The Revenge of Philosophy
Thinking through Variations on the End
This month at The Portal we have been focused on the metaphysics of self-reference, or self-reference as metaphysics. For the rest of the month we will be hosting Greg Dember of What Is Metamodernism?, and
of Bad Guru. To learn more or to get involved, see: The Portal. You can access a single Thought Lab session with Greg Dember, here: Thought Lab.The following post is inspired by a podcast hosted by
of and in collaboration with . You can find the video below titled Transhumanism & Hyperhumanism:I entered into intellectual maturity, not in a time of totalising philosophical systems, but in a time of totalising philosophical impotence. The great philosophical questions about fundamental ontology had become relegated to discursive historical critique, relativised and culturalised. How did the universe begin? What is the nature of the self? Is immortality possible? Post-modern relativity responds: within X historical culture the beginning of the universe is represented by Y, within X historical culture the self’s nature is Y, within X historical culture immortality represents Y.
As
often notes in regards to our contemporary postmodern liberal society: there is no real ontological commitment.1As someone interested in these ontological questions, this void was filled by a form of scientific materialism, expressed in fields like evolutionary biology and quantum cosmology. These fields sought to answer fundamental ontological questions that had previously been the terrain of philosophical dialogue.
I still remember being unconsciously caught in the cross-hairs of this mega-intellectual tension, when, as a student of evolutionary anthropology, I tried to develop a research project approaching the mystery of the origin of language through primatological and paleo-anthropological analysis. In so doing, at an interdisciplinary anthropology conference (and my first ever formal academic presentation), a post-modern cultural relativist professor hysterically interrupted me. He dogmatically claimed that my work was offensive to the cultural sensibilities of Southeast Asian mythological traditions (of which he was a world expert), and whose perspective on the origin of language, primatology and paleo-anthropology could not take into account, or account for.
If I had been making the same presentation 50 years prior, the same dynamic may have emerged, but with my work causing offence to the Christian mythological tradition, as opposed to the Southeast Asian mythological tradition. In general, I have come to the view that what is expressed by post-modernism is just a multiplicity of differences filling the void of a lacking ontological pre-modern singularity that held together Western culture. To put it simply, our culture was unreflectively oriented around Christ and Christianity as the ontological truth of being. Now with that singularity lacking, constantly in need to defence and subject to critique against a secular background, as well as without a clear or coherent modernist narrative that works universally, there is a buffet (multiplicity) of ontological commitments that seek to, consciously or unconsciously, fill that void. The tendency is for this multiplicity to assert itself singularly as coming from a marginalised and oppressed position in relation to a hegemonic or dominant Western culture, whether it is Southeast Asian mythology in relation to scientific materialism, or some other dynamic.
The intellectual tension described above may seem hyper-abstract, ultimately irrelevant to major ontological questions, i.e. whether or not we can accommodate the multiplicity of mythological perspectives on the origin of language in relation to the modern scientific account of the origin of language. In the end what is really at stake if the modern scientific account of the origin of language cannot take into account the Southeast Asian mythological traditions view? Or the traditional Christian view? It is actually difficult to say, and a philosophically trained mind might just say the question is itself being framed wrong since the origin of language is always-already refreshing itself right here and now. But these tensions became/become mega-actual when the modern scientific approach itself started/starts to impinge on the historicity of questions like the relativity of the self and immortality.
Will I (we) live forever?
This is a question that has from the “beginning of time” been framed within a purely religious or philosophical context, but not anymore. Take for example the way the modern scientific approach develops the conditions of possibility for science fiction-like technologies which, some claim, actually open the door to “longevity escape velocity” (LEV).2 Proponents of LEV suggest that we are going to be soon entering a time when life expectancy through technological intervention is improving at a faster rate than people are ageing. In such a situation, our conventional phenomenological human horizon would become fundamentally inverted: while in the past, the older we get, the less we may expect to live; after reaching LEV: the older we get, the longer we may expect to live.
