economical materialist critique of Karl Marx. We will reflect on the increasing determination of technical systems realized in the new wave of industrialization, fueled by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and all sorts of surveillance technologies endowed with a transhumanist ideology that wants to overcome the limit of the human and politics. In order to unfold this hypothesis, we will have to go through a long journey or a theatre of reason. §1. ADVENTURE OF REASON First of all, I would like to put forward a central claim: namely, that since the publication of Kant’s third Critique in 1790, the concept of the organic has been the new condition of philosophizing. It is a reopening of philosophy after the epoch of mechanism and is later developed in other directions: vitalism, organicism, systems theory, cybernetics, and organology, among others. Research in natural science, especially among the naturalists, has introduced the organic to philosophy both as a new metaphysical object3 and as the antidote to the mechanical view of life. The mechanistic reduction associated with the metaphor of the  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Image Books, 2004), 174. 3  See Jennifer Mensch, Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Mensch traces the influence of naturalists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis on Kant and shows that an organicism exists already in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—and it is indeed an “epigenesis of reason.” 2

Introduction

3

clock has lost its lure, and the blurred distinction between animal and machine in René Descartes’s mechanism is interrogated under a bright light, ending with an expression of amazement: How could something like an animal body even be possible?4 What is the meaning of “the organic”? Instead of following conventional discourses in biology, this book proposes to analyze it according to the two key concepts of recursivity and contingency. This is done in order to firmly comprehend the history and dynamic of the notion. The organic mode of thinking also opens up the question of the generatio aequivoca5—that is, the gradual growth from inorganic to organic, from preformed to self-organized, and from heteronomy to autonomy. As Kant has famously claimed in the Critique of Judgment, an “organized product of nature is one in which everything is a purpose and reciprocally also a means.”6 We may even be able to say that the organic serves as the model of a system of metaphysics,7 but also as a resolution to the antinomy between mechanical laws and freedom that Kant proposed in the Critique of Pure Reason. It progressed from idealists such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, F. W. J. von Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel to later thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead, and on to the “organicist movement” and cybernetics (which we refer to as a mechanical organicism), which underlies a theory of individuation qua ontogenesis.

 We paraphrase Kant here: see Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 192: “[I]t is astonishing that something like an animal body should even be possible. And even if I could fully understand all its springs and pipes, all its nerve ducts and levers, its entire mechanical organization, I should still continue to be amazed. . . . Nor, indeed, is the ground of my amazement removed once I have convinced myself that all the unity and harmony I observe around me is only possible because a Being exists which contains within it the grounds not only of reality but also of all possibility.” 5  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), A835/B863. This becoming organic is present in metaphysics, natural history, and the history of reason; see Mensch, Kant’s Organicism, 128. 6  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), §66. 7  Mensch, Kant’s Organicism, 128. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says, “If we survey our cognitions of understanding in their whole range, we find that what reason decrees and tries to bring about concerning them—as a goal quite peculiar to reason—is the systematic character of cognition, i.e., its coherence based on a principle. This unity of reason always presupposes an idea, viz., the idea of the form of a whole of cognition—a whole that precedes the determinate cognition of the parts and that contains the conditions for determining a priori for each part its position and its relation to the remaining parts” (A645, B673). 4

4

Introduction

Retrospectively we may say that Kant’s notion of teleological judgment gives rise to four interpretations. The first two are included in what historian Timothy Lenoir calls a teleo-mechanist program.8 The third and fourth correspond to what we want to claim as an organology: first, organic mechanism, in which the organism is considered as a nonlinear algorithm producing complexity beyond the grasp of the understanding; second, suspicious vitalism, which is due to Kant’s use of the concept of Bildungstrieb (formation drive) from biology; third, organicism, which emphasizes the whole (community) and the exchange between the parts (reciprocity); fourth, organology, which concerns the intimate relationship between biology and technology. These interpretations are nevertheless interlinked. Recursivity is not mere mechanical repetition; it is characterized by the looping movement of returning to itself in order to determine itself, while every movement is open to contingency, which in turn determines its singularity. We can imagine a spiral form, in its every circular movement, which determines its becoming partially from the past circular movements, which still extend their effects as ideas and impressions. This image corresponds to the soul. What is called the soul is the capacity of coming back to itself in order to know itself and determine itself. Every time it departs from itself, it actualizes its own reflection in traces, which we call memory. It is this extra in the form of difference that witnesses the movement of time, while at the same time modifying the being that is itself time, so that it consequently constitutes the dynamic of the whole. Every difference is a differing, deferring in time and a being differed in space, a new creation. Every reflective movement leaves a trace like a road mark; every trace presents a questioning, to which the answer can be addressed only by the movement in its totality. This questioning is a test, in the sense that it may fall or it may continue with intensification, like the movement of a curve. What determines the falling or intensifying is the contingent encounter between internal and external ends. Recursion is both structural and operational, through which the opposition between being and becoming is sublated. Sublation preserves  The term teleo-mechanism is suggested by the historian Timothy Lenoir, according to whom teleo-mechanism is a research tradition that Kant helped to initiate in German biology. See The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht: F. Reidel, 1982), 12–16.

8

Introduction

5

the oppositional theses (thesis and antithesis) and it also elevates them to comprise a third (synthesis). Being is preserved as a dynamic structure whose operation is open to the incoming of contingency: namely, becoming. The opposition between the Eleatic rationality of being and the Ionian physiology of becoming is resolved by this living form, which implies at the same time movement and identity. It is in the Timaeus that Plato first resolves the opposition by constructing the soul in the form of a circle. The soul constantly comes back to itself as a necessity of its being. Aristotle was not able to comprehend the question of recursivity, this being the reason he criticized Plato, maintaining that since we have pauses in thinking, the soul therefore cannot be a circular movement.9 Aristotle didn’t see that the soul is both structure and operation. The opposition between the body and the mind, as well as the concepts of evolution and development in biology, also involve a failure to understand structure and operation, since they all attempt to substantialize. The opposition can be resolved in two ways: first, via a monism that conceives the mind and the body as different functions of a single substance, as we find in Baruch Spinoza; second, via the notion that the body and the mind cannot be separated since they constitute a recursivity that can only be either complete or nothing—this recursivity is often referred to as reentry or self-reference in contemporary biology and systems theory. Gottfried Leibniz’s monadology is a composition of both methods: a monism of monads and a recursivity of mirrors. The recursive movement comprises one of the main characteristics of Leibniz’s concept of the organism: “[E]ach portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each limb of an animal, each drop of its humours, is also such a garden or such a pond.”10 Yet in fact this recursive structure is not necessarily limited to organic beings. Leibniz’s notion of individual substance implies such a possibility of movement in all beings, which, as we know, was rejected by the Cartesians precisely because it implies the omnipresence of the soul in

 Charlotte Witt, “Dialectic, Motion, and Perception: De Anima Book 1,” in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and Martha C. Nussbaum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 177. 10  G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, §67, in Lloyd Strickland, Leibniz’s Monadology: A New Translation and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 28. 9

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Introduction

nonorganic beings, such as a stone. The Cartesians cannot accept this, since in their eyes the individual substance is a confusion of two irreducible substances, res extensa and res cogitans. Leibniz’s monad, the simple substance, takes up the complete notion of individual substance he proposed in Discours de Metaphysique by giving a new apparatus to the substance: the mirror. The mirror reflects; it reflects into itself what is outside of it according to its point of view. Why didn’t Leibniz grant a window to the monad, and instead endow it with a mirror? A window may allow connection like extension, but a mirror allows recursion—it reflects what other mirrors reflect. Every reflection is from a point of view, but such a partiality embeds a totality; it is not the fragment of the universe but the universe seen from a point of view,11 like the finite inscribing the infinite in baroque art,12 which Gilles Deleuze characterizes as “the fold.” However, can an infinite be reached at all? If it is reachable, can one still call it infinite? We can say that it is a becoming infinite (or, like Kant says, “as if”): unity in multiplicity, being in becoming, constancy in change.13 This becoming infinite constitutes the internal dynamics of the monad’s world. Every being, like the sound of a wave, is composed of infinitesimal parts: les petites perceptions. Recursion presents a form in which the infinite is inscribed in the finite; such an infinite is always an approximation, since in the world of the infinite there is no longer difference in quantity but only in quality. The monad is therefore selfsufficient and complete, since what can one demand further when one already possesses the infinite? If such a recursivity characterizes being in becoming—difference in terms of structure and identity in terms of operation—a question arises: How shall we account for the differences among individuals? Why do the sand grains on the beach look different from each other? Why are all twins, in spite of their resemblances, singular on their own? The singularity of every being is constituted by the play  Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 32. 12  Heidegger sees that there is a correlation between the baroque and the formation of system, which is characterized by “the mathematical, thinking as the law of Being, the lawgiving of the genius, the freeing of man to freedom in the middle of beings as a whole, the whole itself in its particulars.” See Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 32. 13  See Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 30. 11

Introduction

7

of recursivity and contingency. What is contingent can sometimes be information, which primordially means giving form. Information triggers the process of individuation, like an unexpected event that circumscribes other probable events. It is an ontogenesis in the sense that movement is no longer the threat of annihilating being into nonbeing, but rather that which conditions its own becoming. Knowing this formation or morphogenesis means that the mind sets itself into the same movement, because if the mind is able to set itself into such movement, there is an identity between mind and nature. The opposition between mind and nature, ideal and real, seems resolved in this respect. The equivalence between mind and nature is a slogan attributed to all idealists and their disciples, as well as to those who write books with titles such as Mind and Nature. §2. INVISIBLE NATURE, VISIBLE MIND Where does recursion begin? The search for the beginning is a search for the first cause. While in a circular loop, the beginning is only temporal, but not necessarily a cause.14 The cause is the totality of the loop. The prime mover or unmoved mover does not intervene from without, but rather the cause is immanent. It is probably in this way that we can interpret what Spinoza says about Deus sive Natura. Or, on the subject of knowing, it is the Ich denke that is itself the loop that is analogical to practical reason and aesthetic judgment. Therefore, the fact is that there is no beginning, just as there is no ground, since every original ground (Urgrund) is a groundless ground (Ungrund) or abyss (Abgrund), and every beginning is the end of another beginning. The prime mover doesn’t do manual winding-up, as one does with mechanical clocks. This image of the prime mover is the fantasy of the epoch of mechanism, because mechanism presupposes a linear causality. Tracing the first cause will therefore necessarily lead to the figure of the divine: The beginning already includes the end. However, the nuance that we have to register here is that, in the mechanical view, God ceases to be

 For the Greeks, the verb cause, αἴτιον, means in the legal sense to be responsible, but also in some cases in guilt or in debt.

14

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Introduction

both efficient and final cause, as it is interpreted after Aristotle; rather, he is only an efficient cause.15 In Giordano Bruno’s philosophy of nature,16 as well as Spinozism or the doctrine attributed to it (pantheism), God is immanent, since it is no longer conceived of as a deity who is somewhere outside of the earth, but rather as the internal principle of motion. Faith is no longer only in transcendence but also in immanence. Recall the teaching of Zarathustra to the villagers after he had descended from the mountain: “[R]emain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extra-terrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not.”17 The announcement of the death of God is also the announcement of the death of the extraterrestrial prime mover and an intention to look for the immanence of the will as power. Recursivity is a notion of immanence. Recursivity defends a nonmechanical existence by emphasizing the formal and the final cause, the telos. It defends against the theory of design while at the same time affirming the final cause as the cause of all causes, which constitutes a natural theology since the end remains ungraspable but effective. This is also the departing point of Kant’s notion of teleological judgment. Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, provides a new condition for philosophizing after rationalism and empiricism: the reflective judgment based on the concept of the organism. Retrospectively we may want to think that the aesthetic judgment presented in the first book on the  Monte Ransome Johnson, Aristotle on Teleology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23–24; the author cited Alexander Koyré: “The disappearance—or destruction—of the cosmos means that the world of science, the real word, is no more seen, or conceived, as a finite and hierarchically ordered, therefore qualitatively and ontologically differentiated, whole, but as an open, indefinite, and even infinite universe, united not by its immanent structure but only by the identity of its fundamental contents and laws. . . . This, in turn, implies the disappearance—or the violent expulsion—from scientific thought of all considerations based on value, perfection, harmony, meaning, and aim, because these concepts, from now on merely subjective, cannot have a place in the new ontology. Or, to put it in different words: all formal and final causes as modes of explanation disappear from—or are rejected by—the new science and are replaced by efficient and even material ones. Only these latter have right of way and are admitted to existence in the new universe of hypostatized geometry.” See Alexandre Koyré, “The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis,” in Newtonian Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 7–8. 16  “God is not an external intelligence rolling around and leading around; it is more worthy for him to be the internal principle of motion, which is his own nature, his own appearance, his own soul than that as many entities as live in His bosom should have motion.” Cited by Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 41. 17  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6. 15

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beautiful and the sublime is analogic to the model of teleological judgment in the second book. In the first book Kant presents a heuristic approach that is not determined by any a priori rules but rather arrives at the end by dynamically constituting its own rules. The end, should it be beautiful or sublime, driven by the imagination, is determined by a purposiveness devoid of purpose. The negations that define the beautiful, such as purposiveness without purpose and pleasure without interest, are indefinite in the sense that it is not immediately given and may never be reached through empirical induction. The aesthetic judgment is analogous to the teleological judgment in the sense that the natural end is an ideal of self-organization that conditions the process without pre-given rules, meaning that it is open to contingency.18 In the aesthetic judgment the mode of negative affirmation is to grant the a priori to the natural end, which serves another end: the moral. In the organism we find a new set of relations (part-whole) and new form of movement (recursion), which not only surpasses mechanism but also reveals the “hidden plan” of nature, a finality that is the “ideal.” Under this condition, thinking and acting have to become organic, since simple mechanical relations of cause and effect are no longer sufficient to serve as the ground of explanation, either in science or in philosophy. Every act is recursive in the sense that it constantly refers to itself and evaluates itself. There is only determinative judgment in mechanism, since determinative judgment only informs linear causality. We know that there is in fact no judgment in this activity: in other words, it cannot be called a judgment; it is only a command. An act presupposes a reflective judgment, which is beyond the mere act since it involves a judgment of value; it is rather an approximation of the whole through reflection. The categorical imperative is ethical because it is recursive in order to arrive at the “universal,” which we call the moral end. But what is this immanent force sustaining such a recursivity? To know the natural end is to know the end of human spirit. This can only be done through an identification between Geist and Natur. It is in the systemic thinking of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel that we find elaborations of the recursion form (see Figure I.1). The ich is the point of departure in  For the relation between nature and cosmopolitanism in Kant, see Yuk Hui, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics,” e-flux 86 (November 2017), https​://ww​w.e-f​l ux.c​om/jo​urnal​/86/1​ 61887​/cosm​otech​nics-​as-co​smopo​litic​s.

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Figure I.1  Forms of Recursion (the central figure is on Schelling sketched by Heidegger).

which every confrontation with the nicht-ich, which Fichte calls a check (Anstoße), forces the ich to return to itself, and it is in this recursive and repetitive movement that reality is revealed as such. The movement between the ich and the nicht-ich is the fundamental principle (Grundsatz) of the philosophical system. In Schelling we see a similar form, but Schelling doesn’t take the opposition between nature and mind as the condition of such an identification. Rather, he takes the mind and nature as two analogical structures and operations, as in his famous claims that mind is invisible nature and nature invisible mind.19 This analogy reposes on a circularity, like the ancient world soul described by Plato. This structure is the circular movement that represents the infinite productivity of nature and spirit. It encounters obstacles such as contingent events, for example, inhibition (Hemmung), whereby this productive force is actualized into products, from natura naturans to natura naturata. The oppositions between nature and spirit, subject and object are obliterated since nature becomes subject—an identity between nature and mind is established. In Hegel, we find another logic of reflection characterized by a double negation (known as dialectics), in which spirit recognizes nature as the other of the self in order to absorb it into the whole.  In this way Schelling also gave freedom to nature, a necessary deviation from Fichte as well as from Kant and Descartes, for whom freedom is only addressed to the subject or the ego. See Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 94.

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Contingency in the mechanical model is a rupture in a set of largescale industrial machineries. It can be catastrophic, since it interrupts the system, while the latter does not know how to respond due to a lack of sophisticated feedback mechanisms. Contingency has to be rearticulated as possibility so that the mechanism will be able to handle hardcoded rules that anticipate contingencies as probability: the possibility of an incoming signal or an input is limited to several options, which are given meanings and values. If one goes to a concert, the chance of being killed by a falling stone on the street is one of the possibilities that is rarely taken into consideration. It can happen, of course, or it may not happen. Contingency is something that is beyond the obvious possibilities, but it is also a possibility: indeed, a strange possibility, since it is a threat to the necessity of laws, including the law of chance in the sense of Henri Poincaré.20 In the recursive model, contingency is expected as necessity since without it there is no exteriority and no external finality. Here the finality is no longer one that is assured by mechanisms like interferences of linear causal propositions, but rather attempts to arrive at such an end by recursively turning back to itself to determine itself. The form it determines is accomplished by combatting contingency, not to eliminate it but rather to integrate it as necessity. Romanticism endows nonorganic beings with this recursivity, since it is the nature or general organism (Allgemeiner Organismus)—according to Schelling (as well as Plato and Plotinus before him, and James Hutton and James Lovelock later)—in which we dwell. Ernst Bloch has rightly noticed that, with the Romantics, every stone is a living being.21 It is a living being not only because it has spirit, but also because it possesses infinite force: It is the infinite force inscribed in the finitude of individual beings. Imagine that a stone is not a static being, but rather that its appearance as a stone is the result of a recursive process toward the infinite. The recursive movement resides not only in nature but also in history. History in the Hegelian sense is the realization of the Absolute through dialectical movements. In this case, contingency is necessary, not only because contingency is omnipresent in nature but also because it is a test that reason has to pass—that is to say, to  See Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (London: Thomas Nelson, 1918), part 1, chap. 4.  Ernst Bloch, Die Lehren von der Materie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 88; a stone “in the eyes of the Romantics, deduces itself as a derivate of a process of life [Lebensprozess].”

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overcome and to progress. In Hegel we find the death of nature (Tod des Näturlichen) as fate, the sacrifice of the affirmation of logic, and it is this attempt to overcome contingency via contingency that we arrive at the question of systemization. §3. CONTINGENCY AND FINALITY The English word accident has a double meaning that we can also find in Aristotle’s Categories, where he distinguishes substance (ὑποκείμενον) from accidents or contingent attributes (συμβεβηκός): accidents, for example, color, being the nonessential in the sense that their arrival or disappearance will not affect the identity of the subject.22 For example, this apple is an apple, regardless of the fact that it was green last week and is red this week. In the Metaphysics, therefore, Aristotle says that “accident is close to non-being.”23 The accidents are also the sensibles, for example, color, quality, quantity, and so on. We will keep in mind this double sense of the accident, as both inessential attribute and as accident, and come back to the conflation of these senses frequently in what follows. By distinguishing accidents as predicates that are subject to change from substance that remains identical to itself, Aristotle resolves the dispute between being and becoming. The modal logic in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason deals with possibility, existence, and necessity; what is necessary is universal or that which guarantees the universal. As Kant says, “[T]hat whose coherence with the actual is determined according to universal conditions

 In a concise dictionary entry, Hans Blumenberg points out that contingency is one of those few concepts that are specifically of Christian origin. In Aristotelian philosophy there is no opposition between possibility and necessity, but rather only between possibility and actuality; it is only when it is bound to logic that such an opposition is established. The ontologization of “possible contingency” is completed in the thirteenth century: “[T]he world is contingent as an actuality, which, because of its indifference to its existence, does not carry the reason and law of its being in itself.” Through the voluntarism of the Franciscan scholastics, necessity no longer justifies contingency, which becomes accident (Zufälligkeit). See Hans Blumenberg, “Kontingenz,” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, ed. Kurt Galling. 3. Aufl. Bd. 3. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1959), 1794. 23  Aristotle, Metaphysics E, 2, 1026b21, in The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 22

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of experience is necessary.”24 If we understand contingency as a mere category of modality, it is opposed to necessity and is only one of the many possibilities. It is our intention to enlarge the concept of contingency beyond modal logic. In March 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared; 239 people completely vanished. As of the time of writing, nothing has yet been confirmed regarding what caused its disappearance. It is a contingent event: It isn’t expected, but it happens. It can happen, though it may not happen. In every event there are theoretically indefinite possibilities. Even when I walk out of my house this morning, as is my routine, I will go to the épicerie next to my house for a coffee before starting writing, or I may see a friend who owes me money from a long time ago and suggest he return his debt. Aristotle calls the first case automaton, often rendered automatic; the second case tyche, meaning chance or luck. There are, in theory, infinite possibilities when an event is actualized, but there is a metastability that is promised by highly probable events, for example, going to the café or meeting a neighbor. However, an event like the disappearance of the Malaysian airplane was not expected and does not belong to the set of highly probable events. Had they known in advance, no passenger would have taken the flight. If we understand contingency as the merely probable then it is possible to understand it from the point of view of probability and statistics. For example, for Pierre-Simon de Laplace determination is opposed to randomness and implies predictability. We know that this opposition is false from various fields, including mathematics (Poincaré), physics (Werner Heisenberg), and biology (Jacques Monod). However, we want to suggest that contingency is not only the merely probable, but rather that which exists in all movements, its meaning and functionality being relative to the nature of such movements. What is a movement? If I say that one moves from one place to another, it means that an event takes place in time and space. I make such a movement in order to grasp, say, a chair. It means that there is a finality in such a movement, and the finality is the ultimate cause: nihil est sine ratione. Contingency exists in all movements and it has different meanings for different types of movement. We can list three of them:

 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A218/B266.

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1. Linear mechanical movement with predefined finality linearly chained to its causalities (A→B→C→D), for which contingency means error, since contingency is not expected: for example, when the gear of a mechanical engine is worn out, one of the linear causalities will not take place, D cannot be produced; 2. Nonlinear movement with predefined finality (A→B→A’→B’→C): for example, a recursive algorithm that exists in every Turing machine. The operation will have to stop at one point since otherwise it will exhaust all resources; a recursive function is limited in this sense. Whether the program stops or not is determined by a check determining whether or not the goal is reached; contingency is demanded in order to improve the performance of the system (for example, the introduction of noise into the operation, as in machine learning). 3. Nonlinear movement with auto-finality (A→B→C→A), meaning that a goal is not predefined. It changes direction according to contingent events, for example the evolution of an organism. Autofinality means precisely that the result is not yet completely defined; even the finality itself is situational. It will have the same fate as (2), but its exhaustion is due not to error but rather to the limits of negentropy. One tends to relate contingency to modal logic instead of seeing it as a functional necessity. So long as we don’t take it to designate mere possibility, it is no longer an abstract concept, but concrete and functional. Hegel understands this well, since first of all dialectics is a nonlinear movement, and in order to advance toward the Absolute, contingency is necessary to affirm freedom and to avoid becoming merely formal (formal in contrast to content [Inhalt]). Contingency becomes necessity regarding the system. Contingency stands out as a concept fundamental to rationality and creativity, something that can clearly be seen in Iannis Xenakis’s stochastic music, about which he writes: Since antiquity the concepts of chance (tyche), disorder (ataxia), and dis-organization were considered as the opposite and negation of reason (logos), order (taxis), and organization (systasis). It is only recently that knowledge has been able to penetrate chance and has discovered how

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to separate its degrees—in other words to rationalize it progressively, without, however, succeeding in a definitive and total explanation of the problem of “pure chance.”25

Contingency will not yield a system unless this contingency becomes necessary; as Xenakis claims, “pure chance and pure determinism are only two facets of one entity.”26 What is such movement, which is contingent and necessary at the same time, or, in other words, it is while it is not? We may want to follow Augustin Cournot and consider it as objective contingency, for it is caused by “the combination or the encounter of events which belong to independent series.”27 Cournot’s concept of contingency is not a violation of causality but rather a particular case of causality, in which two things come together like the technique of collage used by the surrealists whereby two objects or two distant realities are brought together in order to provoke something new or unexpected.28 Recursion is the movement that tirelessly integrates contingency into its own functioning to realize its telos. In so doing it generates an impenetrable complexity in the course of time. Organisms exhibit a complexity of relations between parts and whole inside the body and with its environment (e.g., structural coupling) in its functioning. Life also exhibits such complexity, since it expects the unexpected, and in every encounter it attempts to turn the unexpected into an event that can contribute to its singularity. Failures come when the recursive form cannot generate its consistency. It is then only a pure becoming, meaning that it is neither actual nor potential, like the natura naturans without natura naturata, meaning the not-being.

 Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (New York: Pendragon, 1990), 4. 26  Ibid., 205. By saying so, contingency is no longer what escapes determination, but rather it is a key element of determination, since individuation of rhythm is no longer a predefined forma formata, but also it can be seen as a forma formans in which contingency is necessary. 27  Antoine-Augustin Cournot, “Essai sur les fondements de la connaissance et sur les caractères de la critique philosophique,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Vrin, 1975), 34. 28  See Max Ernst, “Comment on force l’inspiration,” Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution 6 (1933): 43. 25

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§4. BEYOND MECHANISM AND VITALISM We want to show that the continuation of this organic condition of philosophizing gave us organicism and organology in the twentieth century.29 We will see the emergence of a biological organicism and its double, a mechanical organism, also known as cybernetics. One of the aims of this book is to put the two into conversation and reveal the intimacy and tension between them. First of all, organicism is what stands between mechanism and vitalism. The historical drama between Wilhelm Roux and his student Hans Driesch is a classic example demonstrating the opposition between mechanism and vitalism. Roux took two developing cells from frog eggs and killed one with a hot needle. As expected, the remaining cell continued to develop but formed only half a tadpole. In 1891 Driesch repeated the experiment with urchin cells but teased the two cells apart rather than killing one of them. This time he observed that each of the cells grew into a full sea urchin. In contrast to Roux’s mechanism, according to which a half will only develop into a half, Driesch found that a half can also develop into a whole: There is a vital force in the organism that cannot be exhausted by mechanical explanation. This contingent event—contingent in the sense that Driesch wanted to prove that Roux was right, and didn’t expect such a result—characterizes the opposition between Roux’s Entwicklungsmechanismus and Driesch’s vitalism. The first has been discredited as reductionism and the second attacked as having relied on a mysterious force such as élan vital (Henri Bergson) or entelechy (Driesch). In the first half of the twentieth century, between the vitalists and the mechanists, there emerged a third group. Since they saw the organism as a form of organization other than either mechanical laws or a mysterious vital force, they are called organicists. This view is expressed by the philosopher Joseph Woodger when he claims that “cell is not a name for a thing but for a type of organisation,”30 a type of organization to be

 Lewis Mumford made a remark that “it was not until after 1860 that biological facts were recognized as an important basis for technics”—see Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 46—but in this book, first published in 1934, it is not very clear whence comes this date; in a section titled “Toward an Organic Ideology” (368–73), he invokes Whitehead and the physiologist Lawrence Henderson (1878–1942), as well as the architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and several urbanists. 30  Cited by Erik Peterson, The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 70–71. 29

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understood in terms of embryology and biological chemistry. Both the organicists and the cyberneticians believe that the opposition between mechanism and vitalism has already been overcome.31 The organicists and cyberneticians both embrace the general systems theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The cyberneticians take another approach to overcoming this opposition. They are fascinated by Norbert Wiener’s concept of feedback, George Spencer-Brown’s concept of reentry, and Heinz von Foester’s concept of recursion, since these introduce a new epistemology as well as a new machinic operation. In his 1948 Cybernetics, Wiener challenged the mechanism versus vitalism opposition, represented by Newtonian mechanical-reversible time versus Bergsonian biological-irreversible time, since for him cybernetic machines understood as feedback systems have already overcome such an opposition (along with Maxwell-Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics, which resolves the discrepancy between macro- and microstates in physics). In this book we understand feedback, together with self-reference, as another name for recursion. Wiener’s new cognitive scheme is highly valued by Gilbert Simondon as a new epistemology, replacing that of Cartesian mechanism. We find a similar evaluation in Hans Jonas, who also sees cybernetics as “an overcoming of the dualism which classical materials had left in possession by default: for the first time since Aristotelianism we would have a unified doctrine. . . . for the representation of reality.”32 Unlike Jonas, however, who sees the poverty of the cybernetic teleology, Simondon suggests that the feedback system possesses “an active adaptation to a spontaneous finality.”33 If this spontaneous finality is possible, it is because the machine is able to respond to contingency and thus contingency acquires meaning in these operations. For an amplifier that amplifies an incoming signal, regardless of whether it is noise or a melody, contingency doesn’t have  Though we must admit that the drama continues in our time in the debate on the so-called gene-centrism, which sees the gene as the central causal agent, for example, in Richard Dawkins’s very popular The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Critics of gene-centrism want to show that it is another form of reductionist approach that is in favor of determination and prediction, among which systems biology insists that DNA is only coded script and how it is read depends on the system. See Denis Noble, The Music of Life: Biology beyond the Genome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 21. 32  Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 111. 33  Gilbert Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia 7 (2009): 18. 31

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meaning. When the amplifier is constructed in the way that noise will be filtered, noise here stands for contingency and, against meaning, acquires a negative meaning. When a machine learning algorithm is added to the amplifier it is possible that this algorithm will make good use of noise; in other words, contingency acquires a positive meaning, which we may want to follow Deleuze and the Stoics in calling a quasi cause.34 Cybernetic machines employ a new concept that allows the operation to be evaluated and controlled. This concept is information. Information for Wiener is a measure of the level of organization. Organization here means the capacity to recursively integrate contingencies. We therefore see in this sense that there is not really a contradiction between the notion of information as understood by Wiener, on the one hand, and that of Claude Shannon on the other. Note that for Shannon information means surprise: An incoming signal has more information if it is less expected. At first glance this seems opposite to Wiener’s notion of information, which measures the degree of organization. Information is a new category that the ancients didn’t anticipate. As Wiener says, information is neither matter nor energy. Indeed, information, matter, and energy become the fundamental elements of a new theory of individuation. We may want to raise a question: Is it possible to identify information with one of the four Aristotelian causes: formal, material, efficient, and final? If yes, how can we articulate it? For sure, information contributes to the efficient and final causes, and it may be derived from the formal and material causes, but it cannot be reduced to any one of them. This is also the great difference between an information machine and a thermodynamic machine, since an information machine allows a finer order of magnitude and precision of control than energy. Simondon took up the concept of information and turned it into a much broader concept, beyond statistics. Simondon’s innovation is that

 Deleuze takes up what the Stoics call a quasi cause, which is not a real cause in the sense that the relation between cause and effect is not necessary. In other words, there is no necessity between getting sick and becoming a good philosopher, but getting sick can be an event qua quasi cause that transforms the person into a good philosopher (for example, Nietzsche): Being sick implies a double causality: one is a corporeal cause, the other an incorporeal quasi cause: “The Stoics saw clearly that the event is subject to a double causality, referring on one hand to mixtures of bodies which are its cause and, on the other, to other events which are its quasi-cause.” See Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 94.

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he sees the importance of the new category, which cannot be reduced to either matter or energy. Simondon’s approach to information is to turn it into a more general concept, which means signification. When an incoming signal produces signification to the system, it carries information. In this sense, Simondon’s concept of information is closer to that of Gregory Bateson, for whom information is “the difference which makes a difference.”35 Bateson is a thinker of recursion; the later Bateson speaks of a “recursive epistemology” or “ecological epistemology.” Information, as “difference which makes a difference,” is operational and self-referential. Information is that which triggers and facilitates an operation in a system, which Simondon calls individuation. Not all information, and not information alone, will lead to individuation, since information is only one of the conditions, along with matter and energy. However, it also means that energy and matter alone cannot account for individuation. We can push it further by saying that, without information, a contemporary theory of individuation is impossible. For sure, theories of individuation were proposed according to the dominant epistemology of their epochs; for example, the key concept would be force in the time of Isaac Newton and Leibniz, and later also in Kant and Schelling. It is the new epistemological condition that offers a different way of looking at individuation. Information discovered by cybernetics is instrumental to Simondon’s thinking of individuation. Signification in Simondon’s theory of individuation is submitted to contingency: Given a system, signal A may produce a different effect than signal B; the former may be regarded by the system as noise, and therefore ignored, but the latter may have meaning to the system according to its structure of meaning. §5. THE GREAT COMPLETION Heidegger famously proclaimed that cybernetics is the end of metaphysics—or, as we would like to call this event, the great completion. This completion has to be understood as the concretization of systems. Heidegger’s statement needs to be qualified, and it is one of the tasks of this book to do so—but also to reopen it as a question. Heidegger not

 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1987), 276.

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only saw that the main feature of cybernetics is to turn every procedure into a calculable and steering (Steuerung) process; he also understood it as the victory (Sieg) of a new method over science. This method is the conceptualization of feedback: “[T]he reciprocal (hin- und herlaufende) regulation of processes in their interrelation thus takes place in a circular motion. . . . the basic feature of the cybernetic world is the control loop.”36 Feedback is used not only to comprehend being as such—seeing being as looping processes—but also to grasp being as a whole—a whole in the sense of the Greek to panta. This trajectory from being as such to being as a whole in cybernetics also characterizes the passage from first-order cybernetics to second-order cybernetics, of which Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory is one of the highest achievements. Luhmann famously claimed that “the system emerges et si no daretur Deus (even if God doesn’t exist),” and this system emerges from the base of what he and Talcott Parsons call “double contingency,” the Grundsatz of the social system. The concept of double contingency can be simply demonstrated in the interaction between two individuals who have no prior knowledge of one another. Since the ego has no sufficient knowledge of the other’s action, and the other may not anticipate the ego’s action, there is thus a situation of double contingency. The double contingency is posed as a problem to be resolved. For Parsons it is resolved by establishing consensus, or sharing the same symbolic system, while for Luhmann the double contingency is the drive of the emergence of the social system. Since every action is contingency reducing, and it is by constantly attempting to reduce contingency that social orders and norms are established, in this sense Luhmann is able to claim that “every error is productive.”37 The system absorbs contingency by turning it into something probable—that is to say, that which is expected. This absorption of contingency is a process of systematization in which contingency becomes

 Martin Heidegger, “Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens,” in Denkerfahrungen (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), 141–42.  As Luhmann says, “Along with the improbability of social order, this concept explains its normality; under the condition of double contingency, every self-commitment, however accidentally arisen or however calculated, will acquire informational and connective value for the action of others. Precisely because such a system is formed in a closed and self-referential way—namely, A is determined by B and B by A—every accident, every impulse, every error is productive.” See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 116.

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something probable through which the system distances itself from mere mechanism. Jacques Ellul, in his 1977 Le système technicien, has added the notion of the technical system to what Simondon outlined as the lineage of technical objects from element to individual to ensemble. Ellul sharply pointed out that the capability of computers to manipulate large amounts of data was the key to the realization of the technical system, which is becoming more and more totalizing. The technical system is formed through a seemingly contradictory movement: specialization and totalization. On the one hand, technologies become more and more specialized; on the other hand, there is a totalizing tendency that is effectuating. The specialization and diversification of technologies blinds humankind from seeing the unification and totalization of technology: namely, the technical system. He writes: But man has not yet grown aware of this relation between his striving for unity and the constitution of technology as a unitary system. He does not yet know, does not yet see, that this system exists as a system.38

Instead of Luhmann, Ellul choses Edgar Morin as his targeted systems theorist, and considers the latter’s 1973 book Le paradigme perdu: La nature humaine39 to be one of the most dangerous books ever written, since Morin “forges the theory of the de facto technological totalization.”40 This does not necessarily mean that Morin admires the totalization of the technical system, but rather that, in trying to explain the historical progress, he (consciously or unconsciously) unfolds the mechanism of such totalization. A totalized system is one that has its own rules of growth and its own rhythms of development, which Ellul calls “self-argumentation.” As Ellul has emphasized, this does not mean that humankind cannot intervene in the system, but rather that he is “caught in a milieu and in a process, which causes all his activities, even those apparently having no voluntary direction, to contribute to technological growth, whether or not he thinks about it, whether or not he wishes it.”41 The technical system has become a superorganism in the sense of Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere,42 or technosphere in  Jacques Ellul, The Technological System (London: Continuum, 1980), 200.  Edgard Morin, Le paradigme perdu: La nature humaine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).  Ellul, The Technological System, 201. 41  Ibid., 209. 42  Ellul also mentioned Teilhard de Chardin in parallel with Edgar Morin; see ibid., 201. 38 39 40

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the sense of the geologist Peter Haff.43 Retrospectively, Jean-François Lyotard was right when he said that modernity should be understood not as an epoch but rather as the capacity to tolerate contingency,44 which is called resilience today. This assertion may become more evident when we think of notions such as systems theory, which Lyotard used to characterize postmodern society. Neither mechanism nor vitalism will be the best solution to understanding the coevolution between human and machine. The organicists stand out as a new paradigm for thinking about life and system. Among the organicists we would like to highlight Joseph Needham, who started out as a mechanist (author of the book Man a Machine),45 and later turned into an organicist, becoming a core member of the Theoretical Biology Club along with Joseph Woodger, Conrad Waddington, and others. More dramatically still, he also became one of the most important sinologists, having documented the history of Chinese science and technology and, more importantly, framing Chinese philosophy as an organicist philosophy; and lastly, he was president of the Teilhard Center for the Future of Man (London), a center dedicated to the work of Teilhard de Chardin. It is surprising that, in his turn from an organicist to a historian of Chinese science and technology, Needham did not develop it into an organology, but rather seems to affirm an organicist thinking in Chinese technology. Allow me to quote a significant observation from the second volume of his Science and Civilisation in China: Here it is not possible to do more than mention the great movement of our time towards a rectification of the mechanical Newtonian universe by a better understanding of the meaning of natural organisation.

 See Peter Haff, “Human and Technology in the Anthropocene: Six Rules,” Anthropocene Review 1, no. 2 (July 2014): 127: “The technosphere is a system for which humans are essential but, nonetheless, subordinate parts. As shorthand we can say that the technosphere is autonomous. . . . At the large scale, the unplanned, undesigned and spontaneous crystallization of diverse and previously disparate elements of technology into the networked, global system called the technosphere meant there was a new player at the table whose interests would have to be considered in tandem with human interests. This is the point at which the technosphere escaped human control.” 44  Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 68: “Modernity is not, I think, a historical period, but a way of shaping a sequence of moments in such a way that it accepts a high rate of contingency.” 45  Joseph Needham, Man a Machine: In Answer to a Romantical and Unscientific Treatise Written by Sig. Eugenio Rignano & Entitled “Man Not a Machine”(London: Kegan Paul, 1927). 43

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Philosophically the greatest representative of this trend is undoubtedly Whitehead, but in its various ways, with varying acceptability of statement, it runs through all modem investigations in the methodology and the world picture of the natural sciences—the numerous and remarkable developments of field physics, the biological formulations which have put an end to the sterile strife between mechanism and vitalism while avoiding the obscurantism of the earlier “Ganzheit” schools, the Gestalt psychology of Kohler; then on the philosophical level the emergent evolutionism of Lloyd Morgan and S. Alexander, the holism of Smuts, the realism of Sellars, and last but by no means least the dialectical materialism (with its levels of organization) of Engels, Marx and their successors. Now if this thread is traced backwards, it leads through Hegel, Lotze, Schelling and Herder to Leibniz (as Whitehead constantly recognized), and then it seems to disappear. But is that not perhaps in part because Leibniz had studied the doctrines of the Neo-Confucian school of Chu Hsi, as they were transmitted to him through the Jesuit translations and dispatches? And would it not be worth examining whether something of that originality which enabled him to make contributions radically new to European thought was Chinese in inspiration?46

This history of the philosophy of organism that Needham hinted at and the figures that he named here will be partially pursued in this book. Needham’s affirmation of the presence of an organicist thought in Chinese science and technology seems to suggest an intimacy between Chinese thought and cybernetics. Needham’s historical analysis of Chinese science and technology has been instrumental for my own development of the concept of cosmotechnics, though I still have reservations regarding the perfect history and comparison recounted by Needham. Leibniz’s organicism will be dealt with in chapter 2, with regard to Wiener’s Leibnizianism, but Needham’s claim that Chinese thought is a philosophy of the organism47 and that Leibniz took this organicism from neo-Confucian thinking is a delicate issue, one that remains to

 Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 291–92. 47  This argument is based on the concept of “correlation” that Needham found in Chinese philosophy. Sometimes this is also translated as resonance, a translation that I prefer. To put it in a simple way, it means that there is a resonance (co-relation) between heaven and human activities. It is a cosmology that serves as a moral and legal condition of civilization. See Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic Media, 2016), part 1. 46

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be examined with more careful historical studies.48 The unbridgeable difference between Leibniz and neo-Confucian thought is that Leibniz developed his monadology from a logical-mathematical point of view, while the neo-Confucians developed it from the perspective of a moral cosmology centered on the notions of heaven (tian), energy (ch’i), heart (xin) and reason (li).49 The main task here is to address the ambivalent relation between organicist thinking and modern technology. For if we follow Needham and others in saying that the organicism of Whitehead and neo-Confucianism is the antidote to mechanism, and cybernetics is that which surpasses mechanism in the West, will cybernetics be the superior war machine and what will be its appropriation? The dilemma is precisely the following one: Either one returns to a biological organicism or one accepts the mechanical organicism that is cybernetics. The former is fragile because as long as we are not in a state of pure nature (and if it exists at all), it is hard to hold this harmony without directly confronting contemporary technologies and transforming them: We have seen that the Chinese “philosophy of organicism” surrendered to modern technology after the two Opium Wars and now returns in the guise of the political concept called tian xia (under the heaven), which more or less resembles Kant’s organicist cosmopolitics. The latter means that we will have to adapt ourselves to a more and more sophisticated technical system, which is moving toward an undesirable  We have to acknowledge here that Needham didn’t say that Leibniz’s organicist thinking came entirely from his contact with the Jesuits in China. Needham also noticed that Leibniz was influenced by the Cambridge Platonists, including theologians and philosophers like Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, and Ralph Cudworth, who wrote during the middle decades of the seventeenth century and who saw a plastic and vital whole in nature instead of regarding it as mechanical. See Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, 503. The fundamental difference between Leibniz and the Cambridge Platonic school is that the latter speaks of the “mathematical sickness” (morbus mathematkus) of Descartes, while Leibniz stresses that “the doctrine of life must be so formulated that it does not stand in contradiction to the basic principles of mathematical physics.” See Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 82–83. 49  Needham is himself a supporter of mathematical formalization, which for him is also a critique of the vitalists—among them, for example, Henri Bergson and J. S. Haldane. In his 1936 Terry Lectures in Yale, later published as Order and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936/2015), Needham used Haldane as a straw man to expose the limits of the critique against the physico-chemical understanding of life. Needham criticized the vitalists’ use of terms like essential and consciousness without precise definitions. On the other hand he praised Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s effort to mathematically formalize system as well as D’Arcy Thompson, whose work Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917) proposes to use coordinates (in the form of rectangular grids) to understand the change of forms of living beings. See Needham, Order and Life, 6–49. 48

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situation—namely, the increasing technological determination and constant arrival of algorithmic catastrophes. It is to the sharp eyes of Heidegger that the “organic” is another name of the mechanistictechnological “triumph” of modernity over nature. Therefore the idea is no longer simply to restore an organicism (though its importance must not be ignored), whether it be that of Chinese philosophy or that of Needham, Bertalanffy, and Whitehead, but rather, as I want to suggest in this book, the necessity of developing future technological thoughts through the reading of the philosophy of nature, organicism, cybernetics, organology, and cosmotechnics. §6. THE CONFLICT OF ORGANS Just as Ernst Cassirer has remarked that Kant, in his three Critiques, gave only a very peripheral role to technology, it is only in cybernetics and organology that Kant could be seen as a guiding spirit.50 Organicism is a recursive thinking. Organology signifies a shift from one recursive form (in nature) to another. It is a synthetic thought that not only integrates but also searches for a new epistemology that creates a new loop. Georges Canguilhem was the first, as far as we know, to propose the term general organology in order to rethink the relation between organism and machine, a rethinking that does not take the machine as the equivalent of the human but rather thinks of the human-machine as an organic whole. This was inspired by many thinkers, especially the holism of Kurt Goldstein, the exteriorization theory of André Leroi-Gourhan, and the Hegelian philosopher Ernst Kapp. Leroi-Gourhan has claimed that technology is both exteriorization of memory and liberation of organs; the technical object is also what Kapp calls a “projection of organs,” in the sense that tools are fundamentally

 See Ernst Cassirer, “Form and Technology (1933),” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts and A. Calcagno (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 274: “Although new problems constantly arise here, although the work of ‘critique’ will never come to an end, the direction of this work has been set since the days of Kant and his founding of ‘transcendental philosophy.’ The technology, however, has not yet been seriously integrated within this circle of philosophical self-reflection. Technology still seems to retain a singular peripheral character. Genuine knowledge of technology, insight into its spiritual ‘essence,’ has not kept pace with the growth in its scope.”

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shaped according to organs such that the former extend or even replace the functions of the latter. In his 1947 lecture “Machine and Organism,” Canguilhem praised Bergson’s Creative Evolution as the precursor to a general organology, since evolution is primarily a creativity of the élan vital. It may also seem ironic that we come back to the vitalists (Bergson and Canguilhem), an identity that was ridiculed by the organicists, but significance sometimes hides itself in ironies. Canguilhem didn’t elaborate much further on his general organology. Instead, we can find traces in Simondon’s general allagmatic (or universal cybernetics), as well as a much more detailed treatment in the work of Bernard Stiegler, who took the term organology from musicology. It is fair to say that it is only in Stiegler’s work that we can see a more schematized picture of a general organology consisting of psychosomatic organs, social organs (e.g., institutions), and all kinds of technical organs. Those three systems of organs are intimately intertwined and evolve on the basis of changes in the technical organs, but Stiegler has a rather strict understanding of organology as a study of organs, and in doing so, he also bypassed the question of organicism. Stiegler started using the term general organology in 2003 and continues to develop into what he now calls exorganism.51 However, in this book we will not address the later thought of Stiegler, since it is still a promising project under development. In addition to the division between germ plasm and soma by August Weismann,52 and that between genotype and phenotype, Stiegler sees a third type of heredity, one that is neither somatic nor genetic but rather technical. This remains a powerful deconstruction of biology and it only seems apparent today in light of the coming program of human enhancement and genetic engineering. The inorganic in the form of technology is also a form of heredity, which, more than genotypes and phenotypes, is subject to mutation. Technology is what is passed to us as culture, which consists of a means of living, but it is not handed to us as an eternal being; rather, it

 For the notion of exorganism, see Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 115–28. 52  The germ cells are those that preserve the species, for example upon which reproduction is based (e.g., such as egg cells and sperm cells). Somatic cells are products of the organism. They cannot pass genetic information to the germ plasm in order to be transmitted to the next generation. Germ cells can produce both germ and soma cells, while somatic cells can only produce somatic cells. See François Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty Spillmann (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 216. 51

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mutates all the time with accelerating speed. Technology joins immediately with the environment in the theory of evolution. The process of evolution is a dialectical movement between adaptation and adoption, since mere adaptation to the environment refuses the question of the will and mere adoption idolizes the will. I would like to suggest further that organology is not only a systematic study of the human-machine relation but should also study how culture and technics interact: that is, how different cultures—for example, Chinese, Indian, European, Amazonian, and so on—are able to produce new thinking that integrates modern technology into their traditions and also transforms those traditions in order to reopen technodiversity, which is now dominated by the transhumanist imagination of the technological singularity. If in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—an epoch characterized by a perpetual tension between mechanism and organicism/vitalism—we witnessed non-Western cultures surrendering to war machines equipped with mechanical technologies, in the twenty-first century we have to push ourselves to ask if cybernetics could be appropriated in order to open up the question of technodiversity. With the organicist/organological thought that he calls mechanology, Simondon wants first to resolve the problem of alienation caused by the misunderstood human-machine relation, and second to overcome the antagonism between culture and technology. When Simondon talked about culture and technics, it is possible that he was referring only to Western societies. However, we must take it further and try to understand what is at stake in other cultures in the process of globalization. Organology is not simply about adopting a machine by giving it a new purpose, since organology is also a theory, which is grounded in the studies of the evolution of machineries. Simondon’s mechanology aims to reorganize the technical ensembles in order to resolve the problem of alienation through internal resonance (which is one of the terms that Simondon used to translate feedback). The human being has lost the status of a technical individual, since in the age of artisans the latter are able to make themselves an associated milieu for their tools. But in the epoch of industrialization, the automated machines own their associated milieu, workers being rendered redundant for such purposes. The organicity promised by feedback seems to Simondon a possibility to resolve the problem of alienation by reorganizing the relation between humans and machines—a thesis we will look closely in the later chapters.

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Maybe one can say that, in comparison to Simondon’s concept of contingency, Stiegler is more Nietzschean, in the sense that contingency is not only that which motivates a system but also that which transforms the system. It is the concept of a structural transformation qua elevation that characterizes Stiegler’s reading of Simondon’s quantum leap as the threshold of individuation. In Stiegler, this contingency has to become necessity, not in that it is naturalized as part of the system, but rather in that it has to become a pivot through which the individual and the collective are transformed. Organicism and organology, developed from the concept of organic, are constantly challenged by technological development. What we are witnessing today is a shift from the organized inorganic to the organizing inorganic, meaning that machines are no longer simply tools or instruments but rather gigantic organisms in which we live. In the time of Schelling, and later in Hutton and Lovelock, nature is considered as a gigantic organism, of which we are a part. However, this term general organism, which was attributed to nature considered as a source of contingency, seems more appropriately to designate the technological system that we now inhabiting—for example, smart homes, smart cities, and the Anthropocene. Instead, we are observing the becoming of an “artificial earth,” and we are living within a gigantic cybernetic system in the process of forming: This comprises our contemporary condition of philosophizing. As we will explain in chapter 1, Gaia must first of all be seen as the meeting point of James Lovelock’s cybernetics and Lynn Margulis’s organicism. Cybernetics is a methodology for understanding the operation of being and society, but such understanding of society is realized in machinic and material terms.53 The problem with the idea of going back to nature is not that it was wrong but rather that it failed to see the irreversibility of the historical trajectory, something that Marshall McLuhan had already observed in the 1970s when he said that the end of nature is the birth of ecology. Ecology is very much based on the concept of the organism (the relation between organism and environment according to Ernst Haeckel), which, as we will try to demonstrate, constitutes  Simondon characterizes cybernetics as operation and scientific positivism as structure, since he proposes what he calls allagmatic (theory of conversion) as the synthesis, the third. But it is hard to think of an operation devoid of structure. In cybernetics, feedback—or, more generally, recursion—is both operation and structure. For Simondon’s comment on cybernetics and positivism, see “Épistemologie de la cybernetique,” in Gilbert Simondon, Sur la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 2016), 198.

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a new condition of philosophizing since Kant. But this organic nature, which was considered by Kant to be the guarantee of perpetual peace, in that the universal history of humankind is understood as the realization of nature’s hidden plan, is directly challenged when ecology replaces such a concept of nature by taking up its organizational structure. If a new cosmopolitics is possible after Kant, it will have to start with a deconstruction of such a concept of nature, in order to see more clearly whether this “hidden plan” is still realizable, or whether, on the contrary, a new program should be introduced. What would be tragic would be to misunderstand ecology as a “return to nature,” since the return to a Romantic and innocent nature is only an illusion, which is also why Bruno Latour wants to invent Gaia as a political concept.54 In modern urban areas we experience the contingency of nature, but more and more we experience the delay of trains and buses, traffic jams and industrial accidents. Contingency takes another form, since we are not only dealing with meteorology, trying to predict the chance of rain or snow, but also trying to avoid two Tesla autopilot cars from crashing with each other on the highway. With ideas such as big data analysis, machine learning, and smartification, we will see that urbanism will be fully automatized, and that such an automatization is aiming to be ecological and sustainable, which implies the realization of gigantic recursive cybernetic machines. Just as Wiener claims to have discovered a general principle of control and communication in machines and animals, the cybernetic machines are acquiring a kind of organicity, thus becoming the organizing inorganic. This is the reason I wanted to add to this genealogy of the organic the concept of cosmotechnics, as developed in my earlier work The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Cosmotechnics means primarily the unification of moral and cosmic order through technical activities; this unification is a reattachment of the figure to the ground, but it is not a return to metaphysics of the one and the all. We follow Simondon and adopt the figure and ground metaphor from Gestalt psychology. Simondon attempts to understand the history of technology as constant bifurcation from a magic phase where there is no separation between subject and object, and ground and figure coexist in harmony: The figure is the figure of the ground, and the ground the ground of the  See Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (London: Polity, 2017).

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figure. The constant bifurcations—first the bifurcation into technics and religion, then each bifurcates into theoretical and practical parts—lead to the continuous divergence between figure and ground. It demands a philosophical thinking (in view of the failure of aesthetic thinking) to ceaselessly converge the figure to the ground. The genesis of technicity also proposes a multiplicity of cosmotechnics with different relations to different grounds. In other words, we have multiple cosmotechnics in different cultures, instead of a Greek technē or a modern technology analyzed by Martin Heidegger in his famous 1949 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology.” In order to reopen the question of technology in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to reconstruct the genesis of technicities in different cultures, which have their own cosmic specificity.55 Simondon speaks often of technical reality; it seems that he makes allusion to another term, human reality. Along with being there (être là), human reality (réalité humaine) was used to translate what Heidegger calls Dasein into the French language. Like the human Dasein, which needs an articulation of “being there,” modern technology should also be resituated and reappropriated in its genesis. One may wonder: Are we not here again opposing human beings and machines, culture and technology? This is what an organology attempts to avoid, since we reject any substantialization of human and culture. It means that humanity is not a consistent and everlasting substance, but rather accidental. We are playing with the distinction between substance and accidents in classical philosophy, and when we say accident, it also carries the meaning of contingency. The concept of the human is a contingent historical concept. We are already posthuman when we subscribe to the view that the human is a technical existence. If the concept of posthumanism is a theoretical attempt to bring forward an ethics against anthropocentrism, it will fail if it does not take the trajectory that we are going to outline—that is to say, the study of the human-machine relation—into account, since otherwise it will remain a burlesque attempt to produce “high-level ontologies.” Organology could be considered a materialist science, but it is not a materialism that opposes spirit and matter. Rather it seeks, at every opportunity, to allow spirit to exercise its freedom without producing the alienation of

 For a detailed analysis of the notion of cosmotechnics, please see Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China, §2, “Cosmos, Cosmology and Cosmotechnics.”

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the soul.56 Technology is a product of the spirit. Naive materialists fail to understand this, and see spirit as the product of technology—which is unfortunately the case in our time. §7. AFTER ECOLOGY, BEFORE SOLAR CATASTROPHE Is it possible to give a new meaning to the concepts of chance and the automatic that Aristotle defined in his Physics in the epoch of the artificial earth, which is moving toward higher and higher degrees of automation? One will inevitably associate the word automaton with automation, because what is meant by automaton here is probabilities constrained by the capacity of the being—for example, a marching horse will stop before the abyss, a tossing coin will show either heads or tails. With the advancement of machinic automation and the application of statistical mechanics, we are confronting a singular situation in which automata are eliminating contingency on one level—the level of calculative reason (like replacing Paul the octopus with a machine learning algorithm to predict the World Cup champions)—and elevating it to another level—the level of speculative reason. Calculative reason limits the possibilities to multiple choices, like a checklist from which one is forced to choose between some definite options (for example, nationality, gender, etc.). Speculative reason is reactionary while confronting calculative reason, since it will have to go beyond the latter. In this sense Heidegger’s speculation on Being is the most outstanding example, in which Being takes different names, such as the last god or the Unknown. But what does it mean by “beyond” here? Speculative reason wants to go beyond the sensible, beyond the immediately given data, to a realm in which the appearance is

 Ernst Cassirer, in an article titled “Form und Technik” written in 1933, attempts to resolve one of the key problems concerning technology, meaning the subjugation of culture to technology (which Georg Simmel calls the tragedy of culture). Cassirer uses the word Unterwerfung for subjugation, which also means submission. Culture submitting to technology means precisely that the econo-technical development becomes more and more the foundation of culture; all practices are subjugated to technological changes. This is a problem that Cassirer raises, and he attempts to tackle it by proposing a return to the spirit, since if technology is a product of the spirit, then spirit has the capacity and responsibility to overcome such a determination. See Cassirer, “Form and Technology,” 272–73.

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recognized as only one of many possibilities as well as necessities. But speculative reason must also be restricted in order not to fall prey to the Schwämerei. It must, on the contrary, be guided by the phenomenon in order to go beyond the phenomenon. Science can become philosophy only when it moves beyond the phenomenon and ceases to reduce everything to empirical evidence, but rather elevates thinking to a new terrain, for example, a speculative physics that Schelling proposed. However, speculative reason will finally fall prey to a bad infinite if it is no longer able to integrate calculative reason as part of itself, as when one opposes luck to automaton, since it fails to see, as Aristotle has already seen, that all chances/luck are automata—though retrospectively we see that Aristotle is talking about nature here instead of technology. It is necessary to resituate tyche and automaton in the epoch of cybernetics, and to see such a possibility of luck not as a mere subset of possibilities, but also to produce such possibility of luck by adopting the automaton in its own thinking. Concerning technological acceleration and the ends of the human, maybe we should say that what remains is neither posthuman nor transhuman, but rather the inhuman. The inhuman is a term proposed by Lyotard in his thought experiment regarding the explosion of the sun, expected to take place in about 4.5 billion years.57 The female interrogator (along with a male philosopher) in this experiment questions if the research in science and technology is not a preparation for the survival plan after the solar catastrophe, since these research programs tend to look for an absolute separation between thinking and the organic body, so that thinking can survive when all organic lives are destroyed after the solar explosion. The inhuman is first of all a negation, but a negation of two different facts. First of all, it is the negation of what is considered to be human, for example, the unity of the organic body and the soul. In this sense it is a separation between the mind and the body, the thinking substance and the bodily substance, an ultimate scientific project of humankind in anticipation of the solar catastrophe. Lyotard identifies this first sense of the inhuman with system. He writes, “[T]he inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under the name of development (among others) must not be confused with the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage.”58 What does it  Lyotard, “Can Thought Go On without a Body?” in The Inhuman, 8–23.  Ibid., 2.

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mean that the soul is the hostage of “the infinitely secret one”? What is this infinitely secret inhuman? It is the Unknown, the improbable, as Lyotard says when commenting on Saint Augustine, that the inhuman is “more interior in myself than me.” For Augustine, it is God, but after the death of God, it is the Unknown (das Unbekannte), as we can see in Heidegger, or the improbable, as Stiegler claims, following Maurice Blanchot and Yves Bonnefoy. It is something that cannot be reduced to calculability, to statistics, and to preemptive algorithms. The incalculable is the preindividual reality with which the soul is able to elevate, to unfold itself, that is to say, to exercise its freedom. But what exactly is this inhuman of which the soul is hostage? And what does it mean that the soul is hostage? Rationalists, whether they be old or new, didn’t see the point of the Unknown or the Unknowable, though they could have rationalized the Unknowable by giving it meaning—that is to say, giving sense to the existence of the inhuman without falling prey to a twenty-first-century nihilism.59 We are not forcing the irrational or the Unknown as the ground that immediately corrupts all the discourses developed from it; rather, the nonrational is the limit of the rational.60 Retrospectively, the aim of rationalism is to construct a system of reason, such as that which Leibniz achieved. But existence has never been a rationalist project. Rather, like symbolism, rationalism is only one of the organons of thinking. Rationalism attempts desperately to retain a monotheism after it has murdered God, which takes the name of system. Evolutionary biologists and eco-modernists see the Anthropocene as a gigantic system and think that the way to solve the problem of ecological mutation is to modulate such a system, but presupposing a unified system doesn’t really provide us with any weapon other than adapting ourselves to the

 This is the reason why Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology is still worth a reinterpretation, since he rightly pointed out that the two trends of the old ontology—one takes an equivalence between being and the rational, the other rejects the system of objectivity and embraces being as the unknown “thing in itself”—ignore the middle possibility, namely, the coexistence of the partially comprehensible and the partially irrational. See Nicolai Hartmann, New Ways of Ontology, trans. Reinhard C. Kuhn (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953). 60  Heidegger is very cautions on this point when discussing Schelling’s treatise on human freedom. On the one hand the ground which allows existence to reveal itself is precisely “nonrational” (Nicht-Nationale), but one should avoid “throwing this ground into the primeval swamp [Ur-sumpf] of the so-called irrational [Irrationalen].” See Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 107. Heidegger distinguishes between the nonrational and the irrational; the nonrational is not irrational. 59

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system. How to resolve the tension between the passivity of adaptation and the activity of freedom? Human freedom is the possibility of both good and evil. As Schelling attempted to show, evil emerges when the figure is taking over the ground (again like Figure-Ground in Gestalt psychology), when the self-will takes over the universal will; seeking a solution in the self-will is an affirmation of the perversion of the ground, the perpetual loss of the universal will. Criticizing the system doesn’t mean that we should be afraid of the Absolute. On the contrary, it is the Absolute that gives us the force to relativize, and it is through relativization that we affirm the Absolute. The red Tesla Roadster that Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched into space in February 2018 is the demonstration of a cosmotechnics in which the cosmos is mere standing-reserve. It is a significant gesture after the photo of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, after the becoming Gestell of the earth. It is now the turn of Mars, ready for industrial extraction. Nietzsche said in The Will to Power that “[s]ince Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X.”61 Now in the Anthropocene, humankind is reelevated from X to the center, a return of anthropocentrism in new dress. The game of Elon Musk is a demonstration of a planetary project in which geopolitics is no longer about the earth but rather the industrial extraction of Mars. In what way can one think about cosmology after this world picture presented by Musk, which is not only abstract but also concrete in terms of technical domination? The only possibility is to give this world picture meanings beyond that of standing-reserve, not only in theory but also in practice. In order to do so, we will have to reframe the modern technological thinking whose essence is enframing (Gestell). This reframing of the enframing will demand first of all the fragmentation of the system in order to give new realities and meanings to technology—or, in the words of Augustin Berque, “to recosmicise (récosmiser) the earth” by going beyond the “acosmic” of the modern.62 Ellul sharply pointed out the trickiness of “giving meaning to technology,” since it repeats the same  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 8: “The nihilistic consequences of contemporary natural science (together with its attempts to escape into some beyond). The industry of its pursuit eventually leads to self-disintegration, opposition, an antiscientific mentality. Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X.” 62  Augustin Berque, Recosmiser la terre – quelques leçons péruviennes (Paris: Éditions B2, 2018). 61

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path of ancient times, when humans gave meaning to natural phenomena as the mediation between humans and God, which evolves into a natural theology or a concrete religion.63 Ellul sees the difficulty here of not repeating the same path of religion in which God is replaced by technology. We will have to interpret it in different senses. One is to see technology as the Unknown, since it is something that we haven’t encountered in our previous experience, otherwise it wouldn’t be new and there wouldn’t be progress, so giving meaning to it means to give it rationality. The other is to see technology as the manifest of the Unknown and as the means through which the Unknown is rationalized. This returns us to theology and spiritual life, which is in the process of being abandoned or enjoyed only by the privileged ones who can afford to launch rockets to Mars during the daytime and practice yoga and meditation in the evening. Ellul was, however, right to point out that it easily gives rise to two responses64: one is to resolve the issue with nontechnical means, for example, meditation or LSD; the other is to respond with technical solutions, which, when not carefully reflected upon, will only reinforce the positive feedback of the system, like the eco-modernists, who want to repair the earth damaged by technologies with more advanced technology, including geo-engineering. §8. THE FUTURE COSMOLOGISTS If contingency is the driving force of systemization, for both technical and social systems, is it possible to have an absolute contingency, a contingency that cannot be absorbed at all and that exceeds any expectation? Some philosophers attempt to resist recursive totality by turning to absolute contingency as an emergency exit, which may lead to freedom and autonomy. Absolute contingency for the moderns gains its transcendental height as did nature for the Romantics, which will surpass all systems and human cognition, a contingency that functions as does the signal of a lighthouse, the savior of disoriented ships. But when we say expectation, didn’t we already presuppose a subject, a subject that thinks and expects?

 Ellul, The Technological System, 282.  Ibid.

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Cournot’s objective contingency, which we briefly mentioned above, is pushed much further in what Quentin Meillassoux calls “absolute contingency.” For Meillassoux, absolute contingency is an attempt to break away from the nature and mind correlation, to go behind it to show that it is possible to have a new epistemological foundation. This epistemological foundation does not start from the Absolute as Unbedingt but from the Absolute as contingent. If the correlation in idealism and in phenomenology failed to grasp this contingent ground, it is because these schools insist on the subject-object correlation as the ground of knowledge. The subjectivists (Meillassoux chooses to use the word subjectivists instead of idealists) wanted to approach the arche-fact through enforcing the power of thought; that is, how thought can penetrate into the realm of the unknown. For Meillassoux, the Absolute has to be posited outside thoughts, outside the reach of the mind, outside all causalities. In contrast to what he calls the “facticity of correlation” of the correlationist tradition, Meillassoux wants to propose what he calls the “principle of factuality,” meaning to identify a reality or material that is independent of thought. For example, we cannot say if God exists or not, since he may or may not exist; he may appear in front of you tomorrow morning when you wake up, or you may not see him at all within the finitude of your life. I quote Meillassoux: “We will call ‘contingent’ any entity, thing, or event which I know could be, or could have been, other than it is. I know that this vase could have not existed, or could have existed otherwise—I know that the falling of the vase could have not happened.”65 Distancing from correlationism is a way to open up a new inquiry into the existence of the possible. The mission of speculative reason could be understood in terms of Meillassoux’s new treatment of facticity, which proposes “to make facticity no longer the index of a limit of thought—of thought’s incapacity to discover the ultimate reason of things—but the index of thought’s capacity to discover the absolute irreason of all things.”66 Meillassoux wants to produce a new ontology in which one can find a new category

 Quentin Meillassoux, “Métaphysique, spéculation, corrélation,” in Ce peu d’espace autour. Six essais sur la métaphysique et ses limites, ed. Bernard Mabille (Paris: Les Éditions de la Transparence, 2010). The citation is based on the manuscript instead of the book. I would like to thank Robin Mackay for checking the translation. 66  Ibid. 65

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or entity called “over-chaos” (surchaos), which he wants to distinguish from chaos theory in mathematics. This over-chaos is “an absolute” that “escapes the desabsolutization of correlationism.” This over-chaos is not purely chaos, meaning without any possibility of deriving order or law. Within an absolute, inconsistent being, there is hardly any contingency, as he writes: “[A]n inconsistent—universally contradictory— being is impossible, because this being could no longer be contingent. For the one thing that an inconsistent being cannot do is to change, to become other, since, being contradictory, it already is what it is not.”67 The necessity of contingency is not a proposal for a return to chaos (as in some mistaken impressions of the postmodern), but rather to affirm the absoluteness of contingency. But what kind of epistemology will absolute contingency give us? The subject-object correlation can and must be criticized as an anthropocentric approach, in which speculation is subordinated to sense certainty: the dead is less valuable than the living. Meillassoux wants to transvalue knowledge, which could be summarized by the following anticorrelationist and antivitalist epistemological question: Would there not be more modesty, then, in considering that the Universe has nothing to do with our subjective qualities, that it could very well do without them at any degree whatsoever, and to say, more soberly, that there is no absolute scale that makes our properties superior (because more intense) to those of nonhuman living creatures or inorganic beings?68

What kind of epistemology can this be other than a mathematical formalism? But doesn’t this reliance on mathematical symbolism itself presuppose a humanism, which Ernst Cassirer calls animal symbolicum? The escape from the subject-object correlation gives room to speculation, but how does it give us a new epistemology? The concept of absolute contingency definitely merits our attention, since it is that which sets limit to a system, meaning its incapacity to reduce the contingent event into one mere probability of statistics. Absolute contingency is an antisystemic concept, and it is so because once the

 Ibid.  Quentin Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning,” in Genealogy of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism, ed. Suhail Malik and Armen Avanessian (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 126.

67 68

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system fails to grasp it, another foundation of the system will have to be constituted, which means another system. For example, according to the rule of Edme Mariotte, considering a container of gas, the product of the pressure and its volume is a constant (PV = C), but this constant is derived only from experience and hence can be contingent. In De la contingence des lois de la nature, Émile Boutroux tried to show that any necessity is always open to something outside it, or even demands something outside for its law to be completed, while, for a technical system, a certain case of contingency is always already presumed and understood as necessary.69 Like Leibniz’s best-of-all-worlds hypothesis—the world created by God as the technical system created by its designer—it is implemented in the way that it anticipates contingency, meaning that they are only relative contingencies. By admitting that all laws of nature are contingent, as Boutroux proposed, it only shows that an absolute ground is impossible. We still have no new way to found a new epistemology, since all truths become relative. Herein lies the positive use of the concept of absolute contingency in Meillassoux, since it means precisely that a single system cannot hold. A superintelligence may not be illusory, but it will be the end of pluralism. Herein lies the spirit of cybernetics: After every dead-end there is a new epistemology, a new ground; even if this ground is groundless, don’t be afraid of it. Absolute contingency affirms the plurality of systems, including systems that are not comprehensible by human beings. The black box is such an example, since a black box, if it merits the name, remains impenetrable to human cognitive power. Black box is a term used to describe algorithms completely opaque to their users. This is a quantitative challenge to the finitude of knowledge, since imagination is not able to capture (or zusammenfassen, as Kant says) the magnitude of data and therefore can only be surprised. The positive use of absolute contingency is that it affirms the necessity to fragment the system and therefore sets limit to any single all-encompassing system, as Kurt Gödel has done in mathematics. The negative, as we have seen, is that there is no absolute ground for any epistemology. This fragmentation is not a repetition of postmodern discourse, since the postmodern remains a discourse on the universal; this fragmentation is a return to locality in order to rethink technological development. But this return  See Émile Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1921).

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is not a longing for a nostalgic concept of nature, what we at the beginning called a Romantic nature, because nature as such may have ceased to exist since the Industrial Revolution. Nor is it a continuation of the standing-reserve that was condemned by Heidegger. Another standpoint is necessary. I was tempted to call this higher standpoint culture, but I think it is not justified, since it is easy to fall prey to cultural essentialism or ethnocentrism. It is rather what I call a cosmotechnical thinking, which situates technology in its genesis and attaches it to its ground, which is the cosmic reality. This journey through the organism, organicism, and organology will be the departing point for the reconceptualization of cosmotechnics to come. In the affirmation of plurality lies precisely the question of freedom, since to be free is to have the capacity to differ and to defer both the figure and the ground, to allow the bifurcations of future after centuries of modernization qua synchronization. *** This book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1, “Nature and Recursivity,” attempts to read Kant’s reflective judgment as a precursor to recursivity and to show how this reflection is naturalized in the thought of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which I argue prefigures twentieth-century organicism in biology (for example, Bertalanffy, Needham, Woodger, and Donna Haraway) as well as in the concept of Gaia (Lovelock and Margulis). Chapter 2, “Logic and Contingency,” further investigates how the concept of reflection is mechanized in Hegel’s reflective logic and realized in cybernetics, as Gotthard Günther famously claimed, which we also call a mechanical organicism. We will look into two major concepts of cybernetics: feedback and information, through Wiener, Gödel, Alan Turing, Bateson, Simondon, and Heinz von Foester, and how these concepts embody recursivity and contingency (especially Gödel’s general recursive function). Chapter 3, “Organized Inorganic,” attempts to move away from an organicism to an organology, which is presented by Canguilhem in his 1947 article titled “Machine and Organism.” In comparison with organicism, organology attempts to understand the relation between life and technology by refusing mechanism. In organology, science and technology is understood as a medium to return to life. This chapter reconstructs the concept of general organology in Bergson’s and Canguilhem’s thought. Chapter 4, “Organizing Inorganic,” looks further into the organology of

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Simondon and Stiegler and the role of recursivity and contingency in the theory of individuation. It suggests that the “organizing inorganic” is surpassing the “organized inorganic” and therefore enforces a new initiative to rethink organicism and organology. Finally, chapter 5, “The Inhuman That Remains,” takes up this challenge and suggests that after the end of Enlightenment humanity it is necessary to develop an inhumanity (in the sense of Lyotard) as a response to the end of philosophy as well as an opening of a true pluralism, or a multiple cosmotechnics.

