From Noetic Reflection to Planetary Reflection

§12. Noetic Reflection: Consciousness and Life

In chapter 2, we looked at Hegel’s concept of the organic state and Marx’s questioning of the difference between the state organism and the animal organism, and we tried to show that Hegel’s organicism is not “organic” in the sense of living matter, but rather it is fundamentally a logic. Marx could have already understood this since he rightly pointed out that Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right is not a treatise on right per se, but rather a demonstration of his philosophical logic. Indeed, the concept of organicism had a much wider application by the end of the nineteenth century than in Hegel’s time, where the organism remained a regulative idea for political institutions, that is to say, yet to be realized. Therefore, in the introduction, we called it an imaginary organic machine. Even though, in philosophy since the eighteenth century, mechanism had already been criticized and opposed by a proto-organic philosophy, throughout the nineteenth century, mechanism still functioned as a dominant epistemology through the trope of automats.

Retrospectively, we might say that Hegel’s organic logic could not be entirely recognized either in animals, because they are vulnerable to contingency, or in the state, since the implementation of the organic state was still hindered by some mechanistic features present in Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, as Marx criticized.2 Toward the twentieth century, organicism gained its significance given the rampant industrialization and mobilization of natural resources and energies. We risk simplifying such a significance by listing the following areas that deserve our attention: first, in biology, after the failure of the mechanical development theory (Entwickelungsmechanik), identified accidentally by Hans Driesch, and which was later confirmed by the Spemann-Mangold experiment; second, in philosophy, especially in the work of Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, whose organismic philosophy (though the former has been regarded as vitalist) became the theoretical ground for other biologists and sociologists—for example, the Gestalt theorists, Joseph Needham, Lewis Mumford, Georges Friedmann, and Niklas Luhmann; third, in economics, especially the economics inspired by biology—for example, Georgescu-Roegen and Alfred Lotka (though, it was already present in the work of François Quesnay), and that was further developed by the neoliberal thinkers such as Fredrick Hayek; fourth, in politics—for example, to some extent we could even say that communism is first of all the realization of an organismic Hegelian Marxian philosophy, where the Crown and Beamten are replaced with the proletariat, and therefore it is not surprising to recognize an affinity between communism and anarchism, sometimes anarchism and neoliberalism. Although the influence of organicism in the twentieth century is beyond our capacity to document in this book, we suggest that to understand the twentieth century, one cannot avoid analyzing this organismic paradigm, which has already extended into the twenty-first century.

Hegel’s organicism does not derive from a romantic concept of nature, but rather it is grounded in a logical analysis of the organism. Hegel’s logic also provides a path toward a mechano-organicism that could be realized through artificial intelligence. The central theme of Hegel’s logic is reflection, a reflection that does not aim at separation (since when the subject reflects on the object, it divides, the way judgment [Urteil] in German means an original divide) but at integration.3 The original divide (Ur-teil) is present between nature and the spirit, for it is only through reflection that nature can become and transit into the realm of the spirit. In effect, it is through reflection that the Concept, when present in nature and thus being fragile and vulnerable to contingency, is constantly tested by contingency, what Bernard Mabille calls l’épreuve de la contingence, so that it may move toward the concrete and universal realm of the spirit. Therefore, philosophy, which Hegel presents as the absolute spirit after Greek art and the religion of revelation, is a form of reflection: “This concept of philosophy is the self-thinking Idea, the knowing truth (§236), the logical with the meaning that it is the universality verified in the concrete content as in its actuality.”4 The concept of reflection is fundamental to the emergence of consciousness that Hegel analyzed thoroughly, probably even more thoroughly than many paleontologists. Hegel opens his Philosophy of Mind with anthropology (along with phenomenology and psychology, as what he calls subjective spirit), attempting to understand the evolution of the reflective structure and operation of self-consciousness before he moves to the objective spirit, which is consciousness externalized. Hegel’s triadic formulation at times seems problematic. However, Hegel reminds his readers that the triadic scheme does not imply a temporal order, that the second element succeed the first element followed by the third, but rather it is a logical order. Likewise, in the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, the transition from private property to family, which is followed by civil society, is not historical but only logical.

