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 twenty-fourth installment contains sub-sections 2.3.2 and 2.3.3.
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
2.1.3 Architectural and Artistic Trends
2.2 The Historical Black Hole, The Mechanistic Mindset, and The Mechanistic Worldview: 1940-1980
2.2 The Emergence of Post-Classical Analytic Philosophy
2.2.3 The Two Images Problem and its Consequences
2.2.4 Modernism and Countercurrents in the Arts and Design
2.3.1 The Rise of Po-Mo Philosophy
2.3.2 Po-Mo Architecture: Unconstrained Hybridity
2.3.3 Other Apocalyptic Developments: Crises in Physics and Big Science, and The One-Two Punch
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
2.3.2 Po-Mo Architecture: Unconstrained Hybridity
Following the all-out rejection of (high) modernism by Po-Mo, architecture as an academic discipline and as a practice developed an array of responses aimed at overcoming, questioning or undermining the perceived modernist hegemony. One strategy was the usage of collage techniques: the city was not the result of one homogenizing grid or grand récit—on the contrary, it was the result of multiple developments that dynamically influenced each other (Alexander, 1964; Rowe and Koetter, 1984). However, the organic city as a result of such developments, and the artistic technique of collage and juxtaposition were often confounded. This confusion easily led to an architectural style that was “historicizing,” mimicking the traditional, organically grown character of inner cities in new settings. This move was combined with a vigorous rejection of modernist austerity, embracing ornament, kitsch and a juxtaposition of architectural styles. What had worked in Las Vegas was not always an architectural success elsewhere, however.
Another response to (high) modernism was to embrace a globalized brave new world in which “anything goes.” Architectural deconstruction was focused on “opening the white modernist boxes,” often resulting in arresting images of building that showcased an unreserved dynamism, for example, the works of COOP Himmelb(l)au or Peter Eisenmann. Alternatively, and closely resembling the dismantling and prying suspicion that marks Po-Mo, Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers turned the idea of a building inside-out: its hidden parts were made visible, in an attempt at “deconstructing” the modernist way of building, yet retaining all of its functional premises.[i]
And yet another response—often inspired by superficial readings of the work of Gilles Deleuze—was to embrace emerging digital technologies, whose applications produced enormous curvaceous, fluid volumes that were hitherto impossible or extremely costly to build, epitomized by the works of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and UNStudio. The embrace of hybridity (i.e., what expresses or involves a multiplicity of sources) was not in itself problematic, but had the unfortunate effect that architecture became an easy victim of “city marketing” on the one hand, and the willing accomplice in the generation of “junkspace” – the unmemorable residue of a clamorous architectural taste – on the other (Koolhaas, 2002). In this category, the works of OMA, MVRDV, or BIG come to mind. In a globalized and visually oriented world, only the strongest image survives, leading to an architecture that wholeheartedly embraces Koolhaas’s ultimately cynical slogan “¥€$.”
2.3.3 Other Apocalyptic Developments: Crises in Physics and Big Science, and The One-Two Punch
During the same period, from 1980 to 2022, there’s been a crisis in physics with increasingly arcane mathematically-driven theories, together with hugely expensive and hugely funded equipment, including super-colliders, etc., that produce no solutions to outstanding problems that were articulated eighty years ago, and few if any empirical results (Hossenfelder, 2018). Indeed, it is arguable that the “crisis in physics” is in fact Kuhnian and paradigm-shattering, because even our best contemporary physics, the Standard Models of cosmology and particle physics, are inherently incomplete (aka physico-mechanical incompleteness), in a sense precisely analogous to the Gödel-incompleteness of Peano arithmetic together with Principia Mathematics-style mathematical logic (aka logico-mathematical incompleteness).[ii] This crisis in physics, moreover, was and continues to be embedded within a more general and seemingly permanent crisis of Big Science, whereby research and so-called “knowledge-production” in the formal and natural sciences are inherently constrained and driven by the imperatives of the military-industrial-university-digital complex and The Hyper-State (Turner and Chubin, 2020).
Far more alarmingly, since the turn of the millennium, there has also been a world-wide resurgence of virulent nationalism and fascism, alongside the growing influence of the military-industrial-university-digital complex and its neoliberal hegemonic ideology, as well as its greatly enhanced surveillance capacity. As direct consequences of the overpowering force of these developments during the era of “the Anthropocene”—i.e., the specifically humanity-determined era of global ecology—there have been two highly unfortunate general sociocultural and political trends, acting and interacting together like an apocalyptic one-two punch.
On the one hand, there is what Scott, in Seeing Like a State, has called “the logic behind the failures of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century”:
I aim [in Seeing Like a State] to provide a convincing account of the logic behind the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century.
I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above [which Scott calls “state maps of legibility,” according to which state “officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.”] …. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot….
The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It 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.
Only when these two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing to use the fully weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist ideas into being.
A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.
In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build. (Scott, 1998: 2-5)
In short, during the 20th century, four developments collided and then fused with a sinister synergy: first, the emergence of administrative and monitoring measures to direct transactions like land tenure, naming customs or tax collection; second, a steadfast belief in human progress through the application of scientific and technological measures as well as the mastery over nature; third, the willingness of authoritarian states to enforce their measures with coercive practices; and fourth, a submissive civil society that serves as a substrate on which these measures can be enacted.
And on the other hand, there has been what Arran Gare accurately calls an advancing crisis of civilization itself, especially including actually and potentially disastrous global climate change and other ecological disasters (Gare, 2017b). During the 1960s and 1970s, the first ecological theorists vigorously warned the larger society about the effects of overpopulation, the exploitation of natural resources, pollution, and ecosystem destruction as the discipline of ecology took shape.[iii] This pessimistic message was imaginatively captured in dystopian films like Soylent Green and Water World. The notions of sustainability, climate change mitigation, and managing urban growth as policy guidelines in international policies are characteristic of the profound importance of this message, yet the maddening delay with which measures are taken, vividly shows that the consequences of climate change and other ecological disasters have been greatly underestimated and/or unrealistically discounted (Levin, Cashore, Bernstein, and Auld, 2012).
NOTES
[i] Not altogether coincidentally, Oscar Niemeyer and Philip Johnson, two leading representatives of architectural high modernism, were on the jury for the design competition.
[ii] For details, see ch. 4 below.
[iii] See, e.g., (Carson, 1962; Buckminster Fuller, 1969; McHarg, 1969; McDonough, 1992; Papanek, 1995; Odum and Barrett, 2005). These are just a few leading examples of a literature that has been growing exponentially over the last five decades.
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