Chapter 1

Nature and Recursivity

Nature loves to hide. —Heraclitus, Fragment 123

Contingency is always contingent upon something, as long as this something is considered probable or even necessary in time—for example, laws of nature. Not all laws of nature are in themselves necessary, though they are only laws insofar as they are considered to be so. Laws of nature remain necessary until they are disproved by exceptions. In this case, they become contingent, meaning things can be otherwise. It ceases to be a law and is now a fact. It is this particular relation between nature and contingency that we would like to elaborate as a point of departure for reflecting upon the realization of systemic thinking and, finally, technical systems. We are going to examine two fundamental points: 1. Contingency is fundamental to the understanding of nature, not least because nature demonstrates an irregularity deviating from rules that are derived from empirical observations. In order to develop a philosophy of nature, it is necessary to recognize such contingency as a necessity. 2. Any systemic philosophy, either ideal or real, will have to address nature external to the mind (the “I”), and in consequence is obliged to deal with the question of contingency,1 since contingency challenges

 Dieter Henrich, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 157.

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the very foundation of such systems: If the foundation of a system is contingent then all knowledge might be suspended and deprived of its validity. Systemic philosophy will have to render contingency necessary, not only factually but also logically. These two motivations are key for reflecting upon eighteenth-century Naturphilosophie and its successors. (As we will argue in this chapter, its twentieth-century successors are organicism and the Gaia theory.) If philosophy wants to become a system, it will have to develop a mechanism allowing it to resolve the threat posed by contingency. If the a priori laws become contingent, then the system will collapse immediately. The system would therefore better respond to contingency by not having predefined rules, and instead allow rules to emerge during its confrontation with contingency and irregularity. We pass here from a transcendental characterized by rules to a transcendental characterized by teleology, analogous to the movement from Kant’s first to his third Critique. At the center of this systemic thinking is the concept of the organic, which comes from discoveries in the natural sciences, especially biology. Being organic is not merely maintaining part-whole relations, but also designates self-organization and autopoiesis, which we want to call recursivity. And if we want to address the question of technical systems, it is necessary to examine the history of the concept of nature, which is always the other of itself in the Hegelian sense. It is only through a close examination of the concept of nature that we can see clearly the question of technology, since the two have been opposed throughout the history of philosophy. In other words, without understanding the relation between nature and system, we will not understand technical systems: as Heidegger says, “technics: history of nature” (Technik: Historie der Natur).2 §9. KANT AND THE MODEL OF SYSTEM I would like to refer to a very intriguing quote from Schelling’s late philosophy here in order to open up the question of contingency, not only because Schelling will be guiding us throughout this chapter, but  Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI Schwarze Hefte 1938/39 (GA 95) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2014), 351.

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also because it in a certain sense reverses our conventional concept of necessity: The first impression (and this is decisive not only in life, but also in knowledge) of this thing, on the whole and in the particulars so highly contingent, that we call the world—this cannot possibly be the impression of something that has arisen out of rational necessity, that is, through a mere logical emanation. The world resembles nothing less than it resembles a product of pure reason. It contains a preponderant mass of unreason, such that one could almost say that the rational is merely the accidents.3

This seems to be a conclusion that Schelling has given to his early career of systemizing nature, an attempt made between 1794 and 1833 and continuing for a period of almost forty years. Schelling’s verdict is astonishing, not only in his rejection of rational necessity as the ground but also in his consideration of the rational as merely “the accidents.” This contingency is not only related to the particular, to the very instantiation, but rather concerns the whole, the system. We may conceive the system that Schelling is referring to here as a system regulated by the laws of nature. Schelling’s critique is very radical, probably even more so than that of Boutroux, author of the classic On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature (1874). Boutroux argued in this work that contingency is omnipresent, and that each law of nature always contains contingencies that can be logically deduced. It is also different from what we know today as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, since what Schelling is claiming is that contingency is probably the ground, the “substantial,” while the rational is nothing but its accident, and remains one of its expressions. In other words, if contingency is the original ground (Urgrund), it is also a nonground (Ungrund), or an abyss (Abgrund). One may want to ask, doesn’t this conceptualization in the late Schelling contradict the usual impression of the regularity of the concept of system—a philosophical credo of eighteenth-century philosophy? The task of creating a system, or taking philosophy as a system, can be seen as an effort to revive metaphysics after the domination of

 F. W. J. Schelling, Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie (Torino: Bottega D’erasmo, 1972), 99–100; also cited by Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87.

3

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science and the French Revolution. Schelling stands out as one of the most systemic thinkers—probably even more systemic than Hegel— especially in his last publication, Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, often referred as the Freiheitschrift. In this essay Schelling famously declares that the system is not able to get rid of evil; on the contrary, evil is always present in the system as the possibility of freedom. It is sufficient to see that contingency, which can be evil or a state of exception, is immanent in the system. It is of our interest here to carry out a historical-critical exposition of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, since it is an effort to eliminate oppositions (real-ideal, subjectobject, contingency-necessity) through the construction of a generic system, which we can call, following Schelling, the general organism (Allgemeiner Organismus). It is within such a conception that the system as an organic being is postulated, and from there we would like to understand it as a precursor of cybernetics. When it is seen in this way, nature is dissolved in cybernetics: the end of nature. It is such an end in the sense that an innocent, Romanticist, productive nature ceases to be; it is succeeded by cybernetics, as what happened to philosophy in general according to Heidegger.4 However, what exactly is a system, and in what sense can subject and object (nature) be reconciled? Before Schelling, other philosophers, notably Kant, had already attempted to answer this question. In his three Critiques, Kant laid down two fundamental methods of systematization. In the first Critique he proposed his famous architectonics to analyze the relation between nature and subject. Nature appears to the subject as phenomenon, the transcendental faculties regulating the apperception of it. The transcendental deduction of categories of the understanding defines the limit of the understanding as well as the limits of the appearance of phenomenon according to the four groups of categories: namely, quality, quantity, relation, and modality. The model presented in the first Critique is constitutive, in the sense that nature must be submitted to concepts legitimated by the transcendental deduction. Kant’s strategy can be understood in two points: On the one hand, Kant wants to avoid the phantasm of speculative reason, the well-known Schwämerei, hence reason is confined to the unification of rules of the  In his famous 1967 interview with Der Spiegel titled “Only a God Can Save Us,” Heidegger was asked what replaces philosophy; he answered firmly: cybernetics.

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understanding under principles5; second, Kant was obliged to develop a new mechanism or heuristics capable of addressing the Humean challenge on the “contingency of necessity.” A second model is mentioned in the appendix titled “The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection” in the first Critique,6 in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals,7 and more precisely again in the Critique of Judgement, in which reflective judgement is elaborated. The reflectivity here is regulative instead of constitutive, since it is no longer about the submission of nature to the mind according to concepts, but rather a heuristic (as Lyotard describes it) in search of an un-predefined end and its purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit).8 In Kant’s own words, determinative judgment is the imposition of the universal on the particulars, whereas reflective judgment is the search for the universal in the particulars. Simondon was very sharp to point out that in the first two Critiques, criticism was not able to think cybernetics since, like Auguste Comte’s

 In the first Critique, Kant defines reason in the following way: “[I]f understanding may be a faculty of unity of appearances by means of rules, then reason is the faculty of the universe of the rules of understanding under principles. Thus it [reason] never applies directly to experience or to any object, but instead applies to the understanding, in order to give unity a priori through concepts to the understanding’s manifold cognitions, which may be called ‘the unity of reason,’ and is of an altogether different kind than any unity that can be achieved by the understanding. This is the universal concept of the faculty of reason.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), A302/B359. 6  Kant understands deliberation (reflexio) not as a straightforward way to derive concepts from objects, but rather as a subjective way to arrive at concepts (ibid., A261/B317). All comparisons demand a deliberation, while one should distinguish logical reflection from transcendental reflection. Two drops of water, according to logical reflection, are identical, since they are concepts logically derived from categories, but according to transcendental reflection we know that they are different since, although they are identical in terms of concept, they occupy a different time and space; we may be able to assert that it is through the recursivity of thinking that contingency (that which distinguishes one drop of water from the other, and that no longer belongs to the logic of modality) is taken into account. 7  Kant mentions teleology in a footnote: “Teleology considers nature as a realm of ends, morality a possible realm of ends as a realm of nature. In the former, the realm of ends is a theoretical idea for the explanation of what exists. In the latter, it is a practical idea to bring about that which does not exist but what can become actual through our deeds and omissions and what we are to bring about in accord with precisely this idea.” Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Allan Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 54. 8  Jean-François Lyotard, Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (Paris: Galilée, 1991), 8–9. Lyotard’s description of reflective judgment is very machinic, in which he uses heuristic to describe the “transcendental activity of thought,” and sensation the indication that “informs thought of its state.” See also Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard, 73. 5

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positivism, Kant’s criticism still tends to think in terms of structure. It is only in the Critique of Judgment that Kant was able to address the question of cybernetics.9 The second book of the Critique of Judgment is dedicated to teleological judgment, in which Kant presents an organic model. Kant’s writing on teleological judgment had a profound impact on the natural scientists of his time,10 as well as on the next generation of philosophers such as Fichte, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, and Hegel (among others). The clearest definition of the organic form can be found in §64, where Kant defines the organic being as follows: “a thing exists as a natural end if it is (though in a double sense) both cause and effect of itself.”11 Kant then provides the example of a tree, highlighting three elements that define it as an organic being. Firstly, the tree reproduces itself according to its genus, meaning that it reproduces another tree; secondly, the tree produces itself as an individual, absorbing energy from the environment and turning them into nutrients to sustain its life; thirdly, different parts of the tree establish reciprocal relations and thus constitute the whole—as Kant writes, the “preservation of one part is reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the other parts.”12 The concept of the organic being consists in the reciprocal relations between parts and the whole and the capacity of reproduction. It also affirms the two important categories of relation: namely, community (Gemeinschaft) and reciprocity (Wechselwirkung).13 In other words, they constitute a primitive form of self-organization. As Kant writes: “[N]ature, on the contrary, organizes itself, and does so in each species of its organized products—following a single pattern, certainly, as to general features, but nevertheless admitting deviations calculated to secure self-preservation under particular circumstances.”14

 Gilbert Simondon, “Epistémologie et Cybernétique,” in Sur la Philosophie (Paris: PUF, 2016), 180. 10  See Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht: F. Reidel, 1982). 11  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), §64, 199. 12  Ibid. 13  This is the question that I promised to take up, see Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 132. 14  Kant, Critique of Judgment, §65, 203. 9

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§10. THE ORGANIC CONDITION OF PHILOSOPHY The organic constitutes a new condition of philosophizing, for the reason that the organism provides an exit for philosophy, enabling it to move out of the systemic determination by a priori laws, which surrender freedom to mechanical laws and fatalism. We would like to emphasize again that we are not talking about a philosophy of the organism but rather arguing that the organic imposes on philosophy a new condition and new method of thinking. The heuristic of the reflective judgment that Kant elaborated in the Critique of Judgment is the model based on which the final cause (Endursache) is interpreted. The natural end is something that cannot be observed objectively. We can see such and such a tree or such and such an animal, but we cannot grasp nature as a whole through mechanical rules. Reason can only understand the natural end through reflective judgment, meaning that it recursively arrives at a self-organizing being. Teleological thinking is in this sense circular: A→B→C→A.15 The figure of the organism gives Kant the means to resolve several problems. First, it provides the inspiration to imagine a system that is not based on mechanical laws. Mechanical laws are not sufficient to explain contingency and the teleology of nature; this comprises one of the major arguments in the antinomy of judgment.16 Secondly, organism provides the framework or foundation through which natural scientists should consider their object of study, without referring to merely mechanical explanation. Third, it allows Kant to systematically refuse mechanism, hylozoism (living matter), Spinozism (pantheism), and theism.17 Fourth, it is at the core of Kant’s political philosophy, since nature is “the great artist . . . the eventual ‘guarantee of perpetual peace.’”18 Nature is not  Lenoir, The Strategy of Life, 25.  The antinomy of teleological judgment runs as follows: Thesis: all production of material things and their forms must be judged as possible on mere mechanical laws. Antithesis: Some products of material nature cannot be judged as possible on mere mechanical laws (that is, for judging them quite a different law of causality is required, namely, that of final causes). See Kant, Critique of Judgment, §70, 214–15. 17  We are not claiming that Kant is the first thinker of a philosophy of the organism, as Joseph Needham attempted to show that Leibniz was the first European thinker of the organism, which is fully demonstrated in his monadology. However, it was Kant who has made this subject explicit and paradigmatic in his Critique of Judgment. We will discuss Leibniz’s organic thinking in chapter 2, as well as how it influenced Norbert Wiener. 18  Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 25. 15 16

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something that can be judged from a particular point of view, just as the French Revolution cannot be judged according to its actors. Rather, nature can be comprehended only as a complex whole, and the human species, as one part of it, will ultimately progress toward a system (or republican constitution) that approximates the natural end, to that “cosmopolitan whole, i.e., a system of all states that are in danger of acting injuriously upon one another.”19 In §72 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant refused two approaches to explaining purposiveness of nature—namely, the idealist and the realist approaches. The idealist approach implies a lack of design (Ansicht), which Kant illustrates with the accidentalism of Epicurus and Democritus as well as the fatalism of Spinoza. Kant criticized Spinoza’s metaphysics as a “fatalism of purposiveness” precisely because, in such an undesigned system, although the world is derived from the original being, it ignores its intelligence and sees it as emergence out of a mere “necessity of nature” of the original being, which leads to Kant’s objection that Spinoza’s system eliminates all contingency.20 This is because deus sive natura can be interpreted as implying that God is reduced to the substance of nature, thereby losing its transcendence: a dead god. The realism of purposiveness, on the other hand, assumes a life of matter as the result of design—namely, hylozoism—which implies that “life being either inherent in it or else bestowed upon it by an inner animating principle or world soul.”21 We will see later how Schelling took up Spinoza’s concept of nature and Plato’s world soul—namely, hylozoism—by integrating it into the organic.22

 Cited by ibid., 53 without source, but originally from the Critique of Judgment, §83.  Paul Guyer, “The Unity of Nature and Freedom: Kant’s Conception of the System of Philosophy,” in The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42. This critique of Spinozism is refused by Schelling in his Freiheitschrift, in which Schelling wants to show that pantheism is the system of freedom: “And here then, once and for all, our definite opinion about Spinozism! This system is not fatalism because it allows things to be contained in God; for, as we have shown, pantheism at least makes formal freedom not impossible.” See F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 20. 21  Kant, Critique of Judgment, §72, 219–20. 22  See Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 521. Beiser here argues that “[i]n seeing matter as only the negative side of life, as its lowest degree of organization and development, Schelling had virtually embraced the very hylozoism Kant had condemned.” 19 20

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We may want to consider that this development in the study of the organism, which later took the name biology, has provided a new condition for philosophizing, of which Naturphilosophie is part. Philosophy of nature is not one that is independent from other disciplines such as moral and political philosophy; in the third Critique this relation is clear, though sometimes seems to be only symbolic. For example, Kant wrote in the famous §49, “Beauty as symbol of the moral,” that one can always contest that the beautiful is not merely symbolic, but rather analogic in terms of operation since the organic, here taking the form of reflective judgment, shares the same mode of operation as practical reason. Therefore, Kant wrote, “in the latter (reflective judgment) connexion . . . must on the contrary be confined to the service of just the same practical faculty of reason in analogy with we considered the cause of the purpose in question.”23 The new causality, meaning that the organism is at the same time cause and effect of itself, is distinguished from the efficient cause (means to the end). With self-causation in mind, Kant opens the question, which resonates with what is called complexity theory today. In §71, “Introduction to the solution of the antinomy of judgment,” Kant states that “we cannot see into the first and inner ground of the infinite multiplicity of the particular rules of nature, which, being only known empirically, are for us contingent, and so we are absolutely incapable of reaching the intrinsic and all-sufficient principle of the possibility of a nature—a principle which lies in the supersensible.”24 It is sufficient, if not impossible, to list all the mechanical causes, however, the world cause (Weltursache) forces us to situate the phenomenon within a broader perspective: the uncanny whole. This epistemological limit impels Kant to criticize the narrow-minded scientific explanation, at the same time elevating the epistemological question to a metaphysical one. From the perspective of epistemology, Kant skillfully avoids the question of contingency, since if contingency enters into the list of mechanical causes, then certainty can never be assured. From the perspective of ontology, he effectively absorbs contingency, since the contingent is already inscribed and immanent in the  Kant, Critique of Judgment, §65, 203. The sentence previous to this is: “The concept of a thing as intrinsically a natural end is, therefore, not a constitutive concept either of understanding or of reason, but yet it may be used by reflective judgment as a regulative concept for guiding our investigation of objects of this kind by a remote analogy with our own causality according to ends generally, and as a basis of reflection upon their supreme source.” 24  Ibid., §71, 216. 23

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movement toward the natural end. This absorption of contingency in production is significant in Schelling’s philosophy, as we will see later. Here we can see an affinity between contingency and freedom. The organism also underlies a possible solution to the gap between nature and freedom, or theoretical reason and practical reason, that has already been expressed as the third antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason: Thesis: The causality according to laws of nature is not the only causality, from which the appearances of the world can thus one and all be derived. In order to explain these appearances, it is necessary to assume also a causality through freedom. Antithesis: There is no freedom, but everything in the world occurs solely according to laws of nature.25

The three Critiques of Kant, together with the Opus Postumum, comprise the effort to overcome this gap in order to integrate the system of nature and the system of freedom into a single unified system.26 Theoretical reason, according to Kant, is not able to overcome the gap between nature and freedom since it is not able to accommodate freedom due to the necessity that is already implied in theoretical reason. Only in practical reason is freedom able to self-legitimate as moral laws in order to reach the highest good and happiness. The theoretical reason that is considered as such is a form of determining judgment or mechanism, leaving no room for practical reason and contingency. However, the execution of practical reason is also constrained by the necessity of nature in its realization. The elaboration on the teleological judgment, which was largely influenced by the research in the natural science of his time, seems to serve the purpose. As Paul Guyer writes, “[T]he critique of teleological judgement is to bridge the gap between the realms of nature and freedom precisely by showing us that it is possible to realize within nature the final end the pursuit of which is made necessary by practical reason.”27 Reflective judgment seems to have overcome the problem of the mechanism of nature and gives reason a nondetermined heuristic (or, as

 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A445/B473, 473.  Guyer, “The Unity of Nature and Freedom,” 35. 27  Ibid. 25 26

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Kant says, according to “laws that are not yet given”)28 to move toward the highest good, as in the case with the categorical imperative.29 Hence now with Kant we have two models, one mechanical and one organic. It is this organic model that resonates with the Idealists and the natural scientists, such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), whose concept of the formative drive (Bildungstrieb) was frequently taken up by both Kant and Schelling. Schelling’s task consists in overcoming the opposition between the mechanical and the organic—that is to say, in creating a general system that effectively integrates both models into one, instead of looking for a bridge between two separated realms. One may say that Schelling takes up what Kant criticized as the dogmatic system of hylozoism (a principle of the world soul).30 §11. RECURSIVITY IN FICHTE’S ICH Before we move to Schelling and explore recursivity in the concept of the nature, it is necessary to pass by Fichte, since Fichte pushes much further the reflective act in Kant’s system and hands it down to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. It is known that Fichte questioned Kant’s Ich denke (I think) as a mere fact (Tatsache) without being able to account for its causality.31 The I think of Kant is still motivated by Cartesian considerations, and Kant’s renunciation of the idea that the human subject is capable of intellectual intuition, whereby it can theoretically comprehend ideas such as freedom, God, and immortality,  Kant, Critique of Judgment, §69, 385.  We may want to reconsider the famous sentence toward the end of Kant’s second Critique: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and constantly reflection concerns itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 169. Howard Caygill makes an even stronger claim, arguing that this analogy points to a “Kantian physiology of the soul and the cosmos” that unites the “within me” (freedom) and the “above me.” See Howard Caygill, “Soul and Cosmos in Kant: A Commentary on ‘Two Things Fill the Mind . . . ,’” in Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future, ed. Diane Morgan and Gary Banham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 215. Caygill traces the relation between the cosmos and the moral in Kant’s analogy (e.g., beauty as a symbol of the moral) to the influence of Brown and Haller’s theory of irritability on Kant’s Opus Postumum, affirming the organicist structure found in both. 30  Kant, Critique of Judgment, §72, 392, 220. 31  Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1994), 18. 28 29

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suggests the limit of the I think. Fichte took up the critique of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Christian Gottfried Schütz, arguing that the I think should be firstly understood as an act (Tathandlung). This is by no means a simple act that directs from the ich to the empirical world like any ordinary consciousness, but rather an act that is capable of selfpositing (selbst setzen) and reflection. In the later passages, we will see how this self-positing is associated with the ancient question of the soul in Schelling’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus. The self-positing of the ich allows Fichte to further develop the “absolute I.” The absolute I is the starting point of knowledge. It is absolute, since it is not conditioned by anything else other than itself. Fichte rejects the thing-in-itself as the inscrutable source of material diversity among representations32 and takes intellectual intuition—an intuition that is not granted to mortals in Kant’s system—as the ground of such self-positing. Such an intuition indicates the I’s nonrepresentational awareness of itself.33 Unbedingte is also related to the “thing” (Ding), meaning that it is not taken as a thing, as Schelling explained: “Conditioning is the act through which something becomes a thing conditioned, that which is made into a thing, which at the same time reveals that nothing can be posited by itself as a thing, i.e. that an unconditional thing is a contradiction.”34 In the chapter “Antiphysics and Neo-Fichteanism” of Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, Iain Hamilton Grant has clearly shown the mathematical model of Fichteanism as a “recursivity” or “iteration.” For Fichte, the absolute I is the only pole of freedom, since it originates from a self-positing instead of being posited by other beings. Fichte ascribes his transcendental philosophy to the realm of “sheer contingency.”35 The mind and nature, the I and the non-I, constitute a duality. The unconditional I has a non-I as negation or as check (Anstoß); what is outside of the unconditional I is only the product of such a negative effect. Hence nature is only the product of  Günther Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27. 33  Lara Ostaric, “The Concept of Life in Early Schelling,” in Interpreting Schelling: Critical Essays, ed. Lara Ostaric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 57. 34  Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schelling’s Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1995), 50: “Bedingen heißt die Handlung, wodurch etwas zum Ding wird, bedingt, das was zum Ding gemacht ist, wodurch zugleich erhelt, daß nichts durch isch selbst als Ding gesetzt seyn kann, d.h. Daß ein unbedingtes Ding ein Widerspruch ist.” (I/I, 166 f.) 35  Daniel Breazeale, “The Spirit of the Wissenschaftslehre,” in The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 177. 32

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the productive imagination.36 This does not mean that nature outside us doesn’t exist, but that nature as both mechanical and organic model can be only the abstraction of the I through the non-I. After the first principle (self-positing) and the second principle (Anstoß), there is also a third principle, which concerns the unification of I as act. The absolute I is the place where thing and consciousness unite, and the duality between the divisible I and the divisible non-I is resolved: the ideal-real, real-ideal.37 Nature is the object of the Wissenschaftslehre. However, it is only an abstraction of the intelligence. For example, consciousness can grasp a straight line, and abstract its form, and in this sense it pretends to be a system of absolutely universal consciousness, which has no tolerance of a realism beside it.38 Fichte’s system can be conceived as a system of form, like mathematics. Indeed, the two open letters from Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi have attacked Fichte’s Wissenscahftslehre. Kant, of whom Fichte considered himself a disciple, criticized it as being “merely a logic, thus devoid of content and without reference to reality,” whereas the latter criticized it as mathematics and charged him with “nihilism.”39 Herein also lies the fundamental difference between Schelling and Fichte concerning the definition of the Absolute, as Schelling replied to Fichte that what he wants to call philosophy is “the material proof of idealism.”40 Schelling wants to reconcile the real and the ideal without reducing the real to the ideal as Fichte does, which seems to him an “annihilation of nature,” but rather to found the ideal on the real. This is the core concept of Schelling’s philosophy of nature and philosophy of identity, since nature is not something outside us, neither is it simply something in us like human nature: One must recognize the unity between nature and subject so as to abolish the dualism between subject-object. This distinction is later described by  Daniel Breazeale, “Against Nature? On the Status and Meaning of the Natural World in J. G. Fichte’s Early Wissenschaftslehre,” Philosophia OSAKA 9 Offprint (2014): 21. 37  Fichte, “Letter to Schelling 15 Nov 1800,” in J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophical Rupture between Schelling and Fichte (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 27. 38  Fichte and Schelling, The Philosophical Rupture, 57–58. Fichte says, “[I]f it [idealism] wants to be something, it would have to be universal formal logic.” 39  Günther Zöller, “From Critique to Metacritique, Fichte’s Transformation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism,” in The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 139. 40  Fichte and Schelling, The Philosophical Rupture, 43. 36

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Hegel in his The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, according to which Fichte aims for a “subjective subjectobject” while Schelling is looking for an “objective subject-object,” meaning that for Schelling nature is considered to be independent (selbstständig).41 The Absolute for Schelling is no longer the subjective pole but rather the absolute unity of subject-object, which is constantly in recursive movement. I use the term recursive instead of reflective for a significant reason, since according to Schelling, reflection is also a process of separation: the subject reflects on itself in order to separate the “I think” and the “I being thought.” Recursivity is possible only under the condition of an absolute unity.42 Fichte is different from Schelling in the sense that for the former the recursive operation happens only in the ich, in which the “self-generation” (Selbsterzeugung) of nature takes place.43 Fichte adopted the concept of the organic in Kant’s third Critique, and the organic model becomes an “antiphysics” par excellence, since the mechanical model is only a mere abstraction of theoretical reason but not the realization of practical reason. The question of recursivity in Fichte has been explored by the French philosopher Pierre Livet in his 1987 article “Intersubjectivité, réflexivité et recursivité chez Fichte,” in which he defines reflection as “recursivity which loops [boucle] immediately on itself.”44 Livet shows that the recursive process of the I and non-I constitutes a sort of endomorphism, in which the Other is not different from the I. The I in Fichte’s own words is the “mirror that mirrors itself,”45 or an “acting that goes back onto itself” (in sich zurückgehendes Handeln).46 For Grant, the dialectical duality of the I and the non-I, the two pure forms, generates what he calls “abstract materiality.” Grant cites the following passage from Fichte’s Wissenschaftlehre to demonstrate this recursive model:

 Bernd-Olaf Küppers, Natur als Organismus: Schellings frühe Naturphilosophie und ihre Bedeutung für die moderne Biologie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), 35.  Ibid., 39. 43  Zöller, “From Critique to Metacritique,” 140. 44  Pierre Livet, “Intersubjectivité, réflexivité et recursivité chez Fichte,” Archives de Philosophie 50, no. 4 (1987): 585: “On pourrait définir la réflexivité comme une récursivité qui se boucle immédiatement sur elle-même.” 45  Cited by Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy, 36, from Fichte, GA IV/2: 49. 46  Cited by Zöller, ibid., 76, from Fichte, GA I/4: 216. 41

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Thus the activity returns into itself by way of the reciprocating [des Wechsels], and the reciprocating returns into itself by way of the activity. Everything reproduces itself, and there can be no hiatus therein; from every link one is driven to all the others. The activity of the form determines that of the matter, this is the matter of the reciprocating, and in turn its form; the form of the reciprocating determines the activity of the form and so on. They are all one and the same synthetic state [Zustand]. The act returns to itself by way of a circle. But the whole circle is absolutely posited. It is because it is, and no higher ground can be given for the same. (W I, 170–71; 1982: 158–59)47

Grant hence concludes that Fichte has produced a “dead nature of inert material particulars,” and becomes “an unrecognized contributor to formalist models in mathematized science.” The question of the recursivity developed from Kant’s Critique of Judgment (which can itself be traced to Leibniz’s mathematics and metaphysics) has great importance here, since it is what allows a system—and by system we return to the definition by Schelling as a “self-contained whole”—to emerge.48 For Schelling, the question is no longer one of granting priority to the I, but rather to nature as the one and the whole, to give freedom to it and derive the Ideal from the real.49 Hence Schelling’s description of the system is even more powerful, and in certain ways anticipates a more complex system of recursivity such as Ilya Prigogine’s dissipative system and Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s autopoiesis.50

 Ian Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2008), 92. Recursion is also applicable to Fichte’s ethical thought, as Allen Wood summarizes: “For Fichte, each action belonging to my moral vocation lies on the path toward the final end, and necessarily draws us nearer to it. Each recursion, moreover, involves setting only a new end within a determinate range, and not also setting the final end according to some determinate concept of it. On the contrary, my only conception of the final end is that it is what lies at infinity along the path determined by this recursive series of action.” Allen W. Wood, Fichte’s Ethical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 181. 48  F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 145. 49  Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, 94. 50  The philosopher Marie-Luise Heuser, in her earlier work Die Produktivität der Natur. Schellings Naturphilosophie und das neue Paradigma der Selbstorganisation in den Naturwissenschaften (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 1986), has shown the similarity between Schelling’s concept of self-organization and Ilya Prigogine’s Far-from-Equilibrium Systems and how these two thoughts prioritize becoming over being. 47

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§12. CIRCULARITY IN SOUL AND NATURE In a letter to Fichte, Schelling writes, “I speak of object being introduced to consciousness and of consciousness being introduced to object. In this wording, the unity [of the two factors] seems an [external] addition.”51 How is such a recursive model based on the unity of subject and object possible? The question is no longer simply the concept of knowledge but rather the enterprise of philosophy. Philosophy for Schelling is the material proof of transcendentalism. The systematization of philosophy is also a systematization of the way that knowledge is acquired and evolves. In the recursive model, the subject and object have a reciprocal relation, through which a unity is reached after every bifurcation. If I know the world outside of me, it is because I am aware of the fact that I am aware of it. And by coming back to myself, I acquire knowledge of the outside world, like a constant process of negotiation—or more precisely, as Schelling says, an eternal action (ewiges Handeln).52 This is also the ancient concept of the soul as “coming back to the self” (Zu-sich-selbst-Kommen) that we will examine in the following passages and in chapter 3. Bernd-Olaf Küppers concisely summarizes this constant differentiation and unification as follows: Only in this way can the Absolute infinitely differentiate itself while preserving its identity. Since the absolute enters into a difference to itself, which dissolves into an indifference at a higher stage of development, there is a development of the absolute from the general to the particular.53

The conception of nature sees nature and the I as two instances of a generic model, and it is by showing such a generic model that the real and the ideal can be reconciled. In such a view, the object and its determination are never separated in intuition.54 Matter for Schelling is composed of two forces, attraction and repulsion, a concept that he took from Kant’s 1786 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and  Schelling, “Schelling in Jena to Fichte in Berlin, November 19, 1800,” in Fichte and Schelling, The Philosophical Rupture between Schelling and Fichte, 44. 52  Küppers, Natur als Organismus, 42. 53  Ibid., 40–41: “Nur so kann das Absolute sich unter Wahrung seiner Identität unendlich oft ausdifferenzieren. Da das Absolute zu sich selbst in eine Differenz tritt, die sich jeweils auf einer höheren Entwicklungstufe in eine Indifferenz auflöst, gibt es eine Entwicklung des Absoluten vom Allgemeinen zum Besonderen.” 54  Schelling, Ideas, 193. 51

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that was also confirmed by a chemist of his time, Alexander Nicolaus Scherer (1771–1824). In Idea, Schelling quoted Scherer extensively, especially the latter’s conception of the properties of bodies as a result of the activated basic forces of the body. For Schelling, different matters, including light and heat, are only compositions of these forces according to different degrees or proportions, like the cosmogony in Plato’s Timaeus. The reciprocity between the attractive and repulsive forces is best demonstrated in magnetism and Galvanism which begins with polarities.55 Schelling reads §64 and §65 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in a similar manner. In these sections, Kant treats the organic form of living beings in terms of reciprocity and community, using the example of the part/whole relation of a tree. In Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, Schelling refers to this passage in Kant and, more specifically, the idea of absolute individuality in an organism: “Its parts are possible only through the whole, and the whole is possible, not through assembling but through interaction.”56 The unity of the parts and the whole is accomplished through an idea instead of through matter. The idea stands as the third that “contains” two potentially opposed entities. Nature can be regarded as a whole—a whole that later takes on the name of the general organism (allgemeiner Organismus) in Von der Weltseele.57 This is a whole that also consists of two opposing concepts: on the one hand, mechanism, which is “a regressive series of causes and effects”; on the other, purposiveness, which is “independent of mechanism, simultaneity of causes and effects.”58 These two confront each other as two irreconcilable parts, but by unifying them through the idea, nature emerges in circular form, like the world soul described by Plato: If we unite these two extremes (mechanism and purposiveness), the idea arises in us of a purposiveness of the whole; nature becomes a circle which returns into itself, a self-closed system. The series of causes and  Polarity is the first essential step for the genesis of the circular form, as Schelling wrote in Von der Weltseele: “Es ist erstes Prinzip einer philosophischen Naturlehre, in der ganzen Natur auf Polarität und Dualismus auszugehen.” Cited by H. A. M. Snelders, “Romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the Inorganic Natural Sciences 1797–1840: An Introductory Survey,” Studies in Romanticism 9, no. 3 (summer 1970): 198. 56  Schelling, Ideas, 31–32. 57  F. W. J. Schelling, Von der Weltseele. Eine Hypothese der höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus (Hamburg: Tredition, 2011). 58  Schelling, Ideas, 40–41. 55

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effects ceases entirely, and there arises a reciprocal connection of means and end; neither could the individual become real without the whole, nor the whole without the individual.59

Through the third, here taking the form of the idea, which unifies and contains the two extremes, we discover an isomorphism between nature and mind. This isomorphism is revealed in the famous statement in the Ideas: “Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature.”60 The relation between mind and nature is not constituted by a monism, but rather they share a generic model of individuation. Now the question that has to be posed is the following: Whence comes this organizing force? To posit God as the answer of creation seems far too easy for the young Schelling, who identified himself as a Spinozist in an early letter to Hegel.61 It seems that in Schelling’s early period his affinity to Spinoza and distance from religion allowed for a Naturphilosophie and later a speculative physics to emerge. However, as an Idealist, Schelling also has the difficulty of addressing the existence of matter prior to the I. Only by synchronizing the genesis of matter and the genesis of the mind can such a gap be eliminated. In his 1786 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant claims that all change in matter has external causes; therefore matter “has no absolutely inner determinations and grounds of determination.”62 In the same book, Kant proposes to understand the movement of matter according to two fundamental forces: attraction and repulsion. Like Kant, Schelling sees matter as the composition of attractive and repulsive forces. However, unlike Kant as well as other mechanists, especially the Swiss physicist Georges-Louis Le Sage (author of Essai de chimie mécanique [1758)], Schelling is skeptical that one can presuppose matter before force. For example, Le Sage’s atomism sees matter as being made up of divisible particles.63 Schelling’s question was, where does the division end? Presupposing the existence of particles, to Schelling, is only an intuitive way of understanding nature, not the  Ibid.; emphasis mine.  Ibid., 43. 61  See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 32–33; letter from Schelling to Hegel, Feb. 4, 1795. 62  Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, 31. 63  Schelling, Ideas, 163. 59 60

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philosophical way.64 Schelling’s counterproposal is very speculative: He refuses the existence of individual particles as the foundation of matter and recognizes it as a genesis of forces. When the two forces cancel each other out such that equilibrium is attained, then there is just dead matter.65 This leads to the question: If active and unbalanced forces are no longer to be found in dead matter, how can one explain the existence of such an object before us? The answer must be: Such dead matter does not, because it cannot, exist in visible nature. Herein also lies Schelling’s critique of Newton’s interpretation of gravitational force: Gravitational force is for Newton only attraction, but Schelling argues, on the contrary, that it is not enough to deploy attraction without repulsion; this is merely “a scientific fiction” that reduces “the phenomenon as such to laws without thereby intending to explain it.”66 Nevertheless, the two forces, negative and positive, are also not enough, for Schelling goes on to introduce a third force: gravity (Schwerkraft). Gravity is the force that contains and unifies the two oppositional forces, and brings the ideal into the real: If Kant’s expansive and attractive forces (he names “attractive” what we have called “retarding” up to this point) represent nothing other than the original opposition, then he cannot complete the construction of matter from two forces alone. He still requires the third force which fixes the opposition, and which, according to us, is to be sought in the universal striving toward indifference, or in gravity.67

Gravity is the unifying force, yet it is not simply one of many synthesizing forces but the appearance of absolute identity, the indifference between the real and the ideal.68 As a result, we need to bear in mind that this Indifferenz (absence of difference) is not the cancelation of all forces, nor is it the void. Rather, it is the full cohesion of the universal in

 Schelling’s approach resonates very much with Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, which is based on the rejection of a materialistic science by introducing the study of organisms. 65  Schelling, Ideas, 148. 66  Albert Borgmann, “Broken Symmetries: The Romantic Search for a Moral Cosmology,” in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. Nikolas Kompridis (London: Routledge, 2006), 252. 67  F. W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 189. 68  Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 119. 64

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the particular (like sand) or the particular in the universal (like liquid). The conflict of these two forces will be resolved to give an identity, and hence a metastability. What we see in front of us as natural objects are in a metastable state. Any modification in the material, energetic, and informational condition, when strong enough, can trigger further individuation. Schelling did not employ the term metastability but rather cohesion. He also draws an analogy between the Ichheit and the cohesion of the two forces in magnetism: “Cohesion, or, in other words, magnetism, is the impression of self or the I in matter, by which it first emerges as something peculiar to the universal identity and rises into the realm of form.”69 Such a physical-cum-metaphysical paradigm for force is also to be found in the idea of an organism. The emergence of life cannot be explained merely by chemical operations, though they are what give rise to the inorganic nature that is necessary for organic nature (and, indeed, Schelling admits that chemical operations are the only graspable determinate form [bestimmte Form].70 In his discussion of the principle of life, Schelling is responding to Blumenbach’s concept of the Bildungstrieb (driving force for formation), a concept also at stake, of course, in Kant’s third Critique.71 Schelling’s critique of the Bildungstrieb is that it alone cannot act as the primary cause of life. The Bildungstrieb, according to Schelling, is “only an expression [Ausdruck] of every original unification of freedom and lawfulness [Gesetzmäßigkeit] in all formations of nature, but not a fundamental explanation [Erklärungsgrund] of this unification itself.”72 Let us reiterate the above thesis: If Schelling rejects the Bildungstrieb, it is because life demands both forces and a third that is able to retain the contradiction and strive for Indifferenz. There are many more fundamental principles of nature that underlie the process of individuation. These principles are not material, but abstract principles that can be postulated in terms of two opposing tendencies, namely, unification as the positive principle and differentiation as the negative principle.  Ibid., 113, from SW4, S.451f: “Die Cohäsion, oder, was dasselbe, der Magnetismus, ist die Impression der Selbst- oder Ichheit in der Materie, wodurch sie zuerst als Besonderes aus der allgemeinen Identität heraustritt und sich in das Reich der Form erhebt.” 70  F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Cotta: Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1860), 1:2: 498. 71  Timothy Lenoir, “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology,” ISIS 71, no. 256 (1980): 79. 72  Schelling, Von der Weltseele, 178. 69

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In Von der Weltseele, Schelling points out that John Brown’s theory of animal excitability (tierische Erregbarkeit) and powers of excitation (erregende Potenzen) correspond to the positive and negative principles of life.73 How does matter emerge from these forces? How does nature give rise to life? These are core questions that were not resolved in Schelling’s philosophy of nature, since his is ultimately a philosophy of form. The Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) attempted to give a metaphysical reading of inorganic matters such as light, heart, magnetism, and chemistry; and “On the World Soul” (Von der Weltseele), published in 1798, proposed a treatise on organic matter. In the following years, Schelling published his First Outline of a System of Philosophy (1800), along with an introduction to his First Outline, in which he integrates both Ideas and Weltseele to construct his system of nature through what he calls speculative physics. Schelling’s philosophy of nature could be read as an analysis of the potencies to prepare a ground for unfolding the structure of nature. The potencies of nature are investigated according to increasing complexities: A = B, A2, A3, namely, from the inorganic to the organic (dynamic) and the organism. Schelling draws on Carl Friedrich Kilmeyer’s definition of the organic as the repetition of the inorganic at a higher potency, and sees the plant as a preliminary stage of life, and in animals the form of a true organism.74 The work of the American philosopher Bruce Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Scheme of Freedom,75 is instrumental to our reconstruction of the appropriation of the concept of the organic in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Matthews traces Schelling’s appropriation of the organic from his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, traversing his reading of Kant and Fichte, up to his mature writing on freedom. This form, or the original form, is identified in Plato’s Philebus, a form that is the gift of the gods, according to Socrates:

 Schelling, Von der Weltseele, 156–59.  Dieter Wandschneider, “The Philosophy of Nature of Kant, Schelling and Hegel,” in The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Dean Moyar (New York: Routledge, 2010), 79. 75  Bruce Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012). 73 74

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This form is a gift of the gods to men, which together with the purest fire was first given to them through Prometheus. Therefore the ancients (greater men and closer to the gods than us) have left the story behind, that everything which has ever emerged out of unity and multiplicity (plurality), in that it united within itself the unlimited (apeiron, universal) and the limit (to peras, unity): that thus we too in light of this arrangement of things should presuppose and search for every object one idea. . . . —It was the gods then, who taught us to think, learn and teach like this.76

This form is the unity of the infinite in the finite, the multiplicity in the one, a form that caricatures the soul in Plato’s Timaeus: a circular movement that constantly comes back to itself. It is only with such a form that we are able to perceive the infinite in the finite, unity in multiplicity, as it is in nature as well as in art. Schelling’s reading of Plato’s world soul through the lens of Kant’s Critique of Judgment is foundational to his later development, including his appropriation of Spinozism. In his commentary on the Timaeus we find a passage that is almost identical to what Kant describes in §64 of the third Critique, which we have already seen: “We must remember from distance that Plato sees the whole world as a ζωον, that is to say, as an organized being [Wesen], as a being, whose parts are only possible in related to the whole, whose parts are reciprocal with each other as means and ends, and with each other produce their form as reciprocal connections.”77 This original form is opposed to the mechanical form, but it is not on the other side of it; rather, the organic form allows the integration of the mechanical into itself, into a higher potency. There is therefore no longer an opposition between the organic and the mechanical, since the opposition is subsumed within the structure and operation of the organism. The organic form stands for both nature and freedom. It is possible to read Schelling’s early philosophy of nature between 1795 and 1799 as an elaboration of such an organic form, which is at the same time a retrieval of Greek philosophy through the lens of modern natural

 F. W. J. Schelling, Timaeus (Stuttgart: Frommann Holzboog, 1794/1994), 36; also cited by Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy, 46. 77  Schelling, Timaeus, 33: “wir mußen uns ferner erinnern, daß Plato die ganze Welt als ein ζωον, d.h. als ein organisirtes Wesen ansah, also als ein Wesen, deßen Teile nur durch ihre Beziehung auf das Ganze möglich sind, deßen Teile wechselseitig sich gegen einander als Mittel u. Zweck verhalten, u. sich also einander ihrer Form sowol als Verbindung nach wechselseitig hervorbringen.” 76

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science as well as an endowing of a new metaphysical meaning to nature that was in the process of being subsumed by mechanical laws.78 §13. RECURSIVITY IN NATURPHILOSOPHIE In the First Outline it is very clear that Schelling is largely influenced by Spinoza, as he claims to develop a “Spinozism of physics.”79 Schelling adopts Spinoza’s view that nature is one and infinite,80 and that such a nature as a whole is “at once the cause and the effect of itself.”81 Spinoza distinguishes two types of causation: transitive causation, in which the effect comes from an external cause, and immanent causation, in which the cause and effect are in the being itself, that is, a self-causation.82 Secondly, Schelling employs the vocabulary of Spinoza, notably natura naturata and natura naturans. In his Ethics, Spinoza defines the two terms as follows: [B]y Natura naturans we must understand that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself or those attributes of substance, which expresses eternal and infinite essence, in other words . . . God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. By Natura naturata I understand all that which follows from the necessity of the nature of God, or of any of the attributes of God, that is, all the modes of the attributes of God, that is, all the modes of the attributes of God, in so far as they are considered as things which are in God, and which without God cannot exist or be conceived.83  Xavier Tilliette shows that there is a second philosophy of nature in Schelling from 1800 on, for example, in his Würzburg conferences and also in the dialogues such as Bruno and Clara, but this second philosophy of nature engages little with science; the emphasis is on religion, or the hen kai pan. Tilliette suggests that Schelling was content with his previous works on nature and in the reprints of Idees and Weltseele, Schelling only added a preface and some minor corrections. See Xavier Tilliette, Schelling, Une philosophie en devenir, 1, le système vivant 1794–1821 (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 386. 79  Schelling, “Introduction to the First Outline,” in First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 194. 80  It is believed that Spinoza took this idea from Giordano Bruno; see Victor Delbos, Le spinozisme: cours professé à la Sorbonne en 1912–1913 (Paris: Vrin, 1916/2005), 20. It is no coincidence that later Schelling also published a dialogue on Bruno: Bruno, oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge (1802). 81  Schelling, First Outline, 202. 82  Delbos, Le spinozisme, 17. 83  Baruch Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1883/1955), part 1, prop. 29, 68–69. 78

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Hence natura naturata refers to the products of nature, and natura naturans designates the productivity of nature. According to Schelling, when nature is mere product (natura naturata), we take it as object, but as productivity, we then take it as subject.84 Now, the subject has a different relation to nature, in the sense that the I is part of nature and can be deduced from nature. Nature as productivity constantly generates products, and hence nature is always in becoming. Schelling uses the same vocabulary as Spinoza, but he may not employ the same senses and weights that Spinoza gave to these terms. Joseph P. Lawrence proposes that Schelling gives a stricter priority to natura naturans than does Spinoza,85 and in so doing also reintroduces contingency into the process of production. If in Spinoza what is revealed rationally is rational, for Schelling, as Lawrence notes, what is revealed rationally can turn out to be irrational.86 The products are forms of appearance (Erscheinungformen); they are temporary products. The products of nature are produced when the force of nature is inhibited (gehemmt) by something else, and in the products we observe the constant manifestation of nature. Schelling often employed the example of the whirlpool. When the flow encounters an obstacle, it produces a whirlpool. However, it is not a whirlpool as such, but like a whirlpool changes constantly according to the axis of time and the force of the flow. It means that the product is also under transformation and becomes productive: “The whirlpool is not something stationary, but rather constantly changeable and newly reproduced every moment. No product in nature is thus fixed, but produced in every moment by the power of the whole Nature. (We do not see the persistence [Bestehen], but the constant reproduction of the natural products.)”87 The visual example of the whirlpool demonstrates the becoming of the infinite of nature, and its manifestation in finite beings, and situates  Hans-Peter Kunz, Unendlichkeit und System: die Bedeutung des Unendlichen in Schellings frühen Schriften und in der Mathematik (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2013), 116. 85  Joseph P. Lawrence, “Spinoza in Schelling: Appropriation through Critique,” in Idealistic Studies 33, no. 2–3 (2003): 178. 86  Ibid., 186. 87  Cited by Kunz, Unendlichkeit und System, 103, from A.a.O., S. 276 (Anmerkung): “Der Wirbel ist nicht etwas Feststehendes, sondern beständig Wandelbares aber in jedem Augenblick neu Reproducirtes. Kein Produkt in der Natur ist also fixirt, sondern in jedem Augenblick durch die Kraft der ganzen Nature producirt. (Wir sehn eingentlich nicht das Bestehen, sondern das bestängdige Reproducirtwerden der Naturprodukte.)” 84

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them in a system in which finite beings are carried within the force of nature, whether it is generation or corruption. In the constant becoming of nature there are different forms of metastabilities, and in fact the organic form of being as well as philosophy are constituted by the metastability and are conditioned by the unconditional nature. Fredrick Beiser observed some reconciliation of the preceding oppositions among the early Romantics. The first consists in the reconciliation between idealism and realism, incarnated in Fichte and Spinoza. Fichte stands for idealism, in which the subject is posed as the foundation of knowledge, and Spinoza stands for realism, which affirms the existence of nature outside the human subject. Or, more precisely, in Schelling’s writings the philosophy of nature means to overcome both transcendental philosophy and empirical science by founding the ideal on the real through the search for its regularity and purposiveness. The second reconciliation is the reading of Spinoza through Leibniz, especially the latter’s monadology. Beiser states: “The romantics fused Leibniz’s vis viva with Spinoza’s single infinite substance, creating a vitalistic pantheism or pantheistic vitalism. If they accepted Spinoza’s monism, they rejected his mechanism; if they rejected Leibniz’s pluralism, they accepted his vitalism, his organic concept of nature implicit within his dynamics.”88 The vis viva is a concept from Leibniz that is defined as “a power that acts as long as there is suppression of obstacle, without identifying itself with the activity.”89 The force acts spontaneously without being confined to a predefined activity. The vis viva is compatible with Leibniz’s concept of substance, which stands in contradiction to Aristotle’s, since for the latter, substance, either animated or not, is not really spontaneous but rather acts according to the excitation from exteriority. In this marriage between Leibnizian force and Spinozist substance we can see the omnipresence of an organic and recursive form composed of monadic reflections according to a preestablished harmony.90 The monad becomes the simple factor of the composition of nature, and their totality conditions their own movements. When Schelling

 Ibid., 227–28.  Claire Schwarz, Leibniz—La raison de l’être (Paris: Belin, 2017), 202: “une puissance qui agit dès la suppression de l’obstacle, sans s’identifier à l’activité elle-même.” 90  In the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 105, Schelling suggests connecting inorganic nature and organic nature through the preestablished harmony. 88 89

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describes what he calls dynamic atoms, he means original actants (ursprüngliche Aktionen) that are comparable to atoms that constitute the physical material for the corpuscular philosophers, which Schelling also calls nature monads (Naturmonade).91 However, it is important to bear in mind that these simple actants are not masses themselves; they are more like forces or syntheses of forces. Schelling worked out a three-stage operation that sounds very much like a Simondonian conception of individuation: When a limit or inhibition is imposed upon the actants, it is followed by an “alternation” of forces in the being in question; the alteration finally leads to a metastability.92 Now Schelling wants to avoid an opposition between the atomistic system and the dynamical system, since the starting points of both ideas are problematic and oppositional93: The dynamical system denies the absolute evolution of Nature, and passes from Nature as synthesis (= Nature as subject) to Nature as evolution (= Nature as object); the atomistic system passes from the evolution, as the original, to Nature as synthesis; dynamics passes from the standpoint of intuition to that of reflection; atomistics from the standpoint of reflection to that of intuition.94

Schelling wants to use his system as a third, which means to consider the duality of nature as both productivity and product, situated in a recursive reciprocity. This recursive reciprocity is clearly expressed in the “On the World Soul” and in the third division of the First Outline. Schelling offered three hypotheses regarding the first cause of life, and as usual the third is the most probable system. The first hypothesis asks, should one find the first cause of life in living matter itself? The second hypothesis asks, should one find the first cause of life outside of living matter? The first hypothesis is not valid, since life is not the property of its products, but the other way around: Matter is the product of life. The second hypothesis is based on the medical discovery of irritation and allergy, meaning that the animal matter is stimulated by the outer  Peter Heuer, “Schellings Begriff der Naturphilosophie,” in Der Naturbegriff in der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie, ed. Peter Heuer et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 186. 92  Schelling, “Introduction to the Outline,” 224–28. 93  Schelling, First Outline, 211. 94  Ibid. 91

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environment. This is rejected because it is only an explanation based on transitive causality, and hence cannot explain life. Compared to speculative physics, what physics and chemistry cannot do is to go beyond nature as phenomenon or nature as object to nature as subject. The third hypothesis runs like this: “[T]he first cause of the living [Lebendigen] is contained in opposing principles, of which one (positive) is to be sought outside the living organism, the other (negative) in the organism itself.”95 For example, life is the organic form of the positive and negative principles of combustion96: on the one hand phlogistication-deoxidization and on the other dephlogistication-oxidization.97 It is worth noticing here that the question of heat is at the center of this recursive model, as it was one of the most significant discoveries of eighteenthcentury science, and we will return to it in chapter 2. This “eternal loop” is the form of the general organism (Allgemeiner Organismus) that is also nature conceived by Schelling, a revival of the concept of the world soul in Plato’s Timaeus. Here also lies the element of Schelling’s concept of organization: Organization is to me nothing else than the stopped stream of causes and effects. Only where nature has not inhibited this current does it flow forward (in a straight line). Where nature inhibits the current, the current returns (in a circular line) to itself. Not all succession of causes and effects is excluded by the concept of the organism; this term denotes only a succession, which flows back within itself within certain limits.98

We will further discuss the question of form in Schelling’s early philosophy in chapter 3. It is necessary here to state that this model of

 Küppers, 103: “die erste Ursache des Lebendigen ist in entgegengesetzten Prinzipien enthalten, wovon das eine (positive) außerhalb des lebenden Organismus, das andere (negative) im Organismus selbst zu suchen ist.” 96  Schelling, Von der Weltseele, in Sämmtliche Werke 1:2, 493. 97  Phlogiston was believed to be the substance of heat. Even after Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s oxidizing principle of combustion, many scientists such as James Watt, James Hutton, and Joseph Priestley still retained the notion of phlogiston. 98  Schelling, Von der Weltseele, in Sämmtliche Werke 1:2, 349: “Organisation ist mir überhaupt nichts anderes als der aufgehaltene Strom von Ursachen und Wirkungen. Nur wo die Natur diesen Strom nicht gehemmt hat, fließt er vorwärts (in gerader Linie). Wo sie ihn hemmt, kehrt er (in einer Kreislinie) in sich selbst zurück. Nicht also alle Succession von Ursachen und Wirkungen ist durch den Begriff des Organismus ausgeschlossen; dieser Begriff bezeichnet nur eine Succession, die innerhalb gewisser Grenzen eingeschlossen in sich selbst zurückfließet.” 95

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nature is not only limited to explaining a particular phenomenon, but rather aims to explain nature in its totality. This is the aim of a “system” instead of a mere hypothesis. In every single finite being there is, however, an infinite process through which binary oppositions are overcome: mechanical and organic, finite and infinite, rules and freedom, necessity and contingency. This infinity is produced by a productive recursivity. And if, for Fichte and Schelling, the Unconditioned is to be found as the starting point of this recursive thought; however, this unconditional is nature itself as a whole. The Idealists, from Kant to Fichte to Schelling, aim for a mathematical model of theoretical reason, which is able to unveil the “infinite metamorphosis” of spirit and nature.99 §14. ORGANICIST AND ECOLOGICAL PARADIGM Why are we taking such a long journey to reconstruct Schelling’s philosophy of nature, considering that such a concept of nature is considered to be nonscientific, if not simply nonsense? First of all, we want to show how recursivity and contingency are articulated in the philosophy of nature through a historical critical exposition; second, we want to bring Schelling’s Naturphilosophie into dialogue with our contemporary situation. Some historians argue that Schelling’s philosophy of nature exercised a significant influence on the scientists of his time, and this cannot be ignored. However, the question here is not one of subordinating philosophy to science and considering philosophy as a pseudoscience or a mere source of inspiration. Schelling’s treatise on nature is a philosophical attempt to integrate natural science and to give wings to science instead of succumbing or reducing philosophy to science; while he does so without rejecting or condemning science, he makes science stronger than it was. Schelling’s philosophy of nature is a system that attempts to resolve the oppositions between nature and spirit, necessity and freedom, as readers of Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom may find that the system of freedom is based on the system of nature that he constructed in the earlier days. As part of Romantic nature, Schelling’s nature is opposed to mechanism.

 Schelling, First Outline, 213.

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Such antimechanistic thinking exists in parallel with the Industrial Revolution, which is the reign of mechanism, since an organic machine was not yet possible. Feedback mechanisms were applied in James Watt’s centrifugal governor (1788), but a theory of feedback did not appear until 1948. There are two ways to take Schelling’s concept of nature further. One is to conceive a “Romantic ecology” around the intersection of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to further understand the role of this concept of a rich and living nature in the expressions of art and philosophy, as in the work of the historian Robert Richards.100 The other is to see that, in the thought of Schelling, there is a proto-cybernetics or a proto-systems theory. However, these two are not separable, and this is precisely what we would like to show. Some authors101 claim to return to nature and therefore see Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as an ecological thinking, since there is first an original concept of nature (in the Greek sense of phusis) and second a holism that takes the wholeness and reciprocity as the principle of nature, for example, in the Gaia hypothesis. However, rushing toward this conclusion is problematic since it fails to see Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as a precursor of both organicism and organology. This proto-organicism and proto-organology in Schelling’s thought is, however, in tension with the Romantic reading of it, since it at the same time affirms the productivity of nature as a general organism and produces a general form that can be mathematically modeled. In his seminal work, Grant shows only that the model shares similarities with digital technology or the “artificial life,” and sets up an opposition between “abstract artificiality” and “physical actuality.”102 However, Grant didn’t go further than this. He might have intended to eliminate the distinction between nature and technics; however, it seems to me that he goes too quickly on this point, and it is our task to elaborate on these historical transitions. We would like to see how such an organic whole, which is fundamental to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, comes back in the early twentieth century and is developed into variant schools of thought

 See Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).  For example, see Fred Dallmayr, Return to Nature? An Ecological Counter History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). 102  Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 125. 100

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around what is known as organicism.103 A valid question to be raised is if Schelling’s philosophy of nature is fundamentally a vitalism. If we understand vitalism in terms of the concept of an élan vital or entelechy, then we don’t really find such a vital force in his thinking, and indeed he also criticized it as being mysterious. If we understand it as a thought that eschews Aristotelian hylomorphism, in which matter is understood as inert and form is the only force that gives identity and movement, then one may want to associate Schelling with it. However, in between vitalism and mechanism there is also the “third way” known as organicism, associated with authors such Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Joseph Needham, Joseph Woodger, and Conrad Waddington (who were very much influenced by the famous Spemann-Mangold organizer104 experiment in 1921), and many others.105 The organicists wanted to overcome the opposition between vitalism and mechanism, and show that, for example, a cell can neither be reduced to physico-chemical explanations nor be understood as a mysterious vital force, but rather comprises different forms and levels of organization (for example, there can be different levels of organizers in the sense of Hans Spemann).  Schelling as a precursor to L. von Bertalanffy, I. Prigogine, and H. Haken is well recognized by many authors; see Maurizio Esposito, Romantic Biology, 1890–1945 (London: Routledge, 2013), 29–30. 104  This is considered one of the most important discoveries in developmental biology. In 1924 Hilde Mangold, a graduate student with Hans Spemann at Freiburg University, Germany, used salamander eggs of species that differed in their pigmentation. She transplanted a piece of the dorsal lip of the blastopore of the newt Triton cristatus so that it was in contact with indifferent ectoderm of an earlier gastrula of Triton taeniatus. During the development the fate of the transplanted cells could be traced. Spemann and Mangold demonstrated that the graft became notochord and induced neighboring cells to change fates. These neighboring cells adopted differentiation pathways that were more dorsal, and produced tissues such as the central nervous system, somites, and kidneys, e.g., a second embryo. Spemann called the peculiar dorsal lip area of the embryo the organization center. See Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1976/2004), 115; see also E. M. De Robertis, “Spemann’s Organizer and Self-Regulation in Amphibian Embryos,” in Nature Reviews. Molecular Cell Biology 7, no 4 (2006): 296–302. 105  See Erik Peterson, The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), which provides an excellent analysis of this movement; see also Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 38, in which Haraway divides the organicists into three groups: “The German-speaking lineage included von Ehrenfels and Kohler (Gestalt), van Bertalanffy, and Paul Weiss. The English form two sub groups: Haldane, Russell, Morgan, and Smuts. The Americans included Ritter, Henderson, and in a less philosophical more experimental way, E. B. Wilson and R. G. Harrison.” There are ambiguities concerning whether or not J. S. Haldane, E. S. Russell, and General Smuts should be counted as organicists, as some of them are considered neo-vitalists. 103

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What is this organizer, which is able to induce another embryo from a transplanted graft? And what are its physico-chemical activities? These were the questions that interested Needham (as well as Waddington, among others), and later brought him to the laboratory in Berlin-Dahlem. The organizer is like the nucleus in crystalization—the supersaturated solution can start to crystalize only in the presence of the nucleus; likewise, the individuation of the embryo will take place on the graft only in the presence of the organizer. This contrasts with Driesch’s explanation of the determination of the embryo as the act of the entelechy, according to which the determination is understood as a reduction of prospective potency (Prospektive Potenz) to prospective significance (Prospektive Bedeutung). Driesch claims that “a system in the course of becoming, is unable to increase its manifoldness of itself.”106 Needham sees Driesch as a mechanist who dressed mechanism in the new clothing of the entelechy but remains mechanical regarding the development of the embryo. Along with Woodger, Needham sees the spatialization in the development of the embryo as a process of constant complexification: “(1) [T]he number of components is increased; (2) the complexity of the relations in which those components stand to one another is increased; (3) the intrinsic patterns of the components become different from one another.”107 Organicism can be considered a paradigm of thinking that moves from materialistic science to organic materialism. As Whitehead has shown, in the nineteenth century atomism was introduced into science by John Dalton, later spreading into biology and influencing the development of cell theory.108 In this trend of thought, physics was regarded as the ground for understanding nature, and therefore biology had to adopt concepts in physics. In the twentieth century, on the other hand, Whitehead saw a necessary change in moving from materialistic mechanics to an organic mechanics, since an atomic physics that places emphasis on substantial matter was no longer able to give a full account of all natural phenomena: “The appeal to mechanism on

 Hans Driesch, Der Begriff der organischen Form (Berlin: Bornträger, 1919), 42ff.; also cited by Joseph Needham, Order and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936/2015), 74: “kann sich auch im Laufe des Werdens der Grad der Mannigfaltigkeit eines Natursystems nicht‚ von sich’ erhören.” 107  Needham, Order and Life, 74. 108  As Whitehead noted, it exercised a great influence on biologists such as Marie François Xavier Bichat, Johannes Müller, Matthias Jakob Schleiden, and Theodor Schwann. See Science and the Modern World (New York: Pelican Mentor Books, 1948), 102. 106

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behalf of biology was in its origin an appeal to the well-attested selfconsistent physical concepts as expressing the oasis of all natural phenomena. But at present, there is no such system of concepts.”109 Whitehead’s ontology of the organism is based on interaction and becoming. A tree is not an independent tree, but rather a tree in the forest; it has interaction with all other individuals of its surroundings, and such dynamics can be analyzed through internal and external relations (whereas, on the contrary, in material atomism there are only external relations). Whitehead’s take on the transformation of materialistic science into a philosophy of the organism had a great influence on the organicists—notably, on Needham, Waddington, and Woodger, who believed that modern thought demonstrates a very different philosophical worldview from the Cartesian one and has its origin in the concept of the organism110: “The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it.”111 What the organicists took from Whitehead is not a vague holism but rather a new analytical method of studying the organization in different levels; as Needham says, “[A] logical analysis of the concept of organism leads us to look for organizing relations at all the levels, coarse and fine, of the living structure. Biochemistry and morphology should, then, blend into each other instead of existing, as they tend to do, on each side of an enigmatic barrier.”112 Morphology here refers to the work of D’Arcy Thompson, especially Growth and Form (1917), which also inspired Alan Turing’s 1953 paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis Morphology,” a paper that resonates very much with Needham’s statement. Needham distinguished two types of organicism: one “obstructionist” or “dogmatic,” the other “legitimate.”113 The

 Ibid., 105.  Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 137.  Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 80. 112  Needham, Order and Life, 139; cited also by Stephen Jay Gould, “Review of Order and Life,” Leonardo 6 (1973): 267. Gould ends his review with the following: “The union of the two biologies will finally come when we explain the mysteries of ontogenetic development in molecular terms. The heroes of this integration will be men like Roux, D’Arcy Thompson and Needham.” 113  Needham, Order and Life, 18. 109 110 111

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former overemphasize the whole, claiming that all parts are indispensable from the whole and that the whole can never be rendered transparent; Needham gives the example of J. S. Haldane (to be distinguished from his son, J. B. S. Haldane, who we will discuss in the next chapter, concerning cybernetics). The legitimate organicists, on the other hand, analytically inquire into different relations between parts and the whole: (a) independence, (b) functional dependence, and (c) existential dependence.114 We will have to leave the complex history of organicism to professional historians of science, without surveying all these authors, though some of them (such as Waddington) we will engage with later. We would like instead to look particularly into the general systems theory founded by Bertalanffy, whose insistence on the mathematization of the Rationalisierbarkeit of nature was admired by Needham and Woodger.115 Herein lies also the difference between organicism and vitalism: Though they share the view that the study of the parts cannot explain the whole, vitalism introduces some quasi-metaphysical entities as the ground of explanation, while organicists insist that the three principal elements of life (namely, wholeness, directness, and regulation) are explainable even without such mysterious notions.116 While Schelling was writing his philosophy of nature, the Industrial Revolution had just started. The opposition between the mechanical and the organic, as well as the latter’s superiority over the former, remained theoretical, while with the advent of the Industrial Revolution the mechanical worldview triumphed not by regaining its theoretical priority but by reintroducing itself through a material transformation of the world.117 Bertalanffy developed a general systems theory based on an organismic view of the world, which seemed to him a decisive conceptual tool to reverse the situation brought to an impasse by mechanism and industrialism: The mechanical world view, taking the play of physical particles as ultimate reality found its expression in a civilisation which glorifies physical

 Ibid.  Ibid., 24; it is also noted that Woodger translated Bertalanffy’s Kritische Theorie der Formbildung into English in 1933 with the title Modern Theories of Development; note also that the close relation between mathematics and natural history was not something new, since it was already present in the work of Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. 116  Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 34. 117  This of course resonates perfectly with Marx and Engel’s critique of idealism in the opening of German Idealism. 114 115

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technology that has led eventually to the catastrophes of our time. Possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost in the last sanguinary decades of human history.118

Organicism is fundamental to thinking of an open system, which is different from a closed system for the reason that the former exchanges information with its environment, which defers its destruction according to the second law of thermodynamics. Systems theory investigates a form of organization of which organicism is an advanced form. If classical physics produces a theory of unorganized complexity, systems theory concerns “organized complexity,” as Bertalanffy claims that “the theory of unorganized complexity is ultimately rooted in the laws of change and probability and in the second law of thermodynamics. In contrast, the fundamental problem today is that of organized complexity.”119 Bertalanffy’s organizing principle—the Gestaltprinzip or Ganzheitfaktor—is immanent in all levels of organization. His emphasis on organicism can be summarized in terms of the following four main elements: appreciation of wholeness (regulation), organization (hierarchy and the laws proper to each level), dynamics (process— or later, the behavior of open systems), and mathematization.120 Bertalanffy seems to have been a reader of Kant, but probably not a careful one. He criticizes the categories in the first Critique by saying that it is symptomatic that Kant didn’t introduce the notion of interaction and organization.121 He also cites the famous concluding sentence of Kant’s second Critique—namely, “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me”122—in order to make the criticism that “Kant’s moral imperative even if not eroded, would be much too simple for a complex world.”123 It is astonishing that Bertalanffy didn’t comment on  Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (New York: George Braziller, 2015), 49.  Ibid., 34. 120  The first three points are summarized by Haraway; see Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 38. We added the fourth point on mathematics, as Needham said the revolutionary dictum of Bertalanffy is the following: “Only with the closest co-operation of the theoretical physicist, the mathematician, and the mathematical logician, will the problem of the mathematization of biology be solved.” See Needham, Order and Life, 24–25. 121  Bertalanffy, General System Theory, 45. 122  Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 169: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and constantly reflection concerns itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” 123  Bertalanffy, General System Theory, 187. 118 119

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the third Critique, which anticipates his own verdict on the “organismic revolution”: Considered in the light of history, our technology and even our society are based on a physicalistic world picture which found an early synthesis in Kant’s work. Physics is still the paradigm of science, the basis of our idea of society and our image of man. . . . in the meanwhile, however, new sciences have arisen—the life, behavioural, and social sciences.124

Bertalanffy didn’t notice that the term organic, or, in his own terms, organismic, had been the new condition of philosophizing since the time of Kant. His organismic revolution is an awakening in the natural sciences affirming Kant and Schelling’s reflections on the methodology of those sciences. From this perspective, we may see an isomorphism between systems theory and Naturphilosophie, since they all emphasize “part-whole relations.” However, what sustains systems theory as a science is that it wanted to become a “logico-mathematical discipline, in itself purely formal but applicable to various empirical sciences,”125 for example, thermodynamics, biological and medical experimentation, genetics, life insurance statistics, and so on. Bertalanffy’s approach resonates with Lorenz Oken’s comment on Naturphilosophie: “[P]hilosophy of nature is only science if it is mathematizable, i.e. if it can become mathematics.”126 Bertalanffy’s general systems theory is one that resonates with cybernetics, which was developed independently in the same epoch and constitutes the same paradigm with various other schools: Wiener’s theory of feedback, W. Ross Ashby’s theory of self-organization, von Neumann’s theory of automata, and the like. And indeed, as Waddington criticized in his correspondence with the author Arthur Koestler, Bertalanffy’s general systems theory would “eventually become the lingua franca of the computing and artificial intelligence realm.”127 In chapter 2 we will try to understand how Waddington’s comment is relevant here, though that could be what Bertalanffy  Ibid.  Ibid., 37. 126  Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (Zurich: Friedrich Schulthess, 1843), 3; also cited by Snelders, “Romanticism and Naturphilosophie,” 209: “Die Naturphilosophie ist nur Wissenschaft, wenn sie mathematisieren ist, d.h. der Mathematik werden kann.” 127  Peterson, The Life Organic, 218. 124 125

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himself would resist.128 It may be too provocative for the scholars of German idealism to see Schelling as a precursor to the cybernetic concept of life, but it is also by no means acceptable to ignore the historical development and isomorphism that we have attempted to construct here. This is the reason that the current return to Naturphilosophie as an ecology would be suspicious if it fails to understand that ecology is already a cybernetic concept; that is to say, the conceptual shift from Naturphilosophie to systems theory reflects the concretization of ecology. Ecology is a term coined by the German Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), for whom ecology meant “the entire science of the relationships of the organism to its surrounding external world, wherein we understand all ‘existence-relationships’ in the wider sense.”129 Haeckel follows Darwin in conceiving of an economy of nature130 that concerns adaptation and competition. As Haeckel says on a later occasion131: [B]y ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment; including, above all, its friendly and inimical relation with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact—in a word, ecology is the study of all

 Bertalanffy wanted to distinguish himself from cybernetics, since cybernetics is a special case of his general systems theory. At the same time, he criticized technical system as a totalitarianism, as he says that “[h]uman society is based upon the achievements of the individual, and is doomed if the individual is made a mere cog in the social machine. This, I believe, is the ultimate precept a theory of organization can give: not a manual for dictators of any denomination more efficiently to subjugate human beings by the scientific application of Iron Laws, but a warning that the Leviathan of organization must not swallow the individual without sealing its own inevitable doom.” See Bertalanffy, General System Theory, 82; however, it is really hard to argue how the general systems theory cannot be applied for the realization of organic technical systems. 129  Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1866), 2:286–87; also quoted by Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8, n.28. 130  Darwin himself describes this economy of nature as a struggle for survival, as he says in the Origin of Species: “[F]or as all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature, if any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will soon be exterminated.” See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (London: Watts, 1859/1950), 87. 131  Ernst Haeckel, Inauguration Lecture in the Philosophical Faculty of Jena, January 1869. 128

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those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle of existence.132

Does ecology, a theme that has so many political and social connotations today, still hold the same meaning as naturalists such as Haeckel took it to have? We have briefly discussed Latour’s claim that nature must die. While the death of nature does not mean that all that was nature now becomes artificial, it does mean that nature as a category in our knowledge system has taken up a very different meaning because the perspective from which we observe it has been shifted by technology. We would like to invoke here an intriguing remark from an interview with Marshall McLuhan, conducted in the 1970s: Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment that the Earth went inside this new artefact, Nature ended and Ecology was born. “Ecological” thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art.133

Ecology, in McLuhan’s view, is no longer about an economy of nature of which human beings are part, like other plants and animals. Technology has elevated humanity to another level, as the microscope and telescope had done in the time of Kant, with the difference that human beings are still on the earth. With this elevation, the earth is no longer the “original ark” in the sense of Edmund Husserl, but rather it is submitted to engineering; or, more precisely, it becomes an artificial earth or a Spaceship Earth, according to the architect and designer Buckminster Fuller—not that it is made artificially, but rather that it is an object of engineering. Retrospectively we can see that McLuhan has predicted Latour, as well as many others (i.e., Timothy Morton) who argue for an ecology without nature.134 If the question of ecology is technological then we cannot avoid a direct confrontation with the question

 Robert C. Stauffer, “Haeckel, Darwin, and Ecology,” Quarterly Review of Biology 32, no. 2 (June 1957): 141. 133  Marshall McLuhan, “At the Moment of Sputnik the Planet Became a Global Theatre in which There Are No Spectators but Only Actors,” Journal of Communication 24, no. 1 (1974): 49. 134   See Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 132

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of technology. If we follow McLuhan’s verdict and Grant’s historical survey, we can see that the artificial earth was already underway during the time of the Idealists and was completed in the time of cybernetics. It is no coincidence that we also find such a trajectory in geology, and more significant is that it is related to James Watt’s improvement of the steam engine and its wide application during the Industrial Revolution. §15. GENERAL ORGANISM, GAIA, OR ARTIFICIAL EARTH In 1795 the geologist and natural philosopher (as it was called by then) James Hutton published the first two volumes of his Theory of the Earth (the third and last one was not published until one hundred years later). Before that, Hutton had already given a talk in 1785 in the Royal Academy of Edinburgh, in the presence of almost all Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. These three volumes are the complete demonstration of the researches and journeys that he had made in the previous decades. It is very interesting to observe how Hutton’s earth system is developed into two interpretations and probably two models. The contribution of Hutton to modern geology is fundamental, and he is often referred to as the father of the discipline. To understand Hutton’s theory in simple terms, let us distinguish him from two schools. One is neptunism, which believes that the rocks are formed from the precipitation of the earth according to the following order (from bottom up): granite, gneiss and schist, basalt, limestone, sedimentary rocks. Hutton shows that instead of considering it as a linear formation, a cyclic model is more appropriate for understanding the formation of different layers of rocks. At the center in this model is heat, the driving agent of the earth system (like Schelling and many others of his time, Hutton believed in phlogiston). It consists of a cycle of deposition, lithification (causing loose sediment to convert to sedimentary rock), and uplift (vertical elevation of land caused by pressure of plates).135 With this cycle we can imagine the movement

 Jack Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 214–15.

