This book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE: Uniscience and the Modern World, by Robert Hanna, presents and defends a critical philosophy of science and digital technology, and a new and prescient philosophy of nature and human thinking.
It is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text–including the BIBLIOGRAPHY–of THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE HERE.
This sixteenth installment contains section 2.0.
We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. (Pascal, 1995: #110, p. 28)
If there is any science humankind really needs, it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in [the world] that is assigned to humankind, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be human. (Rem 20: 45)
Natural science will one day incorporate the science of humankind, just as the science of humankind will incorporate natural science; there will be a single science. (Marx, 1964: p. 70, translation modified slightly)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A NOTE ON REFERENCES TO KANT’S WORKS
0. Introduction: Science, The Four Horsemen of The New Apocalypse, and The Uniscience
0.0 How Uncritical and Unreformed Science Is Literally Killing The Modern World
0.2 The Uniscience and Pascal’s Dictum
Chapter 1. Natural Piety: A Kantian Critique of Science
1.0 Kantian Heavy-Duty Enlightenment and The Uniscience
1.1 Kant’s Neo-Aristotelian Natural Power Grid
1.2 Kant, Natural Piety, and The Limits of Science
1.3 From Kant’s Anti-Mechanism to Kantian Anti-Mechanism
1.4 In Defense of Natural Piety
1.5 Scientific Pietism and Scientific Naturalism
1.6 How to Ground Natural Science on Sensibility
1.7 Sensible Science 1: Natural Science Without Natural Mechanism
1.8 Sensible Science 2: Natural Science Without Materialism/Physicalism
1.9 Sensible Science 3: Natural Science Without Scientism
1.10 Frankenscience, the Future of Humanity, and the Future of Science
Chapter 2. This is the Way the World Ends: A Philosophy of Civilization Since 1900, The Rise of Mechanism, and The Emergence of Neo-Organicism
2.0 Introduction
Chapter 3. Thought-Shapers
Chapter 4. How To Complete Physics
Chapter 5. Digital Technology Only Within The Limits of Human Dignity
00. Conclusion: The Point Is To Shape The World
APPENDICES
Appendix 1. A Neo-Organicist Turn in Formal Science: The Case of Mathematical Logic
Appendix 2. A Neo-Organicist Note on The Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and “Skolem’s Paradox”
Appendix 3. A Neo-Organicist Approach to The Nature of Motion
Appendix 4. Sensible Set Theory
Appendix 5. Neo-Organicism and The Rubber Sheet Cosmos
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chapter 2. This is the Way the World Ends: A Philosophy of Civilization Since 1900, The Rise of Mechanism, and The Emergence of Neo-Organicism
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. (Eliot, 1974: p. 92)
2.0 Introduction
In the mid-19th century, not long after the European revolutionary upheavals of 1848, the British Romantic artist John Martin vividly imagined The End of The World as an apocalyptic conflagration brought about by an essentially wrathful God; but by 1925—the same year Whitehead published Science and the Modern World—the American and British Modernist poet T.S. Eliot could equally vividly imagine The End as a powerless post-World War I whimper brought about by an essentially hollowed-out and traumatized humanity. In the 75 years between Martin’s painting and Eliot’s poem, the process of modernization proceeded apace, and the traditional civilization of the 19th century proved sadly and even tragically inadequate for dealing with the global cataclysm of The Great War. Eliot had an MA in philosophy from Harvard, and wrote a PhD dissertation entitled “Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley,” but never bothered to defend it in person or receive his PhD. So much for the attractions of professional academic philosophy.