Regardless of the above logical and temporal problem, which we do well to bear in mind, it is still worth asking if the phenomenon of reflection is only limited to the human mind. We know that other animals have some form of consciousness—for example, that an animal is conscious of its prey. When a cat encounters a mouse, the cat knows how to predict the movements of the mouse, which clearly demands a calibrated system of feedback. In the phenomenon of life, reflection exists as a primordial mode of operation in all living organisms, and maybe as well as in inorganic beings (for example, we also often see what seem like recursively generated patterns on shells and rocks). It might be true that for the eyes of some animals, there is no distinction between subject and object (like Rilke described in his elegies: “All other creatures look into the Open with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned inward, are set all around it like snares, trapping its way out to freedom”5). At the same time, this original division comes out of an epistemological necessity to the human mind, as Descartes demonstrated in the Discourse on the Method. For Hegel, the subjective and objective spirit will also have to be overcome through the identification between the Idea and its reflection into nature as existence. This test by contingency, in the sense of Mabille, is essential for arriving at the universal as universal. For living beings who are capable of reflection, it is possible to talk about different “souls” as Aristotle did: for example, a vegetable soul, an animal soul, and the noetic soul. The noetic soul stands out as a special kind of soul: it is that which is above the animal soul and the vegetable soul. This should not be understood in a moral sense, but rather it has a different operation and organization of reflection, and therefore it possesses different complexities and structures. An octopus might have organs that are biologically more complex than those of a human being, but the animal soul of the octopus might not have as many levels of reflection as the noetic soul of the human being. We see a similar passage in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind:

Spirit has come into being as the truth of nature. In the Idea in general this result has the meaning of the truth and of what is prior, rather than posterior, as compared with what precedes it [des Ersten gegen das Vorhergehende]. But, besides this, becoming or transition has, in the concept, the more determinate meaning of free judgement. The Spirit that has come into being means, therefore, that nature self-sublates over against itself [an ihr selbst], and Spirit thus presupposes itself as this universality that is no longer self-externalized in bodily individuality, but simple in its concretion and totality. In this universality it is not yet Spirit, but soul [Seele, noch nicht Geist].6

This paragraph deserves our attention since the truth of nature is to be found in the spirit instead of just in nature. Nature that precedes spirit does not show its truth because its existence as a phenomenon is vulnerable to contingency. The soul is mere consciousness and thus subject to error; the spirit is the rational substance in becoming. In nature, we find nuances of patterns on the leaves of the same plant, we find human beings with eleven toes, and so forth. Instead, it is in the spirit that we find the Idea that is prior to nature. This is no longer a temporal sequence but rather a logical sequence: that which comes after is prior to what precedes it.7 It is because through reflection, which characterizes the free judgement or divide, nature sublates the self that is not yet adequate of being true—and here, being true means the identity between actuality and the Concept. The self-sublation of nature is a reflective or recursive movement assimilating the Concept prior to it. This reflection is a movement from A to B, but also from A to A'. That is to say, it does not change substantially from A to B; instead, it returns to itself, as Hegel says, “only a coming-to-itself of the spirit that is outside itself in nature.”8

One of the lowest levels of reflection found in living beings is between the living being and its milieu. In the case of an amoeba, a single-celled organism, reflection occurs via osmosis by which the amount of liquid in the amoeba’s body is maintained. Laurentiis in his book Hegel’s Anthropology uses the same example, claiming that the “amoeba is this struggle of nature against itself,” and quotes Xavier Bichat (whom Hegel admired) to support this argument: “Life is the totality of functions that resist death.”9 However, the case of the amoeba is only a rather basic form of reflection while the claim of Bichat is a general definition of life, which retrospectively resonates with Erwin Schrödinger’s proposal in What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (1944), where he characterizes life as a process that resists entropy, namely, death. This general claim has to be qualified since from the single-cell amoeba to the Homo sapiens, we are talking about a difference of billions of years of evolution, complexification, and concretization. This increasing complexification could be understood as a struggle against death.