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from rock to soil to rock, from sea to air and back to sea again. Hutton’s theory was in great contrast with the biblically inspired mosaic timeline of the earth. According to the later, the earth is dated 6,000 years old. However, Hutton’s research shows that it dates at least 800 million years old—much longer than the speculations of Buffon and Georges Cuvier. This is also known as the deep time of the earth. To understand it better, let us illustrate it with the example of the Siccar point, which consists of two separate sets of rocks: at bottom is called the Silurian greywacke; the upper layer, sandstones. Approximately 425 million years ago the collision of plates created a trench that triggered the settlement of sediments. The pressure compacted the sediment and minerals in the water and cemented the grains together to form rocks (lithification). Further movement of the plates compressed and wrinkled the sediments and lifted them above sea level to form mountainous land.136 The translators of Schelling’s Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology have noticed Schelling’s hidden reference to Hutton’s theory, when he talked about the “geological hypothesis of uplift” (Erhebungstheorie) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,137 which “proceeds from an idea in which one can no longer speak of something that is certain and lawful but rather only of contingent and disconnected events.”138 Schelling is using the geological hypothesis to demonstrate his theory of the contingency of nature. However, this contingency has to be distinguished from another school that Hutton’s theory was in conflict with—namely, the Cuvier-inspired catastrophism.139 In the context of Hutton, it stands for the idea that the land was formed by a series of catastrophes, for example, the Great Flood. According to Hutton’s theory, the earth is an ongoing and cyclic process driven by heat known as uniformitarianism, and no catastrophic event is necessary for such a process. Hutton’s theory gave rise to an ambiguous reading of the earth as both organic and mechanical. In  Ibid., 212.  F. W. J. Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 19. 138  Ibid. 139  Cuvier didn’t use the word catastrophe but rather révolution, which was rendered into English as catastrophe. 136 137

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parallel to the concept of the earth as a “superorganism,” there was also a mechanical view of it. Hutton was not innocent of this, since he also calls earth a “living machine.”140 The earth does not work without regularities; indeed, the observations of Hutton confirmed that “in nature there is wisdom, system and consistency.”141 However, a deeper relation between the earth and the machine is revealed by the correspondence between Hutton and James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine: I have a letter from Watt—he has brought his curious wheel to go, it works by steam—he says it appears to be right in all essentials and goes with an equitable motion & great power. In short, I believe it will answer (his own words) this will raise his fame yonder it being so new a thing for that is what catches the multitude; though I think the improvement of the reciprocating fire engine is the thing of greater utility but every one will not be sensible of the merits of that great improvement.142

Hutton befriended Watt through Watt’s mentor Joseph Black, professor of medicine at the University of Glasgow, when Watt was an instrument maker at the university. Black had discovered a very important theory of heat, that is, latent heat. Hutton considered latent heat to be equivalent to “Newtonian gravitation” in terms of scientific insight.143 Hutton considered latent heat as part of the “repulsive force” or “solar substance” of the earth, and specific heat as “expansive force,” whose dynamics explain the natural cycles of rock formation.144 Latent heat is believed to be decisive to the steam engine, since it is crucial for calculating and calibrating the heating and condensation of vapor. Watt himself had proved with his experiment that the steam could heat six

 Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 181. 141  Ibid. 142  James Hutton, Letter to Clerk-Maxwell August 1774, in “The Correspondence between James Hutton (1726–1797) and James Watt (1736–1819) with Two Letters from Hutton to George Clerk-Maxwell (1715–1784): Part I,” ed. Jean Jones, Hugh S. Torrens, and Eric Robinson, Annals of Science 51, no. 6 (1994): 637–53. 143  David B. Wilson, Seeking Nature’s Logic: Natural Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 133. 144  David Philip Miller, James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 88. 140

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times its weight of water to 212°F.145 Despite the dispute over the role of the theory of latent heat in Watt’s improvement of the Newcomen engine, it is, however, evident that latent heat itself plays a very important role in the working principle of the engine. One can speculate on the relation between Hutton’s earth system and the steam engine, and to what degree can one set up analogies between the two mechanisms; for example, the volcano is to the earth machine as the safety valve to the steam engine. For this, at least the fire-water model is assured: Hutton himself observed that his theory is “a system in which the subterranean power of fire, or heat, co-operates with the action of water upon the surface of the Earth. . . .” He perhaps saw the elevation of new continents by subterranean heat, and the lowering of the older continents by atmospheric agencies, as in some way analogous to the rise and fall of the piston in one of Watt’s early single-acting pumping engines.146

This organo-mechanism or teleo-mechanism of the earth was taken up in the Gaia hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock, and later developed together with the biologist Lynn Margulis. Lovelock refers to Hutton’s famous 1785 lecture at the Royal Society of Edinburgh: “I consider the earth to be a super organism and that its proper study should be physiology.”147 It is not unreasonable to see a lineage from Schelling’s general organism to Hutton’s super organism and Lovelock’s Gaia, in which we see how a philosophy of nature progresses into cybernetics. Lovelock also borrows the concept of homeostasis from cybernetics to describe the geophysiology conceived by Hutton. To Lovelock’s  Donald Fleming, “Latent Heat and the Invention of the Watt Engine,” Isis 43, no. 1 (April 1952): 4. However, it remains in dispute whether Black’s theory came first then influenced the experiment or Watt’s experiment served as a proof of Black’s theory of latent heat. It has been noted that Black, in his Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry (1803), announced his honor of influencing Watt’s improvement of the engine; this is confirmed by his editor John Robison in the preface. However, Watt didn’t agree with it, and in his letter to Dr. Brewster in May 1914, he rejected the idea that the improvement of the steam engine is based on the theoretical insight of latent heat. See Dionysius Lardner, The Steam Engine Explained and Illustrated (London: Taylor and Walton, 1840), 93–96. 146  Miller, James Watt, Chemist, 133, quoted from G. L. Davies, The Earth in Decay: A History of British Geomorphology 1578–1878 (London: Macdonald Technical and Scientific, 1969), 176. 147  James Lovelock, “Gaia: A Planetary Emergent Phenomenon,” in Gaia 2: Emergence: The New Science of Becoming, ed. William Irwin Thomson (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 1991), 34. 145

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eyes, the cybernetic system is superior to the mechanical system and transcends all ideologies, whether it be capitalism, Marxism, tribalism, or nationalism.148 Gaia is a term that was recommended to Lovelock by the author William Golding to replace the phrase “a cybernetic system with homeostatic tendencies as detected by chemical anomalies in the Earth’s atmosphere.”149 In the early stage of the Gaia theory, Lovelock understands Gaia as a single organism composed of various vital organs at the core and in the periphery. This homeostatic system maintains constant conditions in terms of temperature, acidity, alkalinity, and gas composition: Gaia responses to changes for the worse must obey the rules of cybernetics, where the time constant and the loop gain are important factors. Thus the regulation of oxygen has a time constant measured in thousands of years. Such slow processes give the least warning of undesirable trends. By the time it is realized that all is not well and action is taken, inertial drag will bring things to a worse state before an equally slow improvement can set in.150

In contrast to Lovelock’s strong form of Gaia,151 consisting of a single organism, Margulis forced Lovelock to admit that Gaia does not consist of a single organism but is rather a symbiogenesis of a great variety of organisms,152 including plants, animals, fungi, protists, and

 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140, 142. 149  Lynn Margulis, A Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (London: Phoenix, 2001), 147. 150  Lovelock, Gaia, 119. Lovelock has also developed a rather simplified mathematical model called “Daisyworld” to simulate the dynamic between the environment (temperature) and the biota (white and black daisies). 151  In contrast to the strong Gaia, the weak form of Gaia proposed by James Kirchner states that life collectively has a significant impact on the environment, and therefore that there is a reciprocal relation between the two, which constitutes a coevolution. See James W. Kirchner, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Can It Be Tested?” Review of Geophysics 27, no. 2 (1989): 227: “Homeostatic Gaia can, however, be stated in two nontrivial versions: a weak form (the dominant interactions between the biotic and the abiotic worlds are stabilizing) and a somewhat stronger claim (these interactions make Earth’s physical environment significantly more stable than it would have been without life).” 152  Luciano Onori and Guido Visconti, “The GAIA Theory: From Lovelock to Margulis. From a Homeostatic to a Cognitive Autopoietic Worldview,” Rendiconti. Lincei 23, no. 4 (2012): 375. 148

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bacteria.153 The concept of symbiogenesis in turn comes from Varela and Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis. Some authors therefore claim that with the participation of Margulis, the Gaia theory moves from first-order cybernetics to second-order cybernetics.154 On the other hand, we can equally say that cybernetics and organicism converge in the Gaia theory, in which the earth becomes an organo-mechanical being.155 If Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, systems theory, organicism, and Gaia theory have been attempts to overcome mechanism extended to the planetary scale after the Industrial Revolutions, and in a certain sense to surpass the modern—and, paradoxically, or better, dialectically, by doing so the earth becomes an artificial earth—the Anthropocene signifies first of all the accomplishment of such an artificial earth as a cybernetic system. Lovelock claims that technology, especially communication technology, “has vastly increased Gaia’s range of perception,” and therefore “she is now through us awake and aware of herself. She has seen the reflection of her fair face through the eyes of astronauts and the television cameras of orbiting spacecraft.”156 Lovelock seems to imagine that planetary computation will wake up Gaia or assist it in maintaining its homeostatic functions, but isn’t this a further accomplishment of the technical system, and will this really move us away from the crisis of modernity? Or is it only the aggravation of the symptom of modernity, as Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols, that philosophers’ war against decadence is only another expression of decadence?157 The questions asked by the Idealist philosophers regarding system and freedom return in our own epoch in a very different form, but with increasing urgency. This constitutes the new paradigm as well as the new condition of philosophizing after  Margulis, A Symbiotic Planet, 41.  See Onori and Visconti, “The GAIA Theory.”  In 1973, almost around the same time of the birth of the Gaia theory, the ecologist C. S. Holling in his seminal paper “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems” (Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 [1973]: 1–23) introduced the concept of resilience to ecology by using lakes as examples of self-contained systems capable of balancing themselves (also in view of random events) through positive and negative feedback (11). Holling notes that “[r]esilience determines the persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters and still persist” (17). 156  Lovelock, Gaia, 140. 157  Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), §11, 15. 153 154 155

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Kant’s “organic turn.” This is also the reason for which we have to sketch a new trajectory of thought. However, before one can condemn cybernetics as a mechanism of control or governance, we will need to develop a new understanding of cybernetics according to recursivity and contingency, and see what the impasses are that we need to confront.

Chapter 2

Logic and Contingency

I am as I am not. —Heraclitus, Fragment 81

In chapter 1 we attempted to examine the notion of the system, and to show how it becomes a conceptual tool for resolving some classical philosophical problems, through our interpretation of two categories, recursivity and contingency. The recursivity of natura naturans and natura naturata, on the one hand, captures the one and all (hen kai pan) of all beings; on the other hand, it also makes reason a product of the self-unfolding of the Absolute. Kant’s treatise on teleological judgment provided a new condition for reflecting on the systemic organization of organic and inorganic beings and endowed it with a metaphysical significance; in doing so, contingency is not overcome as mere negativity, since it is now necessary. We can find similar but somewhat nuanced operations in Hegel’s logic of reflection or dialectics. If, in Schelling’s recursivity, the identity between mind and nature is assumed, then contingency is necessary because it functions as a hindrance in the reflection of the natura naturans.1 In Hegel’s recursivity this identity is not assured at the beginning. He starts with contingency, which is a step

 Markus Gabriel, in chapter 3 of his Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), has proposed that, unlike Hegel, who is eager to eliminate contingencies, Schelling developed a “Spielraum der Kontingenz” (playground of contingency), namely, a “belated necessity.” However, as we have shown, this playground of contingency already existed in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, where the recursive model is laid.

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or a test that reason must pass in its journey toward the Absolute.2 The division of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (1817) into three parts—namely, logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit—can be read as a movement toward the world of the spirit through the constant exteriorization (Entäusserung) and sublation (Aufhebung) that characterizes the life of the Notion. There are two operations of recursivity and two functions of contingency in Schelling and Hegel. These two methods nonetheless share a similar task and epistemological paradigm, namely, the rise of biology or science of the organic and chemistry, as well as the discovery of magnetics and electricity, in which the antique concept of essence is reinterpreted as a process. Schelling seizes the necessity of contingency as the outcome of a productivity and creativity of the artistic act, while for Hegel the necessity of contingency is possible only when it is submitted to the examination of logic. The objective of this chapter is twofold: First, we attempt to elaborate on Hegel’s concept of recursivity in relation to contingency; second, we want to see how such system building is relevant to the concept of recursivity in cybernetics. Without claiming that Hegel’s and Schelling’s concepts of the organic are identical with recursive algorithms, we want to show how the trajectory that we work out here is beneficial for reflecting on the relevance of idealism for a contemporary philosophy of technology. If Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is a precursor to biological organicism, Hegel’s logic anticipates a machinic organicism, which is cybernetics. Like idealism, which wants to surpass mechanism and mythical vital forces, cybernetics wants to overcome the opposition between mechanism and vitalism, and to provide an operational logic in all domains, which is characterized by a “self-consciousness.”3 §16. RECURSIVITY IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT We will clarify a fundamental difference between the two models of recursivity, which hinges on the following question: Where is the unconditional or the Absolute located, at the beginning or the end? If  Bernard Mabille, Hegel: l’épreuve de la contingence (Paris: Hermann, 2013).  Gotthard Günther, “Cybernetic Ontology and Transjunctional Operations,” in Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976), 1:331.

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the Absolute is at the beginning then contingency only arrives afterward and will be recognized; if the Absolute is at the end, on the other hand, then one starts with contingency in order to arrive at necessity. One will always have to start with something, either an absolute or unthinged (Unbedingt) ground, as in Fichte and Schelling,4 or to arrive at the Absolute by sublating immediate sense certainty or abstract universality, as in Hegel. This constitutes Hegel’s main critique of Schelling in the preface to his System der Wissenschaft (1807), which later becomes known as Phenomenology of Spirit,5 a work that crystalized during years of collaboration with Schelling and at the same time serves as a fundamental critique of Schelling’s method (even though the name of Schelling is absent).6 If one starts with the Absolute, which sets itself in intellectual intuition, then there is no development, since what rests is only a blind force, an intelligibility in which everything is equal, like all gray cows looking similar in the dark. At the very beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, therefore, Hegel rejects the universality of immediate sense certainty: namely, this and now. The Absolute is not at the beginning of reason, but rather at the end. The Idealists, claims Hegel, accepted the “immediate certainty,” for example, that “I am I,” “my object and my essence is I,” but fails to see that it is an “absolutely negative essence.”7 This applies also to nature: The joyful natura naturans and natura naturata of Spinoza is deficient for Hegel, and so subjected to criticism in The Science of Logic. In Schelling the natura naturans and natura naturata of  It is argued that the concept of the Absolute in Schelling varies in different periods: his early philosophy of nature (1794–1799) that we have discussed in chapter 1, his own transcendental philosophy (the absolute “I”), and his identity philosophy (Absolute as absolute abstract identity), which is the real target of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, it is also true that in different periods of Schelling’s thought, the Absolute is always a starting point in which a unity between spirit and nature is already assumed. 5  Die Phänomenologie des Geistes was the title of the first part of System der Wissenschaft; however, it is interesting to see how this becoming from a system of science to a phenomenology of spirit also confirms the overall thesis in this chapter. 6  Hegel wrote to Schelling (May 1, 1807, from Bamberg) explaining that his critique is not against him but rather against his superficial readers; as Hegel says, “In the Preface you will not find that I have been too hard on the shallowness that makes so much mischief with your forms in particular and degrades your science into a bare formalism.” Schelling requested that Hegel clarify this in the next edition, but Hegel never responded to it. See Jason Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), 21. 7  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller and J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 141–42. 4

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Spinoza consists of a constant reflection that gives rise to products and bifurcation; for Hegel, Spinozism is deficient in the sense that there is a lack of “immanent reflection” in the doctrine of emanation.8 Hegel presents another model in which immanent reflection is a dialectical movement that renders the Absolute transparent. That is to say, the Notion is a recursive process that arrives at itself as a comprehension of itself and the other as a whole. However, this journey is not simply a return to itself but rather a constant process of Aufhebung, in the senses of both preservation and cancelation. Phenomenology is thus a description of the processes of reflection, from immediate determinacy to certainty and finally to truth. Or, to put it in other words, following the remark of Wolfdietrich SchmiedKowarzik, Schelling starts with philosophy of nature and attempts to understand nature, process, and evolution philosophically, where nature is the existing Wirklichkeitszusammenhang that founds and enables human history; while Hegel starts with logic, in which thinking wants to grasp nature in the absolute Idea.9 The Hegelian dialectics is motivated by a negativity, negative due to the immediacy of being and reason’s confusion with the other, which becomes an obstacle to grasping the in- and for-itself of being that is its essence; while in order to move away such confusion, it needs to carry out a series of reflections, in which the self-positing and self-identifying of the given is accompanied by the recognition of the other as the other of the self and as contradiction, and finally the elevation to a synthesis that overcomes such contradiction. In The Science of Logic, this is presented as three reflections in the logic of essence, positing reflection, external reflection, and determining reflection. By resolving the unconscious threat of the negative other we arrive at the essence, in which substance is understood as subject, or subjective reflection. Like what we did by reading Kant and Schelling through the lens of recursivity, the Hegel scholar Edmundo Balsemão Pires proposes to read Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit not as a “romance of culture”

 Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 474.  Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, “Von der wirklichen, von der seyenden Natur.” Schellings Ringen um eine Naturphilosophie in Auseinandersetzung mit Kant, Fichte und Hegel (Stuttgart: Bad Canntatt, 1996), 174.

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or a critique of modern philosophy but rather as a calculus.10 Pires sees the movement of the spirit as a recursive algorithm that progressively proceeds to the Absolute: Analogically speaking, Hegel’s work is an example of the Spirit’s algorithm from an initial state defined by the empirical certainty and a plain hetero-reference of knowledge. We may examine his work as a progression of successive instructions to solve hetero-referential conditions of knowledge in self-referential schemes of the absolute motion.11

Pires’s characterization of Hegelian phenomenology as a recursive algorithm is analogical, in the sense that such a claim is based on an operational similarity between the movement of the spirit and the recursive form of the algorithm. This movement starts with the immediate data, moving from abstract to concrete, from sense certainty to absolute certainty; while every movement is a reflection, or, as we may see later in the language of cybernetics, a reentry (in the sense of Spencer-Brown), a self-reference (in the sense of Luhmann). Hegel refers specifically to the self-movement of the ether, which has its “completion and transparency through the movement of its becoming.” It is in this sense that Pires claims “only self-reference justifies the idea of the reine selbsterkennen im absoluten Andersseyn. . . . Self-reference implies difference and a unity between knowing and the difference.”12 This self-reference is the mechanism toward totality, since it is in the reflection that the self and its other are grasped as a whole, while the truth no longer lies in the self or the other, but in the whole. As Pires has noted, one of the central themes of the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit is precisely the relation between truth and the system of science. Truth is not to be discovered through a system of science, as a proposition whose validity has to be proved against a logical system, but rather truth “can only be the scientific system itself.”13 This wholeness is the

 Edmundo Balsemão Pires, “Phenomenology as the Justification for the Self-Reference of the Absolute,” in Still Reading Hegel: 200 Years after the Phenomenology of Spirit (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2009), 87–109. 11  Ibid., 93. 12  Ibid., 95. 13  Cited in ibid., 99: “kann allein das wissenschaftliche System deselben seyn.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 15. 10

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organic totality, which Pires touches upon though he does not elaborate on either its relation with recursivity or the nature of such recursivity.14 The Hegelian recursivity remains obscure. §17. ORGANICIST AND REFLECTIVE LOGIC Recursivity allows the grasp of the organic whole through the recognition of the other—this other is always plural and situated in different reflections. The Phenomenology of Spirit has already anticipated a large system that Hegel was going to elaborate over the rest of his career. And as John Findlay has pointed out, in the Phenomenology Hegel was already heavily engaged with the question of life and the organic.15 Like the organic in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Hegel emphasizes the holism of the living being as well as the reciprocity of its different parts. The organic whole is considered as a self-sufficient movement that constantly produces and abolishes differences, and for this reason is no longer an abstract concept: Differences, however, are just as much present as differences in this simple universal medium, since this universal fluidity only has its negative nature in so far as it abolishes such differences: differences must be there if differences are to be abolished. But this fluidity, as self-sufficient uniformity, is itself the subsistence of the substance of these differences, in which they occur as distinct members and independent parts. Their being no longer has the meaning of being in the abstract, nor their pure essence the meaning of abstract universality: their being is just the simple fluid substance of pure movement in itself.16

It is evident here that Hegel was very much influenced by Goethe’s writing on the metamorphosis of plants,17 as was Schelling, who wrote about it in his Von der Weltseele. Beyond plants, Goethe was very interested in the debate between Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Georges  Pires, “Phenomenology as the Justification for the Self-Reference of the Absolute,” 99–100. Pires invokes the “organische Einheit” and “das Leben des Ganzen” to point out a rather simplistic fact: that “living cannot be grasped by static description.” 15  John N. Findlay, “The Hegelian Treatment of Biology and Life,” in Hegel and the Sciences, ed. R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky (Dordrecht: Springer, 1984), 83–100. 16  Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1937), 135–36, cited by Findlay, in ibid., 91. 17  For Hegel’s admiration of Goethe’s study of plants, see §345 of Naturphilosophie. 14

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Cuvier on animal structures, which took place in 1830.18 Cuvier proposed the concept of type as marking a rigid distinction between species, while Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire declared that such distinctions were mere fictions: “[T]here are no different animals. One fact alone dominates; it is as if a single Being were appearing.”19 Commenting on this debate, Goethe recognized regularities of nature according to rules and laws but at the same time that the law is also living, “that organisms can transform themselves into misshapen things not in defiance of law, but in conformity with it.”20 Goethe didn’t relinquish the idea of “types,” but attempted to understand rigid forms as products of a genesis that can be scientifically perceived through the “oscillations between ideas and experience.”21 However, we have to recognize that Goethe didn’t aim for a genealogy of species but rather only for a dynamic process that is termed “idealistic morphology.”22 As concerns morphology, Hegel understands that for life to understand life, it is necessary that consciousness shares the same genetic structure as living beings.23 We can therefore understand the Phenomenology no longer as transcendental philosophy but rather the science of the experience of consciousness. Though both were influenced by Goethe, there is a significant difference between Hegel and Schelling with regard to the role of nature. For Hegel, nature is an object of observing reason from the outset, whereas for Schelling it is first of all preconsciously sensed (Emfunden) and detected (Angeschaunt) before becoming an object of reflection.24

 Note that Goethe’s writing on the metamorphosis was published much earlier than the debate. The Cuvier-Geoffroy debate took place over a period of around two months in front of the French Academy of Sciences in 1830. According to the zoologist Ernst Mayr, Cuvier had the victory. Mayr also points out that the reading of evolution (the term was not yet fashioned at that moment in history) in terms of a continuous process and plenitude of beings was influenced by the reading of Leibniz. See Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 325. 19  Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 134. 20  Ibid., 140. 21  Ibid., 145. 22  Ibid., 149. 23  See Songsuk Susan Hahn, Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Concept of Life and Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 48: “To recognize life in an object requires a form of cognition with the same living structure as the object. It takes life to recognize life.” 24  Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Hegel in der Kritik zwischen Schelling und Marx (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014), 138. 18

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Hegel also touched upon the concept of the organic in The Science of Logic, and more fully elaborated upon it in his Naturphilosophie, the second part of his Encyclopaedia. It may worth mentioning that Hegel’s philosophy of nature is considered to be a very peculiar work, and his theory of heat and sound has been considered to be “gibberish.”25 In order to grasp the plant as a whole, argues Hegel, it is necessary to conceptualize the different stages of the development of the plant as continuity and totality, that is, from germ to leaves and to calyx, and so forth. Section 346 of the Naturphilosophie consists of a detailed description of the metabolism of the plant. The production and abolition of differences is the motor of individuation. Hegel divides organisms into geological, botanical, and zoological organisms. Unlike Schelling’s emphasis on the Hemmung, which acts like an external negative force giving form to the productive force of nature, in Hegel there is an immanent negativity in the movement of the organism. We may want to consider these as two different readings of the Spinozist omnis determinatio est negatio. In keeping with his dialectical method in general, for Hegel, plant nature consists of a movement from the abstract to the concrete via an encounter with the other than itself: The process of the plant falls into three syllogisms. . . . [T]he first of these is the universal process, the process of the vegetable organism within itself, the relation of the individual to itself. In this process, which is that of formation, the individual destroys itself, converts itself into its inorganic nature, and by means of this destruction, brings itself forth from itself. In the second process, living being does not contain its other, but faces it as an external independence; it does not constitute its own inorganic nature, but meets it as an object, which it encounters through an apparent contingency. This is the process which is specified in the face of an external nature. The third process is that of the genus, and unites the first two. This is the process of the individuals with themselves as genus, or the production and preservation of the genus.26  Milič Čapek, “Hegel and the Organic View of Nature,” in Hegel and the Sciences, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (Dordrecht: Springer, 1984), 112. Čapek states that “Hegel’s views on physics were plagued by his failure to understand Newton; his views on chemistry suffered by ignoring Lavoisier and Dalton.” Against Findlay’s praise of Hegel as a thinker of evolution, Čapek shows that “the idea of evolution of plants and animal is explicitly rejected in §249 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Sciences. Nature is devoid of history, history begins with historians.” 26  Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 3, trans. M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), §346 Zusatz, 66. 25

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With this syllogism in mind—identity to the self, recognition of the other, unity—Hegel describes plant nature in terms of three major processes: a process of formation (§346), a process of assimilation (§347), and a generic process (§348). We may want to ask, isn’t the end of this process already contained at the beginning, as with Aristotelian teleology? Isn’t the life of the plant only the constant unfolding of the genetic information inside the seed, consisting of the preservation of the self and the genus? Hegel writes in §346a, concerning the development of the seed: The germ [seed] is the unexplicated being [das Unenthüllte] which is the entire concept [Begriff]; the nature of the plant which, however, is not yet Idea because it is still without reality. In the grain of seed [Samenhorn] the plant appears as a simple, immediate unity of the self and the genus. . . . [T]he development of the germ is at first mere growth, mere increase; it is already in itself the whole plant, the whole tree, etc., in miniature. The parts are already fully formed, received only an enlargement, a formal repetition, a hardening, and so on. For what is to become, already is; or the becoming is this merely superficial movement.

Concerning this determination already present in the germ, we may want to ask how far away Hegel is from preformationism. Hegel rejected the preformation hypothesis since it implies that there is no real development.27 Hegel, as we have seen, emphasizes the correspondence between organic life and the phases of the Notion, with the difference that the Notion is self-consistent in time while the plant differs from itself in time—the Notion actualizes itself more completely than the plant. The way to move away from this preformation theory is to reintroduce the concept of contingency into nature, and this is precisely the aim toward the end of Philosophy of Nature. Hegel starts with logic and ends with logic, since what he means by logic is not formal logic, but rather what Findlay calls the “self-grasping Notion” (selbstbegreiffende Begriffe), meaning that the Begriff becomes the Begriff explicitly: “the Begriff of the Begriff.”28 However, since there is an asymmetry between organic life and the Notion, there is also an asymmetry between two contingencies.

 Errol E. Harris, “How Final Is Hegel’s Rejection of Evolution?” in Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 195. 28  Findlay, “The Hegelian Treatment of Biology and Life,” 88. 27

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§18. “FEEBLENESS OF THE NOTION IN NATURE” It is with this remark in mind that we will come back to the question of contingency. Contingency becomes a question for Hegel because, in order to ground Idea as the essence of being, reason must recognize contingency in its development, not simply as something irrational and chaotic (though it may appear temporary), in order to free itself from the world in the world itself29; otherwise reason is exposed, first to its own limit of knowing, and second to an antagonism against nature. If the question of contingency is not recognized and therefore overcome, it also means there will be a discrepancy between the real and the ideal, thinking and being, consisting in the challenge put forward by Wilhelm Traugott Krug: namely, will the Idealists be able to deduce a pen from thinking?30 Retrospectively, if Hegel had access to a 3-D printer today, he would simply show Krug how the pen is recursively deduced. Hegel’s fierce response to Krug, first in his 1802 review of the latter’s work and his article in the Kritischer Journal der Philosophie,31 as well as later in footnotes in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Anmerkung of §250 of the Encyclopaedia, demonstrates that the Notion is not merely abstract, since concrete doesn’t mean physical and sensible, and we can understand the development of the concept as a recursive process in which it comes back to itself in order to know itself. This process can only be an individuation of the concept itself, in which the real and the ideal are no longer separated. This genesis will have to recognize contingency as part of itself, and therefore it is not an attempt to avoid or ignore contingency, but rather it is only by addressing it as necessary that reason is able to overcome it. In Hegel, therefore, we can see two senses of contingency: one is chaotic nature; the other, the logical category or even the category of being, as Bernard Mabille puts it.32 Some authors have suggested that these two notions  Mabille refers to Hegel’s model: (1) the subjective spirit finds a world in front of it; (2) the objective spirit engenders the world; (3) the absolute spirit frees itself from the world in the world itself: Épreuve de la contingence, 86. 30  Raoni Padu, “The Necessity of Contingency and the Powerlessness of Nature: Hegel’s Two Senses of Contingency,” Idealistic Studies 40, no. 3 (fall 2010): 243–55. 31  See Hegel, Werke 2 Jenaer Schriften 1801–1807 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970): “Krugs Entwurf eines neuen Rechtsbegriffs Organons der Philosophie,” 164–65, and “Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme, dargestellt an den Werken des Herrn Krug,” 188–207. 32  Mabille, Épreuve de la contingence, 196. 29

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of contingency are incompatible: “[C]ontingency in nature is not the category of contingency, but a pre-categorical sense of contingency.”33 However, these two contingencies are not unrelated, and we would like to propose that it is only when contingency becomes a logical category that the other contingency, which is characterized in nature, will be recognized as necessary. If we say that in early Schelling’s philosophy the question of contingency is considered to be necessity because the Absolute stands at the beginning of the genesis as the unconditional, in Hegel, the Absolute is no longer at the beginning but rather the process and the end. The reason is clearly spelled out in Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: The presupposition of an intellectual intuition as such an absolute beginning is nothing but monochrome. But the more fundamental problem for Hegel is that it ignores the question of development, since the genesis is not a simple production, leaving recursion to the intervention of contingency as inhibition (Hemmung), which for him is only the realm of nature but not yet the world of spirit. If inhibition for Schelling is both contingency and the condition of production, like the halting status of an algorithm, then for Hegel such inhibition must undergo a dialectical process that doesn’t accept being given as such but sets it into movement. This is a process that we don’t find in Schelling’s recursivity, where the contingent is always already necessary. And it is for this reason that, in the early Schelling, there is no longer an easy opposition between freedom and necessity. As we have said, for some commentators, contingency in Hegel carries two senses: First, it is irrational and chaotic, as it is demonstrated in nature; second, it is a modal category like the possible, the actual, and the necessary.34 However, what does this distinction mean here? Does it mean there is no relation between the two senses at all? Or shall we conclude, as I will try to argue, that the irrational contingency has to pass into a rationalized one, which is implied already in the confrontation between nature and reason, and as is indicated already in one of  Padu, “The Necessity of Contingency,” 249; see also John McTaggart and Ellis McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), 5: “The treatment of the problem of contingency in the dialectic presents a curious alternation between two incompatible points of view, by the first of which contingency is treated as a category, while by the second it is attributed to the incapacity of Nature to realize the Idea.” 34  Raoni Padu has reproached authors like Stephen Houlgate and Dieter Henrich on this score; according to him, they failed to make a distinction between the two. 33

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the three syllogisms, namely Spirit, Logic, and Nature? Hegel’s discussion of contingency in The Science of Logic occurs in the section titled “Actuality.” Actuality for Hegel means the rational (Vernünftig), as he famously claims in Philosophy of Right: “was vernünftig ist, das is wirklich, und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig”—the actual is real but the real is not necessarily actual (actual here means being sensed). The Science of Logic, which we will discuss later, seems to suggest such a transitional phase, in which immediate existence is passed into a “sensed sensible, rationalized existing” (sensible sensé, existant rationalisé) in the words of Bernard Bourgeois.35 The contingency of nature is a key subject in the Encyclopedia. In §250, Hegel contrasts it with the Notion that “the impotence of nature is to be attributed to its only being able to maintain the determinations of the Notion in an abstract manner, and to its exposing the foundation of the particular to determination from without.”36 Nature presents to philosophy a frontier that the latter finds difficult to cross, since if the Notion is able to explain all these contingencies, then the Notion will also be open to contingency. In §368 of the Encyclopedia, titled “The Genus and the Species,” one of the sections on zoology, Hegel continues to expose the “feebleness of the Notion in nature”: The feebleness of the Notion in nature in general, not only subjects the formation of individuals to external accidents, which in the developed animal, and particularly in man, give rise to monstrosities, but also makes the genera themselves completely subservient to the changes of the external universal life of nature.

What does Hegel mean by “the feebleness of the Notion in nature”? Unlike Notions developed by human beings, which are systematic and consistent, and hence protect themselves from external influences, nature is easily affected by contingent events, especially coming from the outside, since its Notion is too feeble to digest these contingencies and therefore it exhibits the irregularities and inconsistencies in its species. As Hegel wrote a few paragraphs later, in §368, Notions developed by humans are subject to defects, but it is even more so in nature:

 Mabille, Épreuve de la contingence, 152.  Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, §250, 215.

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If one is prepared to admit that the works of man are sometimes defective, it must follow that those of nature are more frequently so, for nature is the Idea in the mode of externality. In man, the basis of these defects lies in his whims, his caprice and his negligence. . . . [I]n nature, it is the external conditions which stunt the forms of living being; the forms of nature cannot be brought into an absolute system therefore, and it is because of this that the animal species are exposed to contingency.

We therefore understand why nature sets limits to philosophy, as Hegel wrote earlier in the remark to §250: “[T]his impotence on the part of nature sets limits to philosophy, and it is the height of pointlessness to demand of the Notion that it should explain, and as it is said, construe or deduce these contingent products of nature.”37 We must not make the mistake here of assuming that Hegel is simply condemning contingency as chaotic and insignificant; on the contrary, he gives meaning to contingency, however, in order to overcome it. This is rather clear in §251, where Hegel writes: “[B]eginning with the externality in which it is first contained, the progress of the Notion is therefore a turning into itself in the centre, i.e. the assimilation into subjective unity or being-withinself of what is, to the Notion, the inadequate existence of immediacy or externality.”38 It would be an excuse if reason withdrew itself from this externality and ignored its existence, however. It is for this reason that we can interpret Hegel’s treatise on contingency in The Science of Logic as a unity with that in the Encyclopaedia. §19. DEATH OF NATURE AS AFFIRMATION OF LOGIC Hegel’s strategy of using nature as a transition toward spirit is well spelled out in the interpretation of Songsuk Susan Hahn. Since nature

 Ibid.  Ibid., §251, 217; he continues: “not so that the Notion withdraws from this existence and leaves it as an empty shell, but so that existence as such is immanent within itself, or adequate to the Notion, and so that being-within-self, which is life, itself exists. The Notion wants to break the rind of externality in order to become itself. Life is the Notion which has reached its manifestation and stands displayed in its clarity; at the same time however it is the most difficult for the understanding to come to terms with, because the understanding finds it easiest to grasp whatever is simplest, abstract and dead.”

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has no history, history can begin only with the sublation of the weak Notion in nature, by elevating it to the ethical: [W]e can’t say, strictly from a position inside nature, that nature reacts emotively with abhorrence to contradiction, without lapsing into a kind of anthropomorphism. At this level, nature is a blind, nonrational mechanism, and negation and contradiction appear to nature differently than they do to rational discursive beings such as ourselves. Since nonrational nature is morally neutral with respect to the presence or elimination of contradictions, Hegel seeks to derive from nature a normative notion which is appropriate to a rational self-consciousness who can react moralistically with abhorrence to contradictions and pursue the rational goal of eliminating them.39

We want to suggest that this overcoming of contingency is already contained in the very possibility of the Notion itself. This is because for Hegel Begriff (Notion or Concept) is a living notion—living in the sense that it is reflective and self-determining, and thus not a static notion but rather a self-grasping notion, a notion in which the tension of duality and incompatible terms is overcome through unification in the reflective moment.40 The reflective logic as a movement from appearance to essence is characterized by three reflections in The Science of Logic: first, positing reflection, which starts with appearance, for example, being that is immediate—such being is only negative, so the reflection is a sublation of being as self-positing; second, external reflection, which is recognition of the other as the condition and contradiction of the self; and third, determining reflection, which is the unification of the positing reflection and the external reflection. In “Actuality,” chapter 2 of the “Doctrine of Essence” in The Science of Logic, using the same recursive form, Hegel demonstrates the necessity of contingency by describing movements of the Notion according to the modalities of actuality, possibility, and necessity. I will attempt to reconstruct Hegel’s argument here by highlighting how he starts with contingency and immanent reflection in order to arrive at a complete notion or a notion of the totality. The title of section A is “Contingency or Formal Actuality, Possibility and Necessity.” Contingency here refers to

 Hahn, Contradiction in Motion, 34  Mabille, Épreuve de la contingence, 196.

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the formal, meaning that the content is not yet taken into account. A being is given as such: for example, a stone. Its existence is concrete but merely contingent. It is a formal actuality, which also indicates a possibility. This possibility is actuality reflecting into itself. Reflecting into itself means that such being is a possibility out of many possibilities, such as all different sorts of stones from different origins. And it is for this reason that both actuality and possibility are formal; formal possibility means that everything is possible, for example, A could be A or could be -A. In the “reflecting into” there is “limitless manifoldness,” since “everything is possible that does not contract itself.”41 This unity between the actual (of the being as such) and the possible (that this being is one of the possibilities) is contingency42: The contingent thus presents these two sides. First in so far as it has possibility immediately in it, or, what is the same, in so far as this possibility is sublated in it, it is not positedness, nor is it mediated, but is immediate actuality; it has no ground . . . second, the contingent is the actual as what is only possible, or as a positedness.43

Contingency carries such a paradox within it since as far as it is contingent, it is a mere possibility, and therefore is groundless, but since it is also actual, it has a ground. If being is, it is necessary, but such necessity is only formal, since it is determined as a possibility, and in this sense it is contingent. Contingency is regarded as the recognition of the formality of the existence of the being. If this first reflection is a mere self-identity, we enter a second reflection in relation to another44— in section B, “Relative Necessity, or Real Actuality, Possibility, and Necessity.” The real actuality is so far only the “in-itself of another actual,” and it immediately carries in itself real possibilities. Unlike the formal possibility, which is a reflecting into self as identity, real possibilities are conditions of becoming as projection in reflection. Here Hegel talks about the self-sublating of the real possibility in which, first, the actuality becomes reflective being, “the moment of an other, and thus comes in possession of the self”; and, second, the in-itself  Ibid., 479  Hegel, Science of Logic, 481.  Ibid., 480–81. 44  See John McTaggart and Ellis McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 165. 41 42 43

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of the other is therefore passed into actuality.45 It is not the turning back from itself to itself, but rather a “turning back into itself from the restless being-the-other-of-each-other of actuality and possibility [die Rückkehr in sich aus jenem unruhigen Anderssein der Wirklichkeit und Möglichkeit gegeneinander].”46 These two movements consist of a rejoining of possibility and actuality, by reflecting into the self and the other, which constitute a unity that Hegel calls real necessity. The real necessity is only a relative necessity, as is indicated in the title. It is relative because if we ask why is A necessary, it is because B and C are its conditions. Hegel didn’t distinguish the possible and the probable, but we may want to suggest that the real possible is the probable, since it is that which conditions the becoming of the real actual. It is in this sense that Hegel claims that “in actual fact . . . real necessity is in itself also contingency.” Now this contingency comes from content instead of form. The second reflection leads to a third reflection on the organic totality, in section B, which carries a much shorter title: “Absolute Necessity.” It is absolute since it constitutes its own ground,47 namely, that the notion attends its fullness: It is because it is.48 If we follow the opposition between necessity and contingency, one may arrive at a conclusion that absolute necessity is the negation of all contingencies, since the essence as necessity is not self-mediated and does not need to do so through another. However, this is the opposite of what Hegel would claim: “[T]his contingency (the possibility of an other) is rather absolute necessity; it is the essence of those free, inherently necessary actualities.”49 The McTaggarts explain this seemingly contradictory claim that though being is necessary, its constituent parts have ground in other parts; each part, when looked at separately, would be contingent.50 However, this sounds like only a repetition of the argument of section B. We may want to state in this way: If absolute necessity means that the global condition of existence is taken into consideration (meaning that it is no longer local [therefore relative]), this absolute  Hegel, Science of Logic, 484.  Hegel, Werke 6 Wissenschaft der Logik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 213. 47  John W. Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency (London: Palgrave, 2007), 47: “Thus absolute necessity contains contingency within it as the ground of its own necessity.” 48  Hegel, Science of Logic, 487. 49  Ibid., 488. 50  McTaggart and McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, 167. 45 46

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necessity is still contingent. Hegel completed the circle by starting with the contingency of being and finishing there after three reflections; this circular movement continues in the course of time. As we have seen in Hegel, the necessity of contingency is in fact a process in which the Idea reflects on its abstract and formal possibilities to recognize its existence as contingency. By reflecting on itself as the possibility and contradiction of becoming other, it recognizes the other—as the other of the self—as the condition of its becoming, and therefore arrives at relative necessity. Reflecting on the ground of its existence, it recognizes that its existence as absolute necessity must contain in itself contingency. Contingency is therefore not a merely negative concept. Contingency is double: first, an unreflected contingency indicates the weakness of the Notion, for example, nature; its diversity is an indulgence, as Dieter Henrich writes: “Nature, because it is the frenzy [Aussersichsein] of the concept, is free to indulge in this diversity. So there are some sixty species of parrots, one hundred and thirty seven Veronica, and so on. To enumerate it seems to Hegel to be a mindless and boring occupation, because in such diversity there is no spirit.”51 A reflected contingency, or rather a “domesticated contingency,” is necessary to comprehend the movement of the notion. We can therefore say that nature’s irrationality has its very reason.52 However, when we arrive here, we are now no longer in nature but in the realm of spirit, since it is a realization of self-consciousness. In this sense nature, as Hegel himself said, is “die Idee in der Form des Andersseyns” (Idea in the form of the other) or “der sich enfremdete Geist” (a self-alienated spirit), “ein bacchantischer Gott, der sich selbst nicht zügelt und fasst” (a bacchanalian god who does not control himself).53 Nature expresses itself as the exteriority of contingency and is consequently overcome, and through it the Notion reaches the in- and for-itself. Nature to the Idea is necessarily the other of itself, and serves as a passage toward the free conscious spirit.54 As Schmied-Kowarzik remarks, when the Idea releases itself from nature as its other to the self-grasped spirit,

 Dieter Henrich, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 167.  Padu, “The Necessity of Contingency,” 253. 53  Schmied-Kowarzik, Von der wirkliche, von der seyenden Natur, 170. 54  Ibid. 51 52

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it necessarily sublates the last externality of nature, which leads to the “death of natural being” (“Tod des Natürlichen”): Superseding this death of nature, proceeding from this dead husk, there rises the finer nature of spirit. Living being ends with this separation, and this abstract coincidence with itself. . . . The purpose of nature is to extinguish itself, and to break through its rind of immediate and sensuous being, to consume itself like a Phoenix in order to emerge from this externality rejuvenated as spirit. Nature has become distinct from itself in order to recognize itself again as Idea, and to reconcile itself with itself.55

We will take a pause here regarding Hegel’s philosophy of nature, since the death of nature is the affirmation of logic. A superficial reading leads to an opposition between the ecology of Schelling and the anti-ecology of Hegel. It is probably more appropriate to see that in this passage from nature to spirit, the death of nature doesn’t mean that there are no trees, animals, or bacteria, but rather that nature is recognized as the other of the Idea in the whole, and therefore “consumes itself like a Phoenix in order to emerge from this externality rejuvenated as spirit.” The death of nature is the birth of spirit. This is an extraordinary expression of Hegel’s humanism. Instead of seeing spirit as part of nature, he sacrifices nature to spirit in order to release nature. We will stop on this point concerning the relation between recursivity and contingency, which we have attempted to characterize as Hegelian. Let us recapitulate what we have done so far: In Schelling’s and Hegel’s Naturphilosophie, contingency is enabled and overcome by two recursive models. In Schelling’s early philosophy of nature, contingency is the expression of freedom and nature. In Hegel’s philosophy of nature, contingency is a test for the auto-determination of the Notion. If in Schelling we see an allure toward a reenchantment of nature, or even a Romanticization of nature, it is, however, not sufficient. Instead we propose to see in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie a proto-ecology or

 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 3, §376: “Über diesem Tode der Natur, aus dieser toten Hülle geht eine schönere Natur, geht der Geist hervor. Das Lebendige endet mit dieser Trennung und diesem abstrakten Zusammengehen in sich. . . . Das Ziel der Natur ist, sich selbst zu töten und ihre Rinde des Unmittelbaren, Sinnlichen zu durchbrechen, sich als Phönix zu verbrennen, um aus dieser Äußerlichkeit verjüngt als Geist hervorzutreten. Die Natur ist sich ein Anderes geworden, um sich als Idee wieder zu erkennen und sich mit sich zu versöhnen.”

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even a proto-organicism that is moving toward a systems theory in the sense of Bertalanffy. Contrary to biological organicism, spirit and nature have a different relation in Hegel. Here the progress of the spirit is also the progress toward the death of nature. In this sense, Hegel is probably a step closer to cybernetics, or mechanical organicism.56 In the early twentieth century, recursivity is formalized and systematized in cybernetics and other, parallel developments: for example, computation theory (Gödel-Turing-Church) and automata (John von Neumann). Then it arrives at artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and more complex forms of automation. Alternatively, paraphrasing Hegel, maybe one can say that this machinic organicism characterizes the new form of the absolute spirit of our epoch. The central question for cybernetics, as Gotthard Günther has famously claimed, is as follows: “[T]he question is not what life, consciousness, or self-reflection ultimately is, but: can we repeat in machines the behavioral traits of all those self-reflective systems that our universe has produced in its natural evolution?”57 The reflective mechanism in Hegel seems to Günther a perfect model upon which the “second machine” should build and provides a theoretical foundation for articulating the soul and the machine. Following Hegel, he claims that after idealism one knows that being is not reflective; it limits itself to itself, but the form of consciousness is reflective and goes beyond itself to interact with the environment.58 Günther associates self-consciousness in idealism with the project of cybernetics, not only because he was a Hegel scholar, but also because of the change in the epistemological paradigm after Kant’s formalization of the concept of the organic—a point we have emphasized many times. In this sense we can also understand what Heidegger says concerning Hegel:  Bertalanffy, though recognized in Wiener’s Cybernetics as one of the origins of systems theory, argued that it is not correct to identify cybernetics with systems since cybernetics is only a special case of “general systems theory.” Cybernetics remains a “mechanism,” it tends to be a “closed system” with respect to exchange of matter with environment; it is open only to information. See Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men, and Minds: Psychology in the Modern World (New York: George Braziller, 1967), 67–69. However, this critique of Bertalanffy is not very convincing since the priority that cybernetics gives to information doesn’t mean that it ignores matter and energy (thermodynamics). Furthermore, cybernetics after Wiener (for example, in second-order cybernetics) also provides a more general concept of systems. 57  Günther, “Cybernetic Ontology,” 337. 58  Gotthard Günther, “Seele und Maschine,” in Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik, 86. 56

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“[T]he completion [Vollendung] of metaphysics begins with Hegel’s metaphysics of the absolute knowledge as the Will of the Geist.”59 We can raise another question along the lines of Heidegger’s verdict: Isn’t the systematization of the recursive in cybernetics the new condition for philosophizing, and no longer the same as in the time of Kant? This means that the completion of metaphysics is also the realization of it in cybernetics, and it therefore demands a new task of philosophizing. Metaphysics concerns the understanding of being as such and beings as a whole: the existence of being, for example, this crystal before me and the plant outside the window, a particular being; and the existence of all beings in their totality. The pre-Socratic philosophers, especially the Ionian naturalists, wanted to grasp being as a whole, but they remained premetaphysicians or nonmetaphysicians, as Heidegger calls them. Metaphysics seeks to reconcile being and becoming, the particular and the universal. It is in Plato and Aristotle that metaphysics took shape, with its full explanatory power of being, through a theory of form and ontology, which Heidegger calls onto-theology, and that was later fully combined with Christian theology. The organic is an epistemological concept, but it is also a metaphysical concept precisely because it is able to integrate both mechanical and living beings, as Heidegger has sharply pointed out: The fact that in the age of the absolutely unconditioned “organization,” the ready-made disposable arrangement [Einrichtung] of all beings, the “organic” must become the only one addressed and proclaimed, shows only that now the “mechanical” in the broad sense of the plannable workable [Machbaren] and the “living” have stripped away the long-held gleam of a difference between them.60

We have to pay attention here that for Heidegger, the organic is not opposed to the mechanical; instead, it is fundamentally mechanicaltechnological, as Heidegger already noted toward the end of the 1930s in the so-called Black Notebook that “it might very well still take a considerable time to recognize that the ‘organism’ and the ‘organic’ present

 Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 76.  Martin Heidegger, “XI. Die Technik,” in Besinnung (GA 66), (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 176.

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themselves as the mechanistic-technological ‘triumph’ of modernity over the domain of growth, ‘nature.’”61 This metaphysical task—to grasp being as such and beings as a whole—is not simply a theoretical discourse. It is not something in our mind, but rather a will. This will changes the way the world is known, felt, experienced, and constructed. The metaphysical will subordinates itself to the transcendence of the divine and becomes a means of theodicy. Yet God is not necessarily a mysterious transcendence, but rather the ground of rationalization, as we have found regarding the various proofs of the existence of God. The pantheism of Spinoza is a way to unite the divine with nature (deus sive natura), in which the divine is immanent in the substance that it produced. It is not until Nietzsche that God is murdered and a new ground of rationality has to be constructed—a ground that is at the same time a ground and an abyss. In cybernetics, Heidegger sees a totalizing force tantamount to an exclusive rationality. Therefore, Heidegger was looking for the other thinking, which no longer bears the name philosophy. It matters little for us whether it is called philosophy or something else, but Heidegger sees the necessity of taking another trajectory of thinking in order to think about another beginning. Heidegger wants to take another path, which I formulated as cosmotechnical thinking.62 However, he wants to do this without cybernetics, meaning that he wants to find a beginning that is already pronounced but not yet thought. In order to understand in what sense cybernetics is the end of philosophy, we will still need to understand what cybernetics is and how the organicist and reflective logic of Hegel stands as a precursor to cybernetics. It is not possible to directly map Hegel’s reflective logic onto cybernetics as if the latter is a theoretical application of the former, but it is possible to see how reflection complexifies itself. We will have to reconstruct a philosophy of cybernetics, which is not really a discipline but rather a movement with enormous richness and heterogeneity of ideas. We will need to understand the cybernetics project as a whole. We will elaborate on the “advancement” of mechanism as recursive

 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017), 143.  See Yuk Hui, “For a Cosmotechnical Event: In Honour of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler,” in Reinventing Ihde: Origins, Interplay, and Extensions, ed. Glen Miller and Ashley Shew (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming).

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algorithm by following the work of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing as well as the development of cybernetics in the twentieth century, which has formulated the organic in terms of a more general model with two key concepts—feedback and information—as elaborated by the mathematicians Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and others. We will also trace the development of first-order cybernetics into second-order cybernetics via the systems theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Heinz von Foerster, and Niklas Luhmann, as well as Gilbert Simondon (who attempts to reformulate the concept of feedback in a different fashion) and others. §20. GENERAL RECURSIVITY AND TURING MACHINE Hegel starts from logic and ends at logic, since the Notion acquires its universality and absoluteness only through laborious reflections: immediacy, negation, negation, and reproduced immediacy (wiederhergestellte Unmittelbarkeit). Günther has attempted to construct a non-Aristotelian logic (meaning a multivalued logic) through the formalization of Hegel’s reflective logic. An Aristotelian logic, or classical logic, according to Günther, presupposes the metaphysical identity of thought and being.63 If we refer to the language of Schelling, the classical logic rests on A = B, and did not yet arrive at A2 = (A = B), not to mention A3 = A2 = (A = B). That is to say that, in German idealism there is a self-consciousness as reflection that elevates the A = B to a higher order of logic. Günther spoke a more Hegelian language than a Schellingian language, since the Hegelian reflection, as we have seen, is more concrete and structural.64 In his seminal work, The Consciousness of Machines: A Metaphysics of Cybernetics, Günther claims that “[i]n cybernetics, finally, the idea of Hegel, that reflection is essentially a real process, is made serious when we systematically attempt to transfer processes of consciousness in analogy to machines.”65

 Charles Parsons, “Gotthard Günther,” in Gödel’s Collected Works, vol. 4, ed. Solomon Feferman and John W. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 458. 64  Günther, “Seele und Maschine,” 85. 65  Gotthard Günther, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen Eine Metaphysik der Kybernetik (Baden-Baden und Krefeld: Agis-Verlag, 1963), 95. 63

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If the subject-object relation represents a two-valued logic, Günther sees in Hegel’s reflective logic the possibility of a three-valued logic.66 He understands the evolution of machines as a progress toward the Hegelian logic: A classical machine is a Reflexion in anderes, a von Neumann machine is a Reflexion in sich, but a “brain machine” is a Reflexion in sich der Reflexion in sich und anderes of the “brain machine,” as “Hegel says in the greater Logic.”67 Let’s illustrate this with Günther’s own example. We have I, which is the self, then we have R, which is the first reflection, namely, subjectivity; now we can have a double reflection D, then with these three values we can compute a truth table of three values: IR, ID, DR.68 Or, to generalize Günther’s construction, he defines different R-levels, the 0th R-level being one without self-consciousness, while the next R-level takes the 0th level as its object, which could be schematized as: Ss → (So → Os). As Charles Parsons writes: Every R-level . . . can itself be object of a further reflection. Thus the iteration involved is infinite. Günther draws the further conclusion that it cannot at this point be characterized axiomatically, as a new logic would require, “because it is in no way possible to arrive at final, most general propositions about this open subject and to define it as self-consciousness.”69

What is spotted here in Günther’s logic is an extension of the Hegelian reflection to multiple levels, where another reflection is always possible. Günther started with a very convincing proposal for a many-valued logic, but in The Consciousness of Machines and other writings it is not very clear that his formal logic could be fully realized by cybernetics, and at points it seems that cybernetics exhibits a greater flexibility. However, one point is clear: that Günther, with his elaboration of Hegelian reflective logic, has attempted to structuralize the mechanism of reflection as Hegel himself tried to do. We will see how Günther’s metaphysics of cybernetics is significant by strolling through the work of Gödel and Wiener, as well as that of Gregory Bateson and Heinz von  Ibid., 55.  Günther, “Seele und Machine,” 85.  Günther, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen, 53–54; see the four truth tables that Günther has established. 69  Parsons, “Gotthard Günther,” 436. 66 67 68

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Foerster. We start with Gödel instead of Wiener since Gödel’s recursive function represents the fundamental mathematical basis for the implementation of feedback in modern computation machines. Moving to Wiener later will allow us to understand the broad implications of recursive thinking. In 1952 Günther initiated correspondence with Gödel and discussed his philosophy of logic with him. Gödel, who had been a reader of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason since he was sixteen, had also read some Hegel and Schelling. In the letter to Günther dated June 30, 1954, Gödel had already marked his interest in German idealism as a possible correction of metaphysics: “The reflection on the subject treated in idealistic philosophy (that is, your second topic of thought), the distinction of levels of reflection, etc., seem to me very interesting and important. I even consider it entirely possible that this is ‘the’ way to the correct metaphysics.”70 A few years later, in 1957, as Charles Parsons has noted, in a letter from Gödel to Günther dated April 4, Gödel again raised his interest in the “total reflection” that was once promised by Günther, but absent in his recent work.71 This general interest of Gödel in reflective logic seems to be underelaborated in the literature. Gödel’s trajectory in philosophy has been documented by several authors, including Hao Wang,72 Mark van Atten,73 and Charles Parsons. His interest in Plato, Kant, and Leibniz, and his 1952 turn toward Edmund Husserl’s transcendental idealism as a possible foundation of the sciences has been much discussed. It is therefore not our intention here to reiterate what has been said elsewhere but rather to attempt to

 Kurt Gödel, Collected Works, vol. 4, ed. Solomon Feferman et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 505. 71  Cited by Charles Parsons, “Gödel and Philosophical Idealism,” Philosophia Mathematica 18, no. 2 (2010): 189; Gödel, Collected Works, vol. 4, 527, 529: “I would like to remark that a couple of years ago I read a manuscript of yours about the foundations of logic that contained a very interesting thought I now miss in your more recent works on the topic. For, back then, you interpreted total reflection as something that go beyond all formation of types. It is a plausible view that the implementation of this idea must lead to a nonAristotelian logic, since in this way one immediately runs up against the antinomies of set theory. Now you seem rather to lean towards the view of identifying double reflection with the second logical type and giving up Aristotelian logic for the extended functional calculus, which I regard as unjustified.” 72  Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 73  Mark Van Atten, Essays on Gödel’s Reception of Leibniz, Husserl, and Brouwer (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014). 70

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connect Gödel’s interest in reflection with the concept of recursivity he developed in the 1930s. We will attempt to reconstruct Gödel’s notion of recursivity and its relation to computability or decidability by revisiting the history of computational theory. We will not be able to recount the whole history here, but only the essential steps toward its definition. It is of great interest here, though it sounds somewhat speculative, to understand recursion as a realization of the idealist project. Only after we have worked out a precise concept of recursion in computation will we be able to move into the discussions of second-order cybernetics. In order to do so, however, we must firstly broaden our understanding of the term logic, which is also why Hegel was introduced in the first place. Gödel definitely holds a broader view of logic in comparison to how logic is conventionally understood, in terms of syllogisms and logical inferences. Commenting on Hegel’s logic, Gödel told Wang: Hegel’s logic need not be interpreted as dealing with contradictions. It is simply a systematic way of obtaining new concepts. It deals with being in time. Not Hegel’s logic but some parts of it might be related to a proposition (not concept) producing its opposite. For example, if A is defined as in Russell’s paradox [namely, A is the set of all sets that do not belong to themselves], “A belongs to A” produces its opposite. In Hegel, a condition produces its opposite condition in history: that is a process in time, and truth depends on time. Hegel’s interpretation is like the figures in a puppet show; the second beats the first down. In terms of the unity of opposites and the idea that contradiction gives direction, antinomies receive a different interpretation. The Russell set becomes a limiting case of a succession of belonging-to and not-belonging-to; it is no longer circular.74

Gödel sees in Hegel’s logic the crucial place of time, meaning that Hegelian logic is temporal, since it is fundamentally a series of reflections, and if we base the question of truth on time, then it opens a different experience of logic. It is probably this unconventional understanding of logic that led Gödel to expose the limits of formal logical systems, namely, in his famous 1931 paper on the incompleteness of formal logical systems exemplified by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. This logical proof sends

 Wang, A Logical Journey, 313.

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Gödel back to the necessity of mathematical intuition, which constantly reformulates the development of mathematics.75 What interests us in Gödel’s proof is his ingenious invention of a method that first turns axioms into strings of natural numbers and consequently allows him to arithmetically prove the given proposition through calculation. This leads to the discovery and formal definition of the recursive function and later general recursive function, the equivalence of the universal Turing machine. The arithmetization of symbolic logic and the automation of mathematical proof through calculation was a great leap in modern science. The mathematical development of recursivity and its realization in the universal Turing machine during the 1930s witnessed the emergence of what we call an algorithm. Many people, including computer scientists and social scientists, often refer to recipes when they explain what an algorithm is. This is not completely wrong, since an algorithm does specify certain procedures and rules that have to be followed, but it is also absolutely not right, since a recipe cannot explain at all what an algorithm of our time is. Hence, I would like to propose that algorithmic thinking should be understood in relation to the concept of recursion or reflection. A recursive function simply means a function that calls itself until a halting state is reached. Douglas Hofstadter, in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, explains the concept with a joke: Imagine that a German professor has to give a lecture in one long sentence with a lot of Nebensätze; at the end he will only have to pronounce verbs in order to complete each interaction. First, Richard Dedekind, in his 1888 essay “Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?” formally used recursive functions to define operations and natural numbers. This motif was taken up again by the mathematician Thoralf Skolem in 1922 to reconstruct the logical system of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Skolem’s radicality is that he removed the existential quantifiers used by Russell and replaced them with functions. This is now known as Skolemnization. Literally, we can

 Gödel’s letter to Brutian, dated December 10, 1969, in Gödel, Collected Works, vol. 4, 330; cited also by Pierre Cassou Noguès, Les démons de Gödel. Logique et Folie (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 115.

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also read that the question of existence is no longer a question, since it is, in the end, a mathematical function.76 Second, Gödel defined recursive functions in his 1931 paper titled “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I,” and general recursive functions later in his 1934 paper “On Undecidable Propositions of Formal Mathematics.” In his 1931 paper, in contrast to the formalization of symbolic logic, Gödel arithmetized the formal systems with numbers (now known as Gödel numbering) so that the relations between different axioms could be expressed numerically, as we can see in Table 2.1: Each symbol, including bracket, is given a natural number. This allows Gödel to turn proofs from logical inferences into computation consisting of recursive functions. In his 1931 paper, Gödel defines recursive functions as follows: A number-theoretic function Ø is said to be recursive if there is a finite sequence of number-theoretic functions Ø l, Ø2, . . . , Øn that ends with Ø and has the property that every function Øk of the sequence is recursively defined in terms of two of the preceding functions, or results from any of the preceding functions by substitution, or, finally, is a constant or the successor function x+1.77

We may want to simplify this in the form of F(x) = k F(x-1), in which the function goes back to itself, as well as the result of the preceding function. It is for this reason that we can associate it with Gödel’s interest in Günther’s proposal for a reflective logic. In 1934 Gödel introduced the general recursive function in his paper “On Undecidable Propositions of Formal Mathematical Systems.” Gödel was aware (through his correspondence with the French logician Jacques Herbrand) that his Table 2.1  Scheme of the Gödel Numbering 0 1

N 2

= 3

~ 4

V 5

& 6

→ 7

Ξ 8

Π 9

Σ 10

ε 11

( 12

) 13

 Rod Adams, An Early History of Recursive Functions and Computability (Boston: Docent, 2011), 19–32. 77  Gödel, Collected Works, vol. 1, ed. Solomon Feferman et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 159. 76

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primitive recursive functions didn’t include all effectively calculable functions. In section 9, “General Recursive Functions,” Gödel gives a similar definition of recursive function: One may attempt to define this notion as follows: If Ø denotes an unknown function, and ψ1, . . . ψk are known functions, and if the ψ’s and Ø are substituted in one another in the most general fashions and certain pairs of the resulting expressions are equated, then, if the resulting set of functional equations has one and only one solution for Ø, Ø is a recursive function.78

The second definition is more abstract, and involves another order of complexity since it involves two functions, but it also highlights the three main perspectives of the theory of recursion: (1) That which can be represented in terms of recursive functions is recursively enumerable, namely, it is computable; (2) it starts with a simple function in order to arrive at a complex one, often illustrated by the phenomenon of emergence; and (3) it presupposes the unknown in order to produce the known, meaning that the black box cannot be known exactly but can be substituted by other known functions whose recursive operation may arrive at the same result as the unknown function.79 The following example that Gödel gives may help to understand it:

j ( x, 0 ) =y 1 ( x ) ,

j ( 0, y + 1) =y 2 ( y ) ,

j (1, y + 1) =y 3 ( y ) , j ( x + 2, y + 1) =y 4 (j ( x, y + 2 ) , j ( x, j ( x, y + 2 ))).  Ibid., 268.  Pierre Livet, “La notion de récursivité, de la première cybernétique au connexionnisme,” Intellectica 39 (2004/2): 126.

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Third, following the publication of Turing’s 1936 paper and Stephen Kleene’s (student of Alonzo Church) further definition of general recursivity after Gödel—for example, the Fixed Point Theorem80 and Normal Form Theory81—Church, in a 1937 review of Turing’s 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” claims that the Herbrand-Gödel-Kleene general recursive function is equivalent to Turing’s universal machine and Church’s Lambda definable functions.82 We may be able to say that for Turing, what is computable or decidable is always recursively enumerable, even though some computer scientists (such as Robert Soare) propose to use decidability and computability instead of recursion,83 for the latter carries various meanings in everyday use. However, that would miss the importance of the recursive form central to the mathematical and philosophical understanding. A recursive function may not attain its goal, and hence it doesn’t halt. In this case it gets lost in its infinite looping until it has used up its computational resources, such as the exhaustion of memory or even the physical fatigue of the machine. However, this undecidability is what a universal Turing machine wants to determine, hence to avoid such an infinitive looping. Let’s consider the example of computing the Fibonacci number (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which the next number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. Given a number N, we want to see all the numbers in the series from 1 until N, the recursive function calls itself, and enters a spiral operation until it arrives at its halting status, that is, when the value of the number N becomes 0; N = 0 or N = 1 is an indicator of the telos.

 It can be simply stated as the following: for every Turing computable total function f(x) there is a fixed-point n such that φf(n) = φn (we will see below the recurrence of the term fixed point, e.g., a terminal state). 81  We use Soare’s summary here: There is a primitive recursive predicate T(e, x, y) and a primitive recursive function U(y) such that for any general recursive function φ(x), there is an index e such that φ(x) = U(μy T(e, x, y)). See Robert I. Soare, “Computability and Recursion,” Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 2, no. 3 (1996): 301. 82  Ibid., 297; see also Wilfried Sieg, “Mechanical Procedures and Mathematical Experience,” in Mathematics and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 83  Soare suggests that “the term ‘recursive’ should no longer carry the additional meaning of ‘computability’ or ‘decidability.’” 80

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long fibonacci(long N) { if ((N == 0) || (N == 1)) return number; else // recursion step retur​n  fib​onacc​i(N- ​1)  + ​fibon​acci(​N-  2)​; } It is worth mentioning that the Fibonacci number was also a source of inspiration for Turing’s later paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” in which Turing suggests that it may be possible to understand morphogenesis as a recursive process of pattern generation. Turing proposes a “chemical embryology,” inspired by D’Arcy Thompson’s analysis of biological forms, to “account for the appearance of Fibonacci numbers in connection with Wr-cones.”84 Turing’s algorithm (reaction-diffusion) has succeeded in showing that it is possible to generate patterns and forms that assemble life,85 like the singling out of formal cause and final cause as the causal model of computational biology. One may want to claim Turing as a computationalist who wants to reduce biology to computation, but one would thereby miss the point that it is an opening up of a new epistemology. At stake is how is one is going to proceed with this new mode of knowing, and how this mode of knowing should contribute to the understanding of life. We will be able to tackle this question only in later chapters. To reiterate the concept of digital recursion in a simplified way: Recursion here means that a function calls itself in each iteration until a halting state is reached, which is either a predefined and executable goal or a proof of being incomputable. This notion of recursivity has to be further extended from mathematical proof to wider applications. This can be a mathematical proposition, software or a system like Google, or even a living being recurrently interacting with its living milieu. The realization of this general recursive thinking is the rise of what I term algorithmic thinking. Contrary to automation considered as a form of  Letter from Turing to Michael Woodger, undated, received February 12, 1951, http:​//www​ .alan​turin​g.net​/turi​ng_wo​odger​_feb5​1; also cited by Jack Copeland, “Artificial Life,” in The Essential Turing, ed. B. Jack Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 508. 85  Conrad Waddington commented in a letter to Turing that Turing’s model can find its most signification application “in the arising of spots, streaks, and flecks of various kinds in apparently uniform areas such as the wings of butterflies, the shells of mollusks, the skin of tigers, leopards, etc.” Cited by Copeland, “Artificial Life,” 510. 84

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repetition, recursion is an automation that is considered to be a genesis of the algorithm’s capacity for self-positing and self-realization. Gödel is not a Hegelian since he rejects—in a way of misunderstanding—the Absolute by saying that “there is no absolute knowledge, everything goes only by probability.”86 However, reflection is considered to be a way of moving toward higher-order logic. With the notion of recursivity and its realization in the mechanism of the Turing machine, it seems to be a decisive moment in the history of technology, one that assimilates the concept of the organic and, with its constant amelioration and breakthrough, constitutes a new condition of philosophizing two centuries after Hegel and Schelling. However, we are not rushing to the end now. It is necessary next to investigate further how the concept of the organic is further appropriated in the context of early twentieth-century cybernetics. §21. WIENER’S LEIBNIZIANISM Unlike Günther, Wiener did not employ Hegelian language, but instead named Leibniz as the patron saint of cybernetics. For sure, Leibniz is no Hegel, but they share reflection on the organicity of being and its operation in reflection; this is also why Günther identifies Wiener’s feedback with Hegel’s reflection. This does not mean that Leibniz was the first to ponder upon mathematics and logic. Descartes before him had already constructed a theory of automata. However, in Leibniz one finds a mathematical and physical account of a reflective model that folds the infinite into the finite being, like the best of all possible worlds hypothesis and the monadology. Wiener writes: If I were to choose a patron saint of cybernetics out of the history of science, I should have to choose Leibniz. The philosophy of Leibniz centers about two closely related concepts—that of a universal symbolism and that of a calculus of reasoning. From these are descended the mathematical notation and the symbolic logic of the present day. Now, just as the calculus of arithmetic lends itself to a mechanization progressing through the abacus and the desk computing machine to the ultra-rapid computing

 Wang, A Logical Journey, 291.