That idea alone is enough to stimulate a wealth of new science fiction possibilities, both utopian and dystopian. However, those focusing on the hard science, and the ontological commitment to the possibilities included within, what takes their time and attention is focusing on the pathways to actualisation through bio-genetics or artificial intelligence, or some combination of the two. The point here is that questions of the self and its immortality (in this case) are not culturally relativised to a certain mythological discursivity. Rather, the Self and its Immortality is immanent and the pathway is through scientific materialism which is conceived as a universal structuring moment for all subjectivity. Whatever traditional culture may have to say about immortality is irrelevant because these cultures are historical particularities, and but moments that will become replaced by an actual concrete universality on a higher level.
In transhumanist discourses, this actual concrete universality takes many speculative forms, but what is universal is the agreement that death itself will be historicised. Take, for example, Kurzweil’s view on the topic in The Singularity Is Near:3
“The “inevitability” of death is deeply ingrained in human thinking. If death seems unavoidable, we have little choice but to rationalise it as necessary, even ennobling. The technology of the Singularity will provide practical and accessible means for humans to evolve into something greater, so we will no longer need to rationalise death as a primary means of giving meaning to life.”
How are we to make sense of this ideology?
It is something that I have spent an inordinate amount of time reflecting on, as the fascination with transhumanism as a young man, in particular because of the singularity of its ontological commitments, has been replaced with a, I think, more reflexive stance largely informed by continental philosophy. But still the question is before me: is Kurzweil correct that death is rationalised as an inevitability only because we have not theorised the historical role of technology in the totality of the human project? It is not an absurd question. Hegel, the philosopher who has come to orient my thinking perhaps more than any other, certainly assumed death to be absolutely central to his human phenomenology and his global politics. Consider the following passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit which outlines the core of his ideas about the truth of the self being found in a confrontation with the “death-master”:4
“For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness.”
Or consider Hegel’s later political analysis inclusive of the metaphysics of life and death, which includes within it an ethical injunction against suicide, and in favour of the subject, not waiting for some sort of technological salvation re: LEV, but rather waiting for death by natural causes or waiting for death in service of an idea:5
“Life, as such, being direct and unreflected, and death the direct negation of it, death must come from without as a result of natural causes, or must be received in the service of the idea from a foreign hand.”
Does Kurzweil, as free thinking spirit, oriented concretely towards the ontological commitments of his historical moment, not have the right to question such hypotheses?
Certainly.
Was Hegel aware of artificial general intelligence and the possibilities that it would open for 21st century subjectivity?
Certainly not.
As it relates to the initial framing of this article, are all of our cultural myths of immortality going to become relativised by the progress of scientific materialism in the form of bio-genetics and artificial intelligence? In Kurwzeilian terms, are we destined to “transcend” our biology for an other form of immortal spiritual evolution (if that is the right word)?6
When approaching these questions, I think, surprise surprise, that we need to return to Hegel. For Hegel, we cannot predict the future, but rather must commit to a rigorous dialectical analysis of “what is” without getting carried away with our big bright ideas of “what ought” to be the future of “what is”.
Consider his famous passage about the Owl of Minerva from the Philosophy of Right:7
“Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom.”
The lesson I have derived from this reflection is that I should not presuppose that I know what the ideal of the future is, for example, the immortality of the self. Furthermore, I should not presuppose that my knowledge in X field, for example, computer science, justifies claims about, for example, the eradication of death or the immanence of immortality. At the same time, I think that the actual existence of bio-genetics and artificial intelligence pose serious challenges for our understanding of conventional assumptions about human longevity, certainly.
Thus, I would suggest, that what appears in the lack of both scientific materialism and traditional mythology, is the revenge of philosophy.8 Traditional mythology operates in a closed ontology where our knowledge of the absolute overlaps with its completed reality in the true believer. Scientific materialism reduces material to its knowable coordinates in order to design predictable experiments about the future of being. What both of these operations repress or foreclose is the fact that our knowing and being only overlap in a gap of not-knowing, the unconscious.9 This gap is the space of our historical freedom, but also the space where being itself, and its relation to our knowing, is unpredictable. Thus, scientific materialism does not open us to a completely known future, as it once presupposed, but rather opens us to a dizzying complexity that, while sure to produce symptoms in the subjective form of clinging to pre-modern regressive ontologies, ultimately leaves us with no choice but to assume a true philosophical positionality.