This complexification is not only endosomatic but also exosomatic in the sense that it demands a reflective process between the spirit and its externalization, which we have already discussed in the first two chapters, especially in chapter 2, where we tried to show how such a process gives rise to the concept of the state as organism. Hegel’s theory of externalization did not yet systematically address what later came to be known in paleontology as anthropogenesis. Ernst Kapp’s philosophy of technology made Hegel’s thesis explicit by putting the noetic reflectivity as the absolute beginning of human exosomatic activities:

Here is the actual threshold of our study: the human being, who, with the first equipment, the work of his own hands, discards his historical test piece to become the altogether historical human being, situated within the progress of self-consciousness. The human being is the only secure starting point for thoughtful reflection and for orientation in the world. This is because the human being is absolutely certain first and foremost of himself.10

We would like to connect Kapp’s philosophy of technology with the work of André Leroi-Gourhan who, in Gesture and Speech as well as other works, showed how the process of hominization could be interpreted as series of invention and use of technical tools. Technical activities could be further understood as exosomatic activities, namely, the exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs. This process does not only happen at the level of the individual but also at the level of the species and culture. The formation of the city and later larger administrative units belong to the same phenomenon of exosomatization. The exosomatic process also demands an endosomatic process that is no longer limited to bodily organs.11 In paleontology, externalization plays a central role that conditions the development of the spirit, and where technology gradually occupies a more and more important role in the phenomenon of consciousness, something that we will see later in Teilhard de Chardin’s noospheric reflection. In what follows we will consider the bioeconomic reflection of Georgescu-Roegen, followed by cybernetic reflection, before finally arriving at Teilhard’s noospheric reflection. Through these forms of reflection, we will see how a planetary thinking beyond the nation-state is constructed in the name of humanity, of the human as a species—a test we would like to do by pushing Hegel’s organicism to its extreme.

§13. Bioeconomical Reflection: Georgescu-Roegen Reads Hegel

It is now appropriate to turn to the work of Georgescu-Roegen since he is central to understanding the role of exosomatization in economic activities. Georgescu-Roegen shifted our understanding of economic activities as quantitative exchanges understood by neoclassical economics to bioeconomics based on thermodynamics. Georgescu-Roegen is often credited as a great reader of Marx and Schumpeter. It is uncommon for Georgescu-Roegen to be considered a reader of Hegel,12 even though Georgescu-Roegen takes Hegel’s concept of dialectics as a driving force of his own theory; however, this dialectic is not analyzed explicitly as an operation of reflections, but rather it is implicitly associated with the possibility of an organic form that already presupposes reflection as such. I say implicitly because the transition from dialectics to the organic form was not fully elaborated by Georgescu-Roegen, but rather was only presupposed. Like Hegel before him, Georgescu-Roegen opposes mechanism to organism because mechanism fails to grasp reality due to the limit of its representation. The attempt to apply a mechanistic representation to reality fails because it constitutes precisely what Whitehead might have called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

Georgescu-Roegen saw the limit of an economy theory built upon a dominant mechanistic epistemology. Although the mechanistic epistemology had been challenged by biology in the eighteenth century, such as we have already seen in Kant, Schelling, Hegel, the Romantics, and the naturalists, it continued to exert its power in domains other than science, such as industry, politics, and economy. Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomics can be seen as an attempt to challenge the neoclassical theory of economy (which he identified with classical mechanics) through new discoveries in physics, namely, thermodynamics. If in Marx we see that the accent was put on a moralist critique against the exploitation of the worker, in Georgescu-Roegen we see that it ceases to be a moralist critique, but more explicitly a critique of economic theory itself.

The grounding concept of Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomy is, however, dialectics. Georgescu-Roegen mobilizes dialectics as a counterpart to what he calls arithmomorphism, the belief that all economic activities could be reduced to numbers, calculation, and logical positivism. Georgescu-Roegen identifies the epistemological foundation of neoclassical economic theory as that of Newtonian mechanics. Neoclassical economic theory is founded on the presupposition of a rational Homo economicus whose actions are based on rational and mechanistic calculations. Mechanism in general implies a linear causality, that, following classical physical laws, a movement leads to another like a cause to an effect. In mechanism, the movement of all bodies in space is predictable since they obey these laws and thus, given enough data, could be determined. The best image of mechanism in physics is Laplace’s demon, according to which the whole universe could be predicted given enough data13—a belief that triumphs in data science today. The domination of mechanism was also made possible and reinforced by the technologies of its time, especially mechanical machines, ranging from clocks to industrial machinery. Even when technology changed from the “cold machine” to the “heat machine” via thermodynamics, mechanism continued enjoying its reign for a certain period before being displaced by thermodynamics.14 Following the Carnotian revolution, thermodynamics takes physics to a new terrain, one where physics is reconnected to biology. An epistemology based on thermodynamics provides Georgescu-Roegen with a new lens to look at the economy and develop his theory of bioeconomics—a genuine reflection on economy from the prospect of the living. Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomic attack on the foundations of rationalist economic theory surprisingly relies on Hegel’s dialectics:

It goes without saying that to the category of concepts just illustrated we cannot apply the fundamental law of Logic, the Principle of Contradiction: “B cannot be both A and non-A.” On the contrary, we must accept that, in certain instances at least, “B is both A and non-A” is the case. Since the latter principle is one cornerstone of Hegel’s Dialectics, I propose to refer to the concepts that may violate the Principle of Contradiction as dialectical.15

Hegel’s dialectics is not a theory of the excluded middle but rather a theory of operations. In a dialectical process, A and non-A are two instances coexisting at certain moments. What is at stake, however, is not ambiguity but complexity; that is to say, reality embodies a complexity that cannot be reduced to numerical positivism or simple logicism based on the principle of contradiction. Georgescu-Roegen is not claiming that arithematization has no value; indeed, he even affirms that its “merits are above all words of praise.” What he is instead arguing is that “wholesale arithematization is impossible.”16 The fact that Georgescu-Roegen aligns himself with Hegel is not, as already emphasized, due to the law of the excluded middle; but rather because Hegelian philosophy is primarily a logic of reflection and movement. In the movement, the seemingly contradictory facts become necessary while also being contingent. As we have seen in chapter 1, Ideas are living (lebendig) concepts, and philosophy is in itself considered to be living. Therefore, we can say that for Georgescu-Roegen, the Hegelian inspiration lies in the living nature of Hegel’s philosophy—as he writes, quoting Hegel’s Logic, “Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there Dialectic is at work.”17 A theory based on life and movement is that which attracts Georgescu-Roegen, though he immediately distances himself from Hegel, as can be determined from the footnote to the above quote:

The connection between dialectical concepts thus defined and Hegelian logic is not confined to this principle. However, even though Hegel’s logic inspires the line followed by the present argument, it does not follow Hegel in all respects. We have been warned, and on good reasons, that one may ignore Hegel at tremendous risks. To follow Hegel only in part might very well be the greatest risk of all; yet I have no choice but to take this risk.18

Georgescu-Roegen’s dialectics, therefore, is not a direct application of Hegelian philosophy in economy, but rather, through Hegel who he cannot ignore, the intention is to reground a bioeconomy that is based on movement and life. In Hegel’s philosophy, economy is subordinated to politics in the manner that civil society, which is the totality of economic activities, conforms to that of the political state. Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomy starts with dialectics, continues with thermodynamics, and has its telos in the enjoyment of life. Georgescu-Roegen’s economy is an economy of the living and of life. It is also from this perspective that he sees a similarity between Hegel’s and Whitehead’s organicism:

With regard to the opposition between Change and arithmomorphic structure, Whitehead’s position is essentially the same as Hegel’s. Perhaps in no other place does Hegel state his thought on the matter more clearly than in the following passage: “Number is just that entirely inactive, inert, and indifferent characteristic in which every movement and relational process is extinguished [Denn die Zahl ist eben die gänzlich ruhende, tote und gleichgültige Bestimmtheit, an welcher alle Bewegung und Beziehung erloschen ist].” The statement has generally been criticized as Hegelian obscurantism and anti-scientism. Yet, as I have already intimated, Hegel did not intend to prove anything more than Whitehead, who maintained that no science can “claim to be founded upon observation” if it insists that the ultimate facts of nature “are to be found at durationless instants of time.” Whitehead only had the benefit of a far greater knowledge in mathematics and science of fact than was available in Hegel’s time.19