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machines of the present day, so the calculus ratiocinator of Leibniz contains the germs of the machina ratiocinatrix, the reasoning machine.87

Wiener names Leibniz as the first thinker of universal symbolism and calculus of reasoning, but this remains very vague and general. What exactly is Leibniz’s contribution to cybernetics? By exploring this question we will be able to ground a philosophical investigation of cybernetics and connect it with what we have discussed so far regarding German idealism. As we have already seen in the introduction, Joseph Needham regarded Leibniz as the first thinker of organic philosophy in the history of Western philosophy. It is no coincidence that in Leibniz the thinker of the “reasoning machine” and the philosopher of the “organic” come together; this combination is the real reason that Leibniz is the patron saint of cybernetics. Leibniz’s corpus is far beyond our efforts to examine here, but we would like to outline some important ideas in Leibniz’s contribution as they are interpreted by Wiener. It should noted here that Wiener is a careful reader of Leibniz. We would like to demonstrate two important elements in Leibniz’s cybernetics: (a) the theory of the combinatorial and (b) the mathematical model of the infinite in the finite. Both elements are core to his Monadology, since there the world is composed of monads that see the world according to a point of view giving rise to various combinations; monads have mirrors that reflect the world in itself, which generates a richness far beyond the limit of rules. Leibniz’s 1666 doctoral dissertation, De Arte Combinatoria, is a proposal to understand human thinking, such as ideas, as different combinations of signs. The human mind is a set of operations based on combinations of symbols, and reasoning is the organization of these operations. It is noted that for Leibniz, thinking is calculating, which is analogical to symbolic operations and also to a large extent relies on them. This is also why he leveled the criticism at the Cartesians that they think much more with signs than they believe, and that therefore signs for them remain unthought (impensé).88 The combinations are not random, they have a reason to be as they are, and this is the principle of sufficient reason: Nihil est sine ratione, nothing is without ground  Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 12. 88  Claire Schwarz, Leibniz—La raison de l’être (Paris: Belin, 2017), 140. 87

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or reason. The formulation of thinking in characters aims to “eliminate controversies,” “especially to exterminate the controversies in matters that depend on reasoning, because then reasoning and calculating will be the same.”89 Concerning the relation between the infinite and the finite, this is fundamental to Leibniz’s analogy between symbolic operations and thinking, meaning the inscription of the infinite in the finite. To Descartes, for reason to be perfect it should contain finite steps so that the mind can move along them; the contribution of Leibniz is to inscribe the infinite in the finite, so that the mind is able to comprehend the infinite by means of finite symbols. For example, the famous irrational number π can be represented by Leibniz as a formula with finite symbols: 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - . . . = π/4 The way that the infinite is expressed in the finite is the fold, if we recall Gilles Deleuze’s treatise on Leibniz here. This is at the center of his notion of the “individual substance” developed in Discours de la métaphysique, and later on the “monad” (simple substance) in the Monadology. Leibniz rejected the Cartesian definition of substance as extension in space; instead, he incorporates a dynamic in the substance. The individual substance does not contain the predicates of all substances, since only God can do it, but rather it contains in itself predicates that express the world according to its point of view. A monad, we are told, does not have a window; rather, it possesses a strange apparatus: a mirror. In the Monadology the mirror is the key to the understanding of such points of view, and it is also a mechanism of interiorization. We may want to relate this mechanism of the mirror to the concept of recursion. The monad is in the world, and “in the world” means that there is something outside of it. If the monad is able to look at itself, like the “I” looking at the “me,” then it is outside of itself, so there is a contradiction. On the contrary, if all relations are already contained in the notion of individual substance, defined by the unity and absolute discernment, and not by its metaphysical condition of existence, as Louis Couturat says,90 then we will not be able to grasp the sophistication of Leibniz’s  G. W. Leibniz, Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz, ed. Louis Couturat (Paris: Alcan, 1903), 28: “surtout pour exterminer les controverses dans les matières qui dépendent du raisonnement, car alors raisonner et calculer sera la même chose.” 90  Schwarz, Leibniz—La raison de l’être, 159; Couturat famously made the statement, quoted by Heidegger and other authors: “la métaphysique de Leibniz repose tout entière sur sa logique.” 89

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thought. Leibniz has integrated this negative metaphysical condition by reflecting it into the monad, through which the “in the world” is not a condition but the correlate of the monad’s expression of the world. If we attempt to understand Leibniz’s logic as formal logic—that is, merely in terms of inferences between logical propositions—we are far behind Leibniz’s own thought; we are still within Cartesian mechanism. In Leibniz, the monad is not “inorganic” or mechanical, it is organic and relational; in fact, no substance is inorganic for Leibniz. The Cartesians reject the notion of substantial form since it is the legacy of the Aristotelian concept of the soul—in De Anima, Aristotle draws an analogy between soul and form, as dynamnis—that implies that one has to endow stones and plants with a soul, a thinking subject. Leibniz on the contrary proposes an identification and unity between being and one, which demands an analogy of the soul. This perhaps reminds us of what Günther says regarding the foundation of cybernetics: selfconsciousness as reflection. Wiener’s 1948 Cybernetics Communication and Control in Man and Animals starts with a refreshing chapter titled “Newtonian and Bergsonian Time.” What does he want to convey here regarding Newton and Bergson? Wiener wants to set up an opposition between two concepts of time: Newtonian, reversible, mechanical time, on the one hand; and Bergsonian, irreversible, biological time on the other. In Creative Evolution, Bergson argued that mechanism failed to understand the “concrete time” of “real systems,” instead constructing “artificial systems” of “abstract time.”91 But Wiener’s ultimate aim is to argue that Bergson’s criticism of mechanism is losing its efficacy today, since mechanism has followed a different path since the discovery of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics in the line of James Clerk Maxwell–Ludwig Boltzmann–Willard Gibbs. The significance of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics in relation to Newtonian laws is that it distances itself from the determinism of Newtonian mechanics and sees laws of nature as statistical, meaning that it puts contingency at the center of nature; as François Jacob writes, “[I]n the second half of the nineteenth  Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 36; in the introduction, xxv, Bergson shows how, in a mechanical system, every state of the parts could be restored by an external cause. Since the mechanical system doesn’t have a history, it is driven by mechanical rules like in Newton’s physics. This mechanical view stands in stark contrast to Bergson’s emphasis on the autonomy and self-preservation of the past in Matter and Memory.

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century, several so-called laws of nature became statistical laws.”92 In other words, statistical thermodynamics renders order and chance compatible.93 The microcosm of the quantum world assimilates the vitalist view of time that Wiener attributed to Bergson. The uncertainty and the indetermination of the quantum activities discovered by Heisenberg and the wave-particle duality discovered by Louis de Broglie, together with statistical mechanics, suggested to Wiener the establishment of a new scientific foundation that effectively surpassed the classical opposition between mechanism and vitalism. For Wiener, this new scientific foundation is a realization of Leibnizian metaphysics. Leibniz, the contemporary of Newton, had independently arrived at the discovery of differentiation, but with rather different metaphysical presuppositions. Leibniz’s theory of individual substance, its predicates, the mirroring relations, and the dynamics of force seem to Wiener to march hand in hand with the new physics. Furthermore, Leibniz had already provided the application of such metaphysics, which is the precursor of cybernetics. We may want to understand this in terms of the following two points—even if, for some Leibniz scholars, these may sound like bad analogies. First, the mirroring activity of the monad gives rise to vague impressions, which Wiener relates to the uncertainty of quantum activities: As I have said, some of the Leibnizian monads mirror the world more clearly, some less clearly. This lack of clearness in mirroring is responsible for our impression that there is chance and indetermination in the world. Now, in the modern quantum theory, the indetermination which is an essential feature of the world, as represented in the ordinary four dimensions of time and space, is resolved, according to Heisenberg, if a sufficient number of additional, unperceived dimensions are superadded.94

Wiener thus understands an electron as a monad; he continues: Thus, each electron possesses its own world of dimensions, which mirrors the many-dimensional universe of perfect cause and effect in an imperfect, four-dimensional, non-causal image. It is surely not fanciful to see  François Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty Spillman (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 197.  Ibid., 200. 94  Norbert Wiener, “Back to Leibniz! (Physics Reoccupies an Abandoned Position),” Technology Review 34 (1932): 201–203, 222–24. 92 93

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in this a parallel to the Leibnizian monads, which live out their existences in a self-contained existence in pre-established harmony with the other monads, yet mirror the entire universe.95

Wiener has another reason to draw an analogy between electrons and monads. In a short commentary titled “Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz,” responding to another article from Haldane96 titled “Quantum Mechanics as a Basis for Philosophy,” Wiener suggested that “[t]he paper might indeed be called, ‘Leibniz as a basis for Quantum Mechanics.’” The argument of Haldane is that quantum mechanics, especially the wave-particle dualism discovered by de Broglie, suggests a new way to understand the body-mind problem of inanimate beings. For an inanimate being—for example, a rock—at the macrophysical level it ceases to repair, but at the microphysical level we can see that electrons attempt to repair: For example, when an atom loses an electron, it will get it from somewhere else. George Gale summarized this point precisely: “Each material system has an associated system of de Broglie waves in its phase space, travelling faster than light. The more organized the matter, the greater the quantum mechanical degeneration, i.e. drop in the number of degrees of freedom, and the more resonating the wave system.”97 This is the reason that Wiener identified the particle-wave duality with the body-soul relation proposed by Leibniz, which Wiener relates to the preestablished harmony that Leibniz developed in Le système nouveau de la nature (1696). In the Cartesian model, this relation takes the form of a causal interaction, meaning that they accord with each other according to mutual action. In the Occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche, God tirelessly reacts to every instant of the soul, a veritable deus ex machina. In Leibniz’s model, on the other hand, the body and the soul are replaced by monads that, as Wiener points out,98 are based on preestablished harmony, like two clocks marking the same hour, harmonizing with each other according to their respective mechanisms.  Ibid., 203.  The son of the physiologist J. S. Haldane who Needham criticized and we have discussed in chapter 1, and to whom Wiener owed inspiration; see Wiener, Cybernetics, 23, 36, 94. 97  George Gale, “The Role of Leibniz and Haldane in Wiener’s Cybernetics,” in NWCC ’94 Proceedings of the Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress on Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress, New York, 1997, 252. 98  Wiener, Cybernetics, 41. 95 96

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By comparing monads with electrons, Wiener sees that Haldane is actually assimilating the living organisms to particles; he therefore refers to Leibniz as the base of quantum mechanics. From this perspective we can see that Wiener’s cybernetics, as well as his ambition to overcome the opposition between Bergsonian creative time and Newtonian mechanical time, is largely Leibnizian in inspiration; he also uses Leibniz’s monadology to incorporate Haldane’s organicism. He situates this overcoming within a history of technological progress, from clockwork (mechanical machines) to the steam engine (thermodynamic machines) to twentieth-century information machines: “If the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks and the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control.”99 The seventeenth-century philosophy of Leibniz is not rendered obsolete in the course of this historical progression. On the contrary, Leibniz’s theory of communication is central to the cybernetic project, since communication is fundamental to the monads, even though they don’t have windows but only mirrors.100 Mirrors are more effective than windows, since mirrors reflect, and they can reflect into infinity with limited resources. Among the monads there are circulations of impressions, messages, and functions that are intrinsic to the substance. We can therefore notice that Wiener wrote with a Leibnizian tone when he described contemporary automata: “We deal with automata effectively coupled to the external world, not merely by their energy flow, their  Ibid., 39.  Needham sees another relation between Wiener and Leibniz, which is the binary system. In Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 344, Needham writes: “A dozen years ago the subject might have been left at this point. But recent developments have shown that the binary or dyadic arithmetic of Leibniz is far from being a mere historical curiosity. It has been found to be, as Wiener points out in his important book on ‘cybernetics’ (the study of self-regulating systems whether animal or mechanical), the most suitable system for the great computing machines of the present day. It has been found convenient to build them on a binary basis using only ‘on’ or ‘off’ positions, whether of switches in electrical circuits or thermionic values, and the type of algorithm followed is therefore the Boolean algebra of classes, which gives only the choice of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ of being either inside a class or outside it. It is thus no coincidence that Leibniz, besides developing the binary arithmetic, was also the founder of modem mathematical logic and a pioneer in the construction of calculating machines. As we may later see, Chinese influence was responsible, at least in part, for his conception of an algebraic or mathematical language, just as the system of order in the Book of Changes foreshadowed the binary arithmetic.”

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metabolism, but also by a flow of impressions, of incoming messages, and of the actions of outgoing messages.”101 Leibniz’s philosophy is contemporary to the age of quantum mechanics, and with the discovery of quantum mechanics the world described by Leibniz could be repositioned, if not realized, through cybernetics. Wiener mobilizes Leibnizianism through the lens of the modern sciences (quantum mechanics and the neurosciences). The opposition between Newtonian mechanics and the quantum mechanics of Niels Bohr and Max Planck (which, according to Wiener, forms a “Hegelian antinomy”) is resolved by the statistical mechanics of Maxwell-Boltzmann-Gibbs102: This transition from a Newtonian, reversible time to a Gibbsian, irreversible time has had its philosophical echoes. Bergson emphasized the difference between the reversible time of physics, in which nothing new happens, and the irreversible time of evolution and biology, in which there is always something new.103

Statistical mechanics, which uses Newtonian mechanics with the insights of quantum mechanics, renders every definite movement into a set of probabilities. It seems to Wiener that the oppositions between vitalism and mechanism, irreversible time and reversible time, are not real oppositions—at most they belong to different orders of magnitude, while it is possible to establish a theory of the relations and dynamics between these two different orders of magnitude.104 This leads to Wiener’s refusal of Bergson’s vitalism in a very decisive way: In what way can Bergsonian time not be realized by modern automation? “The modern automation exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living  Wiener, Cybernetics, 42.  Ibid., 37.  Ibid., 38. 104  It is interesting to see the comment from Ruyer on this project, when he says that such an attempt is correct but that the execution is a betrayal of such intentions; see Raymond Ruyer, “La Cybernétique et la finalité,” Les Études philosophiques, Nouvelle Série, 16e Année, no. 2, La Cybernétique (Avril–Juin 1961): 175: “malheureusement, une théorie erronée se répand dans toute la science contemporaine, difficile à dénoncer, parce que son intention générale: rattacher le macro- au microscopique en biologie, est correcte, mais que son exécution trahit l’intention sans être pleinement consciente de la trahison. Elle consiste a parler de micro-cybernétique ou de la cybernétique quantique, alors qu’elle se borne a appliquer a l’échelle de la cellule ou du noyau cellulaire les schémas de la cybernétique mécaniste.” 101 102 103

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organism, and here there is no reason in Bergson’s considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same as that of the automation of this type.”105 Wiener is referring to the concept of feedback, which he presented with Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow.106 What is feedback? It simply means that the difference between the output and the expected output is fed back to the system in order to improve the operation. For example, when we reach out our hand to grasp an object, there are multiple feedback loops taking place among the muscles, motors, and perception, and this feedback allows us to adjust our positions and gestures. It also occurs in technical objects, like the example given by Rosenblueth: Torpedoes possess a targetseeking mechanism by following the magnetic pull of the hull of the ship or the submarine or the sound of the propeller.107 It also occurs in neuro-activities: As observed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, the neuro-network is a net of loops that are beyond abstract logical operations.108 Feedback here means reflection, a circularity between a being and its environment, a nonlinear movement of self-adjustment toward a purpose or telos that defines the whole. This is also why we characterize cybernetics as a “mechanical organicism.” It is unlike a Cartesian causal chain, which we can visualize as a linear propagation from one proposition to another. Wiener refers to the first feedback system as Watt’s governor of the steam engine, which is able to regulate its velocity according to different conditions of load.109 A more contemporary example is homeostasis, a concept described by the physiologist Claude Bernard and later coined by W. B. Cannon. Bernard, in his 1865 Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale, writes that “all the vital mechanisms, however varied they may be, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal

 Wiener, Cybernetics, 44.  Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18–24. 107  Ibid. 108  See Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5, no. 4 (December 1943): 115–33. 109  Wiener, Cybernetics, 95. 105 106

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environment [milieu intérieur].”110 Homeostasis is a mechanism that is able to keep the system within a certain range of constants: for example, temperature, the amount of potassium in the body liquid, and so on. Homeostasis is also used by the British cybernetician W. Ross Ashby to characterize life. Feedback here replaces the reflection of the monads and prompts Wiener to reject notions such as “life,” “vitalism,” and “soul”111: “It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback.”112 This analogy leads Wiener to define both organism and machine by a common telos, the resistance against “the general tendency for the increase of entropy.”113 For Wiener, the concept of feedback is not limited to technical objects and organisms; he also extends it to analysis in economy and other social phenomena. Commenting on what he calls “long time feedback,” he gives the example of Chinese idolatry, according to which the mandate of heaven is correlated to the destiny of the emperor and the dynasty—the suffering of the people due to wars and famines is an indicator that the emperor or the dynasty has lost the mandate of heaven, and therefore that it is destined to fall. Wiener emphasizes this as a feedback.114 With Wiener’s formulation, one can see feedback everywhere; it constitutes a new epistemology. §22. CYBERNETICS OF CYBERNETICS The concept of feedback, we would like to claim here, is a primordial form of recursion. Gödel’s recursive function and the Turing machine  Quoted by Walter Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Norton, 1939), 38. Cannon continues by quoting J. S. Haldane’s comment on Bernard: “No more pregnant sentence was ever framed by a physiologist.” 111  Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 32. 112  Ibid., 26. 113  Ibid., 34. 114  Norbert Wiener, Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 124. Joseph Needham employs a similar logic and describes Chinese thought, especially this mode of correlative thinking, as organic or organicist thinking, as we have mentioned before and we will discuss in more detail in chapter 5. This overlap of ideas in the history of thought is by no means coincidental—or, more pertinently to our discussion, contingent. 110

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are feedback systems, which inscribe such mechanism in an algorithm with a predefined telos. One may argue that from the perspective of finality, a recursive algorithm is different from thinking, since thinking does not have a predefined telos. This is both true and untrue at the same time. It is true since thinking doesn’t have to have an immediate telos like an algorithm, which is judged to be good since it can arrive at the telos in the most effective way, that is, measured by execution time. It is untrue since thinking is always thinking of something, this something is the object of intentionality, and to concretely grasp its existence is to comprehend its telos. For example, the gigantic object that Kant calls the natural end, or nature as a whole, is always already a telos, but such telos is not reachable with objective evidence. On the contrary, Kant tells us that this can be approached only through subjective reason. This means that we will have to enlarge the concept of telos and its relation to recursivity, which is addressed in greater detail in so-called second-order cybernetics. Luhmann and Foerster, considered the chief representatives of second-order cybernetics, both use the word recursion instead of feedback, apart from when they make reference to Wiener. I extend the term recursion to include notions such as feedback and self-reference. Pierre Livet, in an article titled “La notion de récursivité, de la première cybernétique au connexionnisme,” suggests understanding the notion of recursivity in three stages. The first stage is associated with Wiener, McCulloch, Shannon, and others; the second stage, with Ashby and Foerster, and (later) Maturana and Varela; and the third stage with connectivism, for example, research on neural networks that employs a nonrepresentational scheme. If recursivity in first-order cybernetics is understood as what we have seen concerning feedback, in the second stage the concept of recursion is extended to other domains of study such as physics, biology, and the social sciences. In a 1947 article Ashby argued that it is possible to conceive the auto-organization of machines, which was often denied.115 What Ashby proposes is to consider the machine as a function identical to a set of variables. If one of the variables is a step-function of time, a spontaneous change of organization will appear to occur.116 Livet notes that for Ashby,  See W. R. Ashby, “Principles of the Self-Organizing Dynamic System,” Journal of General Psychology 37, no. 2 (1947): 125–28. 116  Ibid., 127. 115

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auto-organization is the change of function according to the environment (like the homeostasis), but Ashby seems to consider the relation between the environment and the machine as a composition of functions instead of as a single function.117 Foerster distinguishes two types of machines, the trivial machine and the nontrivial machine. A trivial machine is synthetically determined, independent of the past, and analytically determinable and predicable.118 For example, we can consider a straightforward function: f(x) = x + 2. A nontrivial machine is synthetically determined, dependent on the past, and analytically determinable and unpredictable. A nontrivial machine is necessarily circular, but not merely repetitive; at the same time, it generates complexity departing from a simpler function. For Foerster, this circular form, recursion119—which he calls Eigenform120—is not a circus vitiosus but rather a circus creativus; it is in fact the foundation of epistemology based on observation. What an observer observes is not simply what he or she perceives, but rather a description of the perception, namely, the description of the description. This does not mean that there are only two levels, the description and the description of it, but rather this reference to itself can occur many times until a fixed point, that is, the absorbing state (what is called reality), is reached. This can be illustrated with the commonly used example of the retina: First the retina provides a two-dimensional projection of the exterior world which one may call a “description of the first order.” The second post-retinal networks then offer to the ganglia cells a modified description of this description; thus a “description of the second order.” And so it goes on via the various stations of computing all the way to descriptions of higher and higher orders.121

 Livet, “La notion de récursivité,” 131.  Heinz von Foerster, “For Niklas Luhmann: ‘How Recursive Is Communication,’” in Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), 309. 119  The word recursion appears in every article of Foester’s collection of essays Understanding of Understanding, as well as in many of his other articles, and plays a central role in his theory of self-reference. 120  Louis Kauffman, “Reflexivity and Eigenform: The Shape of Process,” Constructivist Foundations 4, no. 3 (2009): 121–37. This Eigenform is also the Re-Entry of SpencerBrown, which plays an important role in Varela’s conceptualization of a living system. 121  Heinz von Foerster, “Cybernetics of Epistemology,” in Understanding of Understanding, 232. 117 118

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Thus, when we consider epistemology again as the way of acquiring knowledge, we can see that it has to be recursive. This Eigenform seems to be applicable to different domains, including the social sciences. In an article dedicated to Luhmann on his birthday, “For Niklas Luhmann: ‘How Recursive is Communication,’” Foerster tries to demonstrate that communication is ontologically recursive, and, if we extend it further, all living systems and social behaviors are also recursive. However, unlike the recursive function in mathematics, which only deals with numbers, Foerster suggests that sociology also deals with functions of functions, or functors. Foerster has pushed the concept of recursion much further than others, and it was his aim to extend it to different areas such as linguistics, semantics, fields of action, and others. At the same time he lamented that “ironically all of the recursion topics have slid down into what today is called chaos theory . . . which one can sell graphically, numerically, and verbally to the New York Times.”122 Livet suggests that in the work of Varela and Maturana there is a nuanced usage of the term recursive. The two biologists use it to describe the existence of internal relations between different subsystems in a system, analogous to how Wiener describes feedback, which they call structural coupling (organism and its milieu).123 We have to recognize, however, that Maturana and Varela did not agree with Luhmann’s use of autopoeisis in his communication systems theory; they insist that the notion is only biological. The notion of autopoiesis comes from the study of the circular reproduction of the cell, which Maturana had studied.124 Poiesis in Greek is a synonym of technē, which means to bring forth something as a product (ergon); autopoiesis is thus the operation of the system that is able to generate itself. Luhmann’s take on autopoeisis and operational closure (e.g., the production of structure) is a further systematization, which truly associates autopoiesis with technē in terms of exteriorization as communication (infra)structure. We want to refer here to an interesting discussion regarding autopoiesis and idealism. This discussion merits our attention since the authors—Pierre Livet and Jean-Christophe Goddard—also see the

 Foerster, Understanding of Understanding, 171–72.  Livet, “La notion de récursivité,” 143–44.  See Niklas Luhmann, “Self-Organisation and Autopoiesis,” in Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, ed. Bruce Clarke and Mark Hansen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 151.

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question of recursion as fundamental to idealism, and indeed in Fichte and Hegel one can find different models of recursivity. In his earlier article “Intersubjectivité, réflexivité et recursivité chez Fichte,”125 briefly mentioned in the last chapter, Livet proposes to understand the movement of the I in Fichte’s philosophy in terms of recursion. He shows that the recursive process of the I and non-I constitutes a sort of endomorphism of the kind explored by Varela, the I and non-I forming a circular movement consisting of two moments, encountering and comprehension.126 Goddard thus suggests that for Varela, communication is not about transmission, but rather a circular coupling between the I and its environment in which each reentering is indicated by the check (Anstoß). For Fichte, the check takes place at the moment of the encounter and resends the I back to itself in order to integrate this reflection. This non-I can be nature or other social beings, and for the latter the question of intersubjectivity arises. Reflection, according to Livet’s definition, is “recursivity which loops (boucle) immediately on itself.”127 We will see here two reflective moments, the non-I into the I, and these two moments as the object of another reflection. Seen in this way, Livet reformulates Fichte’s Absolute I as the recursive reflexivity itself: Fichte’s fundamental problem is to conceive reflexivity as such. However, reflexivity goes beyond the self-consciousness, the subjectivity of the Ego: It is a more general structure, which can allow us to think the Absolute (with this Fichte leads us to Hegel, for whom the processes of thought, independent from the individual subject, are reflexive entities).128

Livet distinguishes the recursive model of Fichte from that of Hegel, as we have attempted to do as well: a formalism in Fichte that is limited

 Pierre Livet, “Intersubjectivité, réflexivité et recursivité chez Fichte,” Archives de Philosophie 50, no. 4 (1987): 587. 126  Jean-Christophe Goddard, “Autonomie, réduction et réflexivité: la philosophie naturelle de Francisco J. Varela et le projet transcendental,” Intellectica 36–37 (2003): 210. 127  Livet, “Intersubjectivité, réflexivité et recursivité,” 585: “On pourrait définir la réflexivité comme une récursivité qui se boucle immédiatement sur elle-même.” 128  Ibid., 587: “Le problème fundamental de Fichte, c’est bien de concevoir la réflexivité comme telle. Or la réflexivité dépasse la conscience de soi, la subjectivité du Moi: C’est une structure plus générale, qui peut nous permettre de penser l’Absolute (en cela Fichte nous amène à Hegel, pour qui les processus de pensée, indépendamment du sujet individuel, sont des entités réflexive).” 125

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to the I and a more sophisticated logic of reflection in Hegel. Livet continues that “contrary to Hegel, who gives a reflexivity that includes its other, and therefore can feed itself, Fichte wants to think the reflexivity by itself and therefore finds itself confronted with the problem of giving it another consistency than that of a formal structure and without content.”129 The gesture of Livet and Goddard of relating recursion in cybernetics to German idealism provides a fitting way to end our discussion starting with Hegel, since the similarity between the two lies precisely in the comprehension of organicity, which we have attempted to understand through the two categories of recursivity and contingency. According to Livet’s interpretation, Hegel’s recursivity is “superior” to Fichte’s since it is able to comprehend the whole, which includes the self and the other. But recursivity may take different dynamics, such as contingency, and may bear different meanings in different contexts. When one starts wondering whether Luhmann is in fact a modern Hegelian,130 it is an affirmation of Hegel’s reflective logic and his desire for system as the precursor to a universal cybernetics.131 Unlike Günther, Livet suggests a cybernetics surpassing self-consciousness. It doesn’t mean that Günther is wrong, but rather Livet did not posit cybernetic machines as quasi-organic, since he is aiming for systematic objective knowledge. But Livet is also right that reflexivity is beyond self-consciousness, since recursivity is not limited to individual self-consciousness: after all, there is thinking of thinking, and thinking of thinking of thinking. What makes the thinking enter into thinking of thinking and thinking of thinking of thinking? Information.  Ibid.  Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘Old Europe’ and ‘the Sociologist’: How Does Niklas Luhmann’s Theory Relate to Philosophical Tradition?” E-compós 15, no. 3 (2012): 11. For a detailed comparison between Hegel and Luhmann on self-reference, see Angelika Kreß, “Hegel, Luhmann und die Logik der Selbstreferenz,” in 200 Jahre Wissenschaft der Logik (Hamburg: Meiner, 2014), 433–55. 131  As Hans-Georg Moeller suggests, there is an ambiguity between Luhmann and Hegel. For example, in Social Systems (trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995], xlix), Luhmann says: “Every step must be fitted in. And even the arbitrariness of the beginning loses its arbitrariness (like in Hegel’s system) as the construction of the theory proceeds. Thus a self-supporting construction arises.” Moeller also has pointed that Luhmann thought that his system is more advanced since he believed that Hegel’s reflective logic doesn’t include the subject itself, though we know that this is not true. See Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago & La Salle: Open Court, 2006), 173–75. 129 130

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§23. INFORMATION OF DIALECTICS We would like to proceed further by showing that the other key concept of cybernetics—namely, information—is fundamentally contingent and recursive. By introducing the concept of information, we would like to go beyond the seemingly rigid mathematical models. Let’s raise a somewhat weird question: What is the information of Hegel’s dialectics? If this question is possible, how can it be articulated? Information for Wiener and Shannon, as well as their precursors, is quantitative in the sense that it is a measurement of order and disorder. We know that for Wiener information is the measurement of order; therefore, more information means that the system is more ordered (less entropic and more negentropic). Information for Wiener is in this case closely related to probabilities. The increase in entropy means precisely a movement from the less probable to the more probable, as indicated by the famous Boltzmann’s equation: S = k log P.132 For Shannon, information is the measurement of “surprise”: An incoming event contains more information if it contains more surprise. For example, imagine guessing an English word starting with the letter S. If the incoming letter is z it contains more information than a, because a has more redundancy than z, meaning that there are numerous words start with Sa, but there are countable words starting with Sz. So for Wiener, information is opposite to entropy, while for Shannon, it is the inverse. Wiener’s information-entropy relation comes from thermodynamics.133 The second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system entropy cannot decrease, or stay constant in the case of a reversible transformation or equilibrium; in a spontaneous process, entropy can only increase, and the process is irreversible. For example, there is a transfer of heat from a hot body to a cold body, but a reversible process, a flow of heat from the cold body to the hot body, is impossible (this is also Rudolf Clausius’s critique of the Carnot cycle and Clausius’s definition of the second law of thermodynamics). Maxwell’s demon can be described in the following way: Take a container of a single type of gas particle, in which the particles are moving at different speeds. The container is divided into two chambers. Now imagine a tiny creature (later called Maxwell’s demon) that is able to open a valve on  S = entropy, k = Boltzmann constant, P = probability.  Shannon’s use of entropy was suggested by von Neumann.

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the shared wall of the two chambers in order to let the particles moving with faster speed to go to one chamber and those moving with slower speed to the other. Thus it appears that heat moves from the cold body to the hot body, which means the second law of thermodynamics is violated. What, then, is this demon, and how does it acquire information? Whether it is a question of light (Wiener), memory (Leó Szilard), or knowledge (Léon Brillouin)134 is not of our main concern here, but it means that it is possible to construct these demons to violate the second law of thermodynamics in order to resist becoming homogeneous and orderless, and to fight against the degradation of the universe. Herein lies the concept of negative entropy that Edwin Schrödinger developed in his What Is Life? to describe the self-preservation of life, and which was later abbreviated by Léon Brillouin as negentropy.135 As we saw earlier, Wiener also integrates this concept of the organism in his theory of feedback and information: “[T]he organism is seen as message. Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise.”136 The statistical understanding of information is contested by Simondon, who asks if one can understand information beyond probability.137 This is also the reason that, in L’individation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Simondon suggests developing a nonprobabilistic theory of information in which information means incompatibility, disparation (or disparity), asymmetricity. Information is a difference that produces an effect in the individual (considered as a system), which may lead, or at least contribute, to a process of individuation. This

 See Matthieu Triclot, Le moment cybernétique (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008), 236–49.  This opposition between life and destruction was already anticipated at the beginning of biology, as François Jacob pointed out with various sources: “For Bichat, life is ‘the sum of the functions that oppose death’; for Cuvier, ‘the force that resists laws governing inanimate bodies’; for Goethe, ‘the productive force against action of external elements’; for Liebig, ‘the motor force that neutralizes the chemical forces, cohesion and affinity acting between molecules.’” See Jacob, The Logic of Life, 90–91. 136  Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 95. 137  Gilbert Simondon, Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme de d’information (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2005), 541–42: “Serait-il possible, dès lors, de faire appel à une théorie de l’information pour enrichir et pour corriger la notion de forme telle qu’elle nous est présentée par la théorie de la Forme? Serait- il possible de faire appel à la théorie de Shannon, de Fischer, de Hartley, de Norbert Wiener? Ce qu’il y a de commun à tous les auteurs qui ont fondé la théorie de l’information, c’est que pour eux l’information correspond à l’inverse d’une probabilité. . . . C’est pourquoi il est possible de présenter la quantité d’information comme—log P, P étant la probabilité de l’état de la source.” 134 135

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disparation can be demonstrated with the example of the formation of an image on the retina. We know that the retinal images in both eyes are not identical. It is this disparation as information that allows an individuation of the image to take place, that is, forming a unified image. The doubt one may have is the following: In cybernetics, is there really a lack of a nonquantitative theory of information? I think the best response to Simondon would be one that draws upon Donald MacKay and Gregory Bateson, since for both of them information is precisely qualitative; it is a difference with affection.138 With Bateson it becomes even clearer that information is recursive—it is recursive precisely because it is a difference that makes a difference. How are we going to understand this recursive sentence? Before we approach it, it is important to note that Bateson coins his method sometimes as recursive epistemology, sometimes as ecological epistemology.139 The term recursion is decisive and almost equivalent to “ecology,” since it is that which allows the whole to progress, that is, a holistic movement as well as the interaction of the parts. To say it in Bateson’s own words, recursion is central to the definition of autonomy: “Autonomy—literally control of the self from the Greek autos (self) and nomos (a law)—is provided by the recursive structure of the system.”140 For Bateson, information is first of all difference; such a difference is produced by patterns. This is why Bateson believes that he has invented a new information theory, not against redundancy but rather depending on redundancy.141 It does not aim to eliminate noise, but rather sees contingency as necessary. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson evokes the famous phrase of Alfred Korzybski—“the map is not the territory”—to explain this difference. In an intuitive sense a map is different from a territory because the map is only an abstraction of the  We will have to limit ourselves to a discussion of Bateson. For a more detailed discussion of the reinvention of the concept of information during the 5th Macy Conference involving a discussion between Donald MacKay, Alexander Baveles (a student of Kurt Lewin), and Claude Shannon, see Yuk Hui, “Simondon et la question de l’information,” Cahiers Simondon 6 (2015): 29–47. 139  Peter-Harries Jones, A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 3. 140  Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton, 1979), 126. 141  See Jones, A Recursive Vision, 140–41: “In the mid-1960s, Bateson wrote with delight to Lilly that he had completed a new article (GB, 19683) which would ‘turn information theory upside down,’ for it would make ‘what the engineers call “redundancy” but what I call “pattern” into the primary phenomenon of information. . . . it needs to be married off to a corresponding hypothesis about what happens in the brain.’” (Letters, 858–144/1968). 138

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territory; it is the expression of relations that define the territory. But for Bateson, Korzybski’s proposition has a historical meaning, since it is an inquiry into patterns. European thought, Bateson contests, privileges substantial thinking by asking, for example, what makes up of our earth and air—with an exception in Pythagoras, who asks what is a pattern.142 Every repeated event is always singular in the sense that it demands a recontextualization that Korzybski calls “time-binding.” Thus the same pattern in its repetition can produce difference and sameness as difference.143 This difference is produced through the contextualization of patterns. Human beings learn through knowing and inducing patterns. Information is produced by difference, by the newness that the pattern cannot fully incorporate. Considering a person felling a tree with an axe, an ordinary person (he says “an average Occidental”) will say, “I cut down a tree,” as if there is a self in function, but Bateson considers this a fallacy. Indeed, it should be understood as circulation of difference: More correctly, we should spell the matter out as: (differences in tree) - (differences in retina) - (differences in brain) - (differences in muscles) - (differences in movement of axe) - (differences in tree), etc. What is transmitted around the circuit is transforms of differences. And, as noted above, a difference which makes a difference is an idea or unit of information.144

Information, as Bateson famously claims, is “difference that makes a difference,” which leads to his famous dictum: “patterns which connect.” Bateson searches constantly for connections between patterns— for example, relations—as well as unity between these patterns.145 We reserve the notion of difference for latter discussion. What concerns  Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1987), 455–56: “[H]is statement came out of a very wide range of philosophic thinking, going back to Greece, and wriggling through the history of European thought over the last 2000 years. In this history, there has been a sort of rough dichotomy and often deep controversy. There has been a violent enmity and bloodshed. It all starts, I suppose with the Pythagoreans versus their predecessors, and the argument took the shape of ‘Do you ask what it’s made of—earth, fire, water, etc.?’ Or do you ask, ‘What is its pattern?’ Pythagoras stood for inquiry into pattern rather than inquiry into substance.” 143  For a more detailed discussion of the relation between Bateson and Korzybski, see Jones, A Recursive Vision, 67–68. 144  Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 323. 145  In response to this, Foerster coined “matrix that embeds” to designate a systematic (integrationist) approach to knowledge. 142

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Bateson in epistemology is not the system of knowledge but rather the operational process of knowing, that is, how knowing is possible. Knowing, for him, is a recursive process in which differences have to be constantly introduced. Knowing is recursive. As we have already seen with the Idealists, knowing is reflective in the sense that it concerns a return to itself in order to project to the future.146 In this sense, unlike Ernst Cassirer, who says that animals don’t have self-knowledge,147 Bateson questions how can we say that a cat doesn’t have self-knowledge when it catches a mouse.148 Wiener maintains that the best way to demonstrate the recursive process of self-knowing is in terms of Ashby’s homeostasis. Like Ashby, Wiener thinks that learning is certainly a feedback process, but it is “a feedback on a higher level, a feedback of policies and not of simple actions.”149 Ashby’s model consists of multiple feedback loops. First of all, there is feedback in parts, and then there is feedback that unifies the parts; this means that the organization of the homeostat consists of multiple levels with increasing complexification. However, both Simondon and Bateson also find an ontological problem in the thesis that homeostasis presents a living system. For Simondon, homeostasis always seeks an equilibrium, which means death. Likewise for Bateson, homeostasis, though pretending to assimilate a living being, resembles rather a clockwork.150 In one of Bateson’s most famous articles, “Cybernetic of ‘Self’: A Theory on Alcoholism,” positive feedback—“a bottle will not kill him”151—plays an important role by trapping the alcoholic in a closed circuit until he or she moves away from the feedback circuit to another level, meaning from one system to another, which Bateson calls an epistemological change: “If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the

 It is not our concern to argue whether Bateson is an idealist or a materialist. Jones, in A Recursive Vision, has tried to show that Bateson cannot be included in any of these categories, but it is interesting to think what author can write a book called Mind and Nature, in which learning-evolution shares Schelling’s mind-nature analogy, if not an idealist. 147  See Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), chap. 1. 148  Bateson, Mind and Nature, 106. 149  Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 59. 150  Jones, A Recursive Vision, 114. 151  Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 332. 146

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results of that change will ramify throughout the whole of his universe. Such changes we may well call ‘epistemological.’”152 The alcoholic is trapped by the “other” to whom he wants to prove that “he can . . . ,” and in these positive feedback loops, which one can call symmetric, he is not able to get out of it until he “hits bottom.” Hitting bottom means precisely seeing the limit of such a feedback loop, usually caused by disasters (for example, the diagnosis of cancer or a serious accident) through which he discovers a broader reality, or another system, according to Bateson, which is called “power.” Now we can come back to the notion of difference. What does difference do? Difference is a most arbitrary relation: We can say two apples are different in color even though they are both red; we can say that the twins are different though one cannot find a single difference except difference in space. The recursivity of information is in the second part when such a difference is able to produce a difference, meaning that it modifies the self. The alcoholic’s “hitting bottom” is a difference that brings him out of the positive feedback loop and the illusion of selfcontrol. In Simondon we also see the necessity of difference even in communication theory, since it presupposes that there is a schematic difference on the side of the receiver when it receives information from the sender.153 Now, a mere difference is not enough, since it is only recursive when this difference is able to make a difference: “Being nor not being information doesn’t depend only on the internal characters of a structure; information is not a thing, but operation of a thing arriving in a system and producing a transformation. Information cannot be defined outside this act of transformative incidence and of the operation of reception.”154 In Simondon, differences are measured not by quality but by intensity. As in the process of individuation, it takes place when a threshold  Ibid., 336.  Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), 150: “[I]nformation is not form, nor is it a collection [ensemble] of forms; it is the variability of forms, the influx of variation with respect to a form. It is the unpredictability of a variation of form, not pure unpredictability of all variation. We would thus be led to distinguish three terms: pure chance, form, and information.” 154  Gilbert Simondon, Communication et information (Paris: Les éditions transparence, 2011), 159. “Être ou ne pas être information ne dépend pas seulement des caractères internes d’une structure; l’information n’est pas une chose, mais l’opération d’une chose arrivant dans un système et y produisant une transformation. L’information ne peut se définir en dehors de cet acte d’incidence transformatrice et de l’opération de réception.” 152 153

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is reached: For example, the supersaturated solution starts crystalizing with a small amount of heat, while when the solution is not saturated, it demands a considerable larger amount of heat (which, first of all, has to increase the concentration by reducing water into vapor) for the crystallization to take place. Simondon didn’t talk about Bateson, and Bateson doesn’t seem to have been aware of Simondon, but it is interesting to see here that a theory of information in communication is extended to a wider perspective, in Simondon concerning individuation and in Bateson concerning learning and evolution. Information is a difference that makes difference, only because it is both contingent and recursive. Bateson considers both learning and evolution to be fundamentally stochastic processes. This means that learning is both recursive and contingent. The contingency of information is what allows the recursive model to develop itself according to an auto-finality. Bateson agrees with Ludwig von Bertalanffy concerning his critique of the separation between the observer and the environment in science, but he disagrees with the concept of spontaneity employed by general systems theorists, for whom spontaneity is what underlies the autonomy and creativity of the system. As the organicists did with regard to the vitalist notion of an élan vital, Bateson criticizes the concept of spontaneity as being too mysterious.155 This is the reason for which learning, as well as evolution, is regarded as stochastic process, which cannot be fully determined by any reductionist program.156 Regarding genetic change, Bateson here takes up the concept of epigenesis from his friend Waddington, and elaborates in his own terms: Somatic change precedes the genetic.157 Bateson refuses the idea, widely attributed to Lamarckians, of the “inheritance of acquired modifications,”158 as well as the (neo-)Darwinist notion that evolution depends completely on the gradual change of genetics in geological time, that is,  Jones, A Recursive Vision, 73.  A reductionist program is always twofold: First of all, it reduces evolution to physical and chemical processes; second, with this mechanism, prediction is possible. 157  Bateson, Mind and Nature, 173. 158  This term, now widely attributed to Lamarck, is actually not from Lamarck himself; it was more closely related to Darwin, and the term is suspected to have come from Herbert Spencer. See Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 220. 155 156

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phyletic gradualism. Bateson invokes the experiment of Waddington that contributes to the latter’s theory of genetic assimilation. Waddington’s famous 1942 experiment involved inducing an extreme environmental reaction in the developing embryos of Drosophila (a type of fruit fly). Under the gene called a bithorax, the ordinary flies have a pair of wings, but also two little rods at the end that are considered to be reduced wings for balance. Waddington used ether vapor to stimulate the embryo to grow the two rods into a four-wing fly; he repeated the experiment with the selected Drosophila for the bithorax phenotype over twenty generations and observed that after this time some Drosophila had developed bithorax without ether treatment.159 In 1953 Waddington carried out a similar experiment with crossveinless phenocopy in Drosophila with a heat shock, and obtained a similar result. With the experiment of Waddington, Bateson wants to show that evolution is neither purely Lamarckian nor Darwinian, but rather that the genotype is awoken by the somatic modification in the phenotype: This very profound modification of the phenotype, waking up very ancient and now inhibited morphology, could also be produced by a somatic change. When the pupae were intoxicated with ethyl ether in appropriate dosage, the adult flies, when they hatched, had the bithorax appearance. That is, the characteristic, bithorax, was known both as a product of genetics and as the product of violent disturbance of epigenesist.160

As Susan Oyama noted, for the “program” in the gene to affect behavior, it will have to participate in the phenotype’s form and function, while such participation demands an “insertion of information” from environmental exchange.161 But whether the “insertion of information” will produce a difference or not depends on the intensity of the incoming information and the existing knowledge and experience. Retrospectively, what Bateson understands about evolution as a stochastic process can be compared   See Conrad H. Waddington, “Canalization of Development and the Inheritance of Acquired Characters,” Nature 150 (1942): 563–65; also see Bateson, Mind and Nature, 172. 160  Bateson, Mind and Nature, 172. 161  Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 61–62. 159

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with what Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge called “punctuated equilibrium,”162 which embraces the role of contingency in evolution. Gould defines contingency as “the tendency of complex systems with substantial stochastic components, and intricate nonlinear interactions among components, to be unpredictable in principle from full knowledge of antecedent conditions, but fully explainable after time’s actual unfolding.”163 For Bateson the component of contingency is crucial for the conceptualization of evolution, without which there is nothing new: “In each case there is, I believe, a stream of events that is random in certain aspects and in each case there is a nonrandom selective process which causes certain of the random components to “survive” longer than others. Without the random, there can be no new thing.”164 Recursivity is not only a mechanism that can effectively “domesticate” contingency, as we have seen in Hegel; it is also a mechanism that allows novelty to occur, not simply as something coming from outside but also as an internal transformation. Technics in general is that which attempts to eliminate contingency, but in comparison with technical objects based on linear causality and hence susceptible to contingencies, the recursive mode can effectively integrate contingency in order to produce something new; in other words, it demands constant contingencies. In machine learning today, we will also find the emphasis on stochastic processes and randomness. Indeed, we may understand that the historical trajectory to modern machine learning comes from the failure of classical AI’s attempt to bolt on logic-based semantics to its model, such as the reaction of the Idealists against the Cartesian mechanism (and latter Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of the classical AI based on Heidegger’s critique of Cartesian cognitive theory). It was developed by various scientists such as Arthur Samuel, the PDP research group at the Stanford University, and Geoff Hinton, among others. Insofar as it has  In opposition to phyletic gradualism there is also the theory proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge called punctuated equilibrium. Gould and Eldredge proposed that, from the fossils that we have found, there is no evidence that evolution follows the theory of phyletic gradualism. Further to this lack of evidence of phyletic gradualism, Gould and Eldredge propose that there seem to be discontinuities in the morphologies provided by fossils, which means that evolution could have taken place according to genetic mutations forced by extreme environments. See David F. Prindle, Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), 101–102. 163  Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 46. 164  Bateson, Mind and Nature, 160. 162

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been successful, there is a measure of recursion in how deep learning creates its feature vectors. In a neuro-network, every neuron is given a random weight to start with, and training means to reduce error by recursively adjusting the weights until a desirable output is produced. For decades now it has been a common practice to introduce randomness into algorithms—namely, randomized algorithms, for example, Las Vegas algorithms and Monte Carlo algorithms, which are widely used in sorting and searching. But contingency or randomness is here by no means irrational, since it no longer concerns mere modal logic but rather function and operation. This will be clearer to us when we see how randomness is practiced in programming. First, randomness allows algorithms to save computational cost, since the computer doesn’t have to exhaust all the samples to optimize the output. Second, it destroys “excess information,” meaning that it makes the input data richer and therefore forces the learning algorithm to learn compact representation. Third, by introducing randomness, it allows the learning algorithm to mutate and to jump out of local minima, as the Google search engine is doing. Because the local minima are not optimal in many cases, with algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent, it is possible to jump through those local minima, finally it may not arrive exactly at the global minimum or maximum but only approximate it. It is also in this sense (other than statistical mechanics) that we can understand the claim of Wiener that cybernetic machines are able to “live” the Bergsonian time, since recursivity can be implemented in machines. Simondon understands the significance of recursive epistemology of cybernetics. For him it is possible to combat such a becoming with machines, as Simondon says toward the end of the introduction of his On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects: The machine as an element of the technical ensemble, becomes that which increases the quantity of information, increases negentropy, and opposes the degradation of energy: the machine, being a work of organization and information, is, like life itself and together with life, that which is opposed to disorder, to the levelling of all things tending to deprive the universe of the power of change. The machine is that through which man fights against the death of the universe; it slows down the degradation of energy, as life does, and becomes a stabilizer of the world.165  Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 21.

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For Simondon, humans are organizers of machines, and therefore, with the aid of informational machines, he sees the possibility of using them to combat the entropic disintegration of life and the universe. The violation of the second law of thermodynamics points to an interpretation of life as a nonequilibrium thermodynamics, as Dorian Sagan and Eric Schneider suggest. According to this thesis, nature abhors gradients; it immediately crushes a metal can from which the air has been removed, that is, creating an equilibrium. Life, as the manifestation of the second law, on the other hand, moves in the opposite direction.166 However, this human-machine relation, here indicated as a form of “organization,” is exactly what is missing in the discourse of Wiener, according to Simondon, since the former sees an “identity between living beings and self-regulating technical objects,”167 while for Simondon this equivalence is nothing but misunderstanding. Simondon understands very well the importance of feedback. He wants to use feedback together with a renewed concept of information to conceive a new program, which we will discuss in the rest of this book. §24. INCOMPUTABILITY AND ALGORITHMIC CONTINGENCY In chapter 1 we attempted to establish a relation between Schelling and biological organicism; in the current chapter, we moved to Hegel and a mechanical organicism. In order to overcome the threat of contingency, which is also a threat to the essence, it is necessary to render contingency necessary: not circumscribing it ontologically by recognizing it as necessity, but putting it to a test, a necessary step of rationalization. Logic is that which eliminates contingency by either excluding it as illogical and therefore absurd or else absorbing it in order to enrich the Notion itself. In the logic of Hegel, as well as that which is turned into recursive theory (or rather a general concept of recursion), a temporal dimension is added to logic, as Gödel rightly noticed. This Heraclitean motif is present in the recursive model in which a judgment is possible only in the course of time—that is to say, genesis—instead of a mere  See Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 167  Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 51. 166

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determinate judgment. The domination of reflective judgment has both epistemological and ontological significance. Concerning epistemology, we can see with cyberneticians like Foerster, Maturana, and Varela that recursivity is the condition of any true scientific knowledge. The path toward scientific truth is always a computation of computation, a thinking of thinking, an observation of observation. We will not be able to know the object unless we evolve with the process of knowing. Concerning ontology, we see a new form of Parmenidean rational ontology in which every being is a recursive being, whether it be a crystal or an organism. The question of categories that Aristotle understands to be the vocabulary of ontology, and that Kant believes to be the pure concepts of the understanding, is greatly undermined in this conceptualization, since these categories could be derived recursively instead of given as default of the operation. For cybernetics, the unknown can be constructed through the already known. For example, a black box can be approximated by trial and error. And this is the reason that this notion of recursivity primarily concerns rationality. However, how do we confront the question of undecidability, something that is not recursively enumerable? This will be the only threat of contingency to any computation system. If a number is recursively enumerable it means it is calculable; otherwise we will have algorithmic contingency. The best of all possible worlds of Leibniz—that is, the “simplest in hypothesis” and “richest in phenomenon”168—is the criterion for algorithmic information theory (e.g., Andreï Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin). For example, given a number, the recursive algorithm that is used to express it must be shorter (and the shorter the better) than the number itself. (Here is also the principle of algorithmic compression.) Algorithmic contingency arrives when it is not compressible, or incomputable. Contingency reenters the scene as something that is incomputable, or unpredictable. But such contingency can serve as a leap into another loop and consequently be absorbed by it, one that situates on a higher potency (complexity) of the intellectual life: thinking (which is different but not opposed  See G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays, trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 39: “God has chosen the most perfect world, that is, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena, as might be a line in geometry whose construction is easy and whose properties and effects are extremely remarkable and widespread.” Also cited by Gregory Chaitin, “Leibniz, Information, Math and Physics,” 2005, http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0306303.

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to feedback or self-reference). However, this cannot be reduced to a simple model of positive or negative feedback, since it problematizes the question of the finality of a simple cybernetic machine. Cybernetic feedback allows an “equifinality,” meaning that it allows different paths to arrive at the same end according to individual situations. However, it doesn’t allow a real auto-finality in which will is in tension with rationality. Raymond Ruyer reproached cybernetics for being a reductionist science of machines and organisms that consciously or unconsciously applies a mechanist view in all domains: Feedback, the circuits of recurrent effects of mechanist cybernetics, are only secondary products, symbolising (in the sense of Leibniz) and transporting in the macroscopic space and time the absolute recurrences, transitions of “initial state final state,” the real choices between the possible events according to an unobservable dynamic, which are not primary proprieties of all the individualized domains.169

Hans Jonas also reproached cybernetics for a similar reason. For him, cybernetics has misunderstood teleology as “serving a purpose” (which is mechanical) and “having a purpose” (which has to do with the will).170 However, it may make sense to follow what Colin Pittendrigh and Ernst Mayr call teleonomy instead of teleology, with the difference that teleonomy is close to what we above called auto-finality.171 On the one hand, cybernetics is not a mere “reductionist” science, even though it applies the concept of feedback to all domains. It also presents an epistemological shift. It opens up a new operational thinking, which tends to integrate instead of separate.172 It will be truly reductionist if the feedback loop is maintained only on one plane and thinking is nailed  Ruyer, “La Cybernétique et la finalité,” 176.  Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 122. 171  See Colin Pittendrigh, “Adaptation, Natural Selection, and Behavior,” in Behavior and Evolution, ed. A. Roe and George Gaylord Simpson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 394; also Ernst Mayr, “Teleological and Teleonomic: A New Analysis,” in Methodological and Historical Essays in the Natural and Social Sciences, ed. R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 14 (Dordrecht: Springer, 1974): 91–117. 172  Jonas compares the pilot with the machine. The pilot, unlike the robot, is the being that receives and executes commands, since the pilot has its own motivation and emotion. But Jonas may miss the point here, which is that cybernetics claims that motivation and emotion could also be analyzed according to feedback mechanisms. 169 170

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to that plane without allowing it to elevate or enter into another recursion: for example, reducing every entity to an algorithm.173 That is the reason that the emphasis on recursion in second-order cybernetics can be seen as an advancement of the systematicity of cybernetics, because it extends recursion to all domains. On the other hand, the reality produced by feedback always exceeds its logic, since it also exteriorizes, and it is through the exteriorization that another loop is created. We will take up this critique of cybernetics again in the next chapter, but we will formulate it as a general problem in the philosophy of nature, in which the question of form is privileged and consequently undermines the significance of matter.174 Regarding incomputability, we may want to consider cases in which contingencies cannot be absorbed by reflections—for example, a great cosmic catastrophe—or cases in which the exteriorized, which exceeds the logic of feedback, produces a contingency that cannot be made use of, meaning that the dialectics leads to a dead end, which is an algorithmic catastrophe. Failures and catastrophes direct us to a broader reality, which the previous system cannot integrate, and it enforces the discovery of another system. As when Bateson talks about the theology of Alcoholics Anonymous, he is referring to the “power” that is another even more powerful system; as he says, “[T]he system or ‘power’ must necessarily appear different from where each person sits. . . . The ‘beauty’ of the woods through which I walk is my recognition both of the individual trees and of the total ecology of the woods as systems.”175 The power is analogical to the divine; this divine can be another system, whose rationality may not be readily recognized, but is rationalized through symbols and rituals. Here, instead of talking about an apocalyptic event, we may want to raise examples where the exteriorized can no longer be assimilated into the organic totality. Instead, it disrupts this very capacity of assimilation, because the former gains power of determination—that is, it is no longer reason that sets the limit, but the other way around. I tend  The classical example would be Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and Meaning of Life (London: Penguin, 1996), 48–52, where he reduces natural selection to a “mindless” algorithm. 174  Claus Pias, in his article “Analog, Digital, and the Cybernetic Illusion,” Kybernetes 34, no. 3–4 (2005): 543–50, shows that there is an ignorance of matter in the cybernetics of Wiener. 175  Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 338. 173

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to think that this is the task of twenty-first-century materialism, precisely because the exteriorized ceases to be the servant (Knecht) in the Hegelian dialectics where exteriorization is a means of reason’s selfknowledge, while the completion of the technical system, which is also the accomplishment of metaphysics, is in the process of undoing this dialectic. It also means that a philosophy of limit based on reason gives way to a materialism underestimated by idealists as well as by many socalled materialists. This is the point of departure from which we would like to look into some major interpretations of the relations between human-machine and culture-technics in twentieth-century organological thinking. In inquiring into such a transition, we are moving from a philosophy of nature into a philosophy of technology, where organicism and organology meet each other halfway.

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Fire is want and surfeit. —Heraclitus, Fragment 65

If cybernetics attempts to overcome the opposition between mechanism and vitalism, it is because it systematizes the recursive form as a form of reasoning through the process of information. With this generalized form of thinking, which we reformulated on the basis of Kant’s concept of reflective judgment—namely, recursivity—we can trace a great material transformation in the twentieth century. The cybernetic machines, especially the Turing machine, have a new status, since it is no longer a mere mechanism in the Cartesian sense, nor is it a living being. Instead, it is an organo-mechanical being: a mechanical being implemented in an organic form. The organic form doesn’t just give form as such, but also organizes matter conditioned by a definite end or a relatively open end inscribed in the recursive algorithm. Even if one follows Kant in saying that it is not possible to exhaust the secret of even a single blade of grass or a caterpillar, it is with the realization of cybernetics that we have to analyze the conceptualization of nature and its relation to technology. This does not mean that we are following some conventional readings of John von Neumann’s theory of automata or self-reproduction, visually demonstrated in John Horton Conway’s Game of Life and further developed by the “digital physics” proposed by authors such as Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, or information theory in biology, since these readings are often merely reductionist approaches to the question of life. Reductionism is sometimes 145

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strategically necessary for comprehension, but it should be seen as a tool instead of an equivalent relation. From Kant, traversing the postKantian Idealists, there is an intimacy between the life of the concept and the concept of life, especially in Hegel, where life is identified with the Notion/Concept.1 Not until 1948, with the emergence of cybernetics, was the identity between the concept and life reaffirmed, along with the necessity of reconsidering their relation from the perspective of exteriorization. § 25. FROM ORGANICISM TO ORGANOLOGY In the previous two chapters we attempted to outline an organicism oscillating between the biological and the mechanical. The task of this chapter is to move from organicism to organology, from the concept to life, since organology presents another form of recursivity and contingency. As the first principle of organology, it is important to avoid drawing an equivalence between machine and organism—a common mistake of reductionism—and measuring the progress of technology according to its closeness to “human intelligence,” since this form of thinking is still very much rooted in a separation between form and matter. Each side falls into an extreme of either formal logic or vital matter as an explanation of individuation. Conventional Cartesian mechanism is based on the belief in a linear logic immanent in the living form, thus leading to the mechanization of the organism, and by doing so the analogy between mechanism and organism is taken as an equivalence. There is nothing terribly wrong with mechanization, so long as it is only admitted as one form of knowing rather than its totality. We know that the shift of knowledge from mechanism to organism is an important transition in Western thought, but it would be a mistake to see an equivalence between living form and machine form as it appears everywhere in the mass media today regarding algorithms. It is unwise, if not simply stupid, to lament that Alpha Go has defeated the world champions from Korea or China, since it reveals nothing but a contradiction: On the one hand, commentators see an opposition between the mechanical and the organic, since the organic human is deemed superior, so they lament  Georges Canguilhem, “Le concept et la vie,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 82 (1966): 203.

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their defeat; on the other hand, they affirm an equivalence between the machine and the organism because machines can now replace humans. It is not productive to claim that mechanism will not surpass the organism, since what we are witnessing today is the very beginning of this tendency enabled by cybernetics. One cannot easily dismiss such a possibility, however; the key question will be how to find a strategy of coexistence. Algorithms—that which is fundamental to machines— should be appropriated as a function of the organism, and serve the spirit to achieve higher aims beyond the utility of the machine, thereby freeing the machine from predetermined rules and functions. The assertion of Wiener that cybernetics has resolved the opposition between Newtonian time and Bergsonian time is plausible and deserves much further reflection than it has so far received. However, cybernetics may still follow the wrong path in its search for an equivalence between organism and machine based on imitation, which somehow obscures the distinction between function and operation. This is the reason we must critically assess this assertion regarding the relation between the organic and the inorganic, which cannot be considered only as two potencies, as in Schelling, but should rather be thought of in terms of a hermeneutic circle. This move from organicism to organology suggests that the organic form has to be elevated from a theory of knowledge to a theory of life, and therefore another recursivity. It is not a recursion that progresses toward a total system with numerous feedback loops, but one that reattaches the mechanical recursivity to the ground, which is life itself. The term general organology was coined by Georges Canguilhem in 1947, a year before the publication of Wiener’s Cybernetics. Canguilhem considered Henri Bergson’s 1907 Creative Evolution a precursor to such a project. Organology is not to be understood in terms of cyborg or human enhancement by a “computer-controlled biofeedback system.”2 This reading of Canguilhem and Bergson is still too close to the Wienerian cybernetic machine and a certain transhumanism, without realizing that the task was to prioritize life as the ground of mechanization. The latter, if not critically rethought, tends to separate humans from life. It is difficult to find a philosophy of life in Wiener, though it is possible to identify one in Bateson and second-order cyberneticians. It is not yet an organology.  Ian Hacking, “Canguilhem among the Cyborgs,” Economy and Society 27, no 2–3 (1998): 203.

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In Canguilhem et la vie humaine, Guillaume le Blanc suggests identifying a trajectory of organological thought that stretches “from Bergson to Simondon passing by Jacques Laffite [and] Canguilhem” and that “corresponds to the event of a biological philosophy of culture and the attempt to elaborate on a biological anthropology.”3 Our interest will be to see how organology developed in intimate relationship with organicism, taking its departure from Kant’s third Critique, and to elaborate on the question of recursivity and contingency in organology as creative evolution and normativity. Before we embark on this journey, it will be necessary to revisit the organic form of Schelling that we elaborated in chapter 1 and, starting from there, to problematize the return to a philosophy of nature that was developed at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. From an epistemological point of view, technology and nature are no longer two starkly differentiated terms since the understanding of nature already reveals a technical form, meaning that it is no longer an innocent and naive first nature but rather a cybernetic nature. This is also why we emphasized the ambiguity between a biological organicism and mechanical organicism. The relation between nature and technology has to be reassessed in view of semantic changes, as well as the new epistemological conditions brought about by new discoveries in science and technological innovations. For example, the prominence of force in Schelling’s time is replaced by the concept of information in cybernetics, which was later also adapted in biology via the work of Edwin Schrödinger. Information, which is neither energy nor matter, demands a new place in ontology and reconstitutes the relations between other categories, as well as the foundations of knowledge, just as Bateson and Simondon did by bringing information together with recursion. It reacts against the tendency of separating active form from inert matter in classical metaphysics, where such hylomorphism assigns to intelligence the task of either imposing or extracting form on or from any being as its essence. The fact is that the intuitive example that we have of brick making (in which a mold gives identity to the clay, like form to inert matter) is already a technical one, meaning that it fails to understand what is prior to such imposition of form or abstraction. Instead of

 Guillaume le Blanc, Canguilhem et la vie humaine (Paris: PUF, 2002/2010), 203, n.2.

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thinking of form as the active force or defending the agency of matter, we will need to employ an organological thinking, which is not only an organicist thinking in contradistinction to mechanical reasoning, but also fundamentally a form of synthetic reasoning. In order to unfold the argument we will start with Schelling’s reading of Plato, a reading that, though already finished in 1794, before the publication of his work on the philosophy of nature, is of great importance in the formation of his mature ideas.4 Retrospectively, the lack of elaboration on the question of technology in Schelling’s thought is surprising when we consider that the first Industrial Revolution had already begun. This neglect might be understood to have originated from his prioritization of form over fire, the two gifts bestowed upon humanity by the gods, according to Socrates in the Philebus. We will start with a discussion on Schelling’s choice between organic form and fire, and from there introduce the concept of organology in Bergson and Canguilhem. Invoking Bergson and Canguilhem does not mean reintroducing distinct forms of vitalism against cybernetics, but rather sketching out an organological thinking that seems to me is beyond the mere identification of vitalism with the élan vital.5 As with organicism, the central question is that of “the whole.” In what sense can we talk about the whole? The whole, on the one hand, works against the mechanical construction of the parts, characterizing a progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from object to system. On the other hand, it also implies a teleology, in which the parts operate toward a final cause beyond the grasp of each part. Herein lies the central question of the organology of Bergson and Canguilhem: How to conceive of a creative whole?

 See Bruce Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Life: Life as the Schema of Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), in which Matthews traces the influence of Schelling’s 1794 reading of Plato in the rest of his work. 5  Charles Wolfe has shown that vitalism is not necessarily bound up with a metaphysically loaded concept of vital force, and indeed one doesn’t find such notion in eighteenth-century Montpelier vitalism (associated with prominent doctors and professors in the faculty of medicine at the University of Montpelier). Instead, the attempt was made to model organizational, dynamic, and systemic properties of the organism. See Charles Wolfe, “Models of Organic Organization in Montpellier Vitalism,” Early Science and Medicine 22 (2017): 229–52; see also Charles Wolfe, La philosophie de la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (Paris: Garnier, forthcoming). 4

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§26. FORM AND FIRE, OR LIFE We will have to return to Kant’s concept of the organic, and to conceive of an organology shorn of both Bergson’s hatred for and Canguilhem’s love of Kant. Before we go into the concept of organology, however, we need to address the limit of the concept of organic form in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. It is the question of fire that I found in Bruce Matthews’s discussion of organic form in Schelling’s philosophy, and Matthews’s indifference to this subject, that paradoxically exposes the limits of Schelling’s concept of organic form.6 In the Philebus, Socrates entered into a debate with Philebus on the question of which is most desirable, intelligence or pleasure. The solution that Socrates provides is that it is neither the one nor the other, but a third: the unity of the two. In the Philebus, we recall the famous passage where Socrates proposes that an opposition between finite (τὸ πέρας) and infinite (τὸ ἄπειρον) is not sufficient—we need a synthesis in terms of what they have in common (τὸ κοινόν).7 This third notion is not a synthesis in the sense of the dialectics of Hegel, but rather, according to Schelling, that of a “unity in multiplicity.” The form composed of three elements, which give us an infinite succession of individuation, is what Schelling also searches for in his “On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General” (1794),8 where the philosopher replaces the name Plato with that of Fichte. Later, in “On the World Soul,” the organic form is introduced to designate nature in general. In this affirmation of the wisdom of Plato there is a certain emphasis on paragraph 16c of the Philebus, Schelling’s translation of which I reproduce here, since it deserves our attention: This form is a gift of the gods to men, which together with the purest fire was first given to them through Prometheus. Therefore the ancients (greater men and closer to the gods than us) have left the story behind, that everything which has ever emerged out of unity and multiplicity (plurality), in that it united within itself the unlimited (apeiron, universal) and

 Matthews attempts to make a link between Schelling and the Anthropocene elsewhere; see Bruce Matthews, “Schelling in the Anthropocene: A New Mythology of Nature,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2015): 94–105. 7  Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy, 150 8  F. W. J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794– 1796), trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 38–55. 6

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the limit (to peras, unity): that thus we too in light of this arrangement of things should presuppose and search for every object one idea. . . . —It was the gods then, who taught us to think, learn and teach like this.9

Schelling emphasizes “this form,” which is not explicitly expressed in the Greek text, and in doing so marries the Philebus with the Timaeus. But what is important for us here is that, in a certain way, Schelling has already taken a decision by ignoring the question of the fire, which was sent along to humans with “this form.” We can read this passage in the Philebus in parallel with the story told in the Protagoras by the sophist concerning the two titans Prometheus and Epimetheus. In the Protagoras, the fire is not sent but stolen by Prometheus. There the sophist tells the story of the titan Prometheus, also said to be the creator of human beings, who was asked by Zeus to distribute skills to all living beings. His brother Epimetheus took over the job, but having distributed all the skills found that he had forgotten to provide for human beings. In order to compensate for the fault of his brother Epimetheus, Prometheus stole fire from the god Hephaestus and bestowed it upon humankind: Now Epimetheus, being not so wise as he might be, [321c] heedlessly squandered his stock of properties on the brutes; he still had left unequipped the race of men, and was at a loss what to do with it. As he was casting about, Prometheus arrived to examine his distribution, and saw that whereas the other creatures were fully and suitably provided, man was naked, unshod, unbedded, unarmed; and already the destined day was come, whereon man like the rest should emerge from earth to light. Then Prometheus, in his perplexity as to what preservation he could devise for man, stole from

 Ibid., 46; F. W. J. Schelling, Timaeus, ed. Hartmut Buchner (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1794/1994), 36: “Diese Form ist ein Gabe der Götter an die Menschen, die ihnen einst durch Prometheus zugleich mit dem reinsten Feuer des Himmers zugesandt wurde. Deßwegen auch die Alten, (größre Menschen u. näher den Göttern als wir) uns die Sage hinterlaßen haben, daß aus Einheit u. Mannigfaltigkeit (Vielheit) alles, was je vorhanden war entstand, indem er das Uneingeschränkte (απειρον Allegemeine) u. die Gränze (το περας, die Einheit) in sich vereinigte: daß also auch wir bei dieser Einrichtung der Dinge, von jedem Gegenstand Eine Idee voraussezen, u. suchen sollen. . . . Die Götter wären es demnach, die uns lehrten, so zu denken, zu lernen u. zu lehren.” The Greek original: “θεῶν μὲν εἰς ἀνθρώπους δόσις, ὥς γε καταφαίνεται ἐμοί, ποθὲν ἐκ θεῶν ἐρρίφη διά τινος Προμηθέως ἅμα φανοτάτῳ τινὶ πυρί: καὶ οἱ μὲν παλαιοί, κρείττονες ἡμῶν καὶ ἐγγυτέρω θεῶν οἰκοῦντες, ταύτην φήμην παρέδοσαν, ὡς ἐξ ἑνὸς μὲν καὶ πολλῶν ὄντων τῶν ἀεὶ λεγομένων εἶναι, πέρας δὲ καὶ ἀπειρίαν ἐν αὑτοῖς σύμφυτον ἐχόντων. δεῖν [16δ] οὖν ἡμᾶς τούτων οὕτω διακεκοσμημένων ἀεὶ μίαν ἰδέαν περὶ παντὸς ἑκάστοτε θεμένους ζητεῖν . . . οἱ μὲν οὖν θεοί, ὅπερ εἶπον, οὕτως ἡμῖν παρέδοσαν σκοπεῖν καὶ μανθάνειν καὶ διδάσκειν ἀλλήλους.”