I think that the best we can do is commit to thinking the uncertainty of the present using the methods that have been developed by the greatest philosophical minds of the past.10
In my philosophical training, two of the methods that I have come to rely on can be expressed in the unity of dialectical and speculative logic. I use dialectical and speculative logic to enhance my interpretive capacities of both the present moment, as well as make use of the fields of knowledge that I have been privileged enough to study, e.g. evolutionary anthropology, colonial history, complexity science, etc.
In my recent/aforementioned discussion on
I offered a (dialectical and speculative) thought experiment that has been with me for many years, and in fact motivated my work in Global Brain Singularity.11 I think this thought experiment can help us contextualise the philosophical challenge which is posed to us by proponents of technological singularity. It goes like this:Given our knowledge of evolutionary theory, if we think of any biological organism on the planet (e.g. lion, dolphin, chimpanzee, etc.), we could project their descendants out 1, 2, 5, 10 million years into the future, and within reason expect to find an organism that looks and acts in a somewhat similar way to the current form of the organism. To be sure, we would likely not find lions, dolphins, or chimpanzees, but we would also not likely find something qualitatively different, either.
However, evolutionary theory does not give us the same predictive power when we apply the same logic to the human organism. If we project the human organism out 1, 2, 5, 10 million years into the future, what we get is an impossibility of thought (and perhaps the most interesting impossibility of thought). When we think of the human organism, it becomes difficult to imagine what our species and civilisation will look like even 100 years into the future, and we could well expect something qualitatively different from what is today.
I personally feel that this thought experiment offers an infinite inexhaustible richness for thought. The conventional objects for scientific thought, within a reductionist paradigm, operate on scales of millions of years and maintain their form. It is unlikely that the same can be said for the human organism, especially as within civilisation. While the modern human species is about 200,000 thousand years old, within human civilisation, it only makes sense to think about our species on the scale of thousands of years. The ancient civilisations of Egypt, China, Rome, or the Americas, only existed on scales of thousands of years. Today, modern civilisations as expressed in the form of the nation state have only existed for centuries. It is unlikely that they will maintain their current form 500 years into the future, even if we do not often think about it.
If we really entertain the speculative idea for the human form as a totality 1 to 10 million years into the future, it is highly likely that, we are either dealing with the absence of the form (extinction), or we are dealing with a form of a qualitatively different order (transcendence). I personally think that narratives of the extinction or the end of our form are ways to obfuscate this problem: there is something about our form pointing towards transcendence as immanent to our form. Thus, I think it is more likely that what we are really dealing with is the continuation of our form as part of the mediation of a qualitatively different form.
This should be a philosophical problem, even a philosophical crisis. I would go so far as to say that the appearance of theories of technological singularity, internal to the universe of scientific materialism, points towards the symptom that philosophy has not been willing to really think this. Philosopher Alenka Zupančič has noted that the blind spot at work here is not only scientists who refuse to think with and in the intensities of the philosopher’s discourse, but also that philosophers have refused to recognise that scientific materialism introduces a genuine novelty: a discourse with consequences for the real:12
“The new Real that emerges with the Galilean scientific revolution (the complete mathematisation of science) is a Real in which — and this is decisive — (the scientific) discourse has consequences. Such as, for example, landing on the moon.”
Thus, for example, historicists and deconstructionists and phenomenologists of various backgrounds, could continue writing as if the eruption of a real like the moon landing, or the eruption of a real like artificial intelligence, has no ontological consequences for the future of the human species and our ontological commitments.