Now, almost a century after Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” I’m again imagining The End of the World, but this time as a broadly and radically Kantian proponent of The Uniscience, rather than as a painter or as an ex-philosopher poet. More precisely, the aim of this chapter is to provide, in an accessible, concise, and synoptic format, a new Kulturphilosophie, or “philosophy of civilization,” that covers the period running from the turn of the 20th century to the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. My use of the term Kultur (“culture” or “civilization”) is intended not only to emphasize that I’m philosophizing about civilization as a whole since 1900—including philosophy itself, the applied and fine arts, the formal and natural sciences, the cognitive sciences, the humanities, the social sciences and society, and politics. It’s also intended to emphasize that I’m viewing civilization in this maximally broad sense, during this 120+ years period, as a product of certain philosophical, artistic, scientific, anthropological, social, and political conditions that have also generated a certain world-image or “world-picture” (Weltbild) that has more or less non-self-consciously characterized humanity’s development and guided its course during that period—but towards what? Answer: towards our collective rational “human-all-too-human” condition right now and right here, namely, during the roll-out and fall-out of the 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic, at The End of the World. More precisely, I’m claiming that the past 120+ years of civilization have effectively driven humanity into a veritable cul de sac, a dead end for rational human civilization, epitomized by the mechanistic worldview in its full complicity, collaboration, and entanglement with the military-industrial-university-digital complex and The Hyper-State: in short, The Four Horsemen of The New Apocalypse. As a consequence, humankind most urgently needs to retrace its steps, identify a philosophico-cultural version of Robert Frost’s “road not taken” that briefly appeared between 1900 and 1940, and then correspondingly revolutionize our thinking and reorient it toward a philosophy of the future that can and should extend beyond The End of the World and into the remaining decades of the 21st century, via new wave organicism, aka neo-organicism.
In carrying out this line of argumentation and thinking, it’s my specific methodological intention not to get bogged down in fine-grained details or in scholarly debates about the many particular topics I’ll cover—as interesting or even as fascinating as those details or debates might be[i]—and above all, not to get bogged down in Scholastic debates in the pejorative sense. My specific methodological intention, on the contrary, is to sketch in broad strokes a critically cogent and generally plausible philosophical Big Picture of the last 120+ years, for the purposes of providing, in a late modern and contemporary context, not only what the radically enlightened Kant (Aramayo, 2018; Hanna, 2016a, 2021c) called “an idea of a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view” (IUH 8: 15-31), but also what he called an “orientation in thinking” (OT 8: 133-146). In section 2.1, I critically describe some philosophical, artistic, scientific, social, and political developments in the period from 1900-1940, especially including the rise of classical Analytic philosophy and a crucial paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1970) in the fine and applied arts and the formal and natural sciences alike. In section 2.2, I critically describe similar developments in the period from 1940-1980, especially including the emergence of post-classical Analytic philosophy, so-called Continental philosophy, and the associated emergence of formal and natural mechanism and scientism, as typified, for example, by the cultural cluster that includes computation-theory, decision-theoretic economics, cybernetics[ii] in general and artificial intelligence, aka AI, in particular, together with what James C. Scott has aptly called “a high modernist ideology,” or high modernism for short:
[High modernism] is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. (Scott, 1998: p. 4)
In section 2.3, against the backdrop of high modernism, I critically describe the rise of post-modernism, aka Po-Mo, in the period from 1980-2020, and briefly explore Po-Mo’s cultural nihilism. And finally, in section 2.4, I propose new wave organicism, aka neo-organicism, not only as a grand and novel synthesis of philosophy, the fine and applied arts, the formal and natural sciences, the cognitive sciences, the human sciences, the social sciences and society, politics, religious experience and spirituality, and what has been aptly called “ecological civilization” (Gare, 2017b; Clayton and Schwartz, 2019), but also and above all as the metaphysical and cosmological core of a philosophy of the future extending beyond The End of the World and into the rest of the 21st century: namely, The Uniscience. My proposal, therefore, isn’t a mere alternative to existing philosophical systems, but in fact a radical transformation of our thinking by means of a radical revaluation and repurposing of a discontinued line of thought, namely, the first-wave organicism of the early 20th century.
NOTES
[i] Nevertheless, I’ve also provided quite a few references for those who want to pursue fine-grained details and scholarly debates or explore particular topics further.
[ii] The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary defines “cybernetics” as “the scientific study of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things,” and the online Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines it as “the scientific study of communication and control, especially concerned with comparing human and animal brains with machines and electronic devices.” Correspondingly, in this book I’m using the noun “cybernetics” and the adjective “cybernetic” in this general sense, without a commitment to any particular theory of cybernetics.
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