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Hephaestus and Athena wisdom in the arts [321d] together with fire—since by no means without fire could it be acquired or helpfully used by any—and he handed it there and then as a gift to man. (321c–321d)10

Hesiod told another, slightly different version of the story in his Theogony, in which the titan challenges the omnipotence of Zeus by playing a trick with a sacrificial offering. Zeus expressed his anger by hiding fire and the means of living from human beings, in revenge for which Prometheus stole fire. Prometheus received his punishment from Zeus: He was chained to the cliff, and an eagle from Hephaestus came to eat his liver during the daytime and allowed it to grow back at night. In Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Bernard Stiegler has interpreted this mythology in order to show that the fire as a compensation is precisely because of a default. On this interpretation, fire is technics, which allows “the pursuit of life by means other than life,” the organic through the inorganic, and the history of fire also constitutes the already-there in the sense of Heidegger.11 In Schelling’s interpretation of Plato, the form is separated from the fire, from the origin of their coexistence as presence; that is to say, the soul is separated from technē—the organized inorganic, as Stiegler terms it. If philosophy of nature is identified with the organic form, how can one understand this reality in which the form is no longer separated from the fire, as is so evident to us today in the epoch of the Anthropocene? To do justice to Schelling, we must admit that the philosopher has not completely forgotten about fire. Fire becomes a metaphor of the spirit in “On the World Soul,” where he wrote that death in nature is an extinguished (erloschene) life; and in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (1810), fire became a pseudonym of the sprit, spirit being described as “a soft and muffled flame of life” (sanfte, gedämpfte Lebensflamme).12  Plato, Protagoras, in Complete Works of Plato, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 321c–321d. 11  Bernard Stiegler, “Leroi-Gourhan: l’inorganique organisé,” Les cahiers de médiologie, no. 6 (1998/2): 187–94. 12  See F. W. J. Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2016), 32; also cited by Vicki Müller-Lüneschloß, “Geist ist Feuer. Der Begriff des Geistes in Schellings Naturphilosophie und Psychologie,” in Der Naturbegriff in der klassischen Deutschen Philosophie, ed. Peter Heuer und Wolfgang Neuser (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2013), 199: “das Producirende nun oder das Band wenn es in der Einigkeit mit dem Produkt ist, ist in der That nichts anderes als das innerliche Leben und Weben, die sanfte, gedämpfte Lebensflamme, die in jedem Wesen, auch dem scheinbar Todten brennt (Clairvoyanten sehen es): im Gegensatz aber und Widerspruch mit dem Producireten ist es das verzehrende Feuer.” 10

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It seems that for Schelling, fire is not something that is completely separable from the form, yet it does not possess the technicity that we want to introduce below. If fire is not exterior to the organic form, it is a central theme to articulate the relation between the organic and the inorganic, which we would like to examine in the next two chapters. It is not our aim here to deconstruct Schelling’s philosophy of nature, but rather to rethink both the thought and the unthought in his philosophy of nature, in order to demonstrate a new condition of philosophizing after Kant’s Critique of Judgment. §27. DESCARTES AND THE MECHANICAL ORGANS In his 1947 article “Machine and Organism,” Canguilhem proposed to reverse the Cartesian epistemology concerning the mechanization of life based on functional similarities. This critique of Descartes and praise of Kant and Bergson is fundamentally part of his project to introduce a biophilosophy that he sees the beginning of in 1910, marked by the publication of Bergson’s Creative Evolution in 1907 and the launch of the journal “Année Biologique.”13 Life in Descartes’s system does not have any “ontological originality,” writes Canguilhem; life is not recognized as a “proper metaphysical object.”14 According to Descartes, the body and its movements are governed by mechanical rules. For him, the death of an organism is no different from the malfunctioning of a clock. The episteme that we name “early modern” consists of the belief in the certainty and perfection of the laws of nature, and sees these as the absolute governing rules of all beings. It is not strange to the reader that Descartes, in a great spirit of self-doubt in part 2 of the Discourse on Method, asked, while looking at the street and the pedestrians out of the window, if these were not robots with clothes and hats governed by mechanical rules.15 Descartes’s use of mechanical models to explain vital activities can be found in various parts of his work. It will be sufficient for us to  Georges Canguilhem, “Notes sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Vrin, 2015), 310. 14  Ibid., 311, Canguilhem also named Alain, Brunschvicg, and Sartre. 15  René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 63–66. 13

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understand how such mechanical models seem to him adequate and important for theoretical and practical reasons. The relation between the mechanical model and the living being is not merely functionally analogical but also ontological. Descartes rejected the conventional belief that the soul is responsible for the movements of the body. Instead, he restricted the soul to a localization in the pineal gland where “the seat of the imagination and the ‘common’ sense is located.”16 The soul alone does not control the movement of the body, but rather it receives sensations and sends commands through the mechanism of the nerves, which are then connected to other mechanical parts of the body. In his “Description of the Human Body” (La description du corps humain), published in 1662 with the edition of The Treatise on Man, Descartes provides a mechanical model of the human body by mapping the organs onto existing mechanical parts. In Descartes’s “mapping,” the heart is like the spring that drives different parts into motion: In the heart, there is fire that warms up the blood pumping out of it; veins, stomach, intestines, and arteries are pipes that allow juices, food, and heated blood to circulate from one place to the other; the blood carries the “animal spirits” or “a kind of air or very fine wind,”17 which dilate the brain and make it ready to receive impressions both from external objects and from the soul.18 These same animal spirits flow from the brain via nerves to muscles and thereby command them to move. Descartes goes on to explain the mechanism of nutrition and the formation of the seminal material. He attempts to provide explanations of various bodily phenomena, though many of them seem outdated if not ridiculous today: for example, the correlation between humors and getting thin.19 Descartes’s mechanization of bodily organs is the epistemological product of his time; such mechanization can best be demonstrated when Descartes compares the operation of heat and the arteries with the organs of the church. Here we can draw a schematic comparison (see Table 3.1).

 René Descartes, “Treatise on Man,” in The World and Other Writings, trans. Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106. 17  Descartes, “Description of the Human Body,” in The World and Other Writings, 172. 18  Ibid. 19  Descartes, “Description of the Human Body,” 185: “[W]hen the humours become less abundant, they flow more easily and more quickly, because the subtle matter and the spirits accompanying them have a greater force to agitate them, and this causes them little by little to pick up the parts of the fat and carry them along with them, which is how people become thin.” 16

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Table 3.1  Comparison between Church Organ and Human Body The air which comes from the bellows The spirits which come from the heart The pipes which make sound The pores of the brain through which they pass The distribution of the air in the pipes The way in which the spirits are distributed in these pores

However, we must acknowledge that Canguilhem’s critique of Descartes is not entirely negative. Indeed, Canguilhem sees in Descartes a type of technological thinking that is rare in the history of Western philosophy. In an article titled “Descartes et la technique,” published in 1937, Canguilhem systematically demonstrates the important role of technics in Descartes’s discourse on truth, writing at the very beginning of the text that “Descartes has very explicitly and very frequently said that the effectiveness of the arts is conditioned by the truth of knowledge.”20 Descartes (as well as Francis Bacon) energetically negates the finality of nature in order to affirm human progress and to demonstrate the continuity between the natural and the artificial. As he writes in the Principles of Philosophy: And, to this end, things made by human skill helped me not a little: for I know of no distinction between these things and natural bodies, except that the operations of things made by skill are, for the most part, performed by apparatus large enough to be easily perceived by the senses: for this is necessary so that they can be made by men. On the other hand, however, natural effects almost always depend on some devices so minute that they escape all senses. And there are absolutely no judgments {or rules} in Mechanics which do not also pertain to Physics, of which Mechanics is a part or type: and it is as natural for a clock, composed of wheels of a certain kind, to indicate the hours, as for a tree, grown from a certain kind of seed, to produce the corresponding fruit.21

It is in Descartes that the distinction between nature and technics is blurred, not because Descartes wanted to reconcile nature and technics as two opposing realities, as we see them today, but rather because for  Georges Canguilhem, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 490: “Descartes a très expressément et très fréquemment dit que l’efficacité des arts a pour condition la vérité de la connaissance.” 21  René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982), §203, 285–86. 20

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him they share a common principle: namely, mechanism. This is also the reason why we may say that, having mechanism as the common ground, technics is elevated to be the primacy of knowledge. In other words, technics is not a mere application of scientific knowledge; rather, it is thanks to technics and technical activities that science is made to appear on the occasion of technical breakdown. Descartes, a philosopher who reflected often on both the art of making and of medicine, sees a discrepancy between practice and theory in terms of which they are not reducible to one another, but rather together constitute a cycle of knowledge production. In another article titled “Activité technique et creation,” which was originally a talk given in 1938 at the Société Toulousaine de philosophie, Canguilhem writes: “The fact is that the modern world simultaneously presents a multiplication of theories and a multiplication of techniques. But we cannot say if it is the technical boom that depends on the scientific boom or the other way around.”22 However, this apparent undecidability is only a strategy for affirming the primacy of technics and of creation, which is more primary than scientific knowledge as representation.23 Canguilhem gives various examples—thermodynamics, Pasteur’s theory, the laws of electrostatics—that emerged out of practical obstacles in relation to the steam engine, alcohol manufacturing, improving the compass, and so on, and he doesn’t forget to mention that the laws of dioptrics were formulated in relation to the problem of the size of the glass described by Descartes in his Dioptrique. He therefore arrives at the conclusion that “the rise of scientific thought is conditioned by the failure of technical thought.”24 Canguilhem rejects the idea that technology is an application of scientific knowledge; rather, he sees science and technology as two regimes of knowledge that inform each other. Retrospectively, we should be able to notice that with the advancement of technology, the dynamic of such circularity is largely altered (see chapter 5). Mechanism, understood as a principle of nature, allows Descartes to reverse the intuitive relation between science and technology, which remains an important source of inspiration for Canguilhem. However,  Canguilhem, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 1, 503: “Le fait c’est que le monde moderne présente simultanément une multiplication de théories et une multiplication de technique. Mais on ne peut pas lire dans les faits si c’est l’essor technique qui dépend de l’essor scientifique ou l’inverse.” 23  Le Blanc, Canguilhem et la vie humaine, 207. 24  Ibid. 22

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the major problem of conceiving life in terms of mechanism is that it attempts to “completely explain life without life.”25 In “Machine and Organism,” Canguilhem wants to question the Cartesian conception of the relation between organism and machine and to show that such a reduction should be reversed by recognizing the preexistence of the organism, meaning that biology is prior to technics. And if biology or organism is prior to technics, then this difference, and the dynamics between the two, should be rethought. The central question is not whether mechanism can produce the organism or if mechanism is equivalent to an organism, but rather the relation between the organic and the inorganic (here we can talk about technical objects) has to be systematically articulated. In Descartes there are traces of organological thinking: For example, the imitation of “a prior organic given”26 is implicit in texts such as The Treatise on Man, and sometimes it is explicit—for example, in the Diotrique, which Canguilhem also cites: “[W]e do not know how to make a new body, we must add to the internal organs organs external to the natural organs, artificial organs.”27 Descartes himself did not develop this organology further. Instead we see in Cartesianism an elimination of the teleology of life through the substitution of mechanism for organism, and of anatomical for dynamic functions, since teleology is closed in the technics of production.28 The effort of Canguilhem, as interpreted here, is one of jumping out of such a reduction and substitution to a renewed relation between organism and machine—namely, a general organology. §28. KANT AS PHILOSOPHER OF TECHNOLOGY First, concerning the term organology, we should understand the prefix organo- to signify both organs and the organic, which we have discussed in the previous two chapters. It is the double sense of the word organ that allows us to see both a vitalist dimension and a materialist dimension of Canguilhem’s general organology. It is necessary to

 Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 69. 26  Ibid., 85. 27  Canguilhem, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 1, 497. 28  Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 86–87. 25

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distinguish life and living being, for the latter is more or less identified with biology. However, the ambiguity between life and living being also allows Canguilhem to integrate Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution into his own formulation of the general organology, and it is also precisely for this reason that he terms Bergson’s Creative Evolution the precursor of a general organology. In “Notes sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique,” published in the same year (1947) as “Machine and Organism,” Canguilhem states that the value of Bergsonian philosophy is that it “understood the exact relation between organism and mechanism, being a biophilosophy of mechanism, treating machines as organs of life, and setting up bases for a general organology.”29 Bergson was for him “the first French philosopher who has considered mechanical invention as a biological function, as aspect of the organization of matter by life.”30 Life for Canguilhem is precisely the mediation between the mechanical and value, and such dynamics (in the form of conflict) produce both experience and history.31 Unlike the recursive form in Schelling, in Canguilhem and Bergson we see another recursivity, one that takes up the task of producing and reintegrating the inorganic in order to preserve life, and at the same time exhibits a more advanced form of life. The organism is important to Canguilhem since it is that which defines the individuality of a living being. In “Cellular Theory,” published in the collection of essays Knowledge of Life, Canguilhem rejects the idea that the individual can be understood through an analytic theory based on the atomistic concept of the cell, and proposes instead a synthetic theory that considers individuality from the perspective of a “globality.”32 The organic form is important for Canguilhem’s vitalism as well as his biophilosophy of culture, which gives a new role to technology. Commenting on the organic form, Le Blanc has remarked: “The organic form is itself a concept belonging to the epistemological field of vitalism and the corresponding political overdetermination, romanticism.”33  Canguilhem, “Notes,” 319.  Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 174, n.64. 31  Canguilhem, “Milieu et Normes de l’homme au travail,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4, 306. 32  Le Blanc, Canguilhem et la vie humaine, 47. 33  Ibid.: “La forme organique est elle-même un concept s’inscrivant dans le champ épistémologique du vitalisme et dans la surdétermination politique qui lui correspond, le romantisme.” 29 30

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We have seen in chapter 1 the difference between organicism and vitalism. However, this doesn’t exclude the fact that the organic form is crucial in vitalism, and Canguilhem thanks equally Hans Driesch, Sven Hörstadius, Hans Spemann, and Hilde Mangold for their contributions.34 It is also not simply an affirmation of the philosophical condition that we have tried to explore that began with Kant, but a further development of such organological thinking, at the same time constituting a new condition of philosophizing in view of the relation between nature and technology. It is in regard to the concept of the organic that Canguilhem suggests reading Kant as a philosopher of technology, especially in his Critique of Judgment: Now, contrary to Descartes, one author has affirmed both the irreducibility of the organism to the machine and, symmetrically, the irreducibility of art to science. This is Kant, in the Critique of Judgment. It is true that in France we are not used to looking for a philosophy of techniques in Kant, but German writers who have been interested in these problems, especially from 1870 onward, have not failed to do so. . . . In paragraph 65 of the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment,” Kant uses the example of the watch, so dear to Descartes, to distinguish machine from organism. . . . In paragraph 75, Kant distinguishes man’s intentional technique from life’s unintentional technique. But in paragraph 43 (from the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment”), Kant defines the originality of this intentional human technique relative to knowledge.35

We have already explored in chapter 1 the significance of Kant’s discourse on the concept of organic in §65 of Critique of Judgment, and its development in the work of Schelling and Hegel concerning a philosophy of nature. We should look closely at what Canguilhem wants to say about §75 and §43. In fact, it is not in §75 but rather in §72 that Kant makes a distinction between two forms of procedure or causal

 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 90–91. Sven Horstadius (1898–1996) was a Swedish embryologist who is often listed next to Driesch, Spemann, and Mangold for his contribution to developmental embryology. He used blastomere isolation and recombination to experiment on late cleavage stage sea urchin embryos to study cellular interactions. He shows that the uneven distribution of the egg-cell contents corresponds to the shifting qualities of early embryo cells, as well as that communication between these cells plays an essential role in the differentiation process. See Sven Horstadius, “The Mechanics of Sea Urchin Development,” L’année biologique 26, no. 8 (1950): 381–98. 35  Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life, 92–93. 34

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operations of nature: One is designed (technica intentionalis), the other undesigned (technica naturalis). The former is related to the final cause of nature or the natural end, which already includes the end of every natural project. We cannot know this natural end objectively. The latter concerns the “natural mechanism,” which may be contingently coincident with our concepts of art, but it is also due to such a coincidence that it is “erroneously interpreted as a special kind of natural generation.”36 In §43 Kant makes an effort to distinguish art from nature, technics from science. For a craftsman like a shoemaker, although he may be able to describe how exactly the best shoes should be made, he “doubtless, was not able to turn one out himself.”37 Canguilhem is providing a reading (through Paul Krannhals’s Der Weltsinn der Technik) beyond the irreducibility between organism and mechanism, which states that, for Kant, “every technique essentially and positively includes a vital originality irreducible to rationalization.”38 Kant was dealing with the discrepancy between the final cause of nature and the mechanical cause that is presumed to coincide with art. Recognizing this difference doesn’t mean that one has to reject mechanical rules. Kant instead affirms that everything “which is necessary in this nature as an object of the senses we should judge according to mechanical laws,” but he continues that “the accord and unity of the particular laws and of their resulting subordinate forms, which we must deem contingent in respect of mechanical laws—these things which exist in nature as an object of reason, and, indeed, nature in its entirety as a system, we should also consider in the light of teleological laws.”39 Canguilhem’s strategy of reading Kant as a philosopher of technology is to affirm that for him this irreducibility between mechanism and organism actually points in the direction of accommodating the mechanical within the organic, the  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), §72, 218.  Ibid., §43, 133. 38  Ibid. This is inspired by a citation from Paul Krannhals’s Der Weltsinn der Technik. The citation comes from the Critique of Judgment: “Art, as human skill, is distinguished also from science (as ability from knowledge), as a practical from a theoretical faculty, as technic from theory (as the art of surveying from geometry). For this reason, also, what one can do the moment one only knows what is to be done, hence without anything more than sufficient knowledge of the desired result, is not called art. To art that alone belongs for which the possession of the most complete knowledge does not involve one’s having then and there the skill to do it. Camper describes very exactly how the best shoe must be made, but he, doubtless, was not able to turn one out himself.” 39  Ibid., §77, 237. 36

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machine within life. Canguilhem wants to show a more complicit relation between the mechanical and the organic from different sources in ethnology, which we can summarize as follows: 1. The organic is irreducible to the mechanical. On the contrary, the mechanical can be seen as a particular case of the organic. We may say that mechanization is a kind of rationalization that eliminates certain “useless” and “contingent” features of the organic process. Mechanization entails a simplification and rationalization of the organism. Canguilhem didn’t distinguish the organic from the vital, unlike the other biologists we have discussed—Needham, for example, who promoted a third way, beyond the opposition between mechanism and vitalism. 2. Technical objects originate from the projection of organs. Canguilhem takes the point from Alfred Espinas’s Les origins de la technique (1897), who in turn took it from the Hegelian Ernst Kapp’s Grundlinien der Philosophie der Technik (1877).40 In this work Kapp proposes to understand tools as the projection of organs: For example, a hook can be seen as a projection of the hand. Through the exteriorization of the interior, humans acquire knowledge of themselves by recursively coming back to themselves (Cassirer also considers Kapp’s organ projection as a self-knowing). This close relation between organs and technics was further studied by the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan in his ethnographies on the evolution of technics, in which technics is at the same time the exteriorization of memory and the liberation of bodily organs.41 We must emphasize, however, that Kant was trying to articulate the knowledge of “nature as a whole” as a totality of empirical laws (in §75), and this whole cannot be known objectively. The whole remains unknown, but with the idea of reason (or transcendental supposition as a heuristic principle), one can approach it “as if” the whole is present as such.42 The way that reason arrives at the wholeness is reflective

 See Alfred Espinas, Les origines de la technologie (Paris: Alcan, 1897), and Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien der Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1877).  See André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 42  I would like to thank Michäel Crevoisier for emphasizing this point. 40

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judgment, which unifies the laws of nature. The relation between the whole and reflective judgment seems to presuppose a recursivity whose end remains objectively unknown but which can be subjectively thought through reason. It is also the whole that conditions the parts in the recursive process. The speculation of the whole as a method, through Kant and Kurt Goldstein, has a strong influence on Canguilhem’s general organology. Goldstein’s Der Aufbau des Organismus (1934)43 had a significant impact upon the French philosophy of the time (e.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty). He also proposes a holistic view of the organism, as well as a theory of the abnormal and the pathological, whose traces are clear in Canguilhem’s own theory. What is holism for Goldstein? The sixth chapter of The Organism provides a clear answer. Without going into the details of the various clinical and laboratory examples that Goldstein employed to demonstrate his thesis, we would like to single out two points. First, Goldstein insists on holism as a method for understanding the behavior of the organism instead of being restricted to local and anatomical explanations. The simplest example is that of putting a starfish in various abnormal positions, where one will observe that the organism soon returns to a normal position,44 or when an organism is injured: for example, when a dung beetle loses one of its legs and will then coordinate its whole body to compensate for the loss.45 Goldstein argued against anatomical evaluation as a basis of localization, as well as against so-called antagonism, which states that every performance results from two opposing forces or operating mechanisms (e.g., the enervation of muscles). Instead, Goldstein wants to interpret these phenomena from a holistic perspective, and he states that, concerning the muscle group, “there are never two antagonistic mechanisms active. We are not even dealing with isolated innervations, but only with one.”46 The second point is that Goldstein was very much influenced by the figure-ground theory of Gestalt psychology,  The book is translated into French in 1951 as La structure de l’organisme. Introduction à la biologie à partir de la pathologie humaine, and was translated into English in 1939 as The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). For further commentary on Canguilhem and Goldstein, see Charles Wolfe, “Was Canguilhem a Biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the Project of ‘Biophilosophy,’” in Medicine and Society, New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, ed. Darian Meacham (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 197–212. 44  Goldstein, The Organism, 179. 45  Ibid., 192. 46  Ibid., 219. 43

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though Goldstein never claimed to be a Gestalt psychologist himself. In the same chapter on holism, Goldstein states that “every reaction is a ‘Gestalt reaction’ of the whole in the form of a figure-ground configuration.”47 After criticizing the inadequacy of antagonism theory, he returns to the figure-ground relation by showing that [w]hen a definite movement is intended, then, corresponding to the required distribution in the different sectors of the muscle group, the differential excitation in the spinal apparatus takes place. This pattern of excitation, in the various sectors, forms the “figure process” that stands out as a definite Gestalt of excitation distribution, against the rest of the organism, which forms the background. In the total configuration, the excitation of the agonist, or of the antagonist, represents a part that can only be artificially isolated.48

This figure-ground relation can also be found in authors like Canguilhem and, most notably, Simondon, who often employed the figureground relation to describe the processes of individuation and genesis of technicity, which we will discuss in chapter 4. Although Canguilhem doesn’t explicitly use the figure-ground trope in this text, his reading of Kant seems to have already applied such a view. We could say that Canguilhem’s general organology is, first, based on the organic whole, and second, a call to bring mechanism back to life. In order to further construct Canguilhem’s general organology, which was only mentioned twice in his writings, we will have to raise the question of why Canguilhem claims to read Bergson’s Creative Evolution as a precursor to general organology. §29. ORGANOLOGY IN CREATIVE EVOLUTION Evolution is creative since it is recursive. It consists of repetitive improvements of the means of survival, which open up new perspectives of the world through its artificiality and the interobjective relations that it establishes. It also consists of a constant return to the organizing force, which is life itself, in order to undo what is already made and  Ibid., 182.  Ibid., 219.

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became stratified. Every return is not a return to the same object or the same place, but rather a reorganization of the organic and the inorganic. In Creative Evolution Bergson wants to go beyond both mechanism and finalism. Mechanism is an artificial system that is deprived of “real time,” since the mechanical parts don’t have a history. Every state can be restored according to an external cause. This means that it is reversible and it doesn’t endure. Finalism always presupposes a design. Even Kant’s nature end presupposes a sort of design, which makes Kant’s Critique of Judgment close to cybernetics. Unlike the Leibnizian finalism that subsumes beings to a predefined design, radical finalism breaks such a gigantic program of existence into smaller units, in which every individual has an internal finality. Bergson ridiculed the finalists for having the illusion that such a breaking-down might reduce its surface of blows. The reason is simple: Since the organismic whole is a spatial dimension of life, every “self-contained” organism is always influenced by other organisms, so such an internal finality only affirms the necessity of “external finality.” We thus read the famous claim of Bergson, “[F]inality is external or it is nothing at all”: “The truth is, it lays open to them a great deal more radical as our own theory may appear, finality is external or it is nothing at all. . . . The idea of a finality that is always internal is therefore a self-destructive notion.”49 Bergson’s rejection of finality is subtle, since although he disclaims the finalistic nature of the élan vital, as Ernst Mayr says, it “could not have been anything else, considering its effect.”50 It goes the same when Vladimir Jankelevich points out that Bergsonism presupposes an organic whole; it seems difficult to reject finalism with such a presupposition. When Bergson says that finality is external or it is nothing at all, he is simply refusing a finalism that is in fact a disguised mechanism, meaning that the beginning (the design) already implies the end. External finality means an opening to contingency, to creativity, conditioned by the complexity of the organic whole, which cannot be reduced to simple design. How, then, can we articulate the organic whole? As with Kant’s comment on the difference between the clock and the organism in §65 of the third Critique, Bergson sees in the machine a

 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 47–48.  Ernst Mayr, “The Idea of Teleology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 1 (January– March 1992): 120.

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lack of endurance (durer)51—the machine lasts, but it doesn’t endure; a rock may change, but all successive states are external to each other52; or, in Jankelevich’s words, “A material system is entirely what it is at any moment one observes it, and it is nothing but that. Since it does not endure, it is in a way eternally pure because it has no past whatsoever to color and temper its present.”53 If a machine can be comprehended from its different parts, an organism can be comprehended only from its entirety: “[T]he organism is in its entirety or it is not at all.”54 We cannot demand from a machine more than what has been made, while, on the contrary, organisms “are not what they are and are what they are not.”55 To what extent is the organic whole that Bergson emphasizes different from the whole in finalism? The whole for Bergson is not that which structurally defines an organism; rather, it is life itself. In agreement with what Kant says in §77 of the third Critique, Bergson writes: “That life is a kind of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it the mechanism of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole?” Creative Evolution is a treatise that delivers a critical examination of the evolutionist philosophy by positing philosophy as the ground of science and life as the ground of mechanism. Here we will touch upon the question of time, since life endures. This enduring is not only a subsisting, since evolution is “a real persistence of the past in the present, a duration which is, as it were, a hyphen, a connecting link.”56 But it is also creative, because duration “means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.”57 We see here that for Bergson, evolution is duration consisting of multiplicity indicated by the “absolutely new,”58 while discontinuities or changes are also that which distinguish it from the  Vladimir Jankelevitch, Henri Bergson, trans. Nils F. Schott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 4. 52  Ibid., 5. 53  Ibid.; italics in original. 54  Ibid., 8. 55  Ibid., 10. 56  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 27. 57  Jankelevich, Henri Bergson, 14. 58  The duration is a unity of multiplicity (see chapter 2 of Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson [London: G. Alan, 1913]), which is also a unity of discontinuity. This interpretation may seem to be at odds with Bachelard’s critique of Bergson that he sees only continuity but not discontinuity. See Gaston Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant, trans. Eileen Rizo-Patron (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 51

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mathematized entity or objectification. Life means the persistence of the past and the consistency between the whole and its parts in duration. Bergsonian dualism, which has been reproached by many authors, is not a real dualism in the sense that it does not posit two unsurmountable and unreconcilable realities. Dualism is comprehended in duration and resolved by intuition. By the same token, the dualism between mechanisms and organisms is not a confrontation of the two, but rather precedes an integration according to the spatial (parts-whole relations) and temporal (duration) dimensions of creative evolution. Bergson’s general organology is indeed an attempt to reconcile the inert (matter) and the living (life), the inorganic and the organic. We know that it is in Creative Evolution that Bergson developed the concept of élan vital, which we can understand as an impetus of life that acts on the organization of matter, or as creativity irreducible to any mysterious vital force.59 Bergson distinguishes an indirect and direct way of acting of the élan vital, which also distinguishes intelligence from instinct: “It can either effect this action directly by creating an organised instrument to work with; or else it can effect it indirectly through an organism which, instead of possessing the required instrument naturally, will itself construct it by fashioning inorganic matter.”60 The élan vital, therefore, is an organizing force, which either directly affects the organism or indirectly organizes the inorganic through the organism to make it part of the organism. To reconstruct a Bergsonian organology, we will focus on the third chapter of his Creative Evolution, a chapter to which Canguilhem devoted a long commentary.61 We will do so by taking up the dualities that Bergson sets up: life versus matter and intuition versus intelligence. If intelligence, by geometrizing matter, recursively constructs an artificial system, then by undoing the relation between matter and intelligence, intuition returns mechanism to its ground, which is life. Bergson’s definition of intelligence here is certainly a narrow one, but it is very pertinent to what is called artificial intelligence today because the latter is fundamentally based on  Bergson explains the concept of élan vital in Creative Evolution, 257: “[I]t must be compared to impetus, because no image borrowed from the physical world can give more nearly the idea of it. But it is only an image. In reality, life is of the psychological order, and it is of the essence of the psychical to enfold a confused plurality of interpenetrating terms.” 60  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 142. 61  Canguilhem, “Commentaire au troisième chapitre de L’Évolution créatrice,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4. 59

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geometrical time and space. Bergson’s critique of intelligence can also be applied to the fantasy of artificial intelligence that finds the Absolute in itself. To act is a key word for acquiring a true understanding of intelligence and its potential, since intelligence, as Bergson argued, is not what Plato describes in the allegory of the cave, where intelligence contemplates either the sun or the shadow. To act is at the same time to bathe in the ocean of life, the élan vital. We can thus see that Bergson attempts to account for the genesis of intelligence instead of simply presupposing it. For Bergson, explaining the genesis of intelligence and dissolving its geometric form in order to unveil its primordial reality comprises the primary task of philosophy: Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis.62

Bergson immediately suggests an objection to his theory, which is conceived as a positive feedback loop—for if one wants to go beyond the intelligence, what can one start with if not intelligence itself? If this were true, wouldn’t we be locked within this circle? Bergson introduces “action” to break out of this circle, since action is a kind of information that triggers a Gestalt switch. For example, we cannot learn to swim simply with our intelligence, but must first get in the water, and it is by acting that intelligence is brought back to a reality from which it is detached, if not yet completely so.63 Canguilhem sees here a parallel between the Spinozist natura naturans and natura naturata and the Bergsonian flux of consciousness and intelligence,64 though Bergson used this Spinozist vocabulary only in Two Sources of Morality and Religion.65 If intelligence is characterized by a geometrism, as Bergson claimed, it is necessary to negate such a geometrism (it is considered as  Ibid., 210.  Ibid., 211.  Ibid., 125. 65  Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: MacMillan, 1935), 44. 62 63 64

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a natural logic, such as induction and deduction, which the philosopher criticized) in order to arrive at the primary reality of consciousness.66 Intelligence acts on matter in order to see in it space, and the latter also aids the former to schematize so that it continues on its own. We can thus see that intelligence and matter are two sides of the same genesis: Then in saying that neither does matter determine the form of the intelligence, nor does the intelligence impose its form on matter, nor have matter and intellect been regulated in regard to one another by we know not what pre-established harmony, but that intellect and matter have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to attain at last a common form. This adaptation has, moreover, been brought about quite naturally, because it is the same inversion of the same movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of things.67

That there are two sides to this genesis does not mean that matter is intelligence. Rather, they are two realities correlated with one another. Bergson takes intelligence away from the contemplating whole, as in Plato’s allegory of the cave, to the ground of labor—as Canguilhem says, like a plowing ox (bœuf de labor).68 In the reciprocity of the two terms, Bergson reintroduces a ground against which the genesis of matter and intelligence emerge as a reciprocal process. Action, like a contingent event, which breaks away from the recursive form, takes the intelligence out of its routine and reveals to it an ocean of which it is only a surface: “[Yet] the state of consciousness overflows the intelligence; it is indeed incommensurable with the intellect, being itself indivisible and new.”69 Or even more beautifully, as Canguilhem puts it: “It is by reflecting its character of progressive rectification that the intelligence will find the mobility and the fluidity of the current of which it is the deposit, the solidification. Intelligence, reinterpreting itself in life, revives its genesis, it becomes dynamic from static, agile from frozen again.”70  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 214: “The intellect bears within itself, in the form of natural logic, a latent geometrism that is set free in the measure and proportion that the intellect penetrates into the inner nature or inert matter.” 67  Ibid., 225–26. 68  Canguilhem, “Commentaire,” 135. 69  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 219. 70  Canguilhem, “Commentaire,” 136: “C’est en réfléchissant son caractère de rectification progressive que l’intelligence retrouvera la mobilité et la fluidité du courant dont elle est le dépôt, la solidification. L’intelligence, se retrempant dans la vie, revit à rebours sa genèse, de statique elle redevient dynamique, de figée elle redevient agile.” 66

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Finality is constrained by tendencies—a word that Bergson employs in both Creative Evolution and Two Sources (elementary tendency, preliminary tendency, natural tendency, original tendency, etc.). Tendencies are not ends, but they propel the movement of the flow—these could be habits, will, or the direction of a certain future. All these influences presuppose “an organic whole that manifests a deep-living principle of which they are the expression.”71 The question of finality comes in here again, since these tendencies are like valves, participating in the becoming and leading to what is called a “creative finalism.”72 However, we may want to ask, isn’t this current the one in the sense that Schelling gives to nature? And isn’t the genesis of both matter and intelligence a constant contact with hindrances (Hemmungen), which in turn determine the tendency of the movement of consciousness? Is dualism therefore only a fabulation to be unmade in order to go back to the current? In order to arrive at a better understanding of these questions—even if we will probably never have any satisfactory answers—we have to be precise about the meaning of matter and intelligence.73 Canguilhem proposes to understand the question of materiality in two stages: first, according to its relation to duration, and second, in its relation to extension (étendue). In relation to duration, matter is presented as the “incapacity of linking the present to the past, of contracting habitudes, of utilizing the present by pushing it into the future.”74 Matter can be considered as a fall (chute); it is a product of oblivion (oubli), as in Félix Ravaisson’s On Habit. Canguilhem suggests that Bergson resonates

 G. Watts Cunningham, “Bergson’s Conception of Finality,” Philosophical Review 23, no. 6 (November 1914): 656–57. 72  Ibid. 73  Canguilhem, “Commentaire,” 145. Canguilhem has pointed out the concept of matter in Creative Evolution is different from that in Matter and Memory. In Matter and Memory, Bergson understands matter as “an aggregate of ‘images.’” An image is, for Bergson, that which is in between what the Idealists call a representation and what the realists call a thing. It is more than a representation but less than a thing; this strategic definition allows him to develop an original reading of memory. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 9–10. According to Jankelevitch’s commentary, Matter and Memory is a study of the relation between the matter of the organized individual body and the individual consciousness, while in Creative Evolution the focus is on the relation between the “cosmic matter and the universal consciousness in its effort of organization.” In La pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conférences (Paris: PUF, 1969), 57, matter is presented as repetition; inorganic matter is a series of oscillations, infinitely rapid, that subsumes visible and measurable changes. 74  Canguilhem, “Commentaire,” 148.

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here with his master Ravaisson concerning the role of matter. Like Ravaisson, who thinks that “the body exists without becoming anything [sans rien devenir],” Bergson holds the same view, seeing matter as “a limit, the ideal term of an inclination.”75 In relation to extension, matter is presented as the permanent threat of an exteriorization that retards the spiritual tension or the personality in the form of a deficit. As Bergson says: “[A]ll our analyses show us, in life, an effort to re-mount the incline that matter descends.”76 Toward the end of chapter 3 of Creative Evolution, Bergson delivers an explication of the relation between life and matter through the famous example of steam. The example consists of imaging a vessel full of steam. There is a crack in the vessel, so the steam escapes toward the opening. After having contact with the outside air, the steam condenses and therefore falls back into the vessel. At that moment the escaping steam is trying to raise and retard the falling water drops. With this image, Bergson claims that “from an immense reservoir of life, jets must be gushing out unceasingly, of which each, falling back, is a world.”77 This recursive form, which is ended by its own exhaustion, is not an accurate comparison, as Bergson reminds the readers that the creation of the world is a free act of which life takes part, and so is unlike the jet of steam trying to escape. Nevertheless, this image illustrates the creativity of life, “making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself.”78 Matter, as we can see from this image, is a movement that inverts the movement of life. However, it is not opposed to life, but is rather the necessary condition of evolution: The impetus of life, of which we are speaking, consists in a need of creation. It cannot create absolutely, because it is confronted with matter, that is to say with the movement that is the inverse of its own. But it seizes upon this matter, which is necessity itself, and strives to introduce into it the largest possible amount of indetermination and liberty.79

In relation to extension, tension is present in the spirit like the background against which extension emerges, like freedom in relation to  Ibid., 149.  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 268; quoted also by David Lapoujade, Puissances du temps, versions de Bergson (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2010), 97. 77  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 270. 78  Ibid. 79  Ibid., 274. 75 76

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mechanical necessity.80 The passage from tension to extension is an inversion. Canguilhem brings deficiency, inversion, and de-tension together in the same group.81 To detend, says Bergson, is to let go of tension, in order to extend.82 Canguilhem distinguishes extension from space. The former is the content of perception, while the latter is the pure exteriority of homogeneous parts; therefore, “matter is a possible direction of the consciousness and as such it is more extension [étendue] than spatial.”83 We can recapture the relations between these terms with the aid of a precise summary from Canguilhem: In short, we obtain, in the decreasing order of spiritual reality de-tension (by which matter has a private relationship with the mind/spirit), extension (order properly material where the relation to the spiritual order is progressively forgotten), extended (the past participle signifying here the oblivion of past spiritual participation), space (externality of parts to each other and from the whole to the spirit). Space is the achievement of the intelligence out of a sketch. Here we recognize the brutality of the action, the abusive nature of logical thinking.84

Canguilhem thus suggests that matter has “more natural reality” in Creative Evolution than in Matter and Memory, since in the form of extension matter is “offered and lends itself to the habitude of the intelligence.”85 If action is what triggers the reflection of the intelligence to bring it back to creativity, then this reflection can take place only when the intelligence is forced to go back to and beyond itself. This force acting against it can only be matter itself. It is through contact with matter that the immense virtual tendencies of life are actualized

 Ibid., 258.  Canguilhem, “Commentaire,” 153; on p. 151 Canguilhem remarks that it is only in Creative Evolution but not in Matter and Memory that Bergson uses the word detension as an inbetween term of tension and extension. 82  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 259. 83  Bergson, “Commentaire,” 154. 84  Ibid.: “En somme nous obtenons, dans l’ordre de réalité spirituelle décroissante dé-tente (par quoi la matière soutient avec l’esprit un rapport privatif), ex-tension (ordre proprement matériel où s’oublie progressivement le rapport à l’ordre spirituel), étendue (participe passé signifiant l’oubli de la participation spirituelle passée), espace (extériorité des parties les unes aux autres et de l’ensemble à l’esprit). L’espace c’est l’achèvement par l’intelligence d’une esquisse. On reconnaît là le caractère brutal de l’action, le caractère abusif de la pensée logique.” 85  Canguilhem, “Commentaire,” 156. 80 81

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or individualized. However, the individualities are always reassociated and reintegrated into an organic whole. If we refer back to Bergson’s example of learning to swim, it is evident that one cannot learn how to swim by just watching a video, through which one schematizes matter in geometrical form, for example, the movements of the arms and the kicks. Neither can one learn to swim by repeating these spatialized movements on the bank of the pool without really interacting with the water, which is matter (as extension instead of space). As with the example of swimming, water in terms of matter is not that which limits movement, like a static form, only by acting against which the swimmer can advance. To think of it in terms of organology, water is neither only physical and static nor an ensemble of geometrical and physical attributes; rather, it is that which facilitates the body to let go of its weight and push itself in the desired direction. To learn to swim is to invent new gestures that integrate water as a function of the man-water unity. One can make a more general claim in relation to Bergson: namely, that organology is a practice that infinitizes the finite, liberates the determined by de-geometricizing the object in order to create. Bergson’s theory of the genesis of intelligence implies also a genesis of matter and an attempt to dissolve the rigid spatiality produced by the intelligence. It is in his commentary that Canguilhem formulates what he calls a Bergsonian general organology later in “Machine and Organism” and “Notes sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique”: The formation of form would be correlative to the materialization of matter. In the description of the spatial form, Kant is interested in its use. Bergson thinks that one cannot understand the use if one does not understand its formation, because here too it is the function that creates the organ. Earlier on (E.C., 175) Bergson described matter as organ.86

What is meant by saying that matter is organ here? This passage is directed against Kant’s understanding of intelligence and matter in  Ibid., 157: “La formation de la forme serait corrélative de la matérialisation de la matière. Dans la description de la forme spatiale, Kant s’intéresse à son usage. Bergson pense qu’on ne peut pas comprendre l’usage si on ne comprend pas la formation, car ici aussi c’est la fonction qui crée l’organe. Plus haut (E.C., p. 162/632) Bergson a qualifié la matière d’organe.”

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terms of form and thing. Rather, they are to be understood as movements acting on each other. If intelligence and matter are decomposed into movements, then we will see that the formation of form is no different from the materialization of matter. It is thus not form alone whose functionality is at the center in such a genesis, but rather the unity of usage and formation. Matter is internalized organs: “[Instrument] reacts on the nature of the being that constructs it; for in calling on him to exercise a new function, it confers on him, so to speak, a richer organization, being an artificial organ by which the natural organization is extended.”87 We may want to go a step further here and claim that the enterprise of Bergsonian organology consists in a philosophical attempt to recursively undo the stratified view of science, thus refusing positive science as the starting point of philosophizing by reconstructing a genesis of the intelligence and matter from the point of view of interaction and creation. Evolution is creative only because it is not confined to the geometrical order that is science, and, by struggling to return to that from whence it emerged, it constructs through the matter upon which it acts a new organ corresponding to a new function. For a swimmer, water is not the matter that he or she wants to geometrize and to overcome, but rather water becomes part of his or her body, without which there will be no advancement in movement. A good swimmer is not necessarily physically stronger than a bad swimmer, but he or she knows better how to organize him- or herself and the water in order to set both of them into effective movement. In Creative Evolution Bergson states that “instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even of constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.”88 Matter in relation to intelligence is inorganic instrument spatially schematized—namely, the organized inorganic. This is even more clearly pronounced later, in the Two Sources of Morality and Religion,89 where Bergson writes:

 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 155–56; cited also by Caterina Zanfi, “La machine dans la philosophie de Bergson,” Annales Bergsoniennes 6 (2013): 286. 88  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 155. 89  Zanfi notes that Two Sources is not a work where Bergson confirms his spiritualism but rather a work that demonstrates the mutual need between spiritualism and mechanism. Toward the end of Two Sources, Bergson writes that “the mystical summons up the mechanical . . . mechanism should mean mysticism” (268). 87

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Let us merely recall the fact that life is a certain effort to obtain certain things from raw matter, and that instinct and intelligence, taken in their finished state, are two distinct means of utilizing a tool for this object; in the first case, the tool is part of the living creature; in the other, it is an inorganic instrument which man has had to invent, make and learn to handle.90

Instinct and intelligence stand here as two modes. One is ready-tohand, the other present-at-hand, but the invention and apprenticeship of tools leads back to an embodied and naturalized use. Thus, when Bergson talks about order and disorder, he tries to demonstrate that order and disorder are not two absolute terms, but rather relative. What is disordered is called such just because it is not confined to a specific order, but this doesn’t mean that it is lacking in order. If order and disorder are relative to each other, then Bergson brings evolution back to the infinite possibility of life from the destiny of the intelligence. This could be seen as a fundamental difference between organicism and organology; that is, whereas organicism studies the relations between different parts in the system—for example, an organism—organology extends beyond organic form to reintegrate the inorganic into an organized whole; we may call this constant integration of the organized inorganic evolution. In order to integrate them, it will be necessary to free them from being present-at-hand, and this is the reason for which it is creative. Life is fundamentally artificial. This artificiality must be thought in terms of organology, in which creativity is released from the rigidity imposed by the intelligence. Such liberation is possible only through a doing-undoing process, since there is no undoing if there is no doing, and there is no doing where life is not already presupposed. Like intelligence, a machine-learning algorithm may allow us to turn an ordinary photograph into one that resembles the style of a Klee or a Van Gogh, but it is nothing creative in the sense that what it does is a geometrical mapping of pixels. We have to admit that it is a useful function that can be integrated organologically, but it is not one that could replace creativity.  Bergson, Two Sources, 97. In a later passage Bergson continues: “If our organs are natural instruments, our instruments must then be artificial organs. The workman’s tool is the continuation of his arm, the tool-equipment of humanity is therefore a continuation of its body. Nature, in endowing us with an essentially tool-making intelligence, prepared for us in this way a certain expansion” (267).

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§30. NORMS AND ACCIDENTS Like Bergson’s organology, which seeks an ontological ground of life by rethinking the movement of matter and intelligence by situating them in the reality of the élan vital, Canguilhem also sees that the question of technics in life is beyond any scientific conceptualization. As he says toward the end of “Machine and Organism,” organology has the advantage of showing “man in continuity with life through technique prior to insisting on the rupture for which he assumes responsibility through science.”91 The same thesis is repeated in a different way in “Aspects of Vitalism,” where Canguilhem invokes Hegel’s cunning of reason (List der Vernunft) to describe this strategy. For Hegel, reason employs the ruse of taking a detour through other objects in order to achieve its aim. This detour seems at first glance contingent and inessential, whereas it is in fact necessary: Mechanism, as is well known, comes from “mēchanē,” whose meaning, “engine,” contains two senses: that of ruse and stratagem, on the one hand, and that of machine, on the other. One could ask whether the two meanings do not amount to just one. Is not man’s invention and utilization of machines, and technical activity in general, what Hegel called the ruse of reason? The ruse of reason consists in reason’s accomplishing its ends through the intermediary of objects acting upon one another in conformity with their nature. Essentially, a machine is a mediation or, as mechanists say, a relay. A mechanism does not create anything—and therein lies its merit (in-ars)—but it can be constructed only through art, and it is a ruse. Thus mechanism, as a scientific method and as a philosophy, is the implicit postulate of all usage of machines.92

The mechanist philosophers want to explain life through mechanism, that is to say, to explain life without life.93 The vitalists respond by showing that life cannot be reduced to any physico-chemical and cellular principles. For Bergson, artificial systems are mechanical but not real. Science, when it becomes mechanistic, prevents us from comprehending the creativity which is life itself. Life is a recursive process of making in the unmaking, in which science is necessary in the sense that  Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 97.  Ibid., 63. 93  Ibid., 69. 91 92

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it is a making to be unmade in order to make. In contrast to the presentation of a negative necessity of science in the current of the élan vital, Canguilhem gives a more positive role to science and proposes that the task of vitalism is to search for the meaning of the relation between life and science.94 In “Le concept et la vie” (1966), Canguilhem also addresses the genetic program and information theory of biology, which he refuses to see as a mere “imported metaphor”; rather, he says, it is important to seize the “development and progress of knowledge that it offers.”95 Canguilhem wants to emphasize, in line with the vitalists of the Renaissance, that life seeks “to put mechanism back into its place within life”96—or, in his own words, to “rejoin life through science.”97 This is the spirit of general organology. A theory of form, which is also metaphysics, attempts to comprehend the one and the all, and neglects the constant materialization of fire, which is technics. A theory of life attempts to address the dynamic between the organic and the inorganic through the notion of creation, motivated by the whole, which is life itself. For this, we must pay attention to technical reality, which, like the human reality, has a dynamics of its own. The schemes and forms inside the mind of the engineers are exteriorized in material terms, thus effectively detaching themselves from their confinement to mind and released into the world of which they are going to take part. These material beings are no longer schemes, and therefore it makes almost no sense to criticize technical objects as merely mathematics, without understanding that these are also material  Ibid., 61.  Canguilhem, “Le concept et la vie,” 219. In this text it seems that, at times, in favor of a theory of knowledge, Canguilhem returns to a Hegelian moment of identifying concept and life. As it is has been put by other authors, Bergson’s approach is an “intuition-based vitalism” while Canguilhem’s is a “conceptualist vitalism, in which concept and life are one, or at least unified”: see Charles Wolfe and T. K. Wong, “The Return of Vitalism,” in The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics, ed. Miguel de Beistegui, G. Bianco, and M. Gracieuse (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 70. Though this 1966 article is a survey of the relation between life and concept since Aristotle, via Kant, Hegel, and Bergson, it seems to me rather indecisive regarding the relation between a theory of knowledge and a theory of life, which was much clearer in his general organology. Following Foucault we may say that for Canguilhem it is less about such identification in the Hegelian sense and rather “forming concepts is a way to live and not to kill life; it is a way of life in a relative mobility and not an attempt for immobilizing life.” See Michel Foucault, “La vie: l’expérience et la science,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 90, no. 1 (1985): 13. 96  Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 73. 97  Ibid., 62. 94 95

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beings. In other words, by reducing technical objects to their schemes, one returns to idealism and unconsciously denies materialism. The created is never equal to the scheme that created it, nor is it equal to the élan vital that runs through the process of creation. At stake here is not only the question of form, of artificial organs, but also the question of life in light of the fire. Canguilhem agrees with Marxist philosophers in interpreting biological phenomena in terms of a dialectics,98 but such an interpretation is valid only since life struggles against its mechanization as a permanent demand (exigence).99 Life in the philosophy of Bergson and Canguilhem is creative, but this creativity takes different forms. Guillaume le Blanc has proposed understanding this difference between Canguilhem and Bergson through Canguilhem’s writing on Alain’s work on art.100 Both Alain and Bergson move away from the Platonic conception of art, meaning the imitation of the ideal in the real, since they regard the realization of art as an encounter with contingency—not the least that painting, writing (poetry), and composition (music) are open to the contingency of the muscles.101 But therein also lies a fundamental difference. For Alain, art tends to arrest a movement and to fix a form, since immobility is the basis of representation. For Bergson, however, it is the opposite, and such a fix is rather a constraint on becoming. Even in the case of contemplating a work of art, maintains Bergson, a prolongation of movement is demanded, since art reveals the reality, the “universal reactive duration.”102 However, Canguilhem thinks that both Alain and Bergson are still unwittingly repeating a form of Platonism. Having explicitly disavowed Platonism, Alain proposes to fix the form, and Bergson also refuses error and nothing (néant), because nothing is an error. As Le Blanc points out, Alain and Canguilhem want to understand force “in

 Marx and Engels observed an important role of tools in hominization, as Engels described in the chapter “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” in his manuscript Dialectics of Nature, but a philosophical interpretation is still missing. 99  Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 62: “If vitalism translates a permanent exigency of life within the living, mechanism translates a permanent attitude of the living human toward life. Man is here a living being separated from life by science and attempting to rejoin life through science. If vitalism, being an exigency, is vague and unformulated, mechanism, being a method, is strict and imperious.” 100  Canguilhem, “Réflexions sur la création artistique selon Alain,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4, 415–25. 101  Ibid., 429. 102  Ibid., 433. 98

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the risk of inadaptation, of error and errancy,”103 while, on the contrary, it carries little importance in Bergson’s thought: “By forging the concept of force (élan vital), both in life and in art, its ontology of the real, excluding both non-being and the void, makes impossible the misuse of force. If there is good production and invention in life as in art, there is no such place, and it is the whole problem, for the loss, the error or the failure.”104 This may remind us of Bachelard’s criticism that “while composing his epic of evolution, Bergson no doubt had to disregard accidents.” Bachelard proposes to create a doctrine of the “accident as principle,” as he says that there is only one general law in truly creative evolution—“the law that an accident lies at the root of every evolutionary attempt.”105 This doesn’t mean that there is no contingency in the thought of Bergson. Indeed, Bergson emphasizes that contingency has an important role in evolution, since it is contingency that introduces divergence into the path of evolution. It is also true that Bergson didn’t thematize the question of accident, since he prioritizes duration as multiplicity in unity. If “loss, error, and failure” don’t pose problems for Bergson, it is because Bergson also rejected adaptation. By adaptation here we refer to the organism’s capacity to coordinate its organs in response to changes of its milieu.106 Bergson criticized adaptation as a manifestation of mechanism and finalism,107 so there is nothing called  Ibid.  Le Blanc, Canguilhem et la vie humaine, 215: “En forgeant le concept de force (élan vital), tant dans la vie que dans l’art, son ontologie du réel, excluant tant non-être ou tout vide, rend impossible l’usage erroné de la force. S’il y a bien production et invention dans la vie comme dans l’art, il n’y a pas pour autant, et c’est tout le problème, place pour la perte, l’erreur ou le raté.” 105  Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant, 13. 106  This slightly differs from what is called adaptationism in evolutionary theory, which holds the view that organs adapt themselves to become the best utilities, which means that functions come first. It assumes that the function of the organ is the indicator of the evolution of the species. One asks questions such as “What is the purpose of valves in the veins of vertebrates?” in order to explain the evolutionary process as a process of perfection and complexification, see David F. Prindle, Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), 110. In contrast to the adaptationist view of evolution, there is also the formalist view, which believes that instead of function, form comes first, and later the organism may discover usages. 107  In Creative Evolution, 63–68, Bergson rejects the Darwinian idea of adaptation as natural selection, which takes away the unfit, but this fails to fully explain the complexification of organisms. He rejects the other idea of adaptation, that the content has to fit the environment. In the case of organisms one cannot find “the pre-existing form awaiting its matter.” The two hypotheses of adaptation for him are only solutions to geometric questions. 103 104

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inadaptation for him. Nor is there an inadaptation for Canguilhem from the perspective of biology, since inadaptation means simply elimination. However, it is possible to talk about social inadaptation.108 If we follow Le Blanc in saying that Bergson didn’t go far enough to take up the necessity of failure and error, in Canguilhem we find error, as Michel Foucault says, as the “permanent contingency [aléa] around which history of life and becoming of humans entwine.”109 Error or contingency is addressed in his understanding of the pathological, since the abnormal, or irregularity, is a necessary part of life. As Canguilhem states in The Normal and the Pathological, “irregularity and anomaly are conceived not as accidents affecting an individual but as its very existence”110—or, in the words that he borrowed from Gabriel Tarde, “the normal is the zero of monstrosity.”111 August Comte and Claude Bernard112 maintain an identity between physiology and pathology; or, in other words, the pathological is that which exceeds the upper and longer range of the normal, the latter being the subject of physiology.113 Canguilhem questions the identity between physiology and pathology, maintaining that the latter is derived from the former, by giving a new definition to the pathological.114  Canguilhem, “L’inadaptation, phénomène social,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4, 1059, on the occasion of the colloquium “L’inadaptation, phénomène social,” which took place in Paris in December 1963. Canguilhem points out that adaptation understood as a mechanism between the organism and its milieu cannot be applied directly to social analysis since “society is not a milieu” (1055). 109  Foucault, “Le vie: l’expérience et la science,” 14. 110  Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 125. 111  Ibid., 127. 112  The tradition of August Comte and Claude Bernard could be traced to the influence of François Broussais and Brown’s theory of irritability, who we have briefly discussed in relation to Schelling’s general organism. 113  This conception leads Bernard to claim that “physiology and pathology are intermingled and are essentially one and the same thing.” In a later passage Bernard claims that “[h]ealth and disease are not two essentially different modes as the ancient physicians believed and some practitioners still believe. . . . In reality, between these two modes of being, there are only differences of degree: exaggeration, disproportion, discordance of normal phenomena constitute the diseased state.” See Claude Bernard, Leçons sur le diabète et la glycogénèse animale, 56; cited by Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 64. 114  Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 76. Canguilhem finds a problematic intermingling between the qualitative and the quantitative in Bernard’s definition of the pathological and this leads to his question: “Is the concept of disease a concept of an objective reality accessible to quantitative scientific knowledge?” On p. 79 he points out that quantification is very much based on mechanical models: “thresholds as barriers, regulations as safety valves, servo-brakes or thermostats.” 108

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The pathological is not the lack of norm or order, but rather a norm that deviates from those of health, so there is no opposition between the normal and the pathological, but only between pathology and health115: What characterises health is a capacity to tolerate variations in norms on which only the stability of situations and milieus—seemingly guaranteed yet in fact always necessarily precarious—confers a deceptive value of definitive normalcy. Man is truly healthy only when he is capable of several norms, when he is more than normal. The measure of health is a certain capacity to overcome organic crises and to establish a new physiological order, different from the old. Health is the luxury of being able to fall ill and recover.116

As some authors have proposed, the influence of Kurt Goldstein on Canguilhem is evident. Goldstein refuses any statistical definition of normality and health, but rather considers what he calls the “individual norm”: “[T]here is only one relevant norm; that which includes the total concrete individuality; that which takes the individual as its measure; it is therefore a personal individual norm.”117 Every illness means a new process of adapting to the milieu, which will result in a new individual norm. In the same spirit, Canguilhem claims that “the pathological can be distinguished as such, that is, as an alteration of the normal state, only at the level of organic totality.”118 On the case of diabetes, Canguilhem questions Bernard, who claims that glycosuria is only a function of glycaemia and that the kidney functions by means of a constant threshold, by referring to newer researches that showed that the renal threshold is not fixed and static but rather mobile, depending on the specific condition of the individual.119

 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 131. We cannot say that the concept of the “pathological” logically contradicts the concept of the “normal,” for life in the pathological state is not the absence of norms but the presence of other norms. Rigorously speaking, “pathological” is the vital contrary of “healthy,” and not the logical contradictory of “normal.” 116  Ibid., 132. 117  Cited by Jean Gayon, “The Concept of Individuality in Canguilhem’s Philosophy of Biology,” Journal of the History of Biology 31, no. 3 (1988): 310; from Kurt Goldstein, Der Aufbau des Organismus (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1934), 269. 118  Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 87–88. 119  Ibid., 79. 115

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§31. THE UNCANNY FIRE Pathology is defined in terms of the weakening of the organism’s capacity to adapt to its milieu. A healthy organism is able to adapt itself to a variety of milieus and adopt certain elements of the milieu to empower itself, while a pathological organism can adapt itself only to a specific milieu in order to maintain its interior milieu. Inspired by Goldstein and the German zoologist Jacob von Uexküll, on the other hand, Canguilhem maintained that one should consider the organism and its milieu as a whole. Canguilhem cites Goldstein’s view that biology “has to do with individuals that exist and tend to exist, that is to say, seek to realize their capacities as best they can in a given environment.”120 The question of milieu or environment is in between the two dimensions of the organology (here we follow André Leroi-Gouhran): on the one hand, the exteriorization and liberation of the organ, and on the other hand, the internalization (interiorization) of the environment as an organic whole: “An environment is normal because a living being lives out its life better there, maintains its own norm better there. An environment can be called normal with reference to the living species using it to its advantage. It is normal only in terms of a morphological and functional norm.”121 Recursivity is the mechanism of the norm established between the living being and its milieu. It is not a mere imposition, like mechanical laws, but rather a Spinozist “immanent causation.” We can therefore understand why, commenting on Canguilhem, Pierre Macherey claims that there is an immanent causality of the norm, which emerges from the subjects subjected to it.122 Norms change when an event occurs that exceeds the normalizing capacity of the norms. Disease, when seen as this type of contingent event, leads to the establishment of a new norm, which is also a new relation between the organism and its milieu. Certainly it may take time for a symptom to appear, but to the patient it appears as a sudden event interrupting the previous routine and harmony. Disease, both physiological and psychological, arises out

 Ibid., xix.  Ibid., 142. 122  Julien Pieron, “Critical and Political Stakes of a Philosophy of Norms,” in The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics, ed. Miguel de Beistegui, G. Bianco, and M. Gracieuse (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 101. 120 121

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an inability to adapt to and adopt the existing milieu.123 The launch of a new round of adaptation through technical aides, as a recursive process, is a necessary condition of knowing life: Disease reveals normal functions to us at the precise moment when it deprives us of their exercise. Disease is the source of the speculative attention which life attaches to life by means of man. If health is life in the silence of the organs, then, strictly speaking, there is no science of health. Health is organic innocence. It must be lost, like all innocence, so that knowledge may be possible. Physiology is like all science, which, as Aristotle says, proceeds from wonder. But the truly vital wonder is the anguish caused by disease.124

If in philosophy of biology the organism presents itself as an organic form that includes the organism, its tools, and the environment, the organic is always already outside of itself with other organic and inorganic beings, while it depends on the capacity of the organism to define the boundary of such an organic totality, like a tick defines the dynamic of its Umwelt (internalized outer environment) by filtering its Umgebung (surroundings). Humans are not ticks, however; they also organize their environment with their tools—which is also the commencement of a pathological journey. Indeed, humans not only change their environment but also build completely new environments—for example, the emergence of factories during the Industrial Revolution. The submission of the organic body to mechanical machines produces a malaise that originates from the enforced adaptation to the rhythm and operation of the machines, since division of labor according to machineries is also a fragmentation of knowledge and the organicity of the body. Will it be possible to reverse the situation by turning it around—that is, by submitting machines to the organic body? Bergson thinks that the consciousness in humans enables them to escape the captivation of mechanism, so they propose to “create with matter, which is necessity itself, an instruction of freedom, to make a machine which should triumph mechanism.”125 In the last remark of “Machine and Organism,” Canguilhem cites the sociologist Georges Friedmann’s

 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 184–85.  Ibid., 101. 125  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 288. 123 124

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critique of industrial mechanism and his idea of developing a new mode of work in which machines are adapted to human organisms: Friedmann sees the development of a technique for adapting machines to the human organism as an ineluctable revolution. This technique seems to him a scientific rediscovery of the empirical processes by which primitive peoples have always sought to adapt their tools to the organic norms of an efficient and biologically economical action—that is to say, an action that situates positive value in the evaluation of technical norms within the organism at work, which spontaneously defends itself against any exclusive subordination of the biological to the mechanical.126

Friedmann sees the man-machine adaptation brought about by Taylorism as a reification of workers, and argues that the workers’ reactions against Taylorism should be understood as both a biological and a social defense—or, in other words, the defense of health. This situation thus demands a new relation between human and machine to liberate workers from the subordination of the biological to the mechanical. It is not our priority to assess the judgment of Friedmann in detail and to situate it in the history of labor; it is worth noting that his proposal resonates with many other theorists of technology of his generation, including Lewis Mumford, mostly influenced by Whitehead. However, today we know that working conditions do not resemble the adaptation of instruments to the organic, but rather that machines are themselves becoming organic—a new dialectics toward a techno-systemic totality. Wiener’s claim concerning the obsolescence of the opposition between Newtonian mechanism and Bergsonian vitalism marks the beginning of an epistemological revolution that effectively integrates human and machine into numerous feedback loops. The form of automation that Marx described in Das Capital is not what we normally see in factories today. Automatism is no longer about repetition but rather recursion. Recursive operations are exemplified in the imagination of future smart cities, artificial intelligence, machine learning, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the like. We have pointed out the immanence of recursivity in the process of adaptation, which is ontological, but we also witness the recursivity in the process becoming a modus operandi that is social and technological. Like philosophy of nature, philosophy  Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 96.

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of biology confronts its limit in light of the recursive algorithms implemented as a dominating form of adaptation, which is what Deleuze calls societies of control.127 At the same time, there is an artificial selection (instead of natural selection) enforced by the politics of transhumanism (e.g., human enhancement, genetic engineering). If we take seriously Wiener’s argument that the opposition between mechanism and vitalism is dissolved in cybernetics, and we see it as a milestone of the completion of metaphysics begun in Hegel’s philosophy, then in what way can philosophy—the highest recursive form of thinking—still think? For sure, one can follow Heidegger by saying that it is the end of philosophy, but in order to think with and beyond Heidegger’s concept of philosophy, thinking must identify a new condition under which a transformation is possible in order to escape the enclosure of feedback loops. Canguilhem’s concept of life could be understood as a thinking that transcends the Hegelian identification of the notion of philosophy with that of the system by putting the system back into life.128 If through Kant the concept of the organic has been conceived to be the weapon of philosophy against mechanism and determinism, as well as an aspiration for a cosmopolitan politics, today we are encountering a rather different situation, in which the mechanical is, first, in the process of taking the form of the organic, and second, overriding biological evolution. In this situation we will have to transvalue thinking against any tendency toward closure—a task we will undertake in the next chapter on the organizing inorganic.

 We don’t have space to explore this in detail: for example, the constitution of the interactive environment which serves the aim of promotion and consumption, the use of facial recognition technologies everywhere, as well as the use of interactive concrete in construction. 128  See Canguilhem, “Hegel en France,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4, 322, where Canguilhem sees the projects of Marx and Kierkegaard as having the common objective of refusing such identification and contesting the temptation to identify the judgment of the world with the judgment of the Hegelian system. 127

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If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it. . . . —Heraclitus, Fragment 18

We are more than ever living in an epoch of cybernetics, since the apparatus and environment are becoming organismic. The environment actively engages with our everyday activities, and the advent of planetary smartification means precisely that recursivity will constitute the major mode of computation and operation of our future environment. The recursivity of algorithms equipped with big data will penetrate into every facet of human organs and social organs. The mode of participation of technology is fundamentally environmental while at the same time transforming the environment. This chapter is dedicated to a more elaborated organology and the necessity to push it further. I will argue that it is necessary to look into the question of recursivity and contingency in human-machine relations before we can fully elaborate on the significance of the becoming organic of the environment—which, ironically, has been organic since the very beginning. Milieu-technics is the general operation of cultural-technics, as Simondon has rightly observed. Simondon’s concept of cultural-technics can be understood with the aid of the example of livestock farming, in which technologies act on the milieu instead of acting directly on living beings.1 We can understand the posthuman condition as a large-scale domestication of human beings through the manipulation of the technical system as milieu-technics, as  Gilbert Simondon, Sur la technique (Paris: PUF, 2013), 317.

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was done in the ancient livestock farming described by Peter Sloterdijk in his article “Rules for the Human Zoo.”2 The move from self-domestication through the invention of tools to the large-scale determination of the masses through the modulation of the exterior technical milieu marks the moment of the current work. This planetary domestication goes far beyond the effects of previous communication technologies—telecommunications, radio, television, and even the World Wide Web of the twentieth century. The smartification and systematization of the environment is a more advanced milieu-technic, which is closely related to the silent continuation of the cybernetic movement.3 In the example of the livestock farming, through the application of technologies to primary nature, we have developed a second nature that envelops the earth like the noosphere of Teilhard de Chardin. Livestock farming exhausts the potential of animals, plants, and the environment, while cultural-technics sets a second nature into perpetual genesis, as Simondon observes: “[O]ne could say that culture, by managing the milieu, gives rise to the genesis of a second nature, while livestock farming is detached from all nature, detours the nature to a hypertelic dead-end for the deviated species.”4 Organicism and organology in the twentieth century could be seen in part as an effort to incorporate this second nature into the organicity of body and culture. Oddly, this includes National Socialism in Germany, which attempted to marry Romanticism with industrialism in order to construct a nationalist ideology.5 Simondon proposes a different  Peter Sloterdijk, “The Domestication of Being: The Clarification of the Clearing,” in Not Saved: Essays after Heidegger, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner (London: Polity, 2017), 89–148. 3  Erich Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology,” in The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, ed. Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013), 121–30. 4  Gilbert Simondon, “Art et Technique,” in Sur la technique, 317. 5  For example, Joseph Goebbels writes in Deutsche Technik (speech at the opening of the Berlin Auto Show, February 17, 1939): “[W]e live in an era of technology. The racing tempo of our century affects all areas of our life. There is scarcely an endeavour that can escape its powerful influence. Therefore the danger unquestionably arises that modern technology will make men soulless. National socialism never rejected or struggled against technology. Rather, one of its main tasks was to consciously affirm it, to fill it inwardly with soul, to discipline it and to replace it in the service of our people and their cultural level. National socialist public statements used to refer to the steely romanticism of our century. Today this phrase has attained its full meaning. We live in an age that is both romantic and steellike. . . . National socialism understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythm and hot impulses of our time.” Cited by Don Ihde, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 11. 2

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approach to overcoming the antagonism between culture and technics through a reinvestigation of the evolution of technical objects. Simondon has never used the word organology, but as we saw in the last chapter, Guillaume le Blanc has suggested that organology is a common theme of Canguilhem and Simondon. We also have to remind ourselves that Simondon was greatly influenced by cybernetics, especially the concept of feedback, and also by Canguilhem, who was the supervisor of his supplementary thesis On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Recursivity is thus at center of Simondon’s approach to technical objects. We will see how Simondon’s somewhat implicit organology is further extended and complemented in the work of Bernard Stiegler. Between Simondon and Stiegler we can also find two different ways of approaching contingency. The question of contingency for Simondon remains close to a philosophy of nature, in which a contingent encounter is a source of information that may trigger further individuation. For Stiegler, on the other hand, the question of contingency is closer to artistic creativity. As we might expect, the difference is due to the fact that nature remains an important element in Simondon’s theory of individuation, while for Stiegler the word nature is overcharged with too many meanings. By abandoning the word nature, Stiegler has abandoned pure first nature in favor of a second nature, which is a technicized nature, a nature in which nothing is natural.6 §32. UNIVERSAL CYBERNETICS, GENERAL ALLAGMATIC In chapter 3 we saw how the concept of life is closely related to that of adaptation, which is central in the theory of evolution and animal behavior. Simondon has reproached the concept of adaptation as being analogical to hylomorphism in the sense that the subject has to submit itself to the environment as the ancients did with matter and form: The inert matter gains its identity by being subsumed under a form. In L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Simondon criticizes sociologist Kurt Lewin’s theory of group dynamics,  Bernard Stiegler, “De l’économie libidinale à l’écologie de l’esprit. Entretien avec Frédéric Neyrat,” Multitudes, no. 24 (2006/1): “Je me méfie du terme de nature, parce qu’il est surchargé d’oppositions à la culture et à la technique, et je n’aime pas les modèles oppositionnels.”