And so I’ll go a step further: the philosophy that I have thus far tried to develop, especially in Global Brain Singularity, is a first attempt at trying to think it. But it requires more thinking. It requires an entire paradigm of thought. That’s why, in Global Brain Singularity, I propose the term transmodernism,13 to think through the transcendent implications of modern science without a priori assumptions about their implications for conventional categories (like death and immortality, or temporality and eternity, which we inherit from our metaphysical history and our mythological traditions). To be precise, I define transmodernism as a continuation of the humanist-atheist world’s project towards its extension and expansion in a qualitatively different horizon under the question: “what are the farthest reaches of human sociocultural and technological possibility?”14
The idea and the necessity of transmodernism is that we would avoid pitfalls of previous paradigms in the face of a novel technological horizon produced by a universal form of knowing (science) which produces unknowable universal consequences for being:
Recoil into pre-modern mythology (closed ontology)
Reification of modernist grand unified narratives (simplistic teleology)
Deconstructive post-modern critique of science (epistemological relativism)
While these are all features of standard and well-known cultural paradigmatics, I suppose I should also develop a stance vis-a-vis the term metamodernism, which is subject of a lot of confused speculation today. Here I follow the ideas developed by cultural theorist Greg Dember when he defines the metamodern as:15
“A sensibility motivated primarily by a need to safeguard the individual’s interior, subjective felt experience against the potential degradations of postmodern ironic relativism and modernist reductionism; and also from the ontological inertia of pre-modern tradition.”
Thus, metamodernism, like previous cultural paradigmatics, is not an ideology to identify with, but rather a mode or a form of subjectivity that is actual on the world historical-spiritual horizon. As stated by Dember, what seems to characterise the metamodern subject is the “sensibility” of “felt experience” on the level of “individual interiority” and its preservation or defence in relation to (1) reactionary pre-modern ontologies, (2) simplistic modernist grand narratives or systems, as well as (3) nihilistic tendencies of post-modern deconstruction.
Dember offers many specific examples of metamodernism, inspired by popular culture at large, as well as philosophy, religion, and politics.16 However, in the context of this article, it may be most useful to use an example that he derives from religion. Dember sees the Christian phenomenon of the “Emergent Church” as an expression that fits the metamodern description for the following reasons:17
“I do think that the general concept of metamodernism has a lot to offer contemporary Christianity [and specifically the Emergent Church]. A humbled stance towards notions of universal truth, gained from postmodernism, can be braided with uncompromised faith, with an ultimate valuing of felt experience as the container in which it all lives. Metamodern oscillatory dualities, such as informed naïveté and pragmatic idealism, are apt descriptors for both the one of contemporary culture writ large and for the specific structure of feeling found in the Emergent Church. And to revel in the inherent frailty of human nature while seeing that frailty as the ultimate opening for the Divine seems pretty fucking metamodern to me!”
I think this position on metamodernity has an important place. However, I also think it differs from what I tried to develop in Global Brain Singularity on the level of transmodernity. While metamodernity is making room for subjective felt experience and individual interiority, developing a humble stance towards universal truth, living in a type of pragmatic idealism, and open to something higher as a question; transmodernity fully explodes this question of something higher as entangled with the emergence of the unique discursive powers of science to transform the universal being of humanity in totally unpredictable ways. Thus, I would suggest that the central difference here between the two approaches seems to be about the relation to preservation and defence of subjective interiority and felt experience.
Transmodernism is rather concerned with the actual implications and consequences of conceptual concretion as it relates to challenging what we think of as the limits of the human being, even if it is painful, uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking, ontologically disorienting. In other words, transmodern analysis is concerned with the truth of the historicity of the concept for the future of the human form as itself an open question. For example, will the results of scientific materialism really be a form of transcendence of biological evolution? Or not? Will we see the emergence of human beings that literally start to deify conventional limits of human being? Or not?
Pre-modernism, modernism, post-modernism, and meta-modernism do not and cannot approach questions of this nature. Pre-modernism is too concerned with the truth of a given ontology, modernism is too concerned with a progressive orientation towards a final resting place, post-modernism is too concerned with ripping and tearing things apart, meta-modernism is too concerned with absorption into a space of affects.
