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 eighteenth installment contains subsection 2.1.2.
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
2.1 Wrestling with Modernity: 1900-1940
2.1.1 Six Sociocultural or Sociopolitical Developments
2.1.2 Two Philosophical Developments: Classical Analytic Philosophy and First Wave Organicism
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
2.1.2 Two Philosophical Developments: Classical Analytic Philosophy and First Wave Organicism
During the period from 1900-1940, classical neo-Kantian philosophy in Germany and France and British neo-Hegelian philosophy (carrying over somewhat into the USA—see, for example, Eliot’s Harvard PhD dissertation on F.H. Bradley, and the philosophy of Josiah Royce more generally [Kuklick, 1977]) both came to a more or less bitter end. Slamming the door behind the idealists, and triumphantly (indeed, even triumphalistically) replacing them, and just as often also taking up their vacated university positions, a group of Young Turk avant-garde philosophers carrying the banner of the new tradition of classical Analytic philosophy came onto the scene, following on from Gottlob Frege (as it were, The Father of the founding Trinity of Analytic philosophy), but led by G.E. Moore (The Son), and Bertrand Russell (The Holy Ghost), followed in apostolic succession by the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Vienna Circle Logical Empiricists/Positivists (especially Rudolf Carnap), and W.V.O. Quine (Hanna, 2001, 2021a: chs. II-X, and XVI). Classical Analytic philosophy also stood in an important elective affinity with the rise of high modernism, especially in the applied and fine arts, the formal and natural sciences, and engineering (Janik and Toulmin, 1973; Galison, 1990; Vienna Circle, 1996; Scott, 1998; Vienna Circle, 1996; Reisch, 2005; and Isaac, 2013). And at the same time, the classical Analytic philosophers were engaged in a serious intellectual competition with phenomenology, especially Husserlian transcendental phenomenology (Hanna, 2013b) and Heideggerian existential phenomenology (Hanna, 2008: pp. 149-150, 2021a: section IX.4).
Also simultaneously, however, there was an emerging first-wave organicist movement, expressing itself in philosophy, the applied and fine arts, and the formal and natural sciences alike, including, in philosophy, Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory in 1896 (Bergson, 1911), Creative Evolution in 1907 (Bergson, 1944), Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity in 1920 (Alexander, 1920), John Dewey’s Experience and Nature in 1925 (Dewey, 1958), and especially Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” in Process and Reality in 1929 (Whitehead, 1978); in the applied and fine arts, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the other members of the Prairie School, the “golden period of Scandinavian design” in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland (Wikipedia, 2022e), and the poetry of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens; and, in the natural sciences, Whitehead’s Concept of Nature in 1920, C. Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution in 1923 (Lloyd Morgan, 1923), Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? in 1944 (Schrödinger, 1944), and David Bohm’s “hidden variables”/pilot wave interpretation of quantum theory in 1952 (Bohm, 1952). Schrödinger’s break-through book initiated non-equilibrium thermodynamics and complex systems dynamics, as developed by Ilya Prigogine and his associates (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Prigogine, 1997), and by J.D. Bernal (Bernal, 1967), in the second half of the 20th century; and alongside and inspired by this work, it also primed the autopoietic approach to organismic biology worked out by Francisco Varela and his associates during the 1970s (Varela, Maturana, and Uribe, 1974; Varela, 1979).
In this connection, here’s an important caveat. It’s essential not to confuse the first wave of organicism in philosophy, the applied and fine arts, and the formal and natural sciences, on the one hand, with organic nationalism, aka organic romanticism,in the arts, science, and sociopolitics (Wikipedia, 2022d), as it occurred during the rise of fascism and militarism in Germany, Italy, and Japan—for example, in Nazi architecture and visual art (Wikipedia, 2022a)—on the other. Organic nationalism followed on from J.G. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (Fichte, 1968) and postulates a root analogy between a nation-State on the one hand, and either a single massive complex organism or a distributed organic totality like a beehive on the other. It thereby identifyies individual citizens with unicellular organisms, or worker bees, whose individuality is absorbed into the single life of the whole nation, or the whole hive. So, organic nationalism is authoritarian up to and including totalitarianism, anti-dignitarian, anti-democratic in its focus on the Führerprinzip and/or Strong Man dictator or emperor, who personifies the nation as a single organism, or plays the functional role of the Queen Bee, and more generally, is pervasively historically backward-looking, insular, reactionary, and regressive.
Sharply on the contrary, however, first wave organicism is essentially intertwined first, with the anti-authoritarian, anti-totalitarian, dignitarian, and democratic versions of socialism that I briefly described in the last sub-section, and second, with the search for a humane modernity that would avoid the excesses of the Industrial Revolution and extreme urbanization.
This historical and sociocultural point about first wave organicism is crucial for understanding how that first wave crashed upon the rocky shores of early 20th century Analytic philosophy and was lost, and how classical Analytic philosophy sailed away triumphantly from the scene of the wreck, refusing to take any survivors or salvage any of its philosophical cargo. For one of the most influential propagandist strategies that Russell used to establish classical Analytic philosophy over its leading contemporary philosophical competitors (i.e., phenomenology and organicism), was to criticize Bergson’s metaphysical-&-cosmological organicism—and, by implication, also Russell’s former co-author and mentor Whitehead’s metaphysical-&-cosmological organicism—by intentionally and sophistically blurring the difference between first wave organicism and organic nationalism, thereby effectively impugning the former via political-guilt-by-association with the latter. Over and above Russell’s role as the leading propagandist for classical Analytic philosophy up to 1950, it’s also clear from Russell’s correspondence and other biographical evidence that he was jealously annoyed by Bergson’s great fame during the first three decades of the 20th century (Monk, 1996: ch. 8; Vrahimis, forthcoming), and also that he and Whitehead had a falling-out during World War I for formal-scientific, philosophical, personal, and political reasons alike (Monk, 1996: chs. 6 and 11; Lowe, 1985: chs. XI-XII). In any case, it’s hard to overestimate the knock-on effect of Russell’s anti-Bergsonian (hence anti-French, hence anti-continental-European) philosophical propaganda on the later Great Divide between post-classical Analytic philosophy and so-called “Continental” philosophy (Vrahimis, forthcoming).
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