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which is based on an appropriation of field theory in physics and topology in mathematics. Simondon criticizes Lewin for several weaknesses in his theory. We won’t be able to enter into all the details here, but let’s try to understand it through three major points. First, Lewin’s analysis rests on the paradigm of adaptation: that is to say, that the individual should adapt itself to the group, which is presented as a field of forces. Second, this emphasis on adaptation based on the field of force prevents us from understanding being as the operation of successive individuations.7 Third, the life space (locus of a person’s experiences and needs) is already individuated: that is to say, it is already a solution, because this representation, being the field of forces, doesn’t consider the disparations (or asymmetry, incompatibility) according to different orders of magnitude. To sum up Simondon’s critique, he maintains that Lewin reduces individuation to a social adaptation, and that the method he uses, based on topology and field theory, is not sufficient for expressing the dynamic of individuation. On the contrary, Simondon proposes that we understand the process of individuation by approaching the notion of information in cybernetics. We would like to see more precisely how, with the notion of information, Simondon refuses both hylomorphism and substantialism. By doing so he replaces substance with relations and introduces contingency into the structure and operation of relations. If we follow Simondon, these two ancient theories of individuation presuppose a principle of individuation (which is based on already individuated elements, for example, form and atom) anterior to individuation. It fails to explain individuation since the individuation of the presupposed elements of such a principle has to be explained. Information provides a conceptual tool applicable to all orders of magnitude, whether it be the micro-level of electrons or the macro-level of steam engines. A contingent event brings information into the system and produces a signification to certain elements in the system or the system as a whole, which in turn triggers a new process of individuation. This is the reason that, toward the end of his book on individuation, Simondon claims that “the task of discovery of significations and collective is submitted to chance [hasard].”8 This submission to contingency would remain a vague  Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2005), 209. 8  Ibid., 303. 7

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philosophical proposition if there were no further elaboration. This gesture of positioning individuation on the concept of contingency or chance may risk obscuring the understanding of individuation. I would like to propose that it is in On the Mode of Existence that Simondon attempts to integrate such a notion of contingency into technical organizations. As there are good and bad infinities, there are also good and bad contingencies: luck or catastrophe. The organization of a machine should be valued by its capacity to deal with these different notions of contingency and their classification, instead of mere automatism. One of the most significant forms of organization is what Simondon calls an open machine. An open machine is one that possesses a margin of indetermination, meaning that it is not insensitive to “pure chance,” for example, noise. An amplifier without a margin of indetermination is not able to deal with noise, since it will amplify noises as if they are desirable signals. Contrariwise, an amplifier with a margin of indetermination is able to tolerate these noises by undermining them so that they will not be amplified. A machine that is sensitive to information is able to distinguish different patterns of sound waves, so that the irregular ones can be eliminated and the regular ones will go through. There are different ways that this can be achieved. The most straightforward way will be to have a mechanism that filters noises in consideration of their irregularity. However, this may also eliminate desirable waves; therefore, the most ideal case will be to have a feedback mechanism that governs this learning process. It was too early for Simondon to anticipate machine learning, which arrived only toward the end of the last century. Apparently he was very much nurtured by cybernetics, especially the notion of feedback. Simondon sees in cybernetics a correction of both positivism (Comte) and criticism (Kant), which he calls phenomenalist objectivism. Positivism tends to privilege structure over operation, and excludes the study of operations from the realm of science. Criticism, on the other hand—especially Kant’s first two Critiques—separates knowledge from action.9 The separation between structure and operation in phenomenalist objectivism is a preparation for their unification through reflective thinking. In positivism the synthesis takes place in humanity, which becomes “the absolute principle of normativity10;  Simondon, “Épistémologie de la cybernétique,” in Sur la Philosophie, 178.  Ibid., 179.

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in criticism, it is manifested in respect [Achtung].”11 It is clear that Simondon was referring here to the third Critique, in which reflective judgment is fully elaborated, and which is attempted as a unification of the first two Critiques. Since this reflective thinking has its successor in cybernetics, Simondon claims that Kant could deal with cybernetics only by situating it in the Critique of Judgment.12 Cybernetics, for Simondon, designates a new epistemology that has to be distinguished from Cartesian epistemology. As he repeated on several occasions, “automatism is not cybernetics,” “a robot has nothing to do with cybernetics.”13 He calls the Cartesian and cybernetic forms of reasoning two different cognitive schemes: one linear and based on logical propositions, the other based on recurrent causality. Recurrent causality (causalité récurrente) is a causality that comes back to itself to act on itself—a translation of feedback that Simondon sometimes also calls internal resonance.14 Recurrent causality is recursive. It is in this sense that Simondon calls technical objects that possess an associated milieu constituted by recurrent causality technical individuals—in contradistinction to technical elements (e.g., a gear, a diode, or a triode) and technical ensembles (e.g., a laboratory or a factory). This capacity of coming back to itself in order to determine its next move is the criterion of an “individual” in the sense of a “living being.” For sure, recurrent causality is a reference to feedback, but doesn’t this also resonate with Wiener’s critique of the opposition between Newtonian and Bergsonian time that we looked at in the previous chapter? If the opposition between Newtonian mechanism and Bergsonian vitalism is sublated, it is only because a third, organicist form of organization is identified that preserves both of them and elevates them to a higher potency. The organ is that which is able to condition itself. In the genesis of organs there is an effort toward convergence that systematically binds the organ with the other organs, as well as the body as a whole:

 Ibid., 180. Simondon sees that from this aspect, i.e., the unification in humanity, it is the same regarding Kant and Comte, perhaps the only difference being that such unification manifests itself in the individual for Kant and in the community for Comte. 12  Ibid. 13  See Simondon, “Cybernétique et philosophie,” in Sur la philosophie, 43, 45. 14  Ibid., 47. 11

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[A] vital work [une œuvre de vie] is required to take the leap beyond a given reality and its current systematization, toward new forms that only maintain themselves because they exist all together as a constituted system; when a new organ appears in the evolving series, it maintains itself only if it realizes a systematic and pluri-functional convergence. The organ is its own condition. It is in a similar manner that the geographic world and the world of ready existing technical objects enter into a relation in which concretization is organic, which defines itself through this relational function.15

This is the only passage in On the Mode of Existence where Simondon discusses “organic” concretization. What does it mean that the organ becomes its own condition? It means that it is situated in a system and in reciprocal relations with other parts; it adapts itself to the system while at the same time modifying the system, which in turn conditions its further mode of operation; it becomes its own condition through the feedback of the whole organic system. In a preparatory text titled “Cybernétique et philosophie” (1953), Simondon used the term holistic (holique) to describe this form of organization of cybernetics.16 It is possible to generalize this “organic” thinking of technology through one of his favorite examples, the Guimbal engine, which he mentions toward the end of the above citation on the relation between the geographical world and the world of technical objects. A Guimbal engine is a turbine that uses the river as both a driving force and cooling agent to reduce overheating caused by the Joule effect, which may burn the engine. The river and the turbine become an organologically functional unity. The river in this case is the associated milieu of the turbine. The associated milieu is central to the organic structure of the turbine since it allows such a recurrent causality to take place: When the current is stronger, the turbine produces more heat, while because the water flows faster it also takes away heat more efficiently. Like Wiener, Simondon recognizes the “becoming organic” of technical objects: As he says, “[S]ince the mode of existence of the concretized technical object is analogous to that of natural spontaneously produced objects, one can legitimately consider them as

 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), 58–59; italics added. 16  Simondon, “Cybernétique et philosophie,” 43. 15

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one would natural objects; in other words, one can submit them to inductive study.”17 The Guimbal engine is an excellent example of the holistic organization facilitated by recurrent causality. Simondon and Wiener speculate on the possibility of the becoming organic of machines, which was later elaborated further by Günther as selfconsciousness. However, we should do justice to Simondon’s effort to go beyond Wiener and Ashby’s cybernetics. Cybernetics designates a new epoch for science, but Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics, for Simondon comparable to Descartes’s Discourse on Method, does not yet fully define the cybernetic method. Simondon therefore sees that the most urgent task is to reclaim a cybernetic thinking, which he calls general allagmatic18: This third discipline, synthesis of cybernetics and positivism, will not only be an axiology of knowledge but also a knowledge of being: it will define the real relation of the operation and the structure, the possible conversions of the operation in structure and structure in operation and structure in the same system. Such will be the scope of the discipline; indissolubly scientific and philosophical, which we have named allagmatic.19

Simondon understands Wiener’s cybernetics—and we can also add to it the general systems theory of Bertalanffy and the organicism of Needham et al.—as a mathematics of operation. In the above quote, he seems to suggest that cybernetics prioritizes operation over structure. However, this doesn’t seem to be appropriate, since all systems presuppose structures. It also doesn’t make much sense to say that cybernetics, which was largely influenced by Bertalanffy, ignores structure. Simondon’s real contribution beyond cybernetics can be grasped only toward the end of this chapter. For now we can say that the core of the general allagmatic constitutes a theory of conversions between structure and operation. The equivalence between the machine and the organism that Wiener was hinting at is problematic for Simondon. The cybernetic machine that is invented according to the study of certain behaviors of organisms has only a functional

 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence, 50 [Fr. 58].  Simondon, “Épistémologie de la cybernétique,” 197. 19  Ibid., 189. 17 18

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equivalence with them but not necessarily an operational equivalence. For example, Alpha Go may have the same functions as the Go world champion, but they don’t necessarily have the same operations. Functional equivalence is closely related to its economic value. Marx does not make any distinction between operation and function in his economic analysis of machinery, and the general intellect (allgemeiner Verstand) remains a functional equivalence of categorical analysis. This is the reason that the functional equivalence that we find in artificial intelligence poses the threat of mass unemployment. The general allagmatic is a universal cybernetics in the sense that it aims to go beyond the particular or specific cybernetics (for example, psychology and sociology) in order to conceive of a genesis in which operation and structure are constantly interacting. It is not only an axiology of knowledge but also a knowledge of being—namely, ontogenesis or onto-axiology—meaning that it unifies action and value, operation and structure. The emergence of new values depends on the existence of a problematic, for it is the problematic that presents an incompatibility that has to be resolved in order to arrive at a new metastability qua compatibility. Simondon thus claims that “the axiological function is therefore aspect of structural modification of a holistic system.”20 The axiological function is both exterior and interior, like the citizens and the civic regime in the Greek polis, constituting a holistic structure and operation.21 §33. RECURSIVITY IN PSYCHIC AND COLLECTIVE INDIVIDUATION General allagmatic is a thinking that is central to Simondon’s theory of individuation. The conversion between operation and structure demands a genesis in which they take part. Individuation is a recursive process whose dynamic is reciprocal (between parts) and holistic (as a whole). The questions we would like to raise here are the following:

 Simondon, “Cybernétique et philosophie,” 63.  Ibid. Simondon reproaches Bergson for not having attempted to look for a more profound relation between the two sources of morality in axiology. We have seen that holistic or organic structure has a fundamental role in Bergson’s philosophy, and that the dualism that is omnipresent in Bergson’s thought is only a step toward an organic unity.

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What is the role of technology in this allagmatic thinking? What is the relation between contingency and technology? L’Individuation is an attempt to reconsider the question of being and becoming according to a new epistemology suggested by cybernetics. It is still not a treatise on organology but on philosophy of nature; that is to say, it doesn’t yet address the relation between human and machines, machines and world. We would like to suggest instead that Simondon proposed an organological thinking in On the Mode of Existence, but that this organological thinking was almost invisible in his principal thesis since technology was not yet thematized in his theory of individuation (of physical being, living being, and psychical being). It is organological in two senses. First, technology is the posteriori becoming a priori: For example, memory is empirical, hence posteriori, but once it is recorded it is then a priori since it becomes the condition of new experiences.22 Second, there is an organic whole between the individual and the collective that cannot be separated like fish and water; this organic part-whole relation is the condition of the theory of individuation. We will attempt now to identify the role of recursivity in Simondon’s allagmatic thinking of which individuation is an exemplar. We can understand the individuation of human being as an operation (communication and conversion) between two realities or two structures, the psychical and the collective, initiated by a problematic. We may want to understand the resolution of the problematic as occupying the place of the end or the telos here. Simondon suggests that both psychologism and sociologism make a fatal mistake, since they attempt to substantialize these two realities and confront them as oppositions. An analysis starting with either of these two polarities confronts its own limit. This tendency of substantializing comes out of the desire to seize the essence of the human.23 Psychologism holds the view that the social is a projection of the interior activities of the individual without taking into account the tensions within the individual, while sociologism sees the individual as a product from the point of view of exteriority, without taking into account the agency of the individual. For Simondon,  Of course, Simondon was not the first to talk about this: Ernst Cassirer had already written on the symbolic form as synthesis that the Kantian a priori does not cover, and Konrad Lorenz had interpreted the Kantian a priori as a posteriori of phylogenesis, see Konrad Lorenz, “Kant’s Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology,” General Systems. Yearbook of the Society of General Systems Research 7 (1962): 23–35. 23  Simondon, L’Individuation, 289. 22

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the individual and the social are not substantial realities but rather ensembles of relations. Simondon holds the view that individuation is at the same time psychic and collective. This means that we cannot separate the psychical from the collective, since the psychical is always already transindividual. This transindividual relation of the living being is characterized by an interaction between perception and action in which the problematic is normally resolved by the intervention of affectivity.24 The psychical intervenes when affectivity cannot succeed in resolving the problematic and is therefore obliged to relinquish its central role in individuation.25 According to Simondon the psychic problematic cannot be resolved on the “infra-individual level” since “the psychic life goes from the preindividual to the collective.”26 In order to understand what he means by this, let’s take solitude as an example. Solitude is not a rupture from all relations with the world; on the contrary, it is transindividual in the sense that it is always in search for an outside, without which there is only isolation: “The veritable individual is that which has passed through solitude; what he discovers beyond solitude is the presence of a transindividual relation. The individual finds the universality of relation by means of the test [épreuve] that is imposed on him, and it is a test of isolation.”27 Simondon cites the example of the tightrope walker in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, who was abandoned by the crowd after having fallen down to the ground. Zarathustra feels affection toward him and takes the cadaver on his shoulders to bury it. Of this Simondon writes: “[T]his is through the solitude, in Zarathustra’s presence to a dead friend abandoned by the crowd, that the test of transindividuality starts.”28 This encounter with the tightrope walker—or better, this exceptional event—is the beginning of a discovery of the transindividuality that leads to a new individuation. This transindividuality is constituted by the two poles of interiority and exteriority, which consist of a recursive movement: the interiorization of the exterior and the exteriorization of the interior.29 This means precisely that, as in memory, what  Ibid., 165.  Ibid. 26  Ibid., 166–67. 27  Ibid., 273. 28  Ibid. 29  Ibid., 274. 24 25

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is posteriori becomes a priori—not a priori in the strict sense of being transcendental, but rather in the sense that it becomes the condition or the criteria of selection. Psychical and collective individuation is carried out through such a recursivity, and it is in this sense that we understand that the collective cannot be separated from the psychical (or vice versa). A recursive model expresses psychical and collective individuation better than the process of crystallization that Simondon uses to describe physical individuation. There is a limit to the analogy of crystallization precisely because physical being such as crystals and supersaturated solutions have a lower potency, which means its capacity to act is rather limited, while action or movement is primordial to the psychical and collective individuation. A psychic being will not wait, like the solution, until it becomes supersaturated. Instead, it is in constant search of information to maintain or decrease its entropy, while such a search originates from an excess, or ekstasis, in the sense of Heidegger. The elements that Simondon names in crystallization as a paradigm of individuation remain valid, however—for example, the preindividual (the reality in which individuation takes place), disparation (tension within the individuating system), and metastability (indicator of the resolution of the problematic). The preindividual is the reality that cannot be exhausted and always remains as the background against which individuation takes place. Like Schelling’s natura naturans, which designates the infinite productive force of nature, for Simondon nature is the a priori of individuation, meaning that it offers a preindividual reality to individuation. Individuation for Simondon always presupposes the preindividual, meaning a reality that is given and carried in the individual as potentiality. Individuation cannot exhaust this preindividual reality. Instead, it is conserved in the individuated being and becomes the primary condition for the next process of individuation. Simondon identifies the concept of the preindividual with the Ionian physiologists, especially Anaximander’s apeiron. In chapter 3 we saw how this apeiron is inscribed in the peras, and such inscription constitutes the dynamic of the individual. The preindividual is not a cause, but rather the potential or resource through which the path from cause to effect is actualized. For example, the supersaturated solution, which is charged of potential and hence in this case a preindividual reality, doesn’t lead directly to crystallization; rather, crystallization is realized by a contingent event, for instance, the

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supply of heat. The preindividual is more than unity as well as more than identity30; in other words, it is the hidden excess: One could name nature this preindividual reality that the individual carries with it, in order to find again in the word of nature the signification that the pre-Socratic philosophers have put: the Ionian physiologists found the origin of all the species of being, anterior to individuation; nature is reality of the possible, under the species of this ἂπειρον by which Anaximander produces all individuated forms: Nature is not the contrary of man, but the first phase of being, the second being the opposition of the individual and the milieu, compliment of the individual in related to all.31

The preindividual belongs to the ground that gives form. That which plays the role of the energetic is not forms but rather the ground, which carries forms. The ground is the system of virtualities, potentials, and forces, while the form is the system of actualities.32 The concept of metastability is a counterconcept of equilibrium that we can find in the homeostasis of Ashby, because homeostasis is determined by the search for equilibrium that for Simondon is the impasse of individuation: death. Disparation—incompatibility or asymmetry—is the motor of individuation, which obliges the being in question to pass into act in order to resolve the tensions thus generated. To act means to elevate and to metastabilize. Every successful individuation is like a quantum leap in the sense that there is an elevation from one discrete energy level to another, and precisely due to the discreteness of energy levels, it also gives a metastability, meaning that the next phase of individuation will take place when further conditions (material, energetic, and informational) are met to overcome the threshold of individuation. Metastability is like the effect of the Hemmung that we find in Schelling, since it is a transitionary product of the recursive movement that characterizes the movement of the spirit, with the difference that Simondon’s model is more subtle thanks to the discovery of the notion of information. The recursivity of psychic and collective individuation is even more evident when we consider that toward the end of the introduction to L’Individuation, Simondon says that “the knowledge of individuation is the individuation

 Ibid., 25.  Ibid., 297. 32  Simondon, On the Mode of Existence, 72. 30 31

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of knowledge,” which means that there is a coupling (in the sense of the autopoeisis of Varela and Maturana) between the knowing subject and the totality, including the subject and its environment. One can also see it as a reformulation of what Bergson says about the theory of life and the theory of knowledge. How are Simondon’s and Schelling’s models different from each other—or, more precisely, in what sense is Simondon not an idealist? Unlike Schelling, who proposes a construction of matter from force, Simondon does not suggest the construction of matter through information. Information is the extra of the energetic and material process: “extra” in the sense that it is not reducible either to energy or to matter, but is omnipresent in the process. Information is the disparity that carries in itself a signification: signification in the sense that it carries meaning which the system cannot ignore. Information is only one of the conditions of individuation, along with which we can also find material and energetic conditions. If force can be reduced to an effect of energy (for example, that resulting from the transformation from potential to kinetic energy in the case of the pendulum), information cannot be reduced to either matter or energy. As a signification, information differs from noise precisely because it carries meaning while noise doesn’t necessarily carry meaning; when noise carries meaning, it is already information. Information is not pure chance, and as we have already seen in the introduction and chapter 2, it is both recursive and contingent, as in Bateson’s definition of it as “a difference that makes a difference.” The concept of information originates in communication theory and mathematics, so it is first of all a technical concept, and has its reality in technical objects. A technical object that carries information is that which allows transindividual relations to be established between psychic individuals: a book, for example, which can be shared by multiple readers and form a collective (e.g., a reading group or a fan club). A book, when it is used inappropriately (for example, if it is used as a prop for an unstable desk), loses its information and ceases to possess transindividual relations, which also means it loses its signification. In other words, there is a reality in symbols and technical objects that is already a synthesis.33 As Simondon writes: “[T]he technical object  There is a similarity here between Simondon and Ernst Cassirer, since for Cassirer there is a synthesis in symbols that cannot be fully accounted for according to Kant’s analysis of synthesis in the Critique of Pure Reason; see Carl H. Hamburg, “Reality and Symbolic Forms,” chap. 2 in Symbol and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956).

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understood according to its essence, that is to say technical object as long as it is invented, thought and wanted, assumed by a human subject, becomes the support and the symbol of this relation that we would name transindividual.”34 Simondon therefore endows technical objects with the role of facilitating the process of individuation: By the intermediary of the technical object an interhuman relation is created. That is the model of transindividuality. . . . The relation to technical objects cannot become adequate individual by individual, except in some very rare and isolated cases; [the relation] can only be instituted under the condition that it succeeds in bringing this collective inter-individual reality into existence, which we call transindividual, because it creates a coupling between the inventive and organizing capacities of multiple subjects.35

If we follow what Simondon says concerning transindividual relations, it is possible to conceive an organological thinking that is beyond artifacts (for example, the Guimbal engine), and that extends toward psychic and collective individuation. Transindividual relations are embedded in technical objects and modulated according to their operational and organizational schemes. The evolution of technical objects thus constantly shifts the theater of individuation by reconstructing the stage with new forms of transindividual relations and new dynamics. Cybernetics, with the notion of feedback and information, has introduced a new cognitive scheme, and consequently a new organization of human-machine relations and sociality. Simondon relates his interpretation of the technical lineage—from “elements” to “individuals” and “ensembles”—to specific historical epochs. He sees that technical elements represent the optimism of the eighteenth century, which longed for infinite progress and the constant amelioration of human life. Technical individuals, which appeared in the nineteenth century as automated machines in factories, displaced human beings from the center of production. And in the twentieth century Simondon understands technical ensembles, with the emergence of information machines and cybernetics, as a new project of organizing transindividual relations in order to resolve the problem of alienation.  Simondon, On the Mode of Existence, 335: “L’objet technique pris selon son essence, c’est-à-dire l’objet technique en tant qu’il a été inventé, pensé et voulu, assumé par un sujet humain, devient le support et le symbole de cette relation que nous voudrions nommer transindividuelle.” 35  Ibid., 342. 34

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Simondon calls this way of studying and engaging with technology mechanology. This discipline, which aims to overcome the antagonism between culture and technics and between technics and nature, remains an unfinished project. The organological thinking that he opens up through the process of individuation (understood as an operation that consists of several phases, from the intensification of tensions to the resolution of these tensions in the form of metastability) and individualization (understood as psychosomatic schematization and physical concretization) provides a theoretical framework for understanding the relations between humans and machines, and this framework has to some extents already moved beyond that of Bergson and Canguilhem. This is because, unlike the latter two thinkers, Simondon did not pretend to develop a philosophy of biology, but rather a philosophy of individuation, in conjunction with a philosophy of technology. However, this conjunction remains most of the time implicit in Simondon, since he did not elaborate on the role of technical objects in the process of psychic and collective individuation, and therefore the dialogue he had with cybernetics must be taken much further. §34. AN ORGANOLOGY OF CONTINGENCY Bernard Stiegler’s general organology could be seen as an extension of Simondon’s analysis that reinterprets the major terms in Simondon’s theory of individuation and individualization. Stiegler started elaborating on the concept of general organology since 2003.36 In contrast to the organology of Canguilhem, which was closely related to the organic whole proposed by authors such as Kurt Goldstein, in Stiegler we find less emphasis on the concept of the organic whole and more upon the functional organs. This is because the term organology for him is derived less from Bergson and Canguilhem’s philosophy of life and more from musicology. It is not so much Stiegler’s resonance with Bergson and Canguilhem as his deviation from them that interests us here. Stiegler rarely refers to Canguilhem’s “Machine and Organism,” in which Canguilhem attempts to sketch his concept of organology. We can reconstruct the concept of recursivity and contingency, since both

 According to a conversation we had on December 22, 2017, in Paris.

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of them are of extreme importance in Stiegler’s thought: Contingency for him is the quasi-cause, while recursivity often takes the name of repetition. If we say that the concept of recursivity exists in Stiegler’s thinking, it is because this recursivity is inscribed in the circuit of retention and protention. These are two terms borrowed from Husserl’s theory of inner time-consciousness, where retention names the capacity of remembering or retaining, and protention the capacity of anticipation. Basing himself on Husserl’s concept of primary and secondary retention/protention, Stiegler develops the concept of tertiary retention. To provide an example, when we are listening for the first time to Johann Strauss’s An der schönen blauen Donau, we will retain every now of the melody. Since every now is always already no longer, this retention of the melody is called primary retention. At the same time, since I also anticipate the coming melody—since without this I won’t be able to comprehend the phrasing, and there will be no music but only sound—this anticipation of the coming now—the not-yet—is called primary protention. If tomorrow I remember the Blauen Donau, it is no longer a temporary retained now, but rather recollection: namely, memory or secondary retention. And since I already have memory of the music, I am able to anticipate the end of every phrasing and the end of the piece, which is called secondary protention. On the basis of these concepts of primary and secondary retention and protention, Stiegler suggests what he calls tertiary retention: namely, artificial memories. For example, my secondary retention of the Strauss piece is not reliable, as it is blurred over time, but a CD may help me to recover my memory. Now the gramophone (analog) or the CD or MP3 (digital) are tertiary retentions that in some way invoke the primary and secondary retentions and protentions, like Proust’s madeleine, but it is more than the madeleine since it is characterized by an exactitude that Stiegler calls “orthothetic,” a neologism from the Greek orthotēs meaning “exactitude” and thesis meaning “position.”37 Primary, secondary, and tertiary retention together with primary and secondary protention thus form a circuit in which the soul is no longer simply a movement that returns to itself to determine itself, but rather the soul, whose activity is the noesis, is also a tekhnesis, whose organization depends on the third memory.  Bernard Stiegler, Philosophising by Accident, trans. Benoît Dillet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 61.

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The third memory is a compensation to the retentional finitude of the organism, since an organism cannot retain all its experience and cannot transfer this experience to the next generation without having exteriorized them as symbols and tools. Furthermore, the secondary retention, which we call memory, can be effectively activated only through the tertiary retention, since it is the tertiary retention (for example, writings or images) that provides the force of synchronization and the diachronization of memory. Like Simondon, we find in Stiegler’s organology a recursive form of interiorization and exteriorization. The exteriorization of memory in technical objects is also when the posteriori becomes a priori. This becoming is a transition from the empirical toward the a-transcendental—a-transcendental because it is neither purely transcendental nor empirical. It is only based on this circuit that Stiegler attempts to rearticulate what Simondon calls psychic and collective individuation. However, this interpretation of Husserl also leads to Stiegler’s critique of Simondon. Just as Stiegler finds fault with Husserl for neglecting technical objects in his phenomenology of time-consciousness, he criticizes Simondon for failing to see that the anticipation of operation depends on technical objects.38 By anticipation, Stiegler means that technical objects are the supports of both memory and anticipation, since if anticipation demands an organization of memory, then such an organization depends more and more on artificial memories. For Stiegler, Simondon ignores the role of technical objects in temporalization because he depends too much on Bergson’s concept of time and therefore opposes living time to geometrization, which makes tertiary retention possible: Simondon’s relation to the question of time is too inhabited by its intimate penetration of Bergsonian thought in order for it to be able to escape both the metaphysics of vitalism that denounces the geometrization of time, which is to say, its spatialization, which is precisely that in which every tertiary retention consists, and the Bergsonian ignorance of the crucial difference brought about by Husserl between primary and secondary retention.39  Bernard Stiegler, “Temps et individuation technique, psychique, et collective dans l’oeuvre de Simondon,” Intellectica (1998/1–2): 253. 39  Bernard Stiegler, “The Theater of Individuation: Phase-shift and Resolution in Simondon and Heidegger,” Parrhesia 7 (2009): 46–47. 38

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Stiegler thus argues that although Simondon attempts to rethink individuation in light of the notion of information, he fails to see that information demands a material support, which is precisely the technical object. This critique is probably a little bit too quick and harsh, but it deserves our attention since it also helps to reflect on what we have discussed since chapter 3. We have tried to show above that, for Simondon, there is a recursive process of exteriorization and interiorization, and for him, technical objects carry what he called “transindividual relations,” which are sources of information—though it is true that Simondon doesn’t approach the question of temporality according to the same order of magnitude as Stiegler does. Stiegler’s critique of Simondon (as well as Bergson) points to another dimension of organology. As we have seen, in Creative Evolution Bergson opposes intelligence/matter and intuition/life and wants to decompose matter from geometry into movement. Stiegler’s organology, on the other hand, reposes largely if not entirely on geometrization, since it allows the spatialization of time, and such a schematization is indispensable for a creative evolution. Like André Leroi-Gourhan, who has shown that hominization can be understood in terms of two parallel processes—namely, the exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs—Stiegler understands exteriorization as the spatialization of time: for example, writing is that which discretizes and spatializes speech into symbols. Tools, languages, rituals, writings, and so on are forms of exteriorization that distinguish the human species from the other animals: “Like tools, human memory is a product of exteriorization, and it is stored within the ethnic group. This is what distinguishes it from animal memory, of which we know little except that it is stored within the species.”40 We know that Lamarck’s mistake was due to his belief that phenotypes produced during adaptation to the environment would be passed to the genotype—like the famous giraffe stretching its neck in order to eat the leaves on the tree, which in turn explains its long neck. August Weismann’s discovery of the fact that the soma cell is different from gene cell, and that the former cannot be inherited, renders Lamarck’s example of the giraffe laughable. However, the environmental factor exists and is theorized by Conrad Waddington—a dear colleague of Joseph Needham and Gregory Bateson—as epigenetic. Waddington’s  André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 258.

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notion of the epigenetic landscape is the best way to visualize what he means by epigenetics in evolution: In a landscape consisting of different slopes or valleys, the movement of a ball becomes dependent on the particular configuration and contingent encounters.41 He also coins the word canalization, which is the measure of the ability of a species to produce the same phenotype regardless of changes in the genotype and environment. Waddington’s epigenetics and canalization form a coupled function between gene and environment, a theory of developmental systems biology.42 A question we raised at the opening of this chapter was: What is the relation between technology and the environment? From the perspective of animal behavior one observes a mode of operation between organism and environment, which is an adaptation in order to produce coupling. But with technology there is also the effect of will. Instead of merely adapting themselves to the environment, and unlike animals that consume the environment (e.g., eating up all the grasses), human beings change the environment in favor of their survival. With technology, human beings are able to pass their memory from generation to generation, without affecting the soma and gene cell. In contrast to adaptation, Stiegler uses the word adoption. Human beings adopt the milieu, but not only by adapting to it. To adopt is to affirm what accidently arrived and integrate it into the whole. Adoption is different from adaptation but it is not opposed to it, as if they were two incompatible processes. Rather, there is a dynamic between the two. What constitutes an organology is the strategy of adapting and adopting. Like the Guimbal turbine described by Simondon, it adapts to the geographical milieu of the river (e.g., through isolation with oil) by adopting it as part of its functioning (cooling mechanism). In other words, the river creates an associated techno-geographical milieu. The Mongolian mobile tent is a way to adopt the ever-changing environment; medication is a way to help the patient to adopt the narrowed milieu caused by virus; the will

 Note that this theory has significantly influenced the work of René Thom. In 1966 Thom published the article “A Dynamic Theory of Morphogenesis” in a book edited by Waddington, Towards a Theoretical Biology I, which, according to some, marked the birth of catastrophe theory. See Sara Franceschelli, “Morphogenesis, Structural Stability and Epigenetic Landscape,” in Morphogenesis: Origins of Patterns and Shapes, ed. Paul Bourgine and Annick Lesne (Heidelberg: Springer, 2011), 283–94. 42  See Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 111. 41

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is a way of overcoming suffering and self-pity (e.g., Django Reinhardt’s becoming a legendary guitar player after having lost the use of two fingers of his left hand in a fire). In other words, to adopt is to overcome a deficiency of the milieu by creating an associated milieu. It is also on the question of the associated milieu that we can trace an implicit organic form in Stiegler’s thought. Stiegler calls technology “epiphylogenetic memory.” In his own words, this refers to “the past that I never lived but that is nevertheless my past, without which I would never have had a past of my own.”43 Epiphylogenetic memories constitute the prosthesis of individual and collective memory. They also largely consist of the world into which we are thrown (Geworfenheit) in the sense of Heidegger, meaning the already there—that which I have inherited and which shapes my tendency of identification (instead of a static identity). In the past thirty years Stiegler has from time to time changed his formulation of these terms from tertiary retention to epiphylogenesis, and more recently to exosomatization, as responses to specific questions, yet all of these terms concern the same subject— namely, technics as “the pursuit of life by means other than life.”44 The accident of Epimetheus is not only a fault but also a default—as it is said in the French idiom, le défaut qu’il faut. It is the fault as default constituting the question of the will and necessity. As someone who became a philosopher by accident, Stiegler’s own biography vividly demonstrates such a passage from contingency to necessity. Stiegler had done many things before he started studying philosophy in prison, having been sentenced to five years of imprisonment for armed robbery. Due to the encouragement of the phenomenologist Gerald Granel (someone with whom he had become acquainted while he was still owner of a jazz bar in Toulouse), Stiegler registered in the philosophy program at the University of Toulouse II–Le Mirail. After his incarceration he met Jacques Derrida, and through the latter’s recommendation wrote his memoir under the supervision of Jean-François Lyotard. He later wrote his PhD under the direction of Derrida at the École des hautes études des sciences humaines, with a thesis that he later developed into what became the multiple volumes of La technique et le temps.

 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 140. 44  Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1:17. 43

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This personal biography is not without significance, since it is only through the question of the accident that he opens a new way to think and to act—that is to say, to become by suspending the end. The prison is an accident to Stiegler, as is the loss of fingers to Reinhardt, but these accidents or traumas are causes—or, more precisely, quasi-causes—of their singularity, since not every prisoner can become a philosopher just as not all musicians can become better musicians after losing their fingers (Django Reinhardt and Paul Wittgenstein being exceptions). The accidents are normally considered to be fateful tragedies, but it is possible that these causes transcend normativity (e.g., a guitarist who has lost some fingers may have to pursue another career in the music industry that requires less manual dexterity) and become the condition of a new associated milieu. By suspending finality one suspends also the relation between the origin and fate that is at the heart of Aristotle’s definition of essence, according to which the origin already contains its end. It is in this attempt to reject a sort of Aristotelian final causality that Stiegler adds to hominization and individuation the concept of quasi-causality: We can argue, like Aristotle, that the end is already contained in the origin. In this sense, conducting a radical analysis of what constitutes the origin of a being also tells us something about its end, since, after all, both the origin and the end make up the essence of this being—what makes it identical across time. To use reason this way is to miss the problem of time and becoming (besides, time does not only equate to becoming). Contrary to Aristotle and to all metaphysics—to all “onto-theology,” as we call it after Heidegger—I believe that an accidental process takes place between the origin and the end; we cannot speak only of an essential process for there are occurrences that disturb the metaphysical illusion that the end is already there in the origin. Philosophy should learn how to think this accidentality (together with its genealogy).45

We can even go a step further. Stiegler not only attempts to break this essential relation between the origin and the end in Aristotle, he even demonstrates that it is not legitimate to assert the question of the origin. Indeed, one can talk only about a lack of origin as necessity, a défaut qu’il faut. Or, to put it in other words, technics is accidental, and it is

 Stiegler, Philosophising by Accident, 34.

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also the origin. If the origin is accidental, then the origin can no longer be seized as essence. In this case, the accidental becomes necessary since it is that which defines human being. Instead of claiming that there is an original essence of human, one should analyze the history of technicity. Let’s come back to the question of contingency again, and take up the meaning of Stiegler’s motif of “philosophizing by accident.” At the beginning of the chapter we proposed that Simondon’s concept of contingency is close to a philosophy of nature, while Stiegler’s is closer to artistic practice. For Stiegler, the task of the artist consists in modulating the process of individuation to construct the plan of consistency—that is to say, to render the unexpected necessary, to expect the unexpected, as Heraclitus says in our epigraph. In order to engage with the problem of sensibility today—or what Stiegler calls “the catastrophe of the sensible”—it is necessary that one seizes the accidentality of the epoch, the catastrophic becoming of it as the Ereignis, and renders such accidentality—which is at the first glance improbable—necessary; that is to say, to see it not as a mere matter of fact or a destiny to be followed, but rather a necessary condition for psychic and collective individuation. §35. NATURE OR ART The object of art is the sensible, and the organization of the sensible through artifices is technē. Stiegler sees an opening to both the organic and the social through the exteriorization of the sensible. By such an exteriorization the noetic soul is no longer an individual and isolated soul, but rather one that has a history and is in history as a historical being. For Simondon, anterior to the process of individuation there is a preindividual reality. Such a reality is the reservoir of potential, which will not be exhausted, meaning that once conditions are met, it will allow another process of individuation to take place. While Simondon tends to consider this preindividual reality as nature, as we saw earlier, Stiegler refuses to use the word nature but rather understands the preindividual as an assemblage of technical beings, history, and psychical apparatus. If in Schelling we see that nature possesses the technique of an artist who renders contingency into necessity and inscribes the infinite within the finite, in Stiegler it is not the figure of nature that

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corresponds to individuation but rather the artist whose task is not only to render contingency necessary as its operation, but also aim for an elevation of the audience as a form of revelation. The artist is he who opens up, through his or her work, a process of transindividuation, meaning a psychical and collective individuation. If the work of art is the consequence of the technē of the sensible, and if such a technē opens the noetic soul to a circuit of the social, then the artist takes up the role of a facilitator of individuation. In the second volume of De la misière symbolique, Stiegler asked the question, what is an artist? He answers as follows: The artist is an exemplary figure of psychic and collective individuation, where an I is to be found only within a we and where a we is constituted simultaneously by the strained and oversaturated potential of the pre-individual ground presupposed by this process, and by the diachronies constitutive of the Is through which it is formed. These Is, or psychic individuals, are the inheritors of and strained by this pre-individual potential which connects them, each in their own way, to the we composed by they.46

The term artist here can be replaced with philosopher, educator, or engineer, as you wish, since the artist is only an exemplary figure. The artist is not someone who produces a work of taste, but rather someone who is capable of and responsible for creating a circuit that allows a transindividuation between the I and the we through the sensible exteriorized in the form of an artwork (or, in the case of writing a book, a computer program). Recursivity is established through the work of art, constituting a self-knowing toward an end, while this end remains mysterious, as in mystagogy, a purposiveness without purpose. What is crucial to such an individuation is the tension between the I and the we, and it is through the movement necessitated by tensions and the resolution of them that a metastable state is finally achieved, while such a metastability can only be a multiplicity because the end remains mysterious and singular to each recipient. A metastable state is stable, but it is not an equilibrium. Rather, it means that such an end is also not a finality of utility but rather a process. Metastability designates a transitional status  Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, vol. 2, The Catastrophe of the Sensible, trans. Barnaby Norman (London: Polity, 2015), 154; translation modified.

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that may shift into another phase when a new individuation process is triggered. The Simondonian concept of individuation and the individualization of technical objects are unified in the thinking of Stiegler, and hence technical objects, here in the case of the artwork, become an indispensable dimension of psychic and collective individuation. The artist is he or she who is able to modulate the essential sensible and the accidental sensible, and this modulation is also an act, which renders the accidents (in both senses of the word—namely, inessential and contingent) necessary. An artistic creation is a process through which the unexpected is expected, meaning that the accidents are conceived as necessary in the sense that they are now condition for a possible transformation. It is accidental insofar as it is informational, since it is that which deviates from the regular, the norm, or the already expected, and in doing so it opens a new circuit of individuation in order to arrive at a new normativity. This individuation is presented as a noetic “acting out,” in the sense that a threshold is transgressed, like a quantum leap, elevating one energy level to another energy level; or, in other words, it is a mystagogy. Without recurring to Joseph Beuys, often cited by Stiegler, one can refer to practices from the Dadaists and surrealists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, André Breton, and others. We could say that this motif of artistic creation is rather explicit among the surrealists, for whom the accident is present in all forms of artistic creation: collage, exquisite corpse, automatic writing, and so on. Max Ernst, in “Traité de la peinture surréaliste,” has proposed that [a]sked to characterize here the process which first came to surprise us and put us on the path of several others, I am tempted to see the development [exploitation] of the fortuitous encounter of two distant realities on a non-suitable plane (this paraphrases and generalizes Lautreamont’s famous dictum: beautiful like the fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table) or, to use a shorter term, the culture of effects of a systematic disorientation according to André Breton.47

It is contingency, in the sense of the improbable, that is the mechanism of the encounter of two distant realities, and this encounter, no matter now improbable, has to become art. Obligation means precisely   Max Ernst, “Comment on force l’inspiration,” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 6 (May 15, 1933): 43.

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necessity. The surrealists are only an exemplary figure of such an act of rendering accident necessary. There are, for sure, other practices pivoted on the thinking of the accident. Stiegler adds to this artistic practice a new dimension, which is the theory of individuation. What underlies this process is the will and the creativity to search for truth, to allow the spectators to experience the participation in the divine, in the sense that they desire inexistence through technical objects (be it painting, photography, or video), not from the essential, but from the accident. The artist or philosopher is he or she who elevates contingency to the plane of necessity, where elevation means seizing it as the element of an associated milieu. In contrast to the natura naturans and natura naturata—which exhibit the general activity of the spirit or invisible nature and in which contingency is no longer opposed to necessity, since every contingent event is actualized as necessary—Stiegler’s concept of contingency in the recursivity of psychical and collective individuation designates another dimension of the spirit, one in which the spirit possesses a will that not only actualizes the virtual but also gives new meaning to contingency by seizing it as the opportunity to become, to singularize. §36. TERTIARY PROTENTION AND PREEMPTION If we return to Simondon’s and Stiegler’s understanding of the primacy of contingency, for the former contingency signifies incoming information, while for the latter it signifies the moment of appropriation or transformation, which Heidegger calls the Ereignis. This event already presupposes signification, since without signification there is no becoming and no appropriation. However, the questions that remain are how this event can happen in the time of technical systematization, and indeed whether it will happen at all, as the philosophers of technology expect. In On the Existence of Digital Objects I have noticed that, in the retentional and protentional circuit that Stiegler has proposed, there is a missing element.48 This missing element—tertiary protention—is crucial to understanding the evolution of technical systems, meaning their becoming organic. I have tried on my part to propose the concept  See Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), chap. 6; it is also where I first develop the concept of tertiary protention and recursivity.

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of tertiary protention in order to sketch what I call computational hermeneutics, based on an investigation into the history of Gödel’s recursive function, which was further discussed in chapter 2. I have to admit that, at the time of writing the aforementioned work, I was not yet able to relate it to the subject that we are trying to approach in the current work. The concept of tertiary protention seems to me crucial in order to investigate temporal structure, reconstituted by digital technology, which also presents itself as a new form of determination. Such a determination is always preemptive, in the sense that the machine has already anticipated what the options will be: In this case, freedom means choice. This precisely means that it is a reduction of the contingent to the most probable. The contingent is possible, but it is not the most or highly probable. The contingent is the least probable, or even the improbable. The lack of discussion of tertiary protention in Stiegler’s work seems very paradoxical. On the one hand, the retention and protention of difference is that which gives rise to the concept of différance in Derrida,49 and it is based on such a différance that tertiary retention as differing and deferring is articulated by Stiegler. On the other hand, this silence on tertiary protention seems to suggest that tertiary protention is reducible to tertiary retention, which would be contradictory. We will have to return to Husserl’s writings on time-consciousness in order to clarify this question. In Husserl’s 1905–1906 course, the relationship between retention and protention was not fully elaborated, and in fact only a few pages were dedicated to protention. In the later Bernau manuscript (1917–1918) and C-manuscript (1929–1934), Husserl provides a more integrated model of the relationship between retention and protention. In these different versions Husserl’s focus and approach noticeably shift.50 Protention is a key element that distinguishes Husserl from his teacher Franz Brentano. Brentano’s model has two main elements: namely, ordinary sensations of the now moment and representations of the past. While the former is real, the latter is unreal, since we can never have direct experience of the past.51 That is to say, in Brentano’s model  See Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 278–99. 50  However, this is not our main concern here; rather, our interest is in constructing a general understanding of the way retention and protention function in Husserl’s model. 51  Husserl criticized Brentano’s idea that we cannot directly experience the past and in so doing found himself on the side of Aristotle. See Pierre Keller, Husserl and Heidegger on Human Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 68. 49

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of consciousness, the question of protention is almost nonexistent. The other main difference between Husserl and Brentano, which is also central to Husserl’s triple intentionality model, is that for Brentano what is perceived is actual, a correspondence between a real and a mental content, while for Husserl the psychic present is not an instantaneous moment but a temporal extension.52 Such an extension—or, more precisely, individuation—consists of multiple successive phases mediated by the intertwining of retention, primary presentation, and protention. Husserl, unlike Brentano, intends to inquire into this time of consciousness, the individuation of consciousness, for which time is the principle. While Husserl effectively adopts some elements taken from Brentano (for example, consciousness as continuous flux), he at the same time elaborates his own model of triple intentionality. The clearest explanation of the relation between retention and protention is to be found in articles 1 and 2 of the Bernau manuscript. There the relation between the two, which is only loosely articulated in the 1905–1906 course, is further elaborated, and greater prominence is given to the role of protention, where Husserl proposes what he calls a primary or original process (Urprocess), and shows how protention can be understood from within retention and retention from within protention, a complex model through which the dynamic modifications of both are explained. Here it is helpful to refer to Husserl’s own diagram (see Figure 4.1). Every “primal present” is an intentional act that is accompanied by both retention and protention. We can imagine a series of incoming events from E1–E4, taking E2 as the now. At this moment E1 is added to retention, and consequently modifies the protention E3. In the next now of E3, we see that both E1 and E2 are retained as E13 and E23. The next protention is also modified in accordance with the modification of retention; as Husserl says, “[W]hen new core data (Kerndaten) arises . . . the old ones don’t simply become retentional, a protentional consciousness also ‘grows,’ that complies with the new original data (Urdaten) and correspondingly (terminierend) fulfills itself with them.”53 It is in this sense that we can understand that retention (e.g., E12–E2) contains the forthcoming protention (e.g., E3), while it is also true that there is  Liliana Albertazzi, “Edmund Husserl,” in The School of Franz Brentano, ed. Liliana Albertazzi, Massimo Libardi, and Roberto Poli (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 186. 53  Edmund Husserl, Hua XXXIII, ed. Rudolf Bernet and Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), art. 2, 20. 52

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Figure 4.1  Husserl’s Account of Time-Consciousness in Hua XXXIII, 22.

retention inside protention, since the consciousness of every protention is not a momentary event but rather part of an ongoing stream, so that protention in this way resembles secondary retention, except that it is directed toward the future.54 At this point it may be worth emphasizing that there is a functional difference between protention and retention, and that protention is not purely a product of retention, though it definitely relies on the latter. It has been noted that in §18 of Hua XI55 Husserl proposes an intrinsic difference between retention and protention: directedness (Gerichtet-sein) belongs intrinsically to protention. The kind of directedness referred to here does not belong to the act of the ego but is rather a “passive directedness” in which the ego does not actively participate. In this section, entitled “Description of the Possible Types of Empty Representation,” the word Leervorstellungen, or empty representation, refers to the

 Ibid., 23.  See Edmund Husserl, Hua XI, ed. Margot Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 71–78.

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moment of the primal impression of the stream of consciousness, from where consciousness is continuously constituted. Husserl proposes that, even when both protention and retention are empty representations, an immeasurable (gewaltig) difference must still remain between them: First, retention lacks directedness, since it does nothing but push back to the past, whereas protention continuously directs attention (Gewahren).56 Second, Husserl reproaches Brentano for seeing the lawful connection between retention and impression as an original association, Husserl proposing instead that association takes place only in protention.57 Passive directedness seems to be fundamental, since it also directs active directedness, meaning that it is already a selection: When the grasping egoic regard is directed toward what is to come, this active directedness follows the passive direction that accrues to perception on the basis of protention. When the grasping regard is directed toward what has just been perceived, in other words, when the grasping regard goes through the retentional continuum, then this directedness goes against the passive direction that belongs to perception itself.58

We cannot fully separate protention and retention as two operations, and in fact they form a necessary circuit: Retention, though being passive, motivates protention; protention, being active, enriches the retention according to the structure that is coherent to the experience of the individual. However, we must emphasize here that protention cannot be reduced to either primary or secondary retention, otherwise there will be no différance, as Derrida has already shown: rather, it is the demarcation between passivity and activity, whose dynamic is fundamental to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. If we further consider the dynamic between passive and active directedness against the backdrop of a history of tertiary retention, we can see that such an evolution of tertiary retention entails at the same time an evolution of protention, which can neither be contained within a human subject or consciousness nor reduced to any reified retention. Debt is a primitive form of tertiary protention; it is also retention. With the digital form of tertiary retention we are all in debt: not only in  Ibid., 74.  Ibid., 77. 58  Toine Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time Edmund Husserl’s Analysis of Time-Consciousness (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 183. 56 57

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debt to the past that we haven’t lived but which belongs to us, but also in debt to the future, to which we will have to return by acting in accordance with its predictions. Preemption is a term that is used to describe the delegation of decision making to algorithms, since in our day it is evident that this is the major issue of the automatized society, in which every possible encounter can be the result of calculation. The use of stochastic algorithms is not only an introduction of contingency to user experience, but is also meant to improve the accuracy of calculation. A consumerism that was based on the manipulation of psycho-power, as Stiegler has described, is stretching to calculation based on data. It seems that marketing based on psycho-power (or even psychoanalysis) is losing its central role in the current form of consumerism (even if it remains fundamental), as marketing strategies move from the manipulation of the unconscious to the analysis of big data: that is to say, the manipulation of consciousness (as we are already witnessing, for example, in the Cambridge Analytics affair). It is also the question of protention that confronts us with the question of freedom. §37. INORGANIC ORGANICITY OR ECOLOGY With the becoming organic of machines and technical systems today, how should we think about these organological attempts to comprehend human-machine relations? The new form of industrialization, sometimes referred to as “Industry 4.0,” has proposed rendering the milieu automatic and smart.59 What is meant by smart here? Smart means the capacity to anticipate, to expect what is most optimal. Since the twentieth century  We cannot go into the details of the discourse on smart objects and smart cities; for the purpose of our discussion, I quote the following summary of the industry 4.0 from a news article: (1) Sensors will be involved at every stage of the manufacturing process, providing the raw data as well as the feedback that is required by control systems. (2) Industrial control systems will become far more complex and widely distributed, enabling flexible, fine-grained process control. (3) RF technologies will tie together the distributed control modules in wireless mesh networks, enabling systems to be reconfigured on the fly in a way that is not possible with hardwired, centralized control systems. (4) Programmable logic will become increasingly important since it will be impossible to anticipate all the environmental changes to which control systems will need to dynamically respond. (5) Smart, connected, embedded devices will be everywhere, and designing and programming them will become that much more challenging—not to mention interesting and rewarding; see John Donovan, “Industry 4.0—What’s That About?” 2013, https​://eu​.mous​er.co​m/app​ licat​ions/​indus​try-4​0.

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we have witnessed the maturation of the Third Industrial Revolution (information machines) toward what we know as full-scale automation, enabled by artificial intelligence and digital networks. Since the introduction of computers in the second half of the twentieth century, mechanical and sequential control of automation has been slowly replaced with digital feedback systems. The power of digitization lies in the capacity to effectively create interobjective relations between different technical ensembles,60 compressing time and space, and hence also systematize these ensembles in such a way that they can be easily submitted to calculation. The proliferation of smart objects and smart environments characterize this revolution today. A challenge is thus imposed on us that doesn’t just demand a new critique of industrialization and the alienation brought about by it, but also reflection on the very possibility and impossibility of the tertiary protention implemented in systems of all scales. It is in tertiary protention that the question of contingency is important, since it has to be anticipated in order to optimize. Hence the evolution of tertiary retention is not based on the refusal of contingency but rather depends on it; this is also one of the meanings of being smart. Smart objects take part in the milieu by playing the role of organs of motor-perception (converting approximate sense perceptions to signals), organs of analysis (based on calculation and existing data), and organs of synthesis (constitution of the tertiary protention). These devices are connected together through networks, in contrast to the phenomenon of adaption, which is based on the negotiation between living beings and the environment. The technical system anticipates and modulates, and a social phenomenon can now be induced through signal manipulations and across different networks. Profiling through sensors and different forms of capture constitutes a new type of individual norm in the sense of Goldstein, but this individual norm is not limited to pathological and clinical analysis, since the concept of the milieu is extended beyond human organs to analog and digital organs, constituting a new milieu characterized by an inorganic organicity. The difference between the inorganic organicity and inorganic mechanicity is that the latter demands a total synchronization without which the system will fail to function, while the former (although it still needs a common temporal axis) allows diversity to appear: for example, personalization,  For the concept of interobjectivity, please refer to Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects, chap. 4.

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bottom-up movements. Indeed, diversity is necessary for an organic technical system to optimize its performativity. Therefore, one may argue that a superintelligence is one that is in favor of diversity but not delimiting it; however, this notion of diversity is still limited since it is possible only within this system. The recursive models that define the individual norm through an organic configuration of relations between perception, retention (data capturing), and protention become the source of pathologies. The closest example that we can relate it to is internet and video game addiction, and, like addiction to drugs, these addictions demand a milieu that makes them comfortable while rendering them too feeble to adopt and adapt to other milieus. It would be too simple to think that it is possible to escape by changing the way of dealing with tools like what is called the Gelassenheit, since what is at stake is a systemic determination through modification of the milieu, analogic to how humans domesticate animals. The technical infrastructures stack on one another like building blocks,61 from censors to data, from data to software, and from software to system, which then operate according to a recursive feedback loop. The technical system far exceeds the operational capacity of any individual technical object, or the cognitive capacity of any human individual. The recursive circuit, based on the three forms of protention and retention, constitutes a new dynamic of the soul that indicates the evolution of technical objects and the inhumanization in which the soul is rendered fragile by the product of the spirit. What we are witnessing today, since the advent of cybernetics, is the development of an inorganic organicity stretching through every smart device and multiple levels of systemic organization. They cease to be the merely organized inorganic but rather are becoming the organizing inorganic, which functions recursively to produce its own structures and patterns. Recursivity is a thinking that enters into all orders of magnitude—for example, synthetic biology. Recursive algorithms are employed to conceptualize the reproduction of DNA-RNA-protein. Or as a researcher in synthetic biology has put it, after having referred to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie: “Synthetic biologists aim to enhance and transgress nature by using nature’s self-organization principles, in short: transgressing nature by harnessing nature! They conceptualize

 Benjamin Bratton, The Stack (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

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nature as a kind of technology or, more specifically: as a universal engineer.”62 Nature is recursive; in it one can find reciprocity between parts and the whole. However, recursivity is not only a natural phenomenon; it is also a technical thinking, or what Douglas Hofstadter calls a “strange loop.”63 With recursivity, algorithms are able to domesticate different forms of contingency in order to render them useful. The relation between technics and contingency must be analyzed materially and historically; these relations reflect dominant scientific epistemologies. Capital in the digital age takes up a recursive form enabled by algorithms and digital networks, since it is capable of regeneration/reproduction. This regeneration is not a linear accumulation, however; it recursively overcomes (whether by integrating or eliminating) the contingency on its way toward the infinite: the ultimate goal of accumulation and development. This is not merely ideological, since technology is not an ideology and critique of capital is fundamentally a critique of technology. We can find many concrete examples: Google is a gigantic recursive machine that reproduces itself by integrating all the data of its users, updating them and parsing them into useful information for other services. Google is of course only one example, but when our milieu is surrounded by censors and interactive machines, real subsumption adopts a new mechanism in which the user is treated as a recursive algorithm and becomes part of another recursive algorithm. Deleuze, taking up the vocabulary of Simondon, calls this process modulation instead of molding.64 Maybe it is still not evident, since the concretization process of technical systems takes time. It always starts with bugs and errors, but technology is driven by failure and limits. It is not encouraged by perfection, because perfection means no more progress. What is called a system is supposed to be a self-dependent ideality, realized by an organic (recursive and contingent) form that is mathematically grounded. Retrospectively we can say that the systems of Schelling and Hegel, as well as those of Bertalanffy, Luhmann, and von Foerster, have longed for this inorganic organicity of society, though  Jan C. Schmidt, “Synthetic Biology as Late-Modern Technology Inquiring into the Rhetoric and Reality of a New Technoscientific Wave,” in Synthetic Biology: Character and Impact, ed. Bernd Giese, Christian Pade, Henning Wigger, and Arnim von Gleich (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 15. 63  Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 64  See Yuk Hui, “Modulation after Control,” New Formations 84–85 (2014/15): 74–91. 62

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without thinking about its realization through digital technologies. In the social system of Luhmann, for example, society is maintained by performativity, which functions like feedback, or an Anstoß, deciding if the next cycle should proceed. This self-reference is conceptualized according to the double contingency of communication between two black boxes, and it is different self-reference subsystems that constitute the complexity of the social system. The development of a social system can be realized through the implementation of such recursive forms on all levels (languages, individuals, families, institutions, states) and the connections between these levels. In comparison to Schelling’s idealist conceptualization of nature as general organism, or visible mind, human beings are in the process of realizing it as a cybernetic system. A similar line of thought can be found in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, which he describes as an “envelope of thinking substance.” The noosphere is an “added planetary layer”65 produced by the process of hominization. This “added planetary layer” is leading to a convergence, whose evidence could be found in the “universalization” of technology. As Teilhard observed, the invention of tools may come from individuals, but the spread of such technology is planetary. Since the beginning, when tools were used as a biological function to liberate the limbs and other organs, the constant evolution of technology has produced a rather different scene: When Homo faber came into being the first rudimentary tool was born as an appendage of the human body. Today the tool has been transformed into a mechanized envelope (coherent within itself and immensely varied) appertaining to all mankind. From being somatic it has become “noospheric.”66

It is through the universalization of the Noospheric technologies that Teilhard sees a convergence, which is the convergence of all brains to a Brain, or the creation of a superorganism. The modern earth—which, following Margulis and Lovelock, we can call an artificial earth or Gaia—is the realization of a superorganism, a super Brain that is the collectivity of the individual brains. This superorganism is in great

 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Image Books, 2004), 151. 66  Ibid., 160. 65

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contrast to the general organism of Schelling precisely because, for Schelling, general organism is the name given to nature, while this superorganism that Teilhard is proposing is no longer about nature, but rather a system realized by technology, which is capable of reflection and anticipation. We can raise the following speculative question: If we follow the logic of Teilhard, will it be justified to say that, toward the maturity of the noosphere, technology, and the environment, the organic and the inorganic will together constitute an organismic system in which a perpetual peace in the sense of Kant can be guaranteed, since such a self-organization of nature based on reciprocity and community is what Kant projected as a political ideal? That is to say, with the technological acceleration toward a singularity and intelligence explosion, will it be possible to realize an artificial earth that is capable of self-planning and self-organization, like a true “organism”? But if Teilhard is able to propose such an eschatology, it is because he didn’t take power and capital into account. The superorganism will remain a theological ideal, but it ignores the struggles present within different levels. It is also the reason that organology after Canguilhem must also be a political project, which is cosmotechnical. §38. THE PRINCIPLE OF GROUND How is it possible to think of indeterminacy when the determination of the technical system is now a general tendency? This determination consists of speculating about future actions and events. This is what I suggested constitutes a new condition of philosophizing after Kant’s formulation in the Critique of Judgment. However, the problem is not about the loss of superiority of the organic, but rather the failure to recognize the becoming organic of the inorganic, as Simondon has clearly noticed. Simondon sees it further as a possibility, since it is easier to create and organize associated milieus within an ensemble of information machines, considering that the geographical milieu of the Guimbal engine is not transferable. The struggle is therefore not one that attempts to restore the superiority of the organicity of human being, but rather a struggle that attempts to resituate technology— that is to say, a cybernetic or allagmatic thinking—which is beyond

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technical concretization. (This is also why it is a general allagmatic instead of cybernetics in the sense of Wiener, and is closer to Bateson than to Wiener.) This “going beyond” is not a detachment but rather a recontextualization of technological concretization, not unlike what the vitalists wanted to do with mechanism by putting “mechanism back into its place within life.”67 By mechanizing the organism, argues Canguilhem in “Machine and Mechanism,” Descartes made teleology disappear, since nature is reduced to mechanism and teleology is enclosed in technical activities.68 The distinction between the reflective judgment and determinative judgment in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, as well as the distinction between life and mechanism in Bergson, allows Canguilhem to conceive a reality that is far beyond science and technology, like Kant’s natural end69 and Bergson’s élan vital. In the West one can see the shift from myths to mechanism, and later to organicism and cybernetics, as progress in science, while mathematical formalization is that which qualifies what can be called scientific. Wiener claims that a Bergsonian machine is possible precisely because, like the organicists, he rejects the concept of élan vital, and an organism could be studied mathematically. Wiener’s cybernetics suggests a new epistemology based on feedback and information for constructing non-Cartesian machines. By doing so, Wiener also escalates the territory of rationalism. Both Bergson and Canguilhem see that technical rationalization always carries an irreducible other: “The rationalization of techniques makes one forget the irrational origin of machines. And it seems that in this area, as in any other, one must know how to cede a place to the irrational, even and especially when one wants to defend rationalism.”70

 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 73.  Ibid. 69  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), §75: “This much alone is certain, that if we ought, for all that, to form our judgment on what our own proper nature permits us to see, that is, subject to the conditions and restrictions of our reason, we are utterly unable to ascribe the possibility of such natural ends to any source other than an intelligent Being. This alone squares with the maxim of our reflective judgment, and, therefore, with a subjective ground that is nevertheless ineradicably bound to the human race.” Also quoted by Henri Atlan, Selected Writings on Self-Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Judaism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 183. 70  Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 96. 67 68

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I tend to think that the limit of technical rationality is a central theme of part 3 of Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence, and this remains of ultimate importance since it is necessary to understand technology from its genesis, as well as a crucial element of hominization. If we are right (as stated in the introduction) that the term technical reality (réalité technique), which Simondon proposes to us to reflect on the existence of technical objects, is a response to Heidegger’s Dasein, which was rendered into French as “human reality” (réalité humaine) or “being there” (être là), then, like the human reality, the technical reality also points to a “there.” This means that the technical reality cannot be studied as an isolated entity that is a mere product of rationality, but rather it has to be approached from its historicity and locality. Therefore we understand that Simondon sees the necessity of accounting for a genesis of technicity of which the physical concretization of technical objects is only one part. Simondon wants to move away from the physical concretization to the genesis of technicity, and this is also the point of departure for my own concept of cosmotechnics. There are multiple geneses as there are multiple cosmotechnics. If general allagmatic merits the name of a universal cybernetics, it is because it seeks a genesis as a resolution of problematics that are also necessities, since systems saturate in time, meaning that the structure no longer sustains the dynamic of its operation. The operation therefore has to search for another structure, and this is also a process of transevaluation. In chapter 2 we briefly discussed Bateson’s proposal to end the vicious circle of the positive feedback, which he demonstrates with the example of the alcoholic. This leap is possible when a certain threshold has been reached—for example, a fatal disease or serious accident—and another reality is presented, like the “power” among the members of Alcoholics Anonymous. The power refers to the experience of the divine, the moment when one is out of oneself and the self is reconfigured by an ungraspable external force. This divine takes the name of magic in Simondon and the Unknown and incalculable in Heidegger. In Simondon’s speculative history of technicity, the magic phase is a moment when the figure and ground (in the sense of Gestalt psychology) are separated, while there is no sharp distinction between subject and object. We can understand this indifference between subject and object in terms of a continuity between the interior (the human subject) and the exterior (natural

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phenomenon), in which interiority is reflected in exteriority and vice versa.71 The magical phase bifurcates into technics and religion, and each of them bifurcates further into theoretical and practical parts. In this constant bifurcation in time, Simondon envisages the task of philosophical thinking (in view of the insufficiency of aesthetic thinking) as one that seeks convergence against constant divergence. There is no doubt that technology is indispensable for hominization, but in the development of civilization, technology is only one part of cosmic life. Technology is not equivalent to culture. Indeed, technology is always contested by culture, and at the same time motivated and constrained by culture, as Bertrand Gille has described in view of the conflict between the human systems (juridical, political, economical, etc.) and the technical system.72 However, when technology detaches itself from this balance of figure/ground and becomes its own ground, as well as the ground of other domains, we will have to resituate it in a new episteme and transform it from within according to different epistemologies. This is also the reason for which we must search for the ground of technology. This was also my motivation in developing the concept of cosmotechnics as an attempt to open up the question of technology: We don’t have only one technology (as figure) and one cosmology (as ground), but rather multiple cosmotechnics containing different dynamics between the moral and the cosmos. Borrowing from

 It is not indicated where Simondon first developed this concept of the magic phase, but it strongly resembles James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1920), in which Frazer describes magic as nothing less than the beginning of “experimental physics.” In the magic phase—and this is contrary to common sense—causes are objective, and there was already an “intuition of objective being and events, which are ordered according to fixed rules.” In religions intuition (to be distinguished from magical intuition), “the human is subjected to foreign violent powers to which he entrusts the whole of his being.” In the magic phase there is an “objectivity” not coming from a transcendent being but which rather designates the unity between the subject and objects. The key point is related to interiority: “It grasps nature as a strictly determined sequence of events and seeks to penetrate into the essence of this determination. It knows no coincidence; rather, it rises to the intuition of a strict uniformity of events. And, in this way, it achieves, in contrast to religion, the first stage of scientific knowledge of the world.” See Ernst Cassirer, “Form and Technology (1933),” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts and A. Calcagno (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 287. 72  See Bertrand Gille, Histoire des techniques: Technique et civilisations, technique et sciences (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). 71

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Gestalt psychology, Simondon comments on this relation between figure and ground: Gestalt psychology, while recognizing the function of totalities, attributed force to form; a deeper analysis of the inventive process would no doubt show that what is determinant and plays energetic role are not forms but that which carries the forms, which is to say their ground; the ground, while perpetually marginal with respect to attention, is what harbors the dynamisms; it is that through which the system of forms exists; forms do not participate in forms, but in the ground, which is the system of all forms or rather the common reservoir of the formers’ tendencies, well before they exist separately and constitute themselves an explicit system. The relation of participation that links forms to ground is a relation that bestrides the present and diffuses an influence of the future onto the present, of the virtual onto the actual. For the ground is the system of virtualities, of potentials, forces that carve out their path, whereas forms are the system of actuality.73

The ground functions as the support of all the forms. Simondon proposes to resituate technicity within a cosmic reality, in which the concretization of technical objects (or what he calls physical concretization) should be guided by this search for convergence, which presents itself as an individuation facilitated by an internal resonance. The allusion to Gestalt psychology is very significant when we associate it with what we have seen in the previous chapter concerning the organic totality in Canguilhem and Goldstein (not to mention that Simondon’s master Maurice Merleau-Ponty was very much influenced by Goldstein and Gestalt psychology). The subversion between ground and form produces what Deleuze calls “transcendental stupidity” (bêtise) and what Schelling simply calls “evil”: [I]ndividuation as such, as it operates beneath all forms, is inseparable from a pure ground that it brings to the surface and trails with it. It is difficult to describe this ground, or the terror and attraction it excites. Turning over the ground is the most dangerous occupation, but also the most tempting in the stupefied moments of an obtuse will. For this ground, along with the individual, rises to the surface yet assumes neither form

 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence, 60–61; italics added.

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nor figure. . . . It is the indeterminate, but the indeterminate in so far as it continues to embrace determination, as the ground does the shoe.74

In his seminar on transcendental stupidity, Derrida has noticed that, in order to understand what Deleuze has written about the individuation of the bêtise, it is necessary to engage with Schelling’s concept of the ground both as the original ground (Urgrund) and the groundless ground (Ungrund). Deleuze’s footnote referring to Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift is one reason for making this claim.75 Derrida was probably right to state the importance of Schelling’s concept of the ground here. However, it is crucial to note that Deleuze is also referring to Simondon’s concept of individuation, as well as the ground-figure metaphor that Simondon had borrowed from Gestalt psychology. It has been well noted that Difference and Repetition is a work highly influenced by Simondon, and it is even more evident when we consider that Schelling did not use the term figure when he talked about the ground. Neither did Heidegger use the term in his seminar on Schelling’s Treaties on Human Freedom. Schelling wants to show that freedom is the condition of both good and evil, and that evil is therefore inevitable even in God. This may lead to the suspicion that God is evil, since according to the conventional understanding God and evil, freedom and system, are incompatible. Schelling’s argument shows that evil cannot be other than God, since if evil is not absolutely nothing, then it is being, and if God is the Being of all being, then evil is within God. In the becoming there is a separation between ground and existence, like two forces: gravity and light, universal will and self-will. Every being in its becoming is separating from God, while such separation is a contradiction since it is and can only become in God. The individuation (Vereinzelung) of evil comes out of the striving of the self-will to take the place of the universal will:

 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 152. Also cited by Jacques Derrida, “The Transcendental ‘Stupidity’ (‘Bêtise’) of Man and Becoming-Animal according to Deleuze,” in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 50; italics added. 75  See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 321, n.15: “Schelling wrote some splendid pages on evil (stupidity and malevolence), its source which is like the Ground become autonomous (essentially related to individuation).” 74

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Being spiritual, self-will can strive to be that which it is merely by remaining in the divine ground also as creature. As separated selfhood it can will to be the ground of the whole. Self-will can elevate itself above everything and only will to determine the unity of the principles in terms of itself. This ability is the faculty of evil.76

If we claim that the technical concretization is obscuring the cosmic reality, it is because technical and digital objects are becoming the ground of their own movements instead of the figure. When technology itself becomes the ground, then the cosmic reality is obscured, and the technological acceleration becomes the value of all values. This is why I have attempted to show that we must not conceive modern technology as the totality or the ground, but rather that it is necessary and urgent to conceive different cosmotechnics in which technology is reconnected with the cosmos and the moral. This will demand a rethinking of the transformation of the episteme, which in turns conditions a different political, social, and aesthetic experience. We can say here that it is based on this cosmotechnical reconfiguration that Simondon proposes what he calls co-naturality, which means coexistence between nature and technology; or, more precisely in this case, technical infrastructures complement the magic phase (i.e., the unity between ground and figure), becoming the key points such as peaks, giant trees, and streams in this phase: Look at this TV antenna of television as it is. . . . [I]t is rigid but it is oriented; we see that it looks into the distance, and that it can receive [signals] from an emitter far away. For me, it appears to be more than a symbol; it seems to represent a gesture of sorts, an almost magical power of intentionality, a contemporary form of magic. In this encounter between the highest place and the nodal point, which is the point of transmission of hyperfrequencies, there is a sort of “co-naturality” between the human network and the natural geography of the region. It has a poetic dimension, as well as a dimension having to do with signification and the encounter between significations.77

This can be called a cosmopoiesis in which coexistence is favored instead of the domination of humankind and technology over nature.  Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 142. 77  Gilbert Simondon, “Entretien sur la méchanologie,” Revue de synthèse, tome 130, 6e série, no. 1 (2009): 111. 76

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This organicity in Simondon moves away from a functional necessity (for example, in the Guimbal turbine) to both an aesthetic and philosophical necessity, which is fundamentally intuitive. Intuition for Simondon is “the relation of figure and ground in itself.”78 Instead of reason, Simondon moves back to intuition. Like Bergson, he sees intuition as the primordial faculty that is not yet exhausted by the intelligence. Simondon wants to generalize Bergson’s concept of intuition as a form of knowing that resolves the problematic produced by the inversion of figure and ground,79 but he also wants to overcome Bergson’s opposition between a “pure operation,” which is disinterested, and a “utilitarian operation”80 (as we have seen in the last chapter). For Simondon operation and structure cannot be isolated; a veritable analysis of individual being can rather be understood as an encounter between structure and operation, which he calls allagmatic. There are three types of intuition for Simondon: the magical, the aesthetic, and the philosophical. Magical intuition maintains the coherence between ground and figure, but after its bifurcation into technics and religion it was aesthetic intuition that tried to produce a convergence between the two. However, it can only do so by indicating a relational necessity without going further, and finally it is philosophical intuition that must resume this task. This philosophical intuition has to be distinguished from idea and concept, Kant’s intuition, as well as intellectual intuition: Intuition is neither sensible nor intellectual; it is the analogy between the becoming [devenir] of known being and the becoming of the subject, the coincidence of two becomings: intuition is not merely the grasping of figural realities, like the concept, nor a reference to the totality of the ground of the real in its unity, like the idea; it aims at the real insofar as it forms systems in which a genesis occurs; it is the knowledge proper to genetic processes.81  Simondon, On the Mode of Existence, 244.  Ibid., 242. 80  Simondon, “Allagmatique,” in L’Individuation, 534: “l’intuitionnisme Bergsonien distingue de l’opération pure qu’est l’intuition philosophique la pensée intéressée et utilitaire, matérialisante, spatialisante, c’est-à-dire la pensée qui s’attache aux structures, artificielles ou naturelles: la connaissance vulgaire est une recherche de l’identique à travers la fluidité sans fin du devenir, un refus du mouvement au profit de statique.” 81  Simondon, On the Mode of Existence, 245; translation modified; italics added. Two pages earlier he reproaches the insufficiency of concept and idea: “It [intuition] is not, like the idea, co-natural with the being it grasps, for this co-naturalness can grasp only the ground, which is not the whole [ensemble] of being, it is not abstract like the concept, which abandons the concreteness of being in order to preserve only the decline figure.” 78 79

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We can infer here that philosophical intuition is neither purely contingent nor primitive, but rather an aesthetic and philosophical education, or education of sensibility. This is not epistemology in the strict sense that we use it today in science, but what I prefer to call episteme, the sensible condition of the production of knowledge. Since Simondon claims that intuition is neither sensible nor intellectual, it is also hard to demonstrate that it has nothing to do with the two pure intuitions that characterize the Critique of Pure Reason. What could be justified is that philosophical intuition here is less about the representation of a reality but rather that it first operates in an analogical way.82 Analogical here means that there is a relation between the two becomings of the known being and the subject, but it is not yet a synthesis. Philosophical intuition searches for a coupling between religion and technics, concept and idea, and in this sense we can say that it is in philosophical intuition that we find again an allagmatic that is beyond Simondon’s discussion regarding cybernetics.83 Allagmatic, which is at the heart of philosophical intuition, seeks a genesis. But what exactly is this ground that Simondon is talking about? What kind of reality does it have? We actually couldn’t find an explicit meaning in Simondon’s writing. We associate the ground with a cosmic reality, but this cosmic reality, as the “becoming” of the “known being,” carries in itself something unknowable. It is the Unknown and the most contingent. Kant grants to intellectual intuition the capacity to know the noumenon—including freedom, the divine, and the immortal soul—in order to compensate for the limits of sensible intuition. Simondon’s philosophical intuition is that which produces a coupling between sensible and intellectual intuition (if we assume that it exists and is accessible to human beings, as it is argued by philosophers after Kant: for example, Fichte, Schelling, and Mou Zongsan, among others), just as it does regarding concepts and ideas. The paradox is that this  In The Question Concerning Technology in China, I introduced the Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan’s (1909–1995) appropriation of Kant’s intellectual intuition, according to whom intellectual intuition is that which is beyond sensory knowing; it is an extension beyond sensible intuition to a form of knowing that foregrounds a moral cosmology. I am not equating Simondon’s philosophical intuition with Mou Zongsan’s, since Simondon literally rejected the identification of intellectual intuition with philosophical intuition. However, it is possible to see a resonance between the two, since both of them, in their concepts of intuition, are searching for the ground. In Chinese this ground is called benti (本體), which is often confused with ontology. 83  Simondon, On the Mode of Existence, 245. 82

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Unknown can never be known objectively, since when it is known it is no longer unknown and so no longer remains the absent other of the system, but rather becomes part of techno-science. We must emphasize that the Unknown is an epistemological category, not the mysterious ineffable thus named out of mere “laziness” or “irrationality.” If we put the divine, the Unknown, absolute contingency, incalculability, and even Dao into this category, it is not simply a gesture to affirm the irreducibility of life to physico-chemical activities, or of spirituality to matter, but also to suggest that it is necessary to rationalize the Unknown, which remains necessary for any system of knowledge in order to reframe the question of technology, so that technology will have a finality that is not a finality of use but rather a finality beyond usage. At this point, Simondon is close to Heidegger, and indeed invokes Heidegger: “[T]hought that recognizes the nature of technical reality is that which, going beyond separate objects—utensils—according to Heidegger’s expression, discovers the essence and reach of technical organisation, beyond separate objects and specialized occupations.”84 We are not, of course, equating Simondon with Heidegger here. However, this is also the precise moment when Simondon wants to construct a thought that recognizes technical reality, as when Heidegger wants to deviate from the Gestell of modern technology. A dialogue between Simondon and Heidegger is therefore revealing for a future philosophy of technology. Now, how is an epistemology of the Unknown possible at all? At first glance the question itself may appear contradictory. After all, the Unknown is unknown precisely because there is no way of knowing it, and if there is a way of knowing it, how can it still be Unknown? However, we remind ourselves here that it is the attempt to know the Unknown without really knowing it that constitutes the spirit of organic thinking from Kant to cybernetics. The difference is that in cybernetics the Unknown is ignored on the level of functioning, meaning that the Unknown is absent of function, while we want to take the Unknown as functional, which not only imposes constrains and limits on our comportment in the world, but also allows us to develop a nonexhaustive relation with the world and with technology. When I say that it is necessary to “rationalize” the Unknown, I don’t mean to suggest turning the Unknown into something ready-to-hand that we can grasp,

 Ibid., 230.