Thus, I would argue, none of these paradigmatics are really up to understanding or analysing the truth of the concept. In this process, it would be fair to say that transmodernism should care about the sublation (cancelling/lifting) of affects associated with metamodernism (especially anxiety). But at the same time we should not identify with these affects as truth outside of the fact that anxiety may be signalling a confrontation with the radical unknown, otherness, or alienness of our future, which we must learn how to think.18
In relation to the thought experiment and challenge mentioned above, about the fundamental ontological uncertainty of the human future, we can situate and test many orientations of “humanism” that have been emerging in the past decades.
has outlined four different categories:Post-Humanism: human project is already done
Trans-Humanism: forced choice of a bio-tech merger
Meta-Humanism: human connection with other organisms
Hyper-Humanism: tech as bridge to higher non-tech potential
Roughly speaking, post-humanism corresponds to the hypothesis that there is no continuity between us and our technological products, that a form of technological evolution is going to continue on beyond the human species and replace us; trans-humanism corresponds to the hypothesis that there is a bridge between biology and technology towards a qualitatively different human form; meta-humanism corresponds to the hypothesis of the human as a steward and guardian of subjective interiority/shared affects of all life; and hyper-humanism corresponds to the hypothesis that technology is a bridge to a higher spiritual reality that does not involve technology as its main object, but some higher plane of perception and conception.
My aim in this article is not to fall on one side or the other of one of these possible variants of humanism, but rather to simply present the diversity of different humanism variants that are attempting to reconcile with a universal horizon that does seem to involve a different historical relation and position for the human being. We are living in a very strange time indeed, if the central signifier for our shared experience, that of the human being, is itself entering extreme philosophical confusion. What I will say is that this is the result of one discourse: the scientific discourse and its historical effects and consequences. The scientific discourse, its historical effects and consequences, are material and concrete. It is too easy to dismiss this metaphysics, or relativise this metaphysics. It is also too easy to simply and unreflectively identify with this metaphysics.
The position of the transmodern is that this discourse as universal effects and consequences that threaten our conventional notions of the human being. What will the human being be in 1, 2, 5, 10 million years? What will the human being be in 500 years? In the discourses of technological singularity, this question is often presented on the level of decades; with figures like Kurzweil repeating key dates like 2029 for technological symmetry with humans on the level of language, and 2045 for the transcendence of biology itself through machine uploading.
While my philosophical positionality has allowed me to keep a distance from such absolute ontological predictions, I nevertheless recognise that the effects of large language models, and exponential computational power, forces us to reckon with forces that we have never been forced to reckon with before. What will be the end results for the way we conceive of the self or of our own finitude and morality? What will be the human being after this force has expressed its final word?
The revenge of philosophy is that only philosophical cognition may help us navigate such questions, even if they fundamentally disrupt our subjective interiority and felt experience.
This month at The Portal we have been focused on the metaphysics of self-reference, or self-reference as metaphysics. For the rest of the month we will be hosting Greg Dember of What Is Metamodernism?, and
of Bad Guru. To learn more or to get involved, see: The Portal. You can access a single Thought Lab session with Greg Dember, here: Thought Lab.
It is one of his opening concerns in his discussion with me on latest book, Christian Atheism, see: Christian Atheism.
de Grey, A. 2004. Escape velocity: why the prospect of extreme human life extension matters now. PLoS. e187.
Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Penguin. Chp. 6.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 117.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 76.
There have been papers attempting to theorise the link between Hegel and Kurzweil, see: Zimmerman, M. 2008. The singularity: a crucial phase in divine self-actualisation? Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 4.1-2 (2008): 347-371. (link)
Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 20.
In order to escape the problems of philosophy that refuses the challenge of developing ontological commitments, this points towards the philosophical necessity of a meta-ontology. This is a project that has been pioneered by philosophers like
, see: Agent Swarm blog. This is also something that I have developed, see: Last, C. 2020. A Reflective Note for Dialectical Thinkers. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 257-292.That is why I do what I do, see: Philosophy Portal.
Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. (link)
Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 78.
Ibid. p. 46-50.
Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 46.
Dember, G. 2024. Say Hello to Metamodernism. Forthcoming. (personal communication)
See again: Ibid.
Ibid.
Just know looking at potentials of the new human that are hinted through e.g a gifted ragtime piano player https://youtu.be/cEuosugLCVk?si=WwENEFGVI9gMyTFb as saying what is possible just with the body, its interesting. The hyper-human category seems to kind of match. So transmodernism is considering that trajectory..