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like a glass of water in front of us, but rather constructing a plane of consistency that allows us to access the Unknown through the symbolic world that we have inherited and within which we live. The question of spirituality is always a question of symbols. It is frustrating when cognitivists want to demonstrate that it is possible to reach the spiritual by modifying neural activity, without realizing that it is the symbols that construct the cathedral rather than the mind alone. Noetic recursivity, through which the subject-object distinction is obliterated, is fundamentally a technical recursivity, which complexifies through the course of history and the evolution of symbolic systems. The seemingly mysterious Unknown or the Unknowable may be associated with what Heidegger calls Being.85 It is a response to the exhaustion raised by the constant conquest for the why of the sciences. In his seminar The Principle of Reason, Heidegger proposes two interpretations of Leibniz’s nihil est sine ratione (nothing is without reason), which Heidegger translates as Nihits ist ohne Grund. The first is logical: For any proposition—for example, “stupidity is evil”—to be true, there must be a necessary connection between the subject and the predicate, that is, a foundation of judgment. According to this reading we come to the first interpretation of the ground as ratio or account (Rechenschaft).86 The account is given to the human and to the human as a judging subject. In this judgment, the object has become a Gegenstand, which positions itself in front of the human and his or her point of view. The principle of reason now carries the following meaning, quoting Heidegger: “[E]very thing counts as existing when and only when it has been securely established as a calculable object for cognition.”87 This interpretation of the principle comes with modern technology,  During Heidegger’s encounter with René Char in 1955 in Ménilmontant in Paris, Jean Beaufret recalls that Char said to Heidegger: “Poetry doesn’t have remembrance [Andenken]. Man desires me always to go further to the Before [ins Voraus]—to the Unknown [Unbekannte].” Later in the night, after having gone back to his place, Heidegger told Beaufret: “[W]hat Char said is appropriate. It is the difference between thinking and poetry. Poetry goes always further to the Before, while thinking according to its essence is remembrance [An-denken]. Nevertheless, poetry remains for it an indispensable condition.” See Jean Beaufret, “In Frankreich,” in Martin Heidegger in Gespräch, ed. Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 247–48; for a more elaborated relation on poetry and the Unknown, please see Yuk Hui, “Rhythm and Technics: On Heidegger’s Commentary on Rimbaud,” Research in Phenomenology 47 (2017): 60–84. 86  Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 119. 87  Ibid., 120. 85

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because the latter is based on the calculability (Berechenbarkeit) of objects, and therefore the domination of the principle of reason determines the essence of the era of modern technology.88 If the first interpretation totalizes the ground as the account for the representation of beings, it exhausts being by rendering it calculable. And even if Heidegger did not talk about the figure, we can nevertheless see that calculability is another name for Gestell. It is the moment when the figure becomes its own ground, whereas this self-constitution is primarily a mode of exclusion.89 Heidegger also proposes a second reading of Leibniz’s principle. If in the first interpretation the emphasis is on nihil and sine; in the second interpretation it is the question of est and ratione that concerns us, that is, the question of Being. In this second interpretation the ground is—that is, the ground belongs to Being. The principle of reason thus evoked is no longer what reigns in the representation of beings, but a term of Being. What is this ground as Being? The ground is what answers the question why (warum; in German, weil), but it does not mean because, but whereas (dieweilen): “so long as . . . while.” Heidegger concludes that “whiling (weilen), tarrying (währen), perpetuating (immerwähren) is the old sense of the word ‘Being.’”90 This conclusion echoes his 1949 lecture The Question Concerning Technology, where the word essence is reinterpreted as what remains permanently (das Fortwährende).91 The central question of the ground for Heidegger is the preservation of Being. This ground is groundless, the Urgrund is the Ungrund or Abgrund, since it cannot be reached and seized as present-at-hand. One would be overwhelmed to realize that what one believed to be the ground turns out to be nothing but an abyss. Can humans believe in what cannot be verified while still being guided by it? Isn’t this a return to religion and to poetry, in the case of Heidegger, since the poet should anticipate the arrival of the Unknown (in a way, to expect the unexpected)? And isn’t this a conservative or a romantic rejection of what modern science succeeded in obliterating in order to liberate itself from the oppressions of  Ibid., 102.  Generally speaking we could also argue that the relation between the earth and the world that Heidegger invokes in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is also based on similar groundfigure relation; so also is that between Being and beings. 90  Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 127. 91  Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 30. 88 89

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illusory transcendence? Doesn’t the question of the Unknown lead us astray from the ground that modern science has promised us, in which what is free is rational and what is rational is free? However, what I mean by the rationalization of the Unknown or the unknowable carries a different meaning. It doesn’t mean reinstalling a Godlike transcendence, but rather preserving the instrumentality of technology and unifying it with the spirit, and at the same time going beyond technological instrumentality so that new forms of life and happiness can be perceived through new symbolic systems that allow the Unknown to be welcomed not only in the form of a sect, a religion, or New Age practices, but also manifest in scientific research and technological development, which no longer carry the name “modern science and technology.” Modern science and technology sees only the standing-reserve of the universe, and the possibility of exploring the secrets of the universe according to a materialist doctrine. This groundless ground, because of its virtuality, will be revealed, in one form or another, after a “hitting bottom” of the alcoholic moderns: Only a God can save us.

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Lightning steers the universe. —Heraclitus, Fragment 64

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima catastrophe of 2011, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy already saw the end of tragedy, the end of the longing for a postindustrial apocalypse, as well as the end of any wishful hope for a unified faith and wisdom: “We live no longer either in tragic meaning nor in what, with Christianity, was supposed to transport and elevate tragedy to divine salvation. Nor can we take refuge in any sort of Confucian, Taoist, or Buddhist wisdom: Equivalence does not allow it, despite all our good intentions.”1 The end arrives as an event and discloses the monstrosity of metaphysics. It is not that the earth is under attack. Whether by increasing its strength or mitigating its damages, it will be able to absorb these catastrophes—this is referred to as the resilience of the ecosystem. Rather, the gigantic force of technology is autosystematizing at all orders of magnitude—artificial intelligence, the internet of things, nanotechnology, biotechnology, drones, driver-free cars, smart cities, SpaceX—in the hope that one day, even if it exhausts the productivity of nature, it will enable itself to be self-fueled. The planetarization (in the sense of Heidegger)

 Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 8.

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means the invasion of technology into all beings, rendering them standing reserves, like the general equivalence (it is also in this sense that we understand what Nancy calls equivalence). This technological globalization, first of all, had to conquest the other systems of knowledge. The non-European cultures have to adopt the modern episteme, including its technological apparatus, so that such a gigantic system will be possible. As Heidegger has famously said in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964): “[T]he end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world. The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world-civilization based upon Western European thinking.”2 This “manipulable arrangement” (steuerbare Einrichtung) of the scientific-technological world means cybernetics. This age of ours has to be fundamentally distinguished from the tragic age and the apocalyptic age, which we shall identify with Greco-German and JudeoChristian thought, respectively. The catastrophic age, instead, is global, artificial—maybe we can also say superficial. As we know, now it is the time that algorithmic catastrophes will come one by one: climate change, flash crashes of the global financial markets, mass unemployment, and imminent cyber- and robot warfare. We are no longer dealing with a specific geographical culture; rather, we are now confronting a global culture brought about by technologies, which I described as the accomplishment of a global axis of time. However, it has not and probably will not realize the “hidden plan of nature” as perpetual peace. Reason arrives at a confused moment of its existence, and a nihilism emerges out of this context as the crisis of the Übermensch. Hence it is also a time when reason wants to seek its saving power in contingency, something that is not yet determined and that always remains indeterminable. At the same time, it is recognized that catastrophes can also be transitions toward a better future, since the perfection of technology depends largely on malfunctions and catastrophes: Without the shipwrecks there wouldn’t be better navigation technology; in other words, without failure and obstacles, there wouldn’t be any invention, and probably no science. The planetary convergence that we are witnessing today, and the governmentality that relies on recursive modeling, is no longer a metaphor, but is in the process of completing a superorganism in the sense of Teilhard de  Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 59.

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Chardin and Lovelock. Is this gigantic system going to impose more violent determinations on us, or will it offer a promise of freedom, as the transhumanists claim?3 We would like to come back to the question of determination after having discussed the concept of the margin of indetermination in Simondon’s thought, since in Simondon the margin of indetermination is a principle of machine design as well as of unpredetermined relations between human and machine. How can we approach the question of indetermination in the time of the organizing inorganic of technical systems? §39. POSTMODERNITY AND RECURSIVITY We will have to return to Kant’s third antinomy, already discussed at the beginning of chapter 1, concerning the tension between the laws of nature and freedom. Friedrich Schiller responds to Kant’s antinomy in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man,4 in which Schiller addresses not only the conflict between the sensual and the rational but also political faculties in view of the French Revolution5—namely, the terror of reason over individual freedom. These oppositions take another form in our time—that is to say, governance through algorithms and big data in opposition to individual freedom and desire. Schiller and Kant, of course, did not dream about the reign of machines in our time. Hegel probably has a sense of this, regarding the realization of the State; however, Hegel may not have imagined that the exteriorization of the spirit, in the name of reason, would be actualized in the algorithmic mode of governmentality today. For sure, one can argue about whether this form of reasoning in machines merits the name of reason, but the  Here we will have to refer to what Peter Thiel says, commenting on the political situation in the United States, namely, that he has realized that democracy and freedom are not compatible, since democracy delimits freedom (for example, the freedom of technological and territorial developments). Technological acceleration is capable of surpassing this incompatibility to realize freedom. See Peter Thiel, Education of a Libertarian, 2009, https​://ww​w.cat​ o-unb​ound.​org/2​009/0​4/13/​peter​-thie​l/edu​catio​n-lib​ertar​ian. 4  J. C. F. von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 5  Schiller was horrified by the Reign of Terror in France, especially after the execution of Louis XVI. In a letter dated February 8, 1793, Schiller wrote: “[T]he attempt of the French people . . . has plunged, not only that unhappy people itself, but a considerable part of Europe and a whole century, back into barbarism and slavery.” Quoted by Wilkinson and Willoughby in the introduction to On the Aesthetic Education of Man, xvii. 3

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fact is that recursive algorithms today have a flexibility and a capacity for self-organization and self-improvement that may have overwhelmed thinkers who still naively identified technology with the machines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In view of the above-mentioned antinomy, Schiller’s response is to construct a third. Schiller reformulates the opposition as an opposition between the material drive (Stufftribe), which is sensual, and the formal drive (Formtrieb), which is rational, and suggests a synthesis that he calls play drive (Spieltrieb). The drive of play is a synthesis that, rather than attempting to eliminate any of these two opposing drives, instead renders them contingent, and later necessary, by preserving both. We know that it is this double movement of preservation and elevation that inspires Hegel’s Aufhebung. The play drive, as I would like to argue, is organological, since it attempts to preserve and integrate the two opposing forces into a synthesized force. Schiller’s aesthetic education is still significant today, since his questioning and argumentation could be restaged in our time by considering the displacement of the concept of nature by the concept of the technical system. Schiller proposed to overcome this opposition through aesthetic education, which is also the formation or education of sensibility (Ausbildung des Empfindungsvermögens). Aesthetic education allows the reconciliation between necessity and contingency, the inscription of the infinite in the finite, which has the aim of fully realizing humanity. As Schiller says in Letter 25, “[S]o it is through the unification of both natures, the possibility of inscribing the infinite in the finite, and therefore the possibility of the sublime humanity is demonstrated.”6 Whether Schiller is a philosopher is not our question; however, his attempt deserves to be reformulated and recontextualized. First, it could be read in parallel with Schelling’s system of human freedom, which cannot be completely separated from evil. Second, the realization of humanity could be read in parallel with Lyotard’s concept of the inhuman. Retrospectively, we would like to reconstruct Lyotard’s critique of the concept of system as an attempt to address our concern here, not only because Lyotard has been largely underestimated but also because he remains a prophet of our time.

 See Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, letter 25.

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It seems to me that Lyotard’s writing between his 1979 The Postmodern Condition7 and his 1988 The Inhuman: Reflections on Time— passing by his Le Different in 1983 and notably his exhibition Les Immatériaux in 1985—could be read in terms of the philosopher’s constant reflections on the promise and problematic of the postmodern characterized by the dominance of system. The postmodern embodies an irreducible duality. Like the sublime, it has its positive side—namely, the liberation from the modern concept of order and hierarchy—yet on the other hand it is also characterized by a certain autonomous operation or self-legitimation that constitutes a new paradigm of knowledge production, which Lyotard refers to as system. One may have to admit that the actual status of the production of knowledge and technological development has not yet surpassed what Lyotard envisaged in the first pages of The Postmodern Condition. For sure, it will also be problematic if we believe that we remain in the historical moment that was called the postmodern forty years ago. This demands further reflection on Lyotard’s fundamental critique of technology, in order to understand what is at stake today. Regarding Lyotard’s critique of system, we must first of all clarify an ambiguity in Lyotard’s interpretation of Kant’s reflective judgment. Lyotard is a very careful reader of Kant, especially the Critique of Judgment. It is no exaggeration to say that reflective judgment is the key to Lyotard’s discourse on the postmodern and on art in general. As Lyotard claims, reflective judgment is that which allows Kant to unify the field of philosophy (natural and moral) by “making manifest, in the name of aesthetic, the reflective manner of thinking that is at work in the critical text as a whole.”8 Lyotard calls this reflective judgment, the passage from the particular to the universal, heuristics—a term now often used technically in artificial intelligence, designating a technique for solving a problem when classical methods are too slow. This heuristic process is controlled by the state indicated by sensation. Lyotard takes a rather machinic metaphor here: Heuristic is “the transcendental activity of thought” and sensation is that which “informs thought of its state.”9

  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).  Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, §§23–29 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 8. 9  Ibid., 8–9. 7

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The use of terms such as heuristic, state, and information resembles a modern recursive machine. In chapter 1 we attempted to characterize Kantian reflective judgment as a preliminary model of recursivity, which is the foundation of both aesthetic and teleological judgment. The further development of recursivity led us away from the historical debate between mechanism and vitalism, which we can formulate in the following way: Mechanism implies a repetition of the same, which reduces life to physico-chemical equations. Vitalism implies a repetition of difference, while this repetition is the expression of a vital force that, whether it be it an entelechy or élan vital, remains mysterious. These two are, as Scott Gilbert mocks, the bad companions of organicism.10 We have also seen why the notion of recursivity in modern computational machines is what gives rise to the fantasy of machine intelligence or machine consciousness, since recursion functions like a soul, which comes back to itself in order to know itself, while in every moment of reaching out it encounters contingencies. In the 1950s, Simondon already observed the emergence of a different cognitive scheme from the Cartesian one. The Cartesian cognitive scheme is mechanical, presupposing linear causal relations—“the ‘long chains of reasons’ carry out a ‘transport of evidence’ from the premises to the conclusion, just like a chain carries out a transfer of forces from the anchoring point to the last link”11—while the concept of feedback in cybernetics introduced a new temporal structure, one that was no longer based on a linear form but was rather more like that of a spiral. In this schema the path toward the telos is no longer static but rather a constant self-regulatory process, which Simondon himself described as “an active adaptation to a spontaneous finality.”12 When we said that there is an ambiguity, this is because Kant presents reflective judgment as a heuristic that leads to a unification of the field of philosophy, similar to what Wiener’s “feedback” wants to achieve for all scientific disciplines. In other words, it is the manner through which a systems theory is possible, as we demonstrated earlier. At the same time, reflective judgment seems to be a mechanism of antisystem for Lyotard. This is where the ambiguity lies: It is what makes  Scott Gilbert, “Embracing Complexity: Organicism for the 21st Century,” in Developmental Dynamics 219, no. 1 (September 2000): 1–9. 11  Gilbert Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia 7 (2009): 17. 12  Ibid., 18. 10

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the system possible, while it is at the same time antisystemic. How can this be possible at all? We won’t be able to answer this question immediately, but it is necessary to point out the paradox here. When we say that reflective judgment is antisystemic, it is for two reasons. First of all, reflective logic is superior to categorical logic. As Kant already said in the appendix to the Critique of Pure Reason titled “Amphiboly of Concept of Reflection,” reflection (deliberation, reflexio) doesn’t mean deriving concepts from objects directly but is rather the state of mind in which we discover the “subjective conditions under which [alone] we can arrive at concepts.”13 Reflection is not limited by the categories or pure concepts. It is rather that which supplements the transcendental categories. Kant in the above-mentioned appendix shows that given two drops of water with the same properties, one will not be able to discern them from each other as discrete entities just according to the function of the categories, since the two drops of water are logically the same. It is only with transcendental reflection that the difference is shown, under four headings: identity/difference, agreement/opposition, inner/outer, determinable/ determination. For Lyotard, therefore, reflection pushes the determination of the categories aside without completely negating them: If reflection thus supplements the category, it must have at its disposal a principle of subjective discrimination that belongs to no faculty, but that enables to restore the legitimate limits of the faculty by exploring the confines they dispute. . . . Thus refection retains only the notion of an empty legality of the theoretical use of pure concepts (“type”: KRV, 70–74; 79–84) by prohibiting the content of what reflection brings together from being determined.14

It may seem that Lyotard still sees the system as a mechanical one, like that which is composed of mere determining phrases. As we know, however, that is not the case. Lyotard was aware of cybernetics, especially second-order cybernetics. Throughout his later writings he was very critical of the concept of system, as well as the systems theory fashioned in sociology by Luhmann. Luhmann’s systems theory

 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), A261, B317. 14  Lyotard, Lessons, 40. 13

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presents a different cognitive scheme from the mechanical system, and it is exactly this “advancement” that is the target of Lyotard’s critique: In the work of contemporary German theorists, systemtheorie is technocratic, even cynical, not to mention despairing: the harmony between the needs and hopes of individuals or groups and the functions guaranteed by the system is now only a secondary component of its functioning. The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output—in other words, performativity.15

The system is a self-organizing totality recursively optimizing the global and local relations between the parts and the whole. Luhmann himself also uses the recursive model to describe the postmodern: As he says toward the end of his The Society of Society—the title is already recursive—“[I]f one conceives of postmodern descriptions as operating within realms of self-produced indeterminacy, then one immediately sees parallels to other trends in science that deal with mathematics, cybernetics, systems theory, or with the characteristics of self-referentially and recursively operating machines.”16 Complexity is produced by “repetitive operations that follow on from a self-generated initial state and continue it with every operation as a starting point for further operations.”17 How, then, did Lyotard see in reflective judgment an antisystemic potential? The most straightforward answer is that reflection demonstrates a critique against mechanical systems. However, this would remain an outdated critique that Lyotard himself wants to reproach. A more subtle answer, according to Lyotard, is the sublime. The sublime, as we will discuss later in this chapter, is the grounding sentiment of the postmodern. The sublime is like the incomputable of the Kantian machine: When the recursive algorithm is no longer able to arrive at a halting state, it instead triggers a violent reaction. In other words, it is a failure of the understanding and the imagination alone to produce a representation of the sublime object. Such a failure requires the intervention of reason to stop the process by imposing violence on  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 11.  Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellshaft Band II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 1146, italics added; cited also by Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 196. 17  Ibid. 15 16

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the imagination. We may refer to the example, given by Kant himself, of encountering an Egyptian pyramid: When we are too close to it our gaze always rests on successive apprehensions (Auffassung) without being able to comprehend (Zusammenfassen) the pyramid as a unity.18 Lyotard identifies the sublime with the avant-garde when he says that “for the last century, the arts have not had the beautiful as their main concern, but something which has to do with the sublime.”19 The sublime is, for Lyotard, that which is not representable—the unrepresentable, or, in machine language, the incomputable. But again, it is not the ineffable, since there is an interest in the sublime in Kant, as Lyotard discovered. Kant says that the sublime “indicates in general nothing purposive in nature itself, but merely in that possible use [Gebrauch] of our intuitions of it by which there is produced in us a feeling of a purposiveness quite independent of nature.”20 This feeling of a purposiveness Kant calls respect (Achtung). The term Gebrauch is often translated as use or usage, but Lyotard says that it also means abuse and subreption.21 We will come back to the question of sensibility and the sublime later. At this point we can say that the interest in the sublime is an appropriation of the conflict between faculties—the appropriation of the failure, the impossible. We will now return to the question of the system. Lyotard sees systems theory coming from cybernetics as a powerful thinking of governance and social regulation, but he refuses to see it as a philosophical system: “[S]ystems theory is not a philosophical system but a description of reality, a so-called reality [die sogenannte Wirklichkeit] that has become entirely describable in terms of general physics, which stretches from astrophysics to particle physics . . . and of course also in economic terms.”22 However, it remains doubtful how this is not a  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), §26.  Jean-François Lyotard, “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 135. 20  Kant, Critique of Judgment, §23, B78/A77; cited in Jean-François Lyotard, “Interest of the Sublime,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 125. 21  Lyotard, Lessons, 70. 22  Jean-François Lyotard, Towards the Postmodern, trans. Robert Harvey and Mart Roberts (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 98; also cited by Ashley Woodward, Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism, Information and Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 85. 18

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philosophical system, as I want to show in this work, when later we will see that Lyotard himself, like Heidegger, admits the close relationship between cybernetics and metaphysics. I would like to address this commentary from Lyotard and to extend it to our discussion on the human-machine condition concerning both the legitimation of knowledge and the emergence of technical systems. Lyotard sees clearly a shift from de jure to de facto: namely, that the normativity of laws is replaced by the performativity of procedures. Facts, instead of laws, define norms: This led Luhmann to hypothesize that in postindustrial societies the normativity of laws is replaced by the performativity of procedures. “Context control,” in other words, performance improvement won at the expense of the partner or partners constituting that context (be they “nature” or men), can pass for a kind of legitimation. De facto legitimation.23

This critique of the replacement of de jure by de facto consists in the shift of the production of knowledge in the sense that knowledge—or, in a rather narrow sense, truth—is no longer produced by authorities but rather by the induction of facts. In an article published in 2008 titled “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,”24 Chris Anderson, editor of the magazine Wired, has already proposed that in the age of big data there is no need of theory since algorithms and big data will be able to generate theoretical models, thereby announcing the end of theory. More than ten years later, with the proliferation of deep learning, this tends to be more and more the case concerning the use of big data in both the natural and social sciences. This raises precisely the question of knowledge today, since we all know that if knowledge were reducible to calculability and to fact, this would only be a very limited conception. As Lyotard already says: “Knowledge [savoir] in general cannot be reduced to science, nor even to learning [connaissance]. Learning is the set of statements which, to the exclusion of all other statements, denote or describe objects and may be declared true or false.”25

 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 46–47.  Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 27, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory. 25  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 18. 23 24

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The rejection of the notion of knowledge as reducible to science and calculation is an attempt to show that there is knowledge such as savoir faire, savoir vivre, and savoir-écouter that are beyond the realm of scientific knowledge. Stiegler seems to have gone a step further in this respect by showing that savoir faire is necessary for savoir vivre, and that therefore the deprivation of savoir faire is a form of proletarianization, which problematizes existence by undermining the means of subsistence. The shift in the sense of knowledge in the era of digital automation underlines a delegation of knowledge production and decision making to machines. Lyotard says that “the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government.”26 The organic totality of the system that is based on recursivity is realized through different technological schemes (such as the smart city, the internet of things, etc.), which characterize a planetary computation. In chapter 4 we named the new faculty of the machine to anticipate tertiary protention. The preemption of the tertiary protention is possible only because of the computational hermeneutics, which is essentially recursive: It constantly evaluates the past in order to anticipate the future, which in turn determines the present. Human beings are reintegrated into the temporality of machines, not only as individuals but also as collectives and communities. This is precisely what is called algorithmic governmentality.27 It seems to me that in order to intervene into this new temporal structure today, it is necessary (while we have to do it elsewhere) to redefine savoir faire—or, more precisely, savoir technique—in today’s system of knowledge production. Besides theoretical discourse on the question of recursivity and social systems in the work of Niklas Luhmann and Heinz von Foerster, who also gives another name to recursion—“non-trivial machines” (ironically, Lyotard also calls cybernetic information theory trivial)28—we have attempted to show that such discourses are gradually materialized through the implementation and distribution of smart objects, neuronetworks in urbanism, and the use of smart devices in order to access  Ibid., 9.  See Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns, “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation: Le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation?” Réseaux, no. 177 (2013/1): 163–96. I fear that the lack of attention to the concept and mechanism of recursion is the weakness of this discourse. 28  Ibid., 16: “[T]he trivial cybernetic version of information theory misses something of decisive importance, to which I have already called attention: the agonistic aspect of society.” 26 27

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infrastructures. In this process of the totalization of the technological system, the immediate effect is the process of desymbolization through the establishment of inter-objective relations and resymbolization within the technical system, as Jacques Ellul pointed out in his Le système technicien.29 When Ellul says that “on the one hand, man’s inherent power of symbolizing is excluded; on the other hand, all consumption is symbolic,”30 he means that symbols that connect humans to nature and allow them to master nature in a nonviolent way slowly give way to technology, and finally lead to a resymbolization of the technical system in which symbols are no longer linked to nature but to commodities. The social system is not separable from the technical system. Indeed the technical system is the support of the social system, not only in terms of communication but also in terms of organization. The social system is not reducible to the technical system, though this reduction is taking place rapidly at the moment. Written two years after Ellul’s Technological System, Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition also hints at the realization of totalized technical systems when he says that “the growth of power, and its self-legitimation, are now taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operativity of information.”31 The realization of this system is for Lyotard the continuation of the concept of development, which is a metaphysics without finality: “[W]e are in an Umwelt that is the realization of metaphysics as a general physics under the name of cybernetics.”32 Lyotard here takes up both Heidegger’s verdict on the status of cybernetics and Luhmann’s systems theory, which is the avatar of a “general physics.”33 Cybernetics realizes metaphysics, makes metaphysics reality, and establishes its right over thinking.34 What is left for metaphysics is to incorporate the outside as its inside, to exclude itself as the dominant thinking. For systems theorists the task is not to get out of the system but rather how to optimize the system by modulating its performativity and increasing

 See Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), chap. 4. 30  Jacques Ellul, The Technological System (London: Continuum, 1980), 177. 31  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 47. 32  Lyotard, Towards the Postmodern, 101; also cited by Woodward, Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition, 86. 33  Woodward, Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition, 83. 34  Lyotard, The Inhuman, 6. 29

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its capacity for resilience based on feedback.35 Therefore, when modern leftists lament that there is no longer any outside, they become the true metaphysicians. The opposition between engineering and the humanities can be caricatured as an opposition between positivism and hermeneutics, or between efficiency and reflexivity, but such a distinction, as Lyotard already noted while commenting on the Frankfurt School, is not acceptable,36 for the solution proposed by the latter “is no longer relevant” in postmodern societies, since this opposition ceases to function as a critical apparatus.37 §40. TECHNOSPHERE OR CHRISTOGENESIS Instead of seeing cybernetics as a nonphilosophical system, in this work I have been attempting to show that cybernetics is fundamentally a metaphysical project. The passage from nature to logic, from the organized inorganic to the organizing inorganic, is staged as a conceptual conflict between form and matter. However, this has not been presented as the triumph of one over the other, since they are not separable. It is only in our archaic epistemology that form and matter are separated, and this conflict is interpreted as a philosophical melodrama. With the organizing inorganic, where are the humans heading with their technologies? For decades we have been talking about an intelligence explosion, superintelligence, the technological singularity, a foreseeable technological utopia in which genetic engineering, human enhancement, and immortality are promised. Speculation concerning what comes after the human has been widely discussed. The emergence of x-humanisms, whether this x be post- or trans-, attempts to point to a definite future in which humans can be either saved by a posthuman ethics or by advanced technologies. On the one hand, the posthuman gives us an impression of liberation, of freeing ourselves from the older category of the human. On the other hand, this “being liberated” is nothing other than the fact that humans have become obsolete in relation to

 See, for example, the work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 17. 37  Ibid., 15; it “is no longer relevant for the societies with which we are concerned and that the solution itself is still caught within a type of oppositional thinking that is out of step with the most vital modes of postmodern knowledge.” 35 36

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their own products, as Günther Anders has described in his The Obsolescence of Man.38 I am very sympathetic with posthuman discourse and with the idea that the humanities must fight against any anthropocentrism for what the Italian theorist Rosi Braidotti calls posthumanities.39 However, certain forms of posthuman discourse also betray a naive attitude toward technology, seeing it simply as secondary to a “true” and “good” posthuman ontology, as if all oppositions can be neatly resolved by a theoretical canon, whether this be a process philosophy or a relational ontology, while completely ignoring the transformation of machine-organism relations that we have endeavored to illuminate. Transhumanists, on the other hand, take an opposite position and exploit technology to an extreme. They embrace functionalism (seeing the human as composed of functions that can be improved individually) and an interdisciplinary program for human enhancement, including information technology, computer science, cognitive science and neuroscience, neural-computer interface research, materials science, artificial intelligence, regenerative medicine and life extension, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.40 They emphasize the importance of technology as a means to extropia (as opposed to the “static utopia”), an open-ended perfection of the human species.41 There is an ambiguity between the terms transhuman and posthuman. For example, transhumanists like Nick Bostrom see the transhuman as a form of the posthuman, which possesses some posthuman capacities transcending the limits of the human (for example, life span, cognition, and emotion).42 We may recognize that the transhuman sounds like a typical “scientific humanism,”43 and indeed it is a humanism under the  See Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Bd. I: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, and Bd. II: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1956, 1980). 39  Rossi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity, 2013). 40  Max More, “The Philosophy of Transhuman,” in The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, ed. Max More and Natasha Vita-More (Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 4–5. 41  Ibid. 42  Nick Bostrom, “Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up,” in The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, ed. Max More and Natasha Vita-More (Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 29. 43  Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “The Artificialization of Life: Designing Self-Organisation,” in The Science, Politics and Ontology of Life, ed. Scott Campbell and Paul W. Bruno (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 78–92; it is interesting to notice that in this passage Dupuy also referred to Anders and Hannah Arendt.

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guise of a posthumanism. We want to point out that the posthuman cannot be defined according to a simple divide between a clean posthumanities and an outdated humanism,44 so the transhuman cannot be seen as an enthusiastic open transhumanism opposing a closed dualist humanism. However, here we would like to question the notion of humanity before we justify distancing ourselves from it. Carl Schmitt, in his The Concept of the Political, claims that “the concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.”45 What Schmidt is saying here deserves our attention, since the term humanity itself is problematic and any attempt to define a new future for humanity seems to be a form of cheating. Schiller was able to talk about the realization of humanity since Enlightenment humanism was necessary for his epoch, while after more than two hundred years we will have to face a new politics announced as the end of the Enlightenment.46 This politics concerns not so much human nature as inhumanity. Humanist discourse continues, and it is indicated by a political theology that entails a rather simplistic conception of world history, which we can analyze as a linear progress from premodern → modern → postmodern → apocalypse. This Judeo-Christian eschatology seems to be a dominating discourse in which science and technology will bring forward a system that is more and more favorable for human existence while it will finally confront self-destruction, and what remains is the salvation or the completion of world history as theodicy. It is not without surprise to see that this end of history resonates with the concept of the Homo deus, since by then theodicy will be indicated by transformation of humanity into a kingdom of gods. The author of Homo Deus introduces dataism, a human-algorithm reduction; in the name of “life science,” dataism claims that:

 Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 7–8 (2006): 197–208. 45  Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54. 46  Henry A. Kissinger, “How the Enlightenment Ends,” Atlantic, June 2018, https​://ww​w.the​ atlan​tic.c​om/ma​gazin​e/arc​hive/​2018/​06/he​nry-k​issin​ger-a​i-cou​ld-me​an-th​e-end​-of-h​uman-​ histo​ry/55​9124.​ 44

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1. Organisms are algorithms, and humans are not individuals—they are “dividuals”; that is, humans are an assemblage of many different algorithms lacking a single inner voice or a single self. 2. The algorithms constituting a human are not free. They are shaped by genes and environmental pressures, and take decisions either deterministically or randomly—but not freely. 3. It follows that an external algorithm could theoretically know me much better than I can ever know myself. . . . Once developed, such an algorithm could replace the voter, the customer, and the beholder. Then the algorithm will know best, the algorithm will always be right, and beauty will be in the calculations of the algorithm.47 The transhumanist tone, claiming insight from “life science,” has already pointed to the future of humanity, which can be reduced to artificial intelligences governed by a superintelligence that knows anything and everything. We can find a similar argument in Teilhard’s concept of the noosphere. The noosphere will finally lead to the realization of a superorganism: the Brain of all brains. Through the systematization and planetarization of tools—especially automation—it will finally lead to the complete liberation of human beings from production—or, in economic terms, mass unemployment. Teilhard doesn’t see this mass unemployment as a danger but rather as the possibility of the realization of humanity. Like Schiller, who was concerned by the determination and domination of reason, Teilhard was also obliged to address the question of freedom. He distinguishes two types of freedom: individual freedom and collective freedom. The realization of the technical system as a superorganism may undermine individual freedom, but it also realizes collective freedom: “One might put it that determinism appears at either end of the process of cosmic evolution, but in antithetically opposed forms: at the lower end it is forced along the line of the most probable for lack of freedom; at the upper end it is an ascent into the improbable through the triumph of freedom.”48 Teilhard avoids a crucial problem here: What really is “collective freedom,” and how can it justify the sacrifice of individual freedom?  Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Vintage, 2016), 367. 48  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Image Books, 2004), 178. 47

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Is it not similar to the argument of “collectivism” that we have seen in former communist regimes? And further, what precisely is meant by “convergence”? We have seen in chapter 4 what Simondon calls convergence, which is not the convergence facilitated by transport and communications network, but rather to reattach the figure to the ground. But maybe at the end, for Teilhard, the question of the future of humankind is fundamentally a theological one, as he indicated in a note in the text we cited above titled “The Formation of the Noosphere,” published in Revue des Questions Scientifiques: “The description of the Noosphere and its attendant biology, as here propounded, is no more opposed to the Divine Transcendence, to Grace, to the Incarnation or to the ultimate Parousia, than is the science of paleontology to the Creation, or of embryology to the First Cause. The reverse is true.”49 What Teilhard said concerning the process of evolution and the realization of the superorganism is now much easier to imagine than when he wrote it in the first half of the twentieth century. Today this image is reinforced by the fantasy of the technological singularity, in which the speed of technological development will be indicated by a vertical acceleration. We may say then say that this is a true completion of humanity, since there will no longer be a sharp distinction between the finite and the infinite. In a review of The Phenomenon of Man titled “Cosmologist of the future,” Joseph Needham called Teilhard “the greatest prophet of this age.”50 He admired Teilhard’s work and regarded the “convergent integration” (a term that was employed by Julian Huxley in his preface to The Phenomenon of Man) of the superorganism or superbrain as the most original point of the book, which could be seen as a “Christogenesis”: [T]ime is also of the essence; there was a time when there were atoms but no molecules, later on there were nucleoprotein molecules but no living cells, later fishes but no mammals, later man but no co-operative commonwealth. What are these propositions? Simply, the view of the universe held by the overwhelming majority of working scientists in our age. Implicit in it is the conviction that social evolution is continuous with biological evolution, and therefore that what materialist theologians have

 Ibid., 149, n.1.  Joseph Needham, “Preface to Ursula King,” in Ursula King, Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions (New York: Seabury, 1980), xi.

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called the kingdom of God on Earth is not a desperate hope but a sure development with all the authority of evolution behind it.51

However, in the spirit of eschatology one may ask: Is this completion of humanity a revelation or a catastrophic becoming? We are asking this question, as most of the sci-fi movies do, since we are living in an epoch of technological uncertainty and instability. Cybernetics, the accomplishment of metaphysics, is the force unifying “humanity” through globalization and neocolonization. In other words, we can use the vocabulary of Gestalt psychology in claiming that technology becomes the ground instead of the figure. The noosphere becomes the most dominating sphere on earth, overriding the biosphere. The system is an indication (or the Absolute in the Hegelian sense) of the evolution of science and humanity,52 but it doesn’t necessarily take the form that Schiller envisaged in terms of artistic creation. Any future philosophy that ignores the question of system is fundamentally deficient. §41. INHUMAN CONTRA SYSTEM We would now like to return to Lyotard’s critique of system and to offer a reinterpretation of his concept of the inhuman. It is important to bear in mind that the form of resistance Lyotard is talking about here is not a humanist critique but rather inhumanist. The concept of system poses a major problem to Lyotard and is one of the main features of postmodern society. If systemic thinking becomes dominant, it is because it shows itself to be a better explanation of the efficient cause and the final cause. It is against system that Lyotard proposes the concept of the inhuman. The inhuman is the leading concept of his collection of essays and conference presentations that he delivered to  Joseph Needham, “Cosmologist of the Future,” in Biosphere and Noosphere Reader, ed. Paul R. Samson (London: Routledge, 2002), 86. It should be noted that Needham also presided over the Teilhard Center for the Future of Man in London. However, Needham in this review was also critical of Teilhard’s ignorance of the literature on organicism—for example, Whitehead, Lawrence J. Henderson, Lloyd Morgan, and Samuel Alexander’s concept of emergent evolution—but more significant is his ignorance of Chinese organicist thought, though Teilhard was also famous for his archeological work at the Zhoukoudian of China with P’ei Wen-Chung (or Pei Wenzhong). 52  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 43–44. 51

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a general audience: The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Although it is not written for specialists, The Inhuman remains one of the most important publications of Lyotard, since it also allows him the freedom to speculate on some themes that appear “too dialectical to take seriously.”53 The systemic becoming is the inhuman, since it owes its metaphysical root to development; it is the mastery of human being over all beings: The striking thing about this metaphysics of development is that it needs no finality. Development is not attached to an Idea, like that of the emancipation of reason and of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. It assimilates contingencies [hasards], memorizes their informational value and uses this as a new mediation necessary to its functioning. It has no other necessity than a cosmological chance [hasard].54

How should we understand the two occurrences of the word hasard in this passage? We rendered the first as contingency, because becoming system means precisely the capacity to assimilate contingencies into its operation. That is to say, contingency is not something destructive that interrupts the causalities of the system, but rather that which allows the system to empower its internal dynamic. We render the second occurrence of hasard as chance or accident, since in such a system there is no longer any difference between necessity and contingency, as what we tried to demonstrate with Schelling’s concept of nature. Recursion extends from the mechanism of nature to the mechanism of the machine, the mechanism of capital and now the mechanism of globalized culture. Development, as Lyotard continues, “has thus no end, but it does have a limit, the expectation of the life of the sun.”55 What is meant by an endlessness with a limit, an affirmative negation? This brings us to the famous essay in the collection, “Can Thought Go On without a Body?” This essay is a conversation between a female interlocutor and a male philosopher. It starts with an event, which is the explosion of the sun in 4.5 billion years’ time that will put an end to all organic life, an event after which nothing is thinkable—an event that Lyotard himself coins

 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 57.  Ibid., 7; translation modified. 55  Ibid. 53 54

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solar catastrophe and Ray Brassier considers to be the ultimate challenge to what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.”56 The destruction of all organic life points to the only possibility for the survival of the human, which is the separation between body and mind, between hardware and software. This metaphor of software and hardware is technological, but it is also not a metaphor because it is a research agenda that covers everything from dietetics, neurophysiology, genetics, and tissue synthesis to particle physics, astrophysics, electronics, information science, and nuclear physics.57 The search for the separation between thinking and organic life is a response to the prospect of solar catastrophe, since the central question is, how is it possible to survive without an organic form of life? Or, as Lyotard puts it: “[H]ow to provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth?”58 This is a negative organology, or an extreme humanism. It is negative since it is based on a total negation of the organic and on the belief that there is a possibility, no matter how small it might be, of replacing the organic body with an inorganic artifice for the survival of thinking. Lyotard, through the incarnation of a female interrogator called Him, implicitly goes back to the recursive structure of organization and the possibility that such a recursive algorithm could be independent from the organic body: Most of all: [human]’s equipped with a symbolic system that’s both arbitrary (in semantics and syntax), letting it be less dependent on an immediate environment, and also “recursive” (Hofstadter), allowing it to take into account (above and beyond raw data) the way it has of processing such data. . . . Isn’t that exactly what constitutes the basis of your transcendence in immanence?59

The notion of recursivity is raised here, but Lyotard does not explore the relation between recursivity and reflective judgment further. He did not understand the concept of recursion, just as he had already dismissed information theory in cybernetics for its “triviality” earlier in his The Postmodern Condition. Here he is prepared to reject this thesis  Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008).  Lyotard, The Inhuman, 12. 58  Ibid., 13. 59  Ibid., 12. 56

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by invoking Hubert Dreyfus, whose What Computers Cannot Do? A Critique of Artificial Reason (1972) challenged the research in artificial intelligence (AI) of that time as being too Cartesian in the sense that AI reduces intelligence to a very limited way of knowing. This could be briefly explained with what in classical AI or “Good Old-Fashioned AI” (GOFAI) is called the frame problem, which is about the AI’s description of the world. In order to know an event or an environment, the AI will have to produce a huge amount of descriptions. However, it remains very difficult to contextualize these descriptions. It is Cartesian because, in this form of knowing, everything is merely present-at-hand in the sense of Heidegger, while it ignores the fact that in the preoccupations of everyday life Dasein encounters situations that are readyto-hand and have to do with embodiment and intuition. The rejection of reducing thinking to a binary form is also a rejection of the separation between body and mind. The philosopher, who is challenged in this dialogue, is also a phenomenologist. He has to defend the importance of the body and of sexuality, since without the body and without sexuality, can thinking exist at all? Brassier has nicely summarized the perspectives of the two interrogators: one for which the inseparability between thought and its material substrate necessitates separating thought from its rootedness in organic life in general, and the human organism in particular; another according to which it is the irreducible separation of the sexes that renders thought inseparable from organic embodiment, and human embodiment specifically.60

If becoming system presents a negativity for Lyotard, this is because it is based on a negative organology, which ignores the question of life and existence. And if Lyotard here invokes this negativity, it is because he wants to think through the question of resistance, as he asks in his introduction: “[W]hat else remains as ‘politics’ except resistance to this inhuman?” This resistance is also inhuman since the negative inhuman doesn’t occupy the totality of this concept. Like the sublime, the inhuman also has its double, as Lyotard emphasizes: “The inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under the name of  Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 224.

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development (among others) must not be confused with the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage.”61 The inhuman is truly posthuman in the sense that it considers the dissolution of the human as messages, waves, particles, and cells. However, the inhuman is not transhuman. Although the inhuman shares the negativity of the transhuman—that is to say, it is imprisoned by the fanaticism of development or technological singularity—at the same time it resists such negativity not by rejecting a human-machine hybridity but by rejecting the tendency imposed by a transhumanist ideology that is motivated by the anticipation of the solar catastrophe and desire of inorganic immortality. What is meant by “the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage”? Ashley Woodward identifies the double of the inhuman by suggesting that the negative inhuman can be identified with nihilism, and further that art is the second sense of the inhuman.62 However, I have strong reservations about this second observation since this is too narrow and it does not seem to be what Lyotard was referring to, though it is interesting here to consider in art the potential of overcoming the determination of the system. If the soul is the hostage of the inhuman, it is because the inhuman is like its preindividual reality as well as its call. It is like water to fish: Even though the latter live in the former, it remains transparent to it. This inhuman cannot be reduced to calculation and to representation. The possible explanation of seeing an intimacy between art and the inhuman is that art sends the system back to a primordial creativity in order to undo the totalization of the system. It is clearer when we refer to Lyotard’s reading of Augustine. However, instead of discussing his The Confession of Augustine, I will instead make a short-cut by referring to an episode of a TV program called Apostrophes that was broadcast on the January 9, 1981. I transcribe part of the lengthy conversation below. JFL: You remember that in the eleventh book that you cited, and that you remember, those confessions, there is this formula, it is a god more interior in myself than me, that is what I make allusion to, what Wilson searches, it is that, isn’t it? There is something in me which is more interior in myself than me, well, this what I call the inhuman, I have

 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 2.  Woodward, Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition, 166.

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the right, it is perfectly clear, in fact, because it is just something with which I will never arrive at having . . . Interrogator: Vulgarly, when we employ the word inhuman, we think about the horrible, appalling, cruel, and detestable, we don’t think about interior being which unfolds . . . JFL: You do it on purpose! Interrogator: But I am not philosopher, I am journalist, I am a bit flat.63

Lyotard sometimes refers to this inhuman “which is more interior in myself than me,” as la chose or the child, which carries within it the antidote to the negative inhuman. However, these two inhumans are not completely separate, since the latter is also partially a condition for the former, without which the positive inhuman remains merely an element of theology, meaning that there is only one mode of rationalization of the Unknown through God. The logical sense of the inhuman is exemplified in Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gödel, since both logicians refused the subordination to positivism. Like Gödel, who shows the incompleteness of any logical system in terms of proof, for his part Wittgenstein “did not opt for the positivism that was being developed by the Vienna Circle, but outlined in his investigation of language games a kind of legitimation not based on performativity.”64 The positive inhuman is that which resists systematization and reduction to calculation. The question is, how can we articulate the question of the inhuman, which is not hermeneutic, and not reflexive, without returning to theology or mysticism? The concept of the inhuman (like the Unknown) should be considered an organological concept rather than a theological one since it is not necessarily the transcendent God. Lyotard rejects the reduction of thinking to algorithms or to the determination of any technological system, but he doesn’t explicitly reject technology. In some places the intimacy between technology and culture as modes of inscription is the

 “La postmodernité,” Apostrophes, broadcast January 9, 1989, INA, available online at http://www.ina.fr/video/CPC89002053; translation rendered by Robin Mackay. 64  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 40. 63

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condition under which thinking is possible, and this condition always carries a negative dimension such as incompleteness, lack, or obstacle: [W]e think in a world of inscriptions already there. Call this culture if you like. And if we think, this is because there’s still something missing in this plenitude and room has to be made for this lack by making the mind a blank, which allows the something else remaining to be thought to happen. But this can only “emerge” as already inscribed in its turn.65

There is something that presents itself as a lack, which hurts the already thought as plenitude, since it suspends the already thought in order to allow something new to come. Like the leaving of blank margins in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and painting, the empty is what completes the fullness; the empty is already inscribed. I would like to return to what we discussed in the previous chapter regarding the rationalization of the incalculable or the unknowable, though here Lyotard may use the terms unpresentable or unthinkable. The transcendence would be challenged by the transhumanists: What could not be thought by a superintelligence? And if all is already inscribed in the superintelligence, there is no longer an unthought. Does it also mean that there will be no longer any thinking, and no longer anything contingent? §42. CONTINGENCY AFTER SYSTEM, OR TECHNODIVERSITY In Toward the Postmodern, after having said that we are “in an Umwelt that is the realization of metaphysics as a general physics under the name of cybernetics,” Lyotard continues: “[I]n the Umwelt I am describing, all politics is certainly nothing other than a program of decisions to encourage development. All politics is only . . . a program of administrative decision making, of managing the system.”66 Decades after poststructuralism we are in a much more embarrassing situation with technical systems. Lines of flight can exist only as a refusal to engage with the system, as a self-marginalization or escape to occultism

 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 20.  Lyotard, Towards the Postmodern, 101; cited also by Woodward, Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition, 86.

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and sectlike communes. The question of system remains to be tackled, not only from the perspective of deconstruction, which was carried out in the twentieth century, but also to fragment the system by allowing diversity to emerge.67 Meillassoux’s notion of absolute contingency provides another perspective from which to approach the inhuman, since he refuses the privilege given to what he calls correlationism as the only possibility of knowledge; or, more generally, he provides an ontological refusal of a unified system of knowledge based on subject-object correlation. The correlation between the thinking subject and the thought object privileges a subjectivism that excludes the unthinkable or speculation as a veritable possibility. Empiricism cannot accept that the unthinkable is possible, since if it were possible, it would have to admit the transcendental. What is fundamental to Meillassoux’s challenge to correlationism is its anthropocentrism. As he writes: Would there not be more modesty, then, in considering that the Universe has nothing to do with our subjective qualities, that it could very well do without them at any degree whatsoever, and to say, more soberly, that there is no absolute scale that makes our properties superior (because more intense) to those of nonhuman living creatures or inorganic beings?68

Contingency is that which exceeds correlationism, and in a certain way we may say the opposite—as did Schelling, whom we quoted at the beginning of chapter 1—that is, that maybe it is correlation itself that is contingent, or, as Paul Klee says in his Notebook, “[W]hat is visible is but a fragment of the whole, there being many other latent realities,”

 I would like to refer to a small book by a French author, Josep Rafanell i Orra, Fragmenter le monde (Paris: Éditions divergences, 2018), to acknowledge the author’s attempt to politicize the term fragment, for the author to fragment is a necessary step for better political recomposition. However, I must also emphasize that the projects are fundamentally different. Rafanell i Orra’s critique is still based on an organicist thinking close to that of Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers in that he restricts his discourse to the relation between the human and nonhuman, but he does so by refusing cybernetics. I propose to understand fragmentation as an epistemological and epistemic task that aims to reappropriate cybernetics, like an event (Ereignis), and to do so we must understand the inhuman beyond the human and nonhuman. 68  Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning,” in Genealogy of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism, ed. Suhail Malik and Armen Avanessian (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 126. 67

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which according to Blumenberg is a “devaluation of nature.”69 Contingency is necessary since it challenges the absolutization of correlationism, which in fact leads to a de-absolutization. Reason finds itself in the midst of a jungle of order and disorder. If we admit that correlationism is not the only way of knowing, and that knowledge cannot be reduced to the experience of the subject, it is possible to think of a materialism that is speculative instead of merely factual. Meillassoux aims for an absolute heterogeneity of knowledge, with differences in nature instead of differences in degree, since differences in degree imply a monism, or a fake pluralism: We do not need a monism—or a monopluralism, a monism of difference that seeks to be a pluralism (the magic formula: “monism = pluralism”) but ends up reabsorbing all things into one and the same Whole (albeit an open Whole) to a greater or lesser degree (the tragic formula: “pluralism = monism”). On the contrary, what we need are dualisms everywhere: pure differences in nature, with no continuity whatsoever between that which they make differ, between the many regimes of the real—matter, life, mind, society, etc.—whose possible coordination does not at all allow us to think their rapprochement, unless in a crude mode of blind fact.70

Absolute contingency implies both the limit of thinking and the limit of the unthought: the former, because thinking is limited when it is based on correlationism; the latter, because the unthought can only present itself partially as contingency. The correlation didn’t exist in “ancestral” times. However, as Brassier has showed, this is not the most efficient way to reject correlationism, since this ancestrality can still be thought as such in terms of chronological time, like what paleontologists have been doing, speculating on the images left by the fossils. For Brassier, Lyotard’s solar catastrophe would be a better refusal of correlationism, since it is the annihilation of thinking; as he quotes Lyotard: “[A]fter

 Paul Klee, cited by Hans Blumenberg, “Imitation of Nature: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being,” trans. Anna Wertz, Qui Parle 12, no. 1 (spring/summer 2000): 47. 70  Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition,” 132. What Meillassoux says here is a direct critique of Teilhard’s monopluralism. The latter, when comparing the One in the East and West, claims that “For the East, the One is seen as a suppression of the multiple; for me, the One is born from the concentration of the multiple. Thus, under the same monist appearances, there are two moral systems, two metaphysics and two mysticisms”; cited by Ursula King, Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions, 3. 69

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the sun’s death, there will be no thought left to know its death took place.”71 But what is the use (Gebrauch) of thinking the incapability of thinking if this incapability is not fed back to thinking itself in order to interrupt thinking as such? That is to say, does it have an effect at all? It is in relation to Meillassoux’s explication of the relation between contingency and pluralism that we may be able to endow his absolute contingency with the function of fragmenting the system, and, further, that in between two systems there is a discontinuity or a difference in nature. This is the positive use of absolute contingency. Like Gödel’s incomplete theorem, it obliterates the illusion of a complete formal system. It is an ontological refusal of monism and a monist system. Contingency means precisely that it can be otherwise or not be. It presents itself as an inessential irruptive fulgurite, which is an irruption ex nihilo, rather than following the principle of sufficient reason.72 However, our reading may deviate largely from the author’s own intention in the sense that this is not what Meillassoux really intends to say. The speculative materialism of Meillassoux needs criteria that can justify that it is not unscientific, otherwise it may repeat what Kant calls the Schwämerei of speculation; his critique of Kant and the awareness of the problem of the Schwämerei force him to refrain to another island other than pure reason. This criteria is what he calls “Galileanism,” or, more simply, mathematization, as he is seeking “a materialism capable of founding the thinkability of a nature that is different to our existence and fully mathematizable.”73 This is the same gesture that we find in Bertalanffy and Needham concerning the scientificity of organicism, and which turns into a mechanical organicism. Mathematics is able to describe a world that is independent from the thinking subject, and it is not merely empirical or factual. It is the intention to invent an epistemology that is not based on subjectivism that leads Meillassoux to conceive “signs devoid of meaning,” which have an affinity to mathematics. Signs devoid of meaning are antisensible, since they don’t acquire their quality (quality doesn’t necessarily mean meaning here) through sensible difference; in other words, they don’t acquire their identity through the sensibility that is exhibited in time and space, for example, a melody or a motif. The ontology of empty signs is an anti-Bergsonian  Lyotard, The Inhuman, 9; also cited by Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 229.  Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition,” 150. 73  Ibid., 139. 71 72

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ontology, since Bergson searches for a sensible difference in time and space (by reducing space to temporal experience). In contrast, Meillassoux wants to affirm an operation or operations of empty signs that are devoid of sensible difference. This is the reason that he makes a distinction between repetition, iteration, and reiteration. In repetition—for example, the repetition of the note fa in a melody—each repetition produces a sensible difference, like a motif whose sign repeats in space; it is differential and limited. Iteration is not repetition in the sense that it doesn’t produce sensible differences, since it produces only a pure identity, for example: §§§§§§§§§§. Finally, there is reiteration, which is differential and unlimited. Reiteration is a concept that is not satisfactorily explained: “[T]his third type of recurrence is differential like repetition, but differential in a different way than the latter, since it is conditioned by iteration and opens onto the indefinite.”74 This third type of recurrence is not simply iteration since it raises iteration to another level: Reiteration is the foundation of “potential infinity” and the source of all naïve arithmetic. It is involved in mathematical practice not only as a privileged object, but also as a method, namely, in mathematical recurrence. Reiteration is the entry into the differential territory of iteration: the possibility of thinking differences outside the field of sensible repetition.75

We may want to ask: Is Meillassoux not really talking about recursion here, especially the concept of recursion developed by Gödel and later by Kleene? His confidence in reiteration seems to be based on his ignorance of the history of recursion and history of technology at large. This ignorance risks weakening, if not obliterating, his argument. On the one hand, a complex recursive function is a system of meaning for a mathematician, but in the course of operation it can become completely opaque, since the human mind will lose track of it—it becomes “devoid of meaning,” or, as it is sometimes called, a black box. If it is the case, it is also possible to ask Meillassoux whether machinic knowledge is the noncorrelationalist knowledge that he is aiming at. On the other hand, regarding “potential infinity,” it is not clear how different it is from the Kantian natural end or the malfunction of the Turing machine  Ibid., 177.  Ibid.

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with infinite paper tape. The problem of Meillassoux’s inhumanism is that it is only a halfway house, since it refuses to take modern technology into account or simply treats it as a classical question of logic, so one can still speak like philosophers before the invention of the Turing machine and before digitalization. The formalism that Meillassoux invokes regarding Georg Cantor and David Hilbert, as we have tried to show in the method of Gödel, first becomes arithmetic through Gödel numbering, and mathematical proof becomes a conceptualization of recursivity. It seems to me that it is a step behind today when one is looking for a nonsubjective (human subject) way of knowledge production, since one has the right to ask if the searching for correlations in big data is not precisely an anticorrelationist strategy. One may want to ask if Meillassoux’s ontology of empty signs is only an affirmation of computationalism instead of really opening up the heterogeneity of knowing and the plurality of systems. There seems to be an impasse in Meillassoux’s desire for a new epistemology. But it is necessary to notice that Meillassoux renounced being a reductionist. He is not seeking a mathematical reductionism, but rather sees very clearly the irreducibility of art and life; as he says: “I observe the mathematization of the real, without entering into its theories; and I observe the irreducibility of knowledges and arts one to the other.”76 For us, this irreducibility is at the core of an organological struggle, and organology is not a correlationism. Rather, organological thinking is a synthetic thinking. It is an attempt to connect different regimes and domains in order to preserve life and advance science and technology. There are two significant aspects of Meillassoux’s inhumanism. One is the necessity to think beyond the human, although how this form of epistemology can be formalized is still a big question. The other is to take the concept of contingency and the opening stretched out by Meillassoux to consider the fragmentation of system. This has to be distinguished from naive discourse on postmodern rootlessness (rootlessness in the sense that cultural differences become no longer significant). On the contrary, fragmentation is a return to locality in order to find a strategy to appropriate the inhuman system, not solely from an economic point of view, but rather with an aim of diversity. To fragment the system is not to refuse science and technology, which are

 Ibid., 154.

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its foundation—and here we must recognize the very limit of sabotage, for it will never do any harm to the system since it is only a contingent event for ameliorating the system—but rather to develop different sciences and technologies, to develop different cosmotechnical relations, and in order to do so we will need to recognize both the technical reality and human reality. In The Question Concerning Technology in China, I engaged with the projects of anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which demand an ontological pluralism in order to surpass modernity by refusing nature as a single system.77 The latter is what Descola calls naturalism, a concept of nature reposing on the opposition between culture and nature (besides naturalism there are other ontologies such as analogism, totemism, and animism). Viveiros de Castro has criticized Meillassoux for speaking only from the perspective of Judeo-Christian eschatology, since Meillassoux proposed to question the world without human beings, in which correlationism cannot properly function since there is no direct correspondence between the two parts. In contrast, Débora Danowski and Viveiros de Castro propose that in Amerindian mythology it is the opposite: At the beginning there is the human without the world.78 In other words, Meillassoux follows the logic of Genesis—God creates the world before creating human beings—while in Amerindian culture such genesis doesn’t exist. This critique from Viveiros de Castro and Danowski can be taken simply as a reactionary and postcolonial critique of Meillassoux’s speculative philosophy imbued with Judeo-Christian ideology. However, it can also be read as an affirmation of Meillassoux’s emphasis on a pluralism with differences in nature.79 The affirmation of different natures is an affirmation of locality, and such a question of locality cannot be fully posed as a return to indigenous knowledge or a Romantic concept of nature, but rather as a reopening of the question of

 Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic Media, 2016), §5.  See Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. Rodrigo Guimaraes Nunes (London: Polity, 2016), chap. 4. 79   Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition,” 132. Note that there is a difference between difference in degree and difference in nature. The former signifies variations of qualities and quantities (although differences, they are still of the same being), while the latter affirms nonqualitative differences (for example, a chair and the ashes after it is burned are two beings with difference in nature). 77

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technodiversity and the strategies needed to maintain and continue the ramification of these diversities. However, we must qualify a distinction here between the nonhuman, a category that plays an important role in the “ontological turn,” and Lyotard’s inhuman. The nonhuman is other than human—for example, plants, animals, and minerals—but the inhuman is precisely the negation of the human, what it is not and what it will never be, but the inhuman is inside it. If the concept of the human changes, the inhuman that is its other changes as well. The inhuman may carry the name of God, the infinite, the noumenon, absolute contingency, and so on, but affirming the inhuman will also demand a rationalization that renders a coherent form of life or life of the spirit. Technology in the twenty-first century is becoming inhuman in a negative sense, because it is human, all too human. The inhuman of Meillassoux is different from the inhuman of Lyotard, precisely because the former poses a problem for Lyotard. This is because Meillassoux’s inhuman is the affirmation of a nonhuman way of production of knowledge and systematization—the recursion of meaningless signs—while it is possible to conceive Meillassoux’s inhumanism as a radical opening of production of knowledge that Lyotard didn’t realize. For us, the question is, how is it possible to open up a pluralism when the organizing inorganic is presenting itself as an alienating force, threatening to totalize the production of knowledge and the determination of rules? This is the significance of conceiving a cosmotechnical thinking, not only as a philosophy of technology but also as a strategy for rethinking the coexistence between humans and machines, organic subject and organizing inorganic, the artificial earth and the cosmos. We are not calling for a return of humanism against the inhumanism of the system, but rather trying to conceive the inhuman as a possibility that transcends the system. Insofar as we can speak of a real pluralism and such pluralism is realizable, it is necessarily supported by a technodiversity. The question of technodiversity directs us to the question of epistemology (way of knowing) and episteme (the sensibility that underlies such way of knowing). The most inhuman part of the human is its sensibility (or intuition, if you wish), which, instead of reason, is the foundation of the moral. Exiting the positive feedback loop that characterizes the modern vision of progress, it is possible for another thinking to function either by negating it or by transcending it—that is to say, by inventing another recursive process, another epistemology, as Bateson might suggest.

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§43. SENSIBILITY AND PASSIBILITY The discussion of Lyotard’s concept of the inhuman is a preparation for a cosmotechnical reappropriation of the organizing inorganic. The proposal of fragmenting the system is an attempt to reflect on technodiversity, which is reduced to a single world history of which the Homo deus is its culmination. In the end, the development of a system approximating a political theology is fundamentally a synchronization and convergence in the sense of Teilhard’s noospheric reflection. Teilhard’s noosphere is very close to Vladimir Vernadsky’s use of it, which designates a phase of the development of the earth after the geosphere and the biosphere. The noosphere is fragmentable due to its being inorganic and its becoming organic. Teilhard’s noosphere is evolutionary in the sense that it has its origin in the Western concept of time as progress, and it will have to conquer cultures that seem to him antitime and antievolution: namely, the Eastern way of thinking, which is devoid of love and progress as well as ignoring synthesis and world as an organic whole.80 The noosphere has to be challenged for the sake of a noodiversity as an overcoming of the system, however noodiversity also demands technodiversity as its material support. How is this technodiversity possible in a world where capital is striving for synchronization and convergence? Some theorists believe that with full automation it is possible to emancipate both technology and workers from capitalism, however, they committed the mistake by seeing technology as a universal and that there is only one single history of technology or human-machine complex. It is rather obvious that every nation-state is going to have its own Ministry of Accelerationism (e.g., Dubai appointed its Minister of Artificial Intelligence in 2017), and it is hard  As Joseph Needham noted in his preface to Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions, xiii: “The ‘eastern’ way, he [Teilhard de Chardin] felt, was anti-time and anti-evolution; he repudiated the attraction of pure nature-mysticism, and didn’t like the idea of return or fusion with the One, identification with the universe without the presence of any love. Similarly, the ‘western’ way for him was a way of convergence including love, of progress, synthesis, taking time as real and evolution as real, and recognizing the world as an organic whole.” Needham defended Chinese thought by saying that though Teilhard de Chardin had lived for a long time in China, he spoke very little Chinese, and what he said about antitime and antievolution is Hinduism and Buddhism but not Taoism. In The Question Concerning Technology in China, following Marcel Granet and François Jullien, I have attempted to analyze why time was not elaborated in China, and how this was related to its technological thinking.

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to imagine that this will be an emancipatory politics and not one that only further strengthens the synchronization of the global axis of time. I attempted to show in The Question Concerning Technology in China that, besides considering the different natures that anthropologists propose, it is necessary to consider different cosmotechnics in order to conceive the possibility of the bifurcations of future and world history. A question is raised immediately: What precisely is the difference between Chinese technology and European technology? Does it mean that they produce spoons of different shapes? But are they not of the same function: spoon? It was not my intention to say that technologies are different functionally, but rather that one has to look beyond functionality, as both Heidegger and Simondon endeavored to do so. Historians, when comparing technologies in different geographical regions, tend to understand which one is more advanced than the other: for example, papermaking in the second century in China was more advanced than in Europe during the same period, or, as Bertrand Gille contested, one shouldn’t compare a particular technology but technical system as a whole. Both cases presuppose an understanding that technology is universal and all technologies could be measured according to a universal progress. When we say different cosmotechnics, it means to challenge this dominant view in philosophy and history of technology. We will present this différance with an antinomy of the universality of technology: Thesis: Technology is an anthropological universal, understood as an exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs, as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology have formulated it; Antithesis: Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.

The thesis states that technology has its universal part: for example, the exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs, which Leroi-Gourhan has already shown very clearly in Gesture and Speech and which we have discussed in chapter 3 concerning the organized inorganic. Then there is also a nonuniversal part, meaning that technology is always complicit with an episteme that is fundamentally

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cosmological and irreducible to universal values.81 It is also the same Leroi-Gourhan, who joined the expedition team in Beijing in 1932 in which Teilhard de Chardin also took part, who warns us in the second part of his book Rhythm and Memory, where he expresses his worry of the arrival of complete synchronization: “Individuals today are imbued with and conditioned by a rhythmicity that has reached a stage of almost total mechanicity (as opposed to humanization).”82 Leroi-Gouhran’s warning came out of the anxiety of an epoch of the mechanical industrialization. Today, as we tried to show, such a classical humanist critique has to be reevaluated, but he is at least right when pointing out the increasing synchronization of corporal, social, and cultural dynamics. If we follow Lyotard in saying that the positive inhuman consists of the possibility of resistance, we still need to develop it further. This inhuman is the Unknown, which poses a challenge to the inhuman system and functions as the necessity of contingency. But here we must respond to a question from the scientists: Are we not here sacrificing science and technology to the Unknown, or, more precisely, to a mythical and religious thinking? This is the central dilemma of modernization, since in view of modern science archaic cosmologies have to give way. Kant’s attempt to give room to religion is condemned as being lazy and insufficiently rationalist, but here it is not only a question of religion but also of moral values, which can exist only in relation to a cosmology: an axio-cosmology. Modern science is universal insofar as it is applicable to physical phenomenon, as Kant already anticipated, but science and technologies are bounded in broader cosmic realities that cannot be reduced to astronomy. With this notion of axio-cosmology in mind, we would like to come back to the question of sensibility and aesthetics. In the last chapter of Science and the Modern World, “Requisites of Social Progress,” Whitehead, like Schiller, raises the question of art and aesthetic education. While commenting on the problems left by the industrialization of the nineteenth century, he attributes these to the unachieved project of aesthetics:

 For a critique of Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis, please see Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China, §2, “Cosmos, Cosmology and Cosmotechnics.” 82  André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 311. 81

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The evils of the early industrial system are now a commonplace of knowledge. . . . A contributory cause, of substantial efficacy to produce this disastrous error, was the scientific creed that matter in motion is the one concrete reality in nature; so that aesthetic values form an adventitious, irrelevant addition.83

In the nineteenth century, Whitehead sees a disaccord between aesthetic intuitions and the mechanism of science,84 which leads to such a “disastrous error.” Whitehead also uses the word “sensitiveness,” which for him includes “apprehension of what lies beyond oneself; that is to say, sensitiveness to all the facts of the case.”85 For Whitehead this sensitiveness can be understood as an intuitive intimacy between parts and whole.86 We will affiliate sensitiveness with what we call sensibility. Whitehead challenges mechanistic science and proposes to understand time and space as relational, hence organic. For Whitehead the aim of constructing an organic philosophy is to “construct a system of ideas which brings the aesthetic, moral, and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science.”87 This paradigmatic change that Whitehead is aiming at also demands a symbolic support, which is technics. It has been suggested that there are similarities between Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm change and Michel Foucault’s concept of episteme, a concept that the philosopher abandoned after The Order of Things. In The Order of Things, Foucault attempts to show how knowledge was produced under different epistemes between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries: the Renaissance, the classical, and the modern. I am tempted to understand episteme in terms of sensibility, or, more precisely, the conditions under which such  A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Pelican Mentor Books, 1948), 204.  Ibid., 88. 85  Ibid., 200. 86  Ibid., 149: “The parts of the bodily event are themselves pervaded by their own enduring patterns, which form elements in the bodily pattern. The parts of the body are really portions of the environment of the total bodily event, but so related that their mutual aspects, each in the other, are peculiarly effective in modifying the pattern of either. This arises from the intimate, character of the relation of whole to part. Thus, the body is a portion of the environment for the part, and the part is a portion of the environment for the body; only they are peculiarly sensitive, each to modifications of the other. This sensibility is so arranged that the part adjusts itself to preserve the stability of the pattern of the body.” 87  A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), xi. 83

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knowledge is produced. Sensibility is always local and historical; it is also the condition of noodiversity. For example, epistemes in Europe were different from epistemes in Asian and African cultures, since underlying these different epistemes are different sensitivities and different senses of existence in relation to the cosmos. I would like to offer a rather unconventional interpretation of the relation between the positive inhuman and the question of sensibility that Lyotard raises in his exhibition Les Immatériaux. This hinges on the question of whether the postmodern is a new episteme, and if so, in what way this episteme is related to technology. Lyotard didn’t connect his notion of the postmodern with Foucault, but it seems to me quite reasonable to make such a connection. The postmodern for Lyotard presents a new sensibility, which was the theme of his 1979 The Postmodern Condition and the main discourse of his 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux. Lyotard wants to invoke in the exhibition a sensibility of insecurity, of uncertainty, of anxiety. The role of art, and here this exhibition in particular, is the means of sensibilization. The reconstitution of the episteme is what I understand as the discovery of “sensibility” and the project of “sensibilization”: “The Immaterials” . . . is a kind of dramaturgy of the epoch that is born. We want to make you feel. This is neither pedagogic nor demagogic. We don’t flatter you (see how well you are), we don’t educate you (see how smart we are). We seek to awaken a sensibility already there in all of us, to make feel [faire sentir] the strange in the familiar, and how difficult it is to get an idea of what is changing.88

I believe that Lyotard wanted to demonstrate a new sensibility (or maybe we can say an epochal sensibility) and therefore to sensibilize the postmodern through the medium of art and new technologies. Such sensibility, it seems to Lyotard, is able to provide a new framework and new meanings to techno-logos, to illuminate the possibilities opened up  “Texte de la cassette-son remise à la presse,” in Les immatériaux press release (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1985), 9: “Les Immatériaux . . . sont une sorte de dramaturgie de l’époque qui naît. On cherchera à vous faire sentir. Ce ne sera pas pédagogique, et pas démagogique. On ne vous flattera pas (“Voyez comme vous êtes bien”), on ne vous éduquera pas (“Voyez comme nous sommes intelligents”). On cherchera à éveiller une sensibilité qui est déjà là dans nous tous, à faire sentir l’étrange dans le familier, et combien il est difficile de se faire une idée de ce qui change.”

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by the new technological epochē in the sense of phenomenology. This epochē doesn’t mean that technology will become the new ground, but rather a new condition under which new syntheses and new compositions will have to be produced. Lyotard turned to the thirteenth-century Japanese monk Dôgin’s concept of the “clear mirror” to seek a passibility or a passage (passibilité, a term that he used to translate Sigmund Freud’s Durcharbeiten) in the new technologies. This speculative question is formulated as such: “[I]s the passage possible, will it be possible with, or allowed by, the new mode of inscription and memoration that characterizes the new technologies? Do they not impose syntheses, and syntheses conceived still more intimately in the soul than any earlier technology has done?”89 We can rephrase this question in the following way: How can we think in terms of indeterminism instead of determinism? What kind of thinking is necessary for this indetermination to be carried out, instead of seeking refuge in a metaphysics of contingency? However, Lyotard didn’t go far enough, though he still had projects in mind—it was said that Lyotard wanted to prepare a sequel to the exhibition titled Les résistances, which plays upon the opposition between noise and information. It seems to me that Lyotard’s attempt must be carried further, and beyond European history, and maybe even beyond what he had in mind at that moment: the condemnation of cybernetics as a trivial and deterministic science. What is important in Lyotard’s concept of the inhuman is not only its fundamental critique of humanism, but also its fundamental potential as resistance. But such resistance has to be reinterpreted here as a search for pluralism as indetermination, and therefore as a multiple cosmotechnics. Cosmotechnical thinking is not a call to return to archaic knowledge but rather to reconstruct technological thoughts and technological genesis in order to reappropriate modern technology. One may reproach the inhuman as a humanist concept, since Lyotard still want to get hold of the phenomenological body, but as we have seen that it is not the case and this kind of accusation offers nothing productive, since it is only a posthumanist identity fetish while ignoring the organological struggle in Lyotard’s proposal. Lyotard refers to Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les peintres cubistes. Méditation  Jean-François Lyotard, “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, 57.

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esthétique (1913), in which the poet says, “[M]ore than anything, artists are men who want to become inhuman.” The part that Lyotard didn’t cite continues: “[T]hey seek painfully the traces of inhumanity which are never found in nature. These are the real truths, and beyond them, we know no reality.”90 For Apollinaire, this truth is always new, since it is never once and for all. It is this contradiction—a verity in constant change—that is opposed to the reduction of such a verity to communicative writings. The latter could be realized by machines, which are capable of reproducing signs devoid of sense.91 §44. ORGANICISM, ORGANOLOGY, AND COSMOTECHNICS We have been on a long excursion from the organic to the inhuman, in order to trace a trajectory from philosophy of nature to a philosophy of technology, while also speculating on the future of such philosophy. The accidentality of technics becomes the necessity of the survival of mankind, while becoming contingent again in the progress of civilizations, and now it comes back to centrality by imposing a necessity, which is no longer simply about the survival of the human species but also that of the earth. Such a task is often ambiguously referred to as ecology. Philosophies of nature à la Bruno, Spinoza, Schelling, Laozi, and Zhuangzi, among others, don’t answer our problem directly today, though they remain inspiring and necessary for developing new trajectories of thought. This seemingly bold statement resonates with the opening quote from Jean-Luc Nancy regarding catastrophe, precisely because organization through cybernetic thinking has realized (in certain sense) the general organism qua cybernetic system, which is called ecology. Technological progress demands new forms of thinking, which is beyond the love-and-hate game of Continental and analytic philosophy, Western and non-Western thought. Here I risk burning the bridge: Seeking salvation in a philosophy of nature may be no longer possible. We are moving away from the first nature, and beyond

 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes. Méditation esthétique (Paris: Eugène Figuière & Cie, 1913), 10. 91  Ibid. Instead of devoid of sense, Apollinaire uses “without understanding them.” 90

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first-order and second-order cybernetics,92 from imitator to observer to constructor. At the same time, we must also move away from the second nature in which every being is considered standing reserve (Bestand). The concept of nature has to be integrated in the concept of cosmotechnics to conceptually avoid the opposition between nature and technics, and this is the reason why at the beginning of this book I speak of a third nature, which is inscribed in the concept of cosmotechnics. In human history there is no linear temporal development from nature to technics, from nature to politics. Rather, there is an Urtechnik, which I name cosmotechnics. Some cosmotechnics may appear more “organicist” than others in the sense that they form a dynamic whole, which allows different forms and levels of complexification to be developed in history. Among these cosmotechnics, there was one that was able to mechanicize the whole cosmos and decompose it into standing-reserve, which Heidegger calls modern technology (moderne Technik). Needham—the great thinker of the twentieth century, a world-prominent biologist, a founding figure of the history of science and technology in China—when looking at Chinese civilization, found that Chinese technological thinking is not mechanical but highly organicist: [T]he philosophia perennis of China was an organic materialism. This can be illustrated from the pronouncements of philosophers and scientific thinkers of every epoch. The mechanical view of the world simply didn’t develop in Chinese thought, and the organicist view in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to hierarchical order was universal among Chinese thinkers.93

The recent appropriation of Needham’s work in Chinese science and technology attributes the term holism to Needham without knowing that Needham criticizes this fascination with the whole for obscuring scientific understanding through a vagueness of wholeness (as we discussed in chapter 1). We may want to read this in parallel with  In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Katherine Hayles proposes a periodization of first-order cybernetics, second-order cybernetics, and artificial life. I find the characterization of the third stage as “artificial life” rather unsatisfactory, since it tends to affirm the posthuman by naturalizing some of the historical and political questions that we aim to unfold in this book. 93  Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Routledge, 2013), 21. 92

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Deleuze’s somewhat brutal reading of the Taoist body in the famous “How to Make a Body without Organs” in A Thousand Plateaus. The Taoist practices sex with a female without ejaculating in order to reinforce his male power or energy, and thereby constitutes an intensive body without organs.94 For sure this is an “exercise” of the “whole,” as Deleuze declares at the beginning of the chapter (e.g., the whole against the codified functionalities and hierarchies of organs). Any recourse to holism that is not able to give an account of its organizational and causal relations and complexity often falls back to a laziness of defending its vulgarity. Science and technology in China, as Needham observed, was not mechanical as was the case in Europe. It is clear to me that Needham has read Chinese thought from the perspective of his early work on organicism, and his reading of Chinese thought is done through Whiteheadian eyes. Needham remains a great thinker of biology, and his biological thought is analogical to the image of the Chinese thought that he has described for us. However, like the analogy between the beautiful and the good, we may want to ask if this analogy is contingent or necessary. When Needham turned his eyes from biology to Chinese civilization after the Second World War, it was a contingent event that began when he happened to meet researchers from China in Cambridge. In the course of time, however, this historical event becomes necessary. In so doing, Needham brings Chinese thought closer to cybernetics. Probably for him, the Taoists are the first cyberneticians. If we follow the logic of Needham, we may be able to say that Chinese technology has not passed through the period of mechanism that prepared for the Industrial Revolution in Europe. However, modernization and globalization brought about a new situation, one in which cultures subsumed their cosmotechnics to modern technology, which took up cybernetics as automatism without understanding the epistemological changes brought forth by cybernetics. But the automatism that is the dream of mechanism proceeded to realize a “technician system,” as Ellul rightly put it. On the contrary, in the West we also observe a transition from Cartesian mechanism to organicism and cybernetics/ecology. This chronology, which we call the history of thought or world history, is not a universal principle but rather an instance of noodiversity

 Gilles Deleuze, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1980), 194.

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as well as technodiversity. Evolution is possible only when there is diversity, since biology has already taught us that evolution should be understood as coevolution.95 The artificial selection applied in the population (instead of Darwinian natural selection) will finally lead to the reduction and even elimination of technodiversity and therefore noodiversity. The question thus raised is, will the recursive thinking in cybernetics allow us to relaunch the question of organicism and technodiversity, or will it, being driven by efficiency for the final cause imposed by capital, finally only realize a purely deterministic complex system that is moving toward its own destruction, like the one Lyotard described? I believe that in order to respond to this question, we will have to recognize two images of cybernetics that, notwithstanding its diverse schools of thoughts and disciplines, could be summarized as the following: • One is reductionist; it reduces organisms to feedback systems, which are imitations; it imposes determinism, since all reductions aim for prediction, all predictions are determinisms; its economy is an economy of finality. • The other is nonreductionist, in the sense of Simondon’s general allagmatic, which seeks genesis beyond any form of technological determinism; it is open to contingency without only reducing it to calculation and endorses auto-finality or neo-finalism (in the sense of Ruyer). The technophobes see the first image of cybernetics; Simondon sees the second image of cybernetics and imagines a universal cybernetics or general allagmatic to resolve alienation and antagonism between nature and technics. Heidegger sees both mechanism and organism as the impasse of philosophy and therefore wants to go back to another beginning by invoking the pre-Socratic thinkers, an attempt to discover

 Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis in their article “Futures” remind us that “the dramatic evolution of humans cannot be separated from the co-evolution of our microbial ancestors, the bacteria that constructed our cells and those of our food species of plants and animals. In coevolution, over thousands of years partners change genetically. Inherited partnerships evolve together as new proteins and developmental patterns emerge.” We can understand this as the question of diversity, but instead of biodiversity, we want to reflect on technodiversity. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution (New York: Springer, 1997), 241.

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a new cosmotechnics, as I have claimed elsewhere.96 I believe that it is necessary to read Simondon with Heidegger here, since Simondon’s concept of genesis of technicity resonates with Heidegger’s proposal to overcome modern technology by reconstructing a different thinking hence another beginning, and in this sense Simondon’s more technology-oriented approach complements Heidegger’s more cultureoriented program. Lyotard, in spite of his fierce critique of cybernetics, allows us to see the importance of the question of sensibility and how it constitutes the postmodern episteme, which may be strategically appropriated to open society to new transformations. These two images of cybernetics have completely different social, economical, and political implications. The organicist epistemology, presenting a new paradigm shift of thought in the twentieth century, is naturalized in practice and it turns out to be nothing organicist but mechanical, like when we use a recursive machine to write a program printing out “Hello, World.” Control through tertiary retentions and protensions such as surveillance, social credits, and big data analysis is taking the first path, in which recursive machines are integrating individuals as the constituents of computation. What Deleuze calls the society of control is fully demonstrated in our digital epoch, of which digital control and flexibility (e.g., modulation or performativity) are its means. We may want to say that it is a mechanist use of organicist machines for deterministic use, which, as we wanted to show, is something that has to be reproached, and a broader historical and philosophical perspective opened up, as we have attempted throughout this book. However, let us raise the final question: Is it possible to take seriously the organismic philosophy and transform it into elements of an organology that would allow us to reevaluate actual technological development and leave its finality open? Organicism is still a philosophy of nature. General systems theory and second-order cybernetics have moved a step further, but in the twenty-first century, can we go even further toward elaborating an organological thinking, one that goes beyond the illusion of human beings as mere observers and machines as replacements for human beings? In order to do so we need to inscribe the cosmos organologically, and this is what cybernetics didn’t do and this is at core of the thinking of cosmotechnics. Cybernetics in the Western tradition has

 See Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China, §11.

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already adopted its “modern cosmology,” namely, astrophysics: the end of the cosmos, as some historians have claimed.97 It is also in this sense that Heidegger sees the end of philosophy and the beginning of a world civilization based exclusively on Western thought. In Chinese cosmotechnics, the cosmos is organic insofar as it is analogical to the body. Chinese medicine is therefore very different from Greek medicine, even though they share certain similarities (for example, diagnosis according to pulses).98 The cosmos is an organ of principle, governing both the aesthetic and the moral. The heaven-earth that is the name for the cosmos is correlated with the human activities, while these relations are real and maintained by “resonance.” Precisely because of this, Needham considers neo-Confucianism to be a veritable organic philosophy.99 It is also the reason that Mou Zhongsan, the great New Confucian of the twentieth century, characterizes Chinese philosophy as a moral metaphysics and moral cosmology.100 Standing against it is treating the cosmos as a mere resource—the eternal goal of the deterritorialization of capital. With the question of the moral we also come back to the question of episteme, which I reformulate as the question of sensibility, or, if you wish, a reterritorialization against determinism. The destruction of capitalism will happen not because it is surpassed by its technology, but because its cosmotechnology is fundamentally against the conditions of subsistence and existence. The epistemologies of capitalist technologies can be overcome only by different cosmotechnics that  See Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). 98  See Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 99  Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 499: “When Leibniz speaks of the difference between machines and organisms as lying in the fact that every constituent monad of the organism is somehow alive and cooperating in a harmony of will, we are irresistibly remind of that ‘harmony of wills’ which we noted as characteristic of the Chinese system of ‘correlative thinking’ in which the whole universe in all its part spontaneously cooperates without direction or mechanical impulsion.” 100  See Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China, §18. Note that neo-Confucianism is used to describe the school of thought that emerged in the eleventh century in the late Tang dynasty and became the dominant school during the Sung and Ming dynasties. New Confucianism, on the other hand, is a movement that started between the end of nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. 97

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provide alternative epistemologies and maintain technodiversity and noodiversity. Or, put another way, the totalization of capitalism through more advanced means can be challenged by inventions and usages only according to different ontologies and epistemologies.101 Looking back at history, the Polynesian gift economy that inspired the work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille has been haunting capitalism ever since, and continues in the anticapitalist thought of anthropologists like David Graeber, though modern science has since long rejected Hau and Mana. This sensibility of the world, of the relation between humans and the cosmos, is different from the modern view, but being at odds with modern science is not an excuse not to develop a cosmotechnical thinking that will organologically inscribe science in its working principle. For a hundred years the absolutization of science has led to conflict, while the absolutization doesn’t mean that one is moving toward an end that is called the Absolute, since the Absolute is neither a thing nor a theory of a thing, but is precisely the unthinged (Unbedingt) of an epoch. If we follow Hegel’s analysis in the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik that the absolute spirit passed through different stages from art in the ancient Greek time to religion and, arriving at the Enlightenment, philosophy, perhaps cybernetics is the current expression of the Absolute, as Günther has analyzed.102 After Hegel’s verdict on the end of art, we continue to produce more and more artworks. Religions have survived even though they are not compatible with modern science. There are still many Christians, as there are many Buddhists. What sustains religion is not purely fanaticism, but rather faith, and it is in faith that we find the inhuman, as Lyotard found in Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Maybe after the end of the age of reason art will come back with new gestures and as new forms of resistance, which are beyond the linear history that Hegel has perceived. However, all these remain to be thought and explored beyond the Enlightenment humanism. If the end of European philosophy, according to Heidegger, means the need for new forms of thinking to surpass the challenging mode of unconcealment in modern technology, then these new forms of thinking must first render modern  For concrete examples, please see Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin, “Collective Individuation: The Future of the Social Web,” in Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, ed. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), 103–16. 102  G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 13 Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 140–44. 101

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technology contingent before elevating it to necessity. The fundamental question is the regrounding of technology. We have to emphasize that this is not to add an ethics to AI or robotics, since we won’t be able to change the technological tendency by just adding more values. Instead we have to provide new frameworks for future technological developments so that a new geopolitics can emerge that is not based on an apocalyptic singularity but technodiversity; this is also the reason cosmotechnics is a political concept. What Needham tried to think through in his multiple volumes of work is the relation between ancient Chinese thought and modern Western science and technology. In other words, he wanted to render Chinese thought contemporary: contemporary not in the sense that Chinese thought has already anticipated and is more superior than modern Western science and technology (in the bad spirit of nationalism and ethnocentrism), but rather in the sense that Chinese thought may be useful for showing another way of thinking without being simply opposed to European thought.103 I hold the view that the contribution of a study of Chinese thought of technology in The Question Concerning Technology in China (and this is by no means limited to China, but has to be open to all cultures and civilizations) is not only the demonstration of a philosophy of the organism, which has been done by Needham, but rather a reopening of the concept of technics as multiple cosmotechnics and the future of technological imaginations. This will necessitate the rediscovery of the nonmodern epistemologies and the reinvention of epistemes through the regime of aesthetics as responses to the current crisis from the point of view of localities, or as what Augustin Berque calls recosmosizing [récosmiser]. Schiller’s aesthetic education remains important for us today, and it is all the more significant when we recognize it as a political and cultural project, but we can no longer respond to Schiller’s question with the same humanist approach, since future aesthetic education will be about inhumanity. Aesthetics is at the base of the episteme in the sense that it is local and constituted by its particular way of living and sensing, which are very often mistakenly considered as mere customs. When Whitehead claims that time and space are relational, he is proposing at the same time a new science and a new aesthetics.  Needham grew up as a Catholic and called himself a “process theologist” and an “honorary Taoist.”

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We started our journey on recursivity and contingency by reconstructing a philosophy of nature in Schelling and organicism, and passing to the realization of such philosophy in logic and cybernetics. We tried to suggest a new way to look into the relations between philosophy and technology, organism and machine. We want to supplement this with a cosmotechnical thinking that can be perceived only in systems of knowledge in which the alter-cosmologies remain effective and it is possible to reflect on both questions of epistemology and episteme. The question is not to simply demonize and undermine cybernetics as a mere governmentality, as it is now often conceived, but rather to conceive a new perspective of cybernetics by undermining the tendency of its totalizing and deterministic thinking. However, this is not exactly what Simondon called the open machine, since for Simondon the open machine is only a cybernetic machine possessing a margin of indetermination inscribed in its recursive structure and causality. In saying this we mean precisely to move beyond this image of the open machine by resituating technologies in their genesis, which means to resituate technologies in various cosmic realities. A true pluralism, which Meillassoux attempts to open up with his concept of contingency, cannot be sustained without technodiversity, and such technodiversity is always in conflict with the totalizing power of its mechanism, whether mechanical or organicist. If cybernetics is the end of philosophy, in the sense Heidegger has attributed to it, and if recursivity becomes a “synonym” for process philosophy, then a post-European philosophy can be perceived only by reappropriating this cybernetic moment through different technological thoughts.104 This is the trajectory that we attempted to sketch out in this book. While the questions that we raised still merit further responses, due to the limits of individual effort, such an attempt will remain a common task of philosophy.

 This has to be distinguished from those who pretend to show that cybernetics has a “Chinese origin” or such, though such a quasi-historical approach is always harmless and entertaining.

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Index

Abgrund, 43 the Absolute, 11, 14, 34, 167, 276; at beginning, end, 86–87; contingency and, 35–38, 95; differentiation, unification of, 56; Hegel on, 87; movement of spirit and, 89; over-chaos and, 37; Phenomenology of Spirit on, 95; Schelling on, 53–54, 87n4, 95; as transparent, 88 absolute ground, 87 the absolute I, 52 absolute individuality, 57 absolute necessity, 100–101 absolute unity, 54 absorbing state, 126 abstract, concrete and, 92, 94 abyss, 43 accident, 12, 30, 43, 175–80, 206–7, 210 act, 9, 52–53 actualities, 197 actuality, 99–100 adaptation, 17, 27, 178–79, 178n107, 182–83, 187 adaptationism, 178n106 adoption, 204

aesthetic judgment, 7-9, 238 aesthetics, 8–9 AI. See artificial intelligence Alcoholics Anonymous, 143, 222 alcoholism, 134–35 algorithmic catastrophes, 234 algorithmic contingency, 140–44 algorithmic governmentality, 243 algorithmic thinking, 114–15, 227 algorithms, 139, 147, 217, 235–36 allagmatic thinking, 193–94, 220–21, 227–28 Alpha Go, 193 Also Sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 8, 195 amplifier, 17–18, 189 Anaximander, 196–97 Anders, Günther, 245–46 Anima, 118 animal, machine and, 2–3 animal excitability, 61 antagonism theory, 163 Anthropocene, 28, 33, 152 anthropocentrism, 257 anticipation, 202, 219–20 antithesis, 4–5, 47n16, 50 apeiron, 62, 150–51, 196 297

298

Index

Apollinaire, 269–70 appearance, 31–32, 64 Aristotle, 5, 12, 12n22, 106, 118, 206 art, 160, 207–10, 254 De Arte Combinatoria (Leibniz), 116 artificial intelligence (AI), 2, 103, 138, 166–67, 252–53 artificiality, 174 artificial systems, 118, 175 artist, 207–8 Ashby, W. Ross, 75, 124–26, 134, 192 associated milieu, 205 atoms, 65–66, 120 attraction, repulsion and, 58–59 Aufhebung, 88 Augustine, 254, 276 auto-finality, 14, 136, 142, 273 automata, 103, 115, 121–22 automation, 103, 114–15, 248 automatism, 183, 272 automaton, 13, 31–32 autonomy, 132 autopoiesis, 83, 127 axiological function, 193 Bachelard, Gaston, 178 Bateson, Gregory, 19, 107–8, 132– 38, 143, 148 beauty, 49 becoming infinite, 6 Begriff, 93, 98 being, 6, 99, 104–5, 120, 145, 188, 195 Being, 31, 230 being there, 30, 222 Beiser, Frederick, 65 Bergson, Henri, 16, 118n91, 119, 122–23, 148–49; against adaptation, 178–79, 178n107; Canguilhem and, 153, 167–71,

200, 221; Creative Evolution by, 26, 147, 153, 158, 163–74, 203; on élan vital, 164, 166–67, 178; on geometrism, 167–68, 202; on intuition, 227; Kant and, 164–65; on machine, 164–65; Matter and Memory by, 171; on mechanism, 118, 164, 182; on organology, 163–75; Platonism of, 177; on recursivity, 170; Two Sources of Morality and Religion by, 167, 169, 173–74, 173n89, 174n90 Bernard, Claude, 123–24, 179–80, 179nn113–14 Berque, Augustin, 34 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 17, 73–76, 76n128, 102–3, 136 bifurcations, 30, 39, 265 Bigelow, Julian, 123 Bildungstrieb, 4, 60 biology, 5, 272–73; Canguilhem and Goldstein on, 181; computational, 114; mechanism and, 71–72; on organism, 49, 182; philosophy of, 183–84; rise of, 86; synthetic, 217–18; technics and, 157 Black, Joseph, 80 Black Notebook (Heidegger), 104–5 le Blanc, Guillaume, 158, 177, 179 Bloch, Ernst, 11 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 51 body, organs and, 190–91 body-mind problem, 120 Bohr, Niels, 122 Boutroux, Émile, 38, 43 brain machine, 107 brains, 219, 248 Brassier, Ray, 251–53, 258–59 Brentano, Franz, 211–12, 214 Brown, John, 51n29, 61, 179n112 Bruno, Giordano, 8

Index

calculus of reasoning, 115–16 Cambridge Platonists, 24n48 canalization, 204 Canguilhem, George, 25–26, 147–49, 155–57, 159–61, 163, 175–80, 176n95; Bergson and, 153, 167–71, 200, 221; on biology, 181; concept of life, 184; on Friedmann, 182–83; Knowledge of Life by, 158; The Normal and the Pathological by, 179, 179n114 Cannon, W. B., 123 capital, 218-220, 251, 264, 273, 275276 Das Capital (Marx), 183 capitalism, 275–76 Cartesian philosophy, 5–6, 117–18, 120, 153, 238 Cassirer, Ernst, 25, 25n50, 32n56, 37, 134 de Castro, Viveiros, 262 Categories (Aristotle), 12 causality, 15, 67, 190, 206 causation, immanent, 181 cause, 7–8, 18, 47, 49, 160 cause and effect, 57–58 cell, 16–17, 26n52 chance, 13–14, 31 change, 14–15 chaos, 37 Char, René, 230n85 check, 52 Chinese philosophy, 23–25, 23n47, 124n114, 264n80, 275 Chinese science and technology, 22–23, 265, 271–72, 277 Christianity, 233–34 Christian theology, 104 Christogenesis, 245–50 church organs, 154, 155 circularity, 5, 10, 56–63

299

classical AI, 138, 253 classical logic, 106 classical machine, 107 cohesion, 60 collective individuation, 193–200, 202 collective memory, 205 command, judgment versus, 9 communication, 121, 198 communication technology, 83 community, 46, 57 complexity, 15, 244 complexity theory, 49 computational biology, 114 computational hermeneutics, 210–11 computational theory, 109 computation theory, 103 Comte, Auguste, 45–46, 179 co-naturality, 226 the concept, 146 The Concept of the Political (Schmitt), 247 concrete, abstract and, 92, 94 concretization, 19, 76, 140, 218, 220–24 consciousness: Brentano’s model of, 211–12; experience of, 91; Husserl on, 212–14, 213; mechanism and, 182; object and, 56; reality of, 167–68; selfconsciousness and, 86, 129; timeconsciousness, 213 The Consciousness of Machines: A Metaphysics of Cybernetics (Günther), 106–7 consumerism, 215 contingency: absolute, 258–59; the Absolute and, 35–38, 95; algorithmic, 141–42; causality and, 15; chaos and, 37; correlationism, 257; domesticated, 101; double, 20; finality and,

300

Index

12–15; formal, 98–99; Gould on, 138; Hegel on, 94–96, 98–99; information from, 7; laws of nature, 41, 43; in mechanical model, 11; modal logic and, 12–14; in movement, 13; nature and, 41, 94–96; necessity and, 44–45, 68, 86, 101; the Notion and, 101; objective, 36; organology and, 200–207; as possibility, 11; possible, 12n22; probability and, 13; reason and, 11–12; reflected, 101; resilience, 22; Schelling on, 43, 95; sheer, 52; Simondon on, 28; Spinoza’s system against, 48; submission to, 188–89; after system, 256–63; in systemic philosophy, 41–42; in systemization, 35; technology and, 193–94; as unity, of actual, possible and, 99. See also recursivity, contingency and Conway, John Horton, 145 correlationism, 251–52, 257–58 cosmogony, 57 cosmology, future, 35–39 cosmopoiesis, 226 cosmotechnics, 1, 29, 39, 105, 223, 226, 270–78 Cournot, Augustin, 15, 36 Couturat, Louis, 117–18 creation, 4 Creative Evolution (Bergson), 26, 147, 153, 158, 163–74, 203 creative whole, 149 creativity, 14, 170–72, 174 criticism, 189–90 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 2–3, 8, 62, 148, 220–21, 221n69; on beauty, 49; Bergson and, 164–65; on cybernetics, 46,

164; on idealism, realism, 48; philosophy of technology in, 159; on recursivity, 55; on reflective judgment, 45, 47, 49, 49n23, 237; Simondon on, 190; on teleological judgment, 46 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 51n29 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 2n3, 3, 3n7, 12–13, 50, 108, 228 cultural-technics, 185–87 culture, 26–27, 39, 223 Cuvier, Georges, 90–91 cyberneticians, 16–17 cybernetic machines, 18, 129, 139, 142, 145 “Cybernetic of ‘Self’: A Theory on Alcoholism” (Bateson), 134–35 cybernetics, 1, 3, 27, 32, 185, 199, 229, 272–75; Bertalanffy and, 76n128; Chinese science, technology and, 23; in Critique of Judgment, 46, 164; of cybernetics, 124–29; as end of philosophy, 105; epistemology and, 38, 194; Hegel and, 105; Heidegger on, 19–20, 244; idealism and, 86; Leibniz and, 115–16, 119; Lovelock on, 81–82; as mechanical organicism, 124; as mechanical organism, 16; mechanist, 142; metaphysics of, 107–8, 244–45; organicism and, 24; overcoming dualism, 17; recursivity in, 86, 104, 125; second-order, 143; selfconsciousness, 86; self-reflective, 103; Simondon on, 28n53, 228; universal, 187–93; the unknown in, 141; of Wiener, 121, 147, 192, 221

Index

Cybernetics Communication and Control in Man and Animals (Wiener), 17, 118, 192 cyborg, 147 Dalton, John, 71, 92n25 Darwin, Charles, 76, 76n130 Dasein, 30, 222, 253 dataism, 247–48 death, 197 debt, 214–15 decadence, 83 Dedekind, Richard, 110 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 18n34, 117, 225, 271–72 deliberation, 45n6 Derrida, Jacques, 211, 214, 225 Descartes, René: on automata, 115; on church organs, human bodies and, 154, 155; Discourse on Method by, 192; mechanical organs and, 153–57; on mechanism, 2–3, 155–57 Descola, Philippe, 262 determinate judgment, 140–41, 221 determination, 220 determinism, 248 deus ex machina, 120 dialectical duality, 43 dialectical movement, 11 dialectics, 88, 92–93, 130–40, 177, 183 différance, 211, 214, 265 difference, 133, 135, 258 The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (Hegel), 53–54 differentiation, 119 differentiation, unification and, 56, 60 digital feedback, 216 digital recursion, 114

301

Dioptrique (Descartes), 157 directedness, 214 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 192 disease, 181–82 disparation, 131-132, 188, 196-197 diversification, 21 domesticated contingency, 101 double contingency, 20 Dreyfus, Hubert, 252–53 Driesch, Hans, 16, 71 drives, 236 Drosophila, 137 dualism, 17, 120, 166 duality, 54 dynamic atoms, 65–66 earth, 8, 28, 31, 34-25, 78–83,186, 219, 233, 252, 270 ecological paradigm, organicist paradigm and, 68–78 ecology, 28–29, 76–78, 215–20, 270 efficient cause, 49 ego, action of, 20 élan vital, 136, 164, 166–67, 178, 221, 238 Eldredge, Niles, 137–38, 138n162 Eleatic rationality, 5 electron, 119–21, 188 Ellul, Jacques, 21, 34-25, 244, 272, empiricism, 257 empty signs, 259–61 end of nature, 28, 233–34 enframing, 34 Enlightenment philosophy, 78, 247 entelechy, 16, 71, 238 entropy, negative, 131 environment, 185–86, 204 epigenetics, 203–4 epiphylogenetic memory, 205 epistemology, 17, 19, 25, 245, 263, 275–76; absolute contingency in,

302

Index

37; Cartesian, 153; cybernetics and, 38, 194; Kant and, 49; the organic and, 104; on process, of knowing, 133–34; as recursive, 127; of the unknown, 229 equilibrium, 130 Ereignis, 207, 210 Ernst, Max, 209 eternal loop, 67 Ethics (Spinoza), 63 event, 210 evil, 34, 224–25 evolution, 5, 27, 136–38, 163–64, 170, 174, 203–4, 273. See also Creative Evolution (Bergson) excess information, 139 excitation, powers of, 61 existence, 101, 110–11 exorganism, 26 expansive force, 80 expectation, 35 extension, 170–71, 212 exterior, interior and, 222–23 exteriorization, 25, 127, 203, 143144, 146, 161, 170, 181, 202, 207, 235, 265 external finality, 11, 164 extropia, 246 faith, 8 feedback, 20, 105–6, 108, 123–25, 134–35, 142–43, 216, 263 Fibonacci number, 113–14 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: on the Absolute, 53–54; on absolute I, 52; formalism of, 128–29; Grant on, 54–55; Hegel and, 53–54, 127–29; ich of, 51–55; the I in, 128; Kant and, 51–52; recursive model of, 54–55; on recursivity, 54–55, 55n47, 128– 29; Schelling and, 53–54, 150;

on subjective subject-object, 54; Wissenschaftslehre of, 53–55 figure-ground theory, 29–30, 162–63, 223, 225–26 final cause, 47, 160 finalism, 164–65, 169, 178, 273 finality, 12–15, 142, 164, 169 the finite, 6, 62, 117 fire, 151–53, 181–84 First Outline of a System of Philosophy (Schelling), 61, 63, 66 van Foerster, Heinz, 107–8, 126 the fold, 6 force, 11, 58–60, 64–65, 70, 80, 166, 197–98 form, 7, 148–49, 176, 197. See also organic form formal actuality, 99 formal drive, 236 formalism, 37, 128–29 formative drive, 51 Foucault, Michel, 179, 267 frame problem, 253 Frazer, James, 223n71 Fredkin, Edward, 145 freedom, 33–34, 50, 52, 102, 170– 71, 248 French Revolution, 43–44, 235 Friedmann, Georges, 182–83 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, 233 Fuller, Buckminster, 77 functional equivalence, 192–93 functional organs, 200 functors, 127 future cosmology, 35–39, 249 Gaia, 29, 81–83, 82n151 Gale, George, 120 Geist, 9 gene-centrism, 17n31 general allagmatic, 26, 192–93, 222 general equivalence, 233–34

Index

general organism, 28, 44, 67, 69, 219–20 general organology, 25–26, 147, 157, 172, 176 general physics, 244 general recursivity, 106–15 general systems theory, 73–74, 192, 274 genetics, 75, 136–37, 252 geology, 78–80 geometrism, 167–68, 202 germ, 93 German idealism, 76, 106, 116, 129 Gestalt psychology, 29–30, 162–63, 223–24 Gestell, 34, 229, 231 Gille, Bertrand, 223 globalization, technological, 233–34 God, 33, 262–63; as cause, 7–8; death of, 105; emergence of systems and, 20; evil and, 225; ex machina, 120; Genesis, 262; natural phenomena and, 34–35; nature and, 48; Spinoza on, 63; technology replacing, 35 Goddard, Jean-Christophe, 128–29 Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter), 110 Gödel, Kurt, 38, 43, 105–13, 108n71, 124–25, 210–11, 259 Gödel numbering, 111, 261 Goebbels, Joseph, 186n5 Goethe, 90–91 Golding, William, 82 Goldstein, Kurt, 25, 162–63, 180–81, 200, 216, 224 good, evil and, 34 Google, 218 Gould, Stephen Jay, 137–38, 138n162 Grant, Iain Hamilton, 52, 54–55, 78 gravitation, 59, 80

303

the great completion, 19–25 ground: absolute, 87; of existence, 101; figure and, 29–30, 162–63, 223, 225–26; groundless, 7, 231; Leibniz on, 116–17; original, 7, 43, 225; principle of, 220–32; reason and, 116–17; of technology, 223, 226; unthinged, 87 group dynamics, 187–88 Growth and Form (Thompson), 72 Grundsatz, of social system, 20 Guimbal engine, 191, 204 Günther, Gotthard, 103, 106–8, 129 Guyer, Paul, 50 Haeckel, Ernst, 76–77 Haff, Peter, 21–22, 22n43 Hahn, Songsuk Susan, 97–98 Haldane, J. B. S., 120–21 Haldane, J. S., 24n49, 70n105, 73, 124n110 happiness, 50 hardware, 252 Hartmann, Nicolai, 33n59 Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 11–12, 14, 44; on the Absolute, 87; Canguilhem on, 175; on contingency, 94–96, 98–99; cybernetics and, 105; dialectic, 88, 92–93; The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy by, 53–54; Fichte and, 53–54, 127–29; Gödel and, 109; Günther on, 106; Heidegger on, 103–4; on the Idealists, 87; Krug on, 94; logic of, 106, 140; metaphysics of, 184; Naturphilosophie of, 92– 93, 102–3; on notion, in nature, 96–97, 101; Phenomenology of Spirit by, 86–91, 95; Philosophy of Right by, 96; on plants,

304

Index

92–93; on real necessity, 100; on reason, 175, 235; on recursivity, contingency and, 85–86; recursivity of, 129; reflective logic of, 90–93, 105, 107; reflective mechanism of, 103; on Schelling, 53–54, 87, 87n6, 91; The Science of Logic by, 87–88, 92, 96, 98; on seed, 93; Spinoza and, 87–88; on spirit, 86 Heidegger, Martin, 6n12, 265; on Being, 31, 230; Black Notebook of, 104–5; Char on, 230n85; cosmotechnical thinking of, 105; on cybernetics, 19–20, 244; on Dasein, 30, 222, 253; on end, of philosophy, 234, 275; on Ereignis, 207, 210; on Gestell, 229, 231; on Hegel, 103–4; on modern technology, 230–31, 271, 276–77; on nature, 1; on ontotheology, 104; on the organic, 25; The Principle of Reason by, 230; “The Question Concerning Technology” by, 30; Schelling and, 10, 33n60; Simondon on, 229, 274; on technics, 42; on thrownness, 205 Hemmung, 10, 92, 95, 169, 197 Henrich, Dieter, 101 Heraclitus, 1, 41, 85, 140–41, 145, 233 heredity, technical, 26 hermeneutics, computational, 210–11 heuristic, 47, 237–38 Hinton, Geoff, 138 Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (Schelling), 79 history, 11, 97–98 hitting bottom, 135

Hofstadter, Douglas, 110, 218 Holling, C. S., 83n155 homeostasis, 81–82, 124, 134 Homer, xiii Homo deus, 247, 264 human body, 154, 155 humanism, 37, 246–47, 263, 269 humanity, 247–48, 250 human-machine relation, 140 human reality, 30, 222 Husserl, Edmund, 77, 201–2, 211– 14, 213 Hutton, James, xv, 78–81 Huxley, Julian, 249 hylomorphism, 70, 148, 187-188 hylozoism, 48, 51 the I, 52–54, 128 I being thought, 54 ich, 9–10, 51–55 the Idea, 101–2 idealism, 48, 53, 76, 86, 106, 116, 127–29 idealist morphology, 91 Idealists, 51, 87, 134, 146 Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Schelling), 57–58, 61 identity, philosophy of, 53–54 imagination, productive, 52–53 immanence, 8 immanent causation, 181 immanent reflection, 88 immediate sense certainty, 87 inadaptation, 178–79 inanimate being, 120 incomputability, algorithmic contingency and, 140–44 indeterminacy, 220, 235 Indifferenz, 59 individual memory, 205 individual norm, 216–17

Index

individual substance, 5–6, 119 individuation, 3-7, 19, 28, 60, 71, 94, 188, 193–200, 202–3, 207–9, 225 L’Individuation (Simondon), 197–98 industrialism, 73, 186 industrialization, 2, 27, 73–74 Industrial Revolution, 69, 73, 148, 182, 215–16 Industry 4.0, 215 the infinite, 6, 11, 62, 117, 121 infinite force, 11 infinite metamorphosis, 68 information, 129, 188–89, 198, 203, 238; of dialectics, 130–40; feedback and, 105–6; giving form, 7; Simondon on, 18–19; theory, 132, 141, 145 inhibition, 10, 95 the inhuman, 32, 250–51, 253–55, 261, 263 inhuman contra system, 250–56 inhumanity, 247, 253–54 inhumanization, 217 inorganic, 28–29, 245 inorganic organicity, 215–20 instinct, 174 intellectual intuition, 51–52, 227–28 intelligence, 166–69, 171–74. See also artificial intelligence interior, exterior and, 222–23 interiorization, 117, 203 internal finality, 164 internalization, 181 internal resonance, 190 intuition, 51–52, 109–10, 227–28, 228n82 inversion, 171 Ionian physiology, 5 the irrational, 33 iteration, 52, 260 I think, 51–52, 54

305

Jacob, François, 118–19, 131n135 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 53 Jankelevich, Vladimir, 164 Jonas, Hans, 17, 142, 142n172 judgment, 9, 140–41. See also reflective judgment; teleological judgment Kant, Immanuel, 145, 172–73, 220, 266; on attraction, repulsion, 58; Bergson and, 164–65; Bertalanffy on, 74–75; Cassirer on, 25, 25n50; Critique of Practical Reason by, 51n29; Critique of Pure Reason by, 2n3, 3, 3n7, 12–13, 50, 108, 228; on deliberation, 45n6; epistemology and, 49; Fichte and, 51–52; on intellectual intuition, 227–28; I think of, 51–52; Lyotard on, 241; Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science by, 58; modal logic of, 12–13; model of system, 42; models of, 51; on natural end, 47, 49–50, 49n23, 125; on nature, 46–48, 159–62; ontology and, 49–50; Opus Postumum by, 50; on the organic, 2, 46, 83–84, 184; on organism, 28–29, 47; as philosopher, of technology, 157–63; on reason, 44–45, 45n5; Schelling and, 51, 56–60, 62; Schiller on, 235; on Schwämerei, 259; on Spinoza, 48; on systematization, 44; on teleological judgment, 4, 8–9; on teleology, 45n7; Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770 by, 3n4; on Timaeus, 62. See also Critique of Judgment (Kant) Kapp, Ernst, 25–26

306

Index

Kilmeyer, Carl Friedrich, 61 Kirchner, James, 82n151 Klee, Paul, 257–58 knowing, process of, 133–34, 141, 182 knowledge, 131, 134; axiology of, 193; facts and, 242; heterogeneity of, 258; individuation and, 197–98; Lyotard on, 242–43; objective, 129; scientific, 141, 156; systematization, 54–56; transvaluation of, 37 Knowledge of Life (Canguilhem), 158 Koestler, Arthur, 75 Korzybski, Alfred, 132–33 Koyré, Alexander, 8n15 Krug, Wilhelm Traugott, 94 Kuhn, Thomas, 267 Küppers, Bernd-Olaf, 56 language, 203 Latour, Bruno, 29, 77 Lawrence, Joseph P., 64 laws of chance, 11 laws of nature, 41, 43 Leibniz, Gottfried, 5–6, 24, 24n48, 38, 65; De Arte Combinatoria by, 116; best of all possible worlds, 141, 141n168; Bergson on, 164; calculus of reasoning, 115–16; on communication, 121; cybernetics and, 115–16, 119; Deleuze on, 117; finalism of, 164; on ground, 116–17; the infinite, the finite and, 117; Le système nouveau de la nature by, 120; metaphysics of, 119; monad of, 117–18; Monadology of, 116–17; Needham on, 23, 116; organic philosophy of, 116; on soul, 118;

universal symbolism of, 115–16; Wiener on, 119-122 Leibnizianism, 115–24 Lenoir, Timothy, 4, 4n8 Le paradigme perdu: La nature humaine (Morin), 21 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 25–26, 266 Le Sage, Georges-Louis, 58 Lewin, Kurt, 187–88 life, 60; adaptation, 187; as artificial, 174; Canguilhem and, 184; complexity of, 15; creativity of, 170; knowing, 182; matter, as product of, 66; as the Notion, 97; organic form of, 67; as recursive process, 175–76; teleology of, 157 life science, 247–48 light, 120, 131 linear mechanical movement, 14 livestock farming, 186 Livet, Pierre, 54, 125–29 living being, 195 living organism, 122–23 local minima, 139 logic: Aristotelian, 106; classical, 106; of Hegel, 106, 140; modal, 12–14; natural, 167–68; organicist, 90–93; reflective, 90– 93, 105, 107; symbolic, 110–11; two-valued, 107 logical emanation, 43 loop, 20, 113, 123, 128, 135, 141–43, 218, 263 Lovelock, James, 28, 81–83 luck, 189 Luhmann, Niklas, 20–21, 20n37, 127, 129, 219, 239–40, 244 Lyotard, Jean-François, 22, 32, 45n8, 236–45, 250–56, 258–59, 263, 268–70

Index

Mabille, Bernard, 94 machine, 27, 106–7, 200; animal and, 2–3; Bergson on, 164–65; cybernetic, 18, 129, 139, 142, 145; humans, as organizers of, 140; open, 189, 278; organism and, 124, 146–47, 182–83; reason and, 235–36; reasoning, 116; trivial versus nontrivial, 126; Turing, 106–15, 124–25, 145, 260–61; Wiener on, 29 machine learning, 2, 103 MacKay, Donald, 132 magical intuition, 227 magic phase, 222–23, 223n71 magnetism, 57, 60, 86 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, 13 Malebranche, Nicolas, 120 Mangold, Hilde, 70n104 Margulis, Lynn, 28, 81–83 Mars, 34 Marx, Karl, 2, 183 material drive, 236 materialism, 30–31, 55, 143–44, 259 mathematical formalism, 37 mathematical intuition, 109–10 mathematical symbolism, 37 mathematics, 38, 75, 108, 110–11, 130, 187–88, 259 matter: in evolution, 170; force and, 198; form and, 148–49; intelligence and, 166, 168–69, 172–73; as internalized organs, 173; as movement, 170; organizing, 145; as product of life, 66 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 171 Matthews, Bruce, 61, 150 Maxwell’s demon, 130–31 Mayr, Ernst, 142, 164 McCulloch, Warren, 123 McLuhan, Marshall, 77–78

307

the mechanical, the organic and, 104–5, 161 mechanical form, 62 mechanical laws, 47, 153–54 mechanical model, 11, 153–54 mechanical organicism, 3, 24, 103, 123–24 mechanical organism, 16 mechanical organs, 153–57 mechanics: Newtonian, 118–19, 122; quantum, 119–20, 122; statistical, 17, 31, 118–19, 122 mechanism, 4n8, 11, 211; advancement of, 105–6; Bergson on, 118, 164, 182; biology and, 71–72; Cartesian, 146; consciousness and, 182; Descartes on, 2–3, 155–57; industrialization and, 73–74; natural, 160; of nature, 57; organicism and, 70; organism and, 273–74; recursivity, contingency and, 138; reflective, 103; Schelling against, 68–69; in systemic philosophy, 42; vitalism and, 16–19, 70, 86, 145 mechanist cybernetics, 142 mechanology, 27, 200 Meillassoux, Quentin, 36–38, 251– 52, 257–62, 258n70, 278 memory, 4, 25–26, 131, 202, 205 Mensch, Jennifer, 2n3, 3n3 metabolism, of plant, 92 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Kant), 58 metaphysics: on being, beings, 104– 5; of cybernetics, 107–8, 244–45; end of, 19–20; of Hegel, 184; Leibnizian, 119; of Spinoza, 48; will and, 105 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 12 metastability, 60, 208–9

308

Index

milieu-technics, 185–86 mind, 7–12, 41–42, 52, 58, 85, 120 Ministry of Accelerationism, 264–65 mirror, 6, 54, 119, 121 modal logic, 12–14 model, of system, 42–46 modernity, 25, 104–5 modern technology, 229–31, 271, 276–77 monad, 5–6, 65–66, 117–21 Monadology (Leibniz), 116–17 monism, 65, 258 monotheism, 33 moral end, 9 Morin, Edgar, 21 morphology, 72, 91 movement, 13–15, 89, 100, 170 Mumford, Lewis, 16n29, 183 Musk, Elon, 34 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 233, 270 nationalism, 186 National Socialism, 186, 186n5 Natur, 9 natural end, 47, 49–50, 49n23, 125, 221 naturalism, 2, 262 natural logic, 167–68 natural mechanism, 160 natural science, 2, 34n61, 47, 68 natura naturata, natura naturans and, 63–64, 85, 87–88, 167, 210 nature: or art, 207–10; art and, 160; circularity of, 56–63; comprehended as a whole, 48; contingency of, 41, 94–96; death of, 12, 101–2; diversity of, 101; end of, 28, 233–34; force of, 64– 65; freedom and, 50, 102; God and, 48; Heidegger on, 1; the Idea and, 101–2; invisible, 7–12, 58; Kant on, 46–48, 159–62; laws of,

41, 43; mechanism, purposiveness of, 57; mechanistic-technological triumph over, 25; mind and, 7, 10, 52, 58, 85; modernity triumphing over, 104–5; monads, 65–66; the Notion in, 93–97, 101; philosophy of, 8, 49; product in, 64; from productive imagination, 52–53; productivity of, 10; as recursive, 218; return to, 29; Romantic, 38–39; self-generation of, 54; soul and, 56–63; spirit and, 103; structure of, 61; subject and, 53–54, 64; system for, 68; systemizing, 43; technical systems and, 1; technics and, 155–56; technology and, 145; as whole, 57; as word, 187, 197, 207 Naturphilosophie, 42, 49; as ecology, 76; of Hegel, 92–93, 102–3; organicism and, 69–70, 102–3; recursivity in, 63–68; of Schelling, 44, 61–65, 68–70, 83, 102–3, 217–18; systems theory and, 75–76 necessity, 12n22, 14, 38; absolute, 100–101; contingency and, 44–45, 68, 86, 101; freedom and, 170–71; functional, 227; obligation and, 209–10; Schelling on, 42–43, 86 Needham, Joseph, 71–73, 124n114, 249–50, 264n80, 272, 277; on Haldane, 24n49; on Leibniz, 23, 24n48, 116; on Wiener, 121n100; Science and Civilisation in China by, 22–23 negation, 32, 52 the negative, 38 negative entropy, 131 negative feedback, 142 negative organology, 253

Index

negative principles, 60–61 negativity, 254 neo-Confucianism, 24 neo-Darwinism, 136–37 von Neumann, John, 145 neuron, 139 Newton, Isaac, 59, 80, 119 Newtonian mechanics, 118–19, 122 nicht-ich, 9–10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 28, 34, 34n61, 83, 105, 195 nihilism, 33, 53, 234, 241, 254 nonground, 43 nonhuman, 37, 257, 263 the non-I, 52–54 nonlinear movement, 14 nonorganic beings, 11 the nonrational, 33, 98 nontrivial machine, 126 noosphere, 21–22, 219, 248–50, 264 The Normal and the Pathological (Canguilhem), 179, 179n114 norms, 175–81, 216 the Notion, 93–97, 97n38, 98, 101, 146 oar, xiii–xv object, 56, 198–99, 203, 209–10, 222, 224. See also subject-object objective contingency, 36 objective knowledge, 129 objective subject-object, 53–54 obligation, 209–10 Occasionalism, 120 Odysseus, xiii–xv Odyssey (Homer), xiii Oken, Lorenz, 75 On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller), 235 On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature (Boutroux), 43

309

On the Existence of Digital Objects (Hui), 139, 187, 189–91, 210, 222; On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Simondon), 139, 187, 189–91, 210, 222 “On the World Soul” (Schelling), 61, 65, 150, 152 ontology, 33n59, 36–37, 49–50, 72, 259–61 onto-theology, 104 open machine, 189, 278 open system, 74 operational equivalence, 192 Opium Wars, 24 Opus Postumum (Kant), 50 order, 130, 180 The Order of Things (Foucault), 267 the organic, 25; as epistemological concept, 104; Kant on, 2, 46, 83– 84, 184; the mechanical and, 104– 5, 161; recursivity, contingency on, 3; Schelling on, 61; system as, 44; in systemic thinking, 42 organic body, 32 organic condition, of philosophy, 47–51 organic form, 62, 67, 150–52, 158 organicism, 2, 2n3, 4, 16–17, 22–24, 259, 270–78; Bertalanffy on, 74; cybernetics and, 24; of Haldane, 121; mechanical, 103, 123–24; mechanism and, 70; Naturphilosophie and, 69–70, 102–3; Needham on, 23-25, 68-73; open system in, 74; on organization, 70–71; organology and, 146–49, 186; vitalism and, 70, 159; Whitehead and, 72 organicist logic, 90–93 organicist movement, 3

310

Index

organicist paradigm, ecological paradigm and, 68–78 organicity, 215–20, 227 organic philosophy, 116 organic thinking, 191 organism, 5, 9, 15, 23; absolute individuality in, 57; algorithms and, 147; biology of, 49, 182; cells of, 26n52; ecology and, 28–29; élan vital of, 166; general, 28, 44, 67, 69, 219–20; Goldstein on, 162; Kant on, 28–29, 47; living, 122–23; machine and, 124, 146–47, 182–83; mechanical, 16; mechanism and, 273–74; ontology of, 72; preexistence of, 157; Schelling on, 60; Whitehead on, 72 organismic revolution, 74–75 organization, 18, 67, 70–71, 140 organizing inorganic, 28–29, 245 organology, 2, 4, 16, 22, 270–78; Bergson on, 163–75; of contingency, 200–207; cyborg and, 147; general, 25–26, 147, 157, 172, 176; individuation and, 200; on machines, 27; materialism and, 30–31; negative, 253; organicism and, 146–49, 186; proto-organology, 69; Simondon on, 187 organo-mechanical being, 145 organs: body and, 190–91; conflict of, 25–31; functional, 200; internalized, 173; mechanical, 153–57; projection of, 25–26, 161 origin, 206–7 original ground, 7, 43, 225 The Origin of Species (Darwin), 76n130 the other, 42, 99–100 over-chaos, 36–37 Oyama, Susan, 137

Parsons, Charles, 107 Parsons, Talcott, 20 particle, 58–59, 120 particular, universal and, 59–60 part-whole relations, 75, 194 passability, sensibility and, 264–70 Pasteur, Louis, xiv pathology, 179–80, 180n115, 217 pattern generation, 114 phenomenalist objectivism, 189 phenomenology, 88, 214, 269 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 86–91, 95 Philebus (Plato), 61–62, 149–51 philosophical intuition, 228, 228n82 Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (Grant), 52 philosophy: of biology, 183–84; cybernetics, as end of, 105; end of, 234, 275; of identity, 53–54; as material proof of idealism, Schelling on, 53; of nature, 8, 49; organic condition of, 47–51; postEuropean, 278; science and, 32; systemic, 41–42 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 96 physics, speculative, 61, 67 Pires, Edmundo Balsemão, 88–90 Pitts, Walter, 123 Planck, Max, 122 plants, 90, 92–93 Plato, 10; allegory of the cave, 167; Philebus by, 61–62, 149–51; Protagoras by, 151; Timaeus by, 5, 52, 57, 61–62, 67, 151; on world soul, 57–58, 62 Platonism, 177 play drive, 236 pluralism, 258, 263 Poincaré, Henri, 11 polarity, 57 positive, negative principles, 60–61 positive feedback, 134–35, 142, 263

Index

positivism, 45–46, 189–90 possibility, 11–13, 12n22, 100 possible contingency, 12n22 posthuman, 30-32, 185–86, 245–46 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard), 237, 244, 268 postmodernism, 38 postmodernity, 235–45 poststructuralism, 256 potency, 61-62, 71, 141, 190, 196 potentials, 197 power, 143 powers of excitation, 61 practical reason, 50 preemption, 210–15 preindividual, 197 primary protention, 201 primary retention, 201 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead), 109–10 The Principle of Reason (Heidegger), 230 Principles of Philosophy (Descartes), 155 probability, 11, 13 productive imagination, 52–53 productivity, of nature, 10 projection, of organs, 25–26, 161 Prometheus, 151–52 prospective potency, significance, 71 Protagoras (Plato), 151 protention, 201, 210–16 proto-organology, 69 psychic individuation, 193–200, 202 psychologism, 194 purposiveness, 57, 208 quantum mechanics, 119–20, 122 “Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz” (Wiener), 120 quasi-causality, 206 quasi cause, xii, 18, 201, 206

311

“The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger), 30 The Question Concerning Technology in China (Hui), xii, xv, 30n55, 228n82, 262-265, 274277 randomness, 13, 139 rationalism, 33, 221 rationality, 14, 143 Ravaisson, Félix, 169–70 realism, 23, 48, 53, 65 real necessity, 100 real systems, 118 reason, 11–12, 115, 234, 258; adventure of, 2–7; ground and, 116–17; Hegel on, 175, 235; Kant on, 44–45, 45n5; machine and, 235–36; in modern technology, 230–31; on natural end, 47; practical, 50; reflective judgment and, 50–51; speculative, 31–32, 44–45; theoretical, 50; unity of, 3n7 reasoning machine, 116 reciprocity, 46, 57, 66 recurrent causality, 190 recursion, xiv; beginning, 7; digital, 114; feedback and, 124–25; forms of, 10; idealism and, 127–28; as the infinite, in the finite, 6; Lyotard on, 252; in pattern generation, 114; as structural, operational, 4–5 recursive algorithms, 217, 235–36 recursive circuit, 217 recursive function, 110–13, 124–25, 210–11 recursive model, 54–56 recursive reciprocity, 66 recursivity: from absolute unity, 54; of act, 9; being in becoming, 6;

312

Index

in being organic, 42; Bergson on, 170; Critique of Judgment on, 55; in cybernetics, 86, 104, 125; of epistemology, 127; Fichte on, 54–55, 55n47, 128–29; general, 106–15; of Hegel, 129; of history, 11; in ich, of Fichte, 51–55; as immanence, 8; iteration, 52; of knowing, 133–34; of life, 175–76; with loops, 128; in mathematics, 110; models of, 86–87; of nature, 218; in Naturphilosophie, 63–68; of nonorganic beings, 11; in Phenomenology of Spirit, 86–90; postmodernity and, 235–45; in psychic, collective individuation, 193–200; reflectivity versus, 54; in scientific knowledge, 141; Simondon on, 187, 203; of soul, 4; Stiegler on, 201 recursivity, contingency and: in Hegel, 85–86; mechanism, 138; movement, 15; on the organic, 3; organicism, organology and, 2; in Schelling, 85–86; singularity of, 6–7; in systems, 1, 85 reductionism, 16, 145–46, 261 reflected contingency, 101 reflection, 6, 52; anticipation and, 219–20; feedback as, 123–24; Lyotard on, 239; in phenomenology, 88; as process, 106; as recursivity, with loops, 128; self-reflection, 103 reflective being, 99 reflective judgment, 45n8, 140–41, 240; act and, 9; Critique of Judgment on, 45, 47, 49, 49n23, 237; reason and, 50–51 reflective logic, 90–93, 105, 107 reflective mechanism, 103 reflectivity, 45, 54

reframing, 34 Reinhardt, Django, 206 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 52 reiteration, 260 religion, 35, 223, 227–28 repetition, 4, 37-38, 61, 93, 100, 115, 133, 169, 183, 201, 225, 238, 258-260 repulsion, attraction and, 58–59 repulsive force, 80 resilience, 22 resituate technology, 220–21 retention, 201–2, 212–13 retina, 126, 131–32 return to nature, 29 Richards, Robert, 69 Romantic Ecology, 69 Romanticism, 11, 29, 38–39, 65, 68–69, 186 Rosenblueth, Arturo, 123 Roux, Wilhelm, 16 Russell, Bertrand, 109–10 Ruyer, Raymond, 122n104, 142 Sagan, Dorian, 140 Saint-Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy, 90–91 sameness, as difference, 133 Samuel, Arthur, 138 Schelling, Friedrich, 147–49, 207–8, 219–20; on the Absolute, 53–54, 87n4, 95; on attraction, repulsion and, 58–59; on Brown, 61; on contingency, 43, 95; defining philosophy, 53; on dynamic atoms, 65–66; on evil, 34, 224–25; Fichte and, 53–54, 150; First Outline of a System of Philosophy by, 61, 63, 66; on forces, 58–59; Hegel on, 53–54, 87, 87n6, 91; Heidegger and, 10, 33n60; Historical-Critical

Index

Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology by, 79; Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature by, 57–58, 61; on inhibition, 95; Kant and, 51, 56–60, 62; late philosophy of, 42–44; on life, 60; against mechanism, 68–69; on mind, nature, 10, 58; on nature, as subject, 64; on nature monads, 65–66; Naturphilosophie of, 44, 61–65, 68–70, 83, 102–3, 217–18; on necessity, 42–43, 86; on Newtonian gravitational force, 59; on object, consciousness and, 56; on objective subject-object, 53– 54; on the organic, 61; on organic form, 150–51; on organism, 60; on organization, 67; on particles, 58–59; proto-organology of, 69; on recursive reciprocity, 66; on recursivity, contingency and, 85–86; Schelling’s Treaties on Human Freedom by, 225; on Scherer, 57; speculative physics of, 61; Spinoza and, 58, 63–64, 87–88; against subject-object dualism, 53–54; on system, 55; as systemic thinker, 43–44; systemizing nature, 43; on the thing, 52; Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom by, 44, 68; on whirlpool, 64–65; “On the World Soul” by, 61, 65, 150, 152 Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy—Life as the Scheme of Freedom (Matthews), 61 Schelling’s Treaties on Human Freedom (Schelling), 225 Scherer, Alexander Nicolaus, 57 Schiller, Friedrich, 235–36, 247–48, 266, 277

313

Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich, 88, 101–2 Schmitt, Carl, 247 Schneider, Eric, 140 Schütz, Christian Gottfried, 52 Schwämerei, 44–45, 259 science, 2, 32, 34n61, 47, 68, 175– 76, 243, 266. See also Chinese science and technology; life science Science and Civilisation in China (Needham), 22–23 The Science of Logic (Hegel), 87–88, 92, 96, 98 scientific humanism, 246–47 scientific knowledge, 141, 156 secondary protention, 201 secondary retention, 201 second law of thermodynamics, 130, 140 second-order cybernetics, 143 seed, 93 self, other and, 99–100 self-argumentation, 21 self-causation, 63 self-consciousness, 86, 98-103, 129 self-contained whole, system as, 55 self-generation, of nature, 54 self-knowledge, 134 self-organization, 75, 240 self-reference, 89 self-reflection, 103 self-will, 225–26 sensibility, passibility and, 264–70 Shannon, Claude, 18, 130 sheer contingency, 52 sickness, 18n34 signification, 210 Simondon, Gilbert, 17–19, 26–27, 29–30, 131, 135–36, 140, 148, 163, 185–86, 188,

314

Index

192; on co-naturality, 226; on contingency, 28; on convergence, 249; on Critique of Judgment, 190; on cybernetics, 28n53, 228, 273; on Gestalt psychology, 223–24; on Heidegger, 229, 274; on indetermination, 235; on individuation, 194–200, 202–3, 207, 209; L’Individuation by, 197–98; on intuition, 228; on magic phase, 222–23, 223n71; On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects by, 139, 187, 189–91, 210, 222; on open machine, 278; on organicity, 227; on organology, 187; on recursivity, 187, 203 Skolem, Thoralf, 110 Sloterdijk, Peter, 186 smart technology, 215–16, 215n59 social order, 20n37 social system, 20, 244 The Society of Society (Lyotard), 240 Socrates, 61–62, 150 software, 252 solar catastrophe, 251–52 solitude, 195 soul: Aristotle on, 118; Cartesians on, 5–6; circularity of, 56–63; coming back to itself, 56, 62; Leibniz on, 118; nature and, 56–63; organic body and, 32; recursivity of, 4; as structure, operation, 5; as the unknown, 33; world soul, 57–58, 62, 67 specialization, 21 speculative physics, 32, 58, 61, 67 speculative reason, 31–32, 44–45 Spencer-Brown, George, 17 Spinoza, Baruch, 5, 7, 48, 58, 63–65, 87–88, 167 spirit, 86, 89, 103, 152–53

state, 238 statistical mechanics, 17, 31, 118–19, 122 steam engine, 80–81, 123, 188 steering process, 19–20 Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson), 132–33 Stiegler, Bernard, 26, 28, 152, 187, 200–201, 203–11 stochastic music, 14–15 structure, operation and, 4–5, 10, 62, 188-194, 222, 227 subject, 51–54, 64 subjective subject-object, 53–54 subjectivists, 36 subject-object, 29, 37, 53–54, 56, 107 sublation, 4–5 the sublime, 241, 253 substance, 5-6, 12, 30, 32, 48, 63, 65, 80, 90, 105, 117-119, 121, 133, 188 substantialism, 188 superintelligence, 256 superorganism, 79–80, 219–20 surrealism, 210 symbiogenesis, 82–83 symbolic logic, 110–11 symbolism, 33, 37, 115–16 synthesis, 4–5 synthetic biology, 217–18 system: contingency after, 256–63; emergence of, 20; foundation of, 37–38; homeostatic, 82; Lyotard on, 237–42; mechanical, 239; model of, 42–46; for nature, 68; open, 74; as organic being, 44; postmodern, 237; recursivity, contingency in, 85; Schelling on, 55; social, 20, 244; transforming, 28 systematic objective knowledge, 129

Index

Le système nouveau de la nature (Leibniz), 120 Le système technicien (Ellul), 244 systemic philosophy, 41–42 systemic thinking, 42–44 systemization, 35, 43–44, 54–56, 186, 248 systems: artificial, real, 118; evolution of, 1; God, in emergence of, 20; inorganic organicity, of society, 218–19; recursivity, contingency in, 1, 85; technical, 1–2, 223, 242–44 systems theory, 2, 5, 20, 22, 73–76, 102–3, 192, 239–41, 244–45 Taoism, 271–72 Tarde, Gabriel, 179 Taylorism, 183 technē, 30, 127, 207–8 technical heredity, 26 technical individuals, elements and ensembles, 190, 199 technical object, xiv, xv, 21, 123124, 138-140, 161, 175-177, 187-191, 198–99, 203, 209–10, 222, 224 technical reality, 30, 222 technical systems, 1–2, 21, 41-42, 76, 210, 218, 223, 235, 242–44, 256 technics, 42, 138, 152, 155–57, 185– 87, 206–7, 223, 227–28. See also cosmotechnics technodiversity, 27, 256, 263, 272– 73, 275–76 technological acceleration, 32 technology: Chinese, 22–23, 265, 271–72, 277; communication, 83; contingency and, 193–94; culture and, 26–27, 223; cybernetic, 27; ecology and,

315

77–78; in evolution, 27; Gestell, of modern, 229; globalization of, 233–34; God and, 35; Goebbels on, 186n5; ground of, 223, 226; Kant, as philosopher of, 157–63; mechanology, 200; modern, 229– 31, 271, 276–77; nature and, 145; organs and, 25–26; philosophy of, 159; resituate, 220–21; smart, 215–16, 215n59; specialization, diversification of, 21; universality of, 265 technosphere, 21–22, 22n43, 245–50 Teilhard Center for the Future of Man, 22 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 2, 21– 22, 186, 219–20, 248–49, 264 teleological judgment, 4, 8–9, 46, 47n16, 50 teleology, 45n7, 47, 93, 142, 149, 157, 221, 157 teleo-mechanism, 4n8 teleonomy, 142 tension, 170–71 tertiary protention, 210–16, 243 tertiary retention, 201, 211–6, 274 Tesla Roadster, 34 The Obsolescence of Man (Anders), 245–46 theology, 104, 143 Theoretical Biology Club, 22 Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770 (Kant), 3n4 theoretical reason, 50 thesis, antithesis and, 4–5, 47n16, 50 the thing, 52 thinking: algorithmic, 114–15, 227; allagmatic, 193–94, 220–21, 227–28; cosmotechnical, 39, 105; loop, 141–42; organic, 191. See also systemic thinking Third Industrial Revolution, 215–16

316

Thompson, D’Arcy, 72, 114 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze), 271–72 Tilliette, Xavier, 63n78 Timaeus (Plato), 5, 52, 57, 61–62, 67, 151 time and space, 13 time-consciousness, 213 Tiresias, xiii–xiv tools, 203, 248 totalization, 21 Toward the Postmodern (Lyotard), 256 transcendental deduction, 44 transevaluation, 222 transhumanism, 2, 32, 246–47, 254 transindividuality, 195–96, 198–99, 208 transitive causality, 67 The Treatise on Man (Descartes), 154, 157 Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Schelling), 44, 68 trivial machine, 126 Turing, Alan, 72, 105–6, 113–14 Turing machine, 106–15, 124–25, 145, 260–61 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 83 Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson), 167, 169, 173–74, 173n89, 174n90 tyche, 13–14, 32 von Uexküll, Jacob, 181 Umgebung, 182 Umwelt, 182, 244 Unbedingt, 36 Unbedingte, 52 uncanny fire, 181–84 the Unconditional, 68 unconditional I, 52

Index

Ungrund, 43 unification, differentiation and, 56, 60 uniformitarianism, 79 unity, 3n7, 53–54, 57, 62, 99, 150 universal, particular and, 59–60 the universal, 12–13 universal cybernetics, 187–93 universal symbolism, 115–16 universal will, 34. 225–26 the unknown, 33, 35, 141, 229–32 unthinged ground, 87 Urgrund, 7, 43, 225, 231 value, 226 Varela, Francisco J., 127–28 virtualities, 197 vis viva, 65 vital force, 70 vitalism, 4, 16–19, 70, 86, 136, 145, 159, 176 Waddington, Conrad, 75–76, 114n85, 136–37, 203–4 Watt, James, 69, 78, 80–81, 81n145, 123 wave-particle dualism, 120 Weismann, August, 26 What Computers Cannot Do? A Critique of Artificial Reason (Dreyfus), 252–53 whirlpool, 64–65 Whitehead, Alfred North, 3, 24, 71–72, 109–10, 183, 266–67 whole, nature as, 57 Wiener, Norbert, 107–8, 115–17, 119, 122–24, 130, 139, 184, 190–91; Cybernetics Communication and Control in Man and Animals by, 17–18, 118, 192; cybernetics of, 121, 147, 192, 221; on machine, 29;

Index

“Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz” by, 120 will, 105, 225–26 The Will to Power (Nietzsche), 34 window, 6 winnowing fan, xiv Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte), 53–55 Wolfe, Charles, 149n5 Wolfram, Stephen, 145 Wood, Allen, 55n47

Woodger, Joseph, 16–17, 71, 73 Woodward, Ashley, 254 world cause, 49 world soul, 57–58, 62, 67 Xenakis, Iannis, 14–15 Zarathustra, 8, 195 zoology, 96

317

About the Author

Yuk Hui is the author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2017).

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