Georgescu-Roegen thus first identifies Hegel and Whitehead as thinkers in favor of change over static numerical representations. The Hegel quote in the above citation is from §286 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Georgescu-Roegen decontextualizes this sentence from Hegel’s Phenomenology by making it explicitly a critique of numbers. §286, which belongs to the section “Observation of Organism [Organischen],” is part of Hegel’s explanation of the organic form. The organic stands in contrast to the inorganic insofar as the former, due to its absolute fluidity, can absorb external disturbances and maintains a relation with the Other through its organic unity. Hegel started the analysis of the organic substance from two sides: the inner and the outer. The inner is the “simple soul,” the “pure Concept of end,” whose being is observed as the movement of a vanishing actuality; the outer on the contrary subsists in the “quiescent being of the organism.”20 The inner refers to the universal organism, and the outer refers to the inorganic nature; however, since it is never precise in these passages if Hegel means the structured body (Gestaltung) or the natural environment, it remains difficult to say whether Hegel is offering a retake on the mind-body problem or organism-milieu interactivity. Hegel claims that the effective or actual organic essence is neither the inner nor the outer, but the middle, which unites the being-in-itself (inner) and the being-for-itself (outer).21 In the paragraph that Georgescu-Roegen quotes, Hegel starts with a conceptual experiment of imagining that both inner and outer also have, for their own part, an inner and an outer; let us label them as I(i) and I(o) and O(i) and O(o). I(i), defined according to the movement of the Concept, is the “unrest of abstraction” (Unruhe der Abstraktion) and O(i) the “quiescent determination” (ruhende Bestimmtheit), namely, number, since the outer is at times considered inorganic as it only has magnitude and is devoid of movement. I(i) and O(i) form a pair that consists of the dynamic of the organic law. For Hegel, the point is not to criticize or demonize number per se but rather to show that the static and lifeless nature of number is always dialectically related to its other. Now we can see that Georgescu-Roegen’s take on Hegel does not do perfect justice to what Hegel was trying to say; nonetheless, he came to the same conclusion as Hegel: he arrives at the fundamental logic of the organic form. This is why we said earlier that Georgescu-Roegen’s take on dialectics, though it does not depart from reflection, does nevertheless aim at an organic form. For this reason, he also friends Whitehead with Hegel as thinkers of organicism and critics of arithmomorphism.

It is precisely here that the question of organism and life defines the bioeconomy and a planetary thinking that attempts to articulate a new program of economy, not based on arithmetic but on thermodynamics. Unlike Hegel, who arrived at the organism of the state as a culmination of the spirit, Georgescu-Roegen takes the organism of economy as a planetary phenomenon determined by the laws of thermodynamics. The human species is privileged here as one that can directly participate in the environment to slow down or speed up the entropic process. We should remind ourselves of the two laws of thermodynamics that we learned in high school physics: the first concerns the conservation of energy; the second concerns the universal tendency toward the dissipation of energy and toward disorder, i.e., becoming entropic. Disorder here does not mean complex order but rather the homogeneity of order: it fails to produce differences or diversity. One might find various definitions of entropy today, but here we want to list the three definitions that Georgescu-Roegen himself summarized. According to Clausius, the first definition of entropy is understood as a physical system state variable that divides temperature change over the transfer of internal energy across two systems. Boltzmann then provides a second definition that understands entropy as the degree of disorder. The third definition, a statistical mechanical definition, was derived from Boltzmann’s fascination with Maxwell’s work in particle distributions and concerns the relation between micro- and macrophysics, which Georgescu-Roegen states as “how to derive one opaque fact of nature, the Entropy Law, from the opaque facts of nature expressed by the laws of mechanics.”22 That is to say, in the third definition, entropy is defined by Georgescu-Roegen himself as “the thermodynamic probability that the corresponding disorder shall occur.”23 Human beings are, therefore, considered to be like Maxwell’s demon, who, capable of anticipating the thermodynamic probability of disorder, can manipulate the second law of thermodynamics by transmitting heat from low temperature to high temperature:

The point is no mystical vitalism, but a matter of brute facts. Some organisms slow down the entropic degradation. Green plants store part of the solar radiation, which in their absence would immediately go into dissipated heat, into high entropy. That is why we can now burn the solar energy saved from degradation millions of years ago in the form of coal or a few years ago in the form of a tree. All other organisms, on the contrary, speed up the march of entropy. Man occupies the highest position on this scale, and this is all that environmental issues are about.24

The human being, as we read above, “occupies the highest position” in the manipulation of the second law of thermodynamics to slow down the entropic becoming of the ecosystem. As we recall, according to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is becoming more entropic: it is in the process of becoming disorder (through the dissipation of energy, i.e., becoming homogenous qua a lack of order).25 To resist such an entropic becoming, the organism must maintain order within the body (psychosomatic functions and metabolism) and the environment. We can say that Georgescu-Roegen departs from the concept of an organism to propose a new understanding of economic activities not from the perspective of rationalist calculation on gain and loss but rather considering the value of economic activities as negentropic processes. This negentropic process has its aim in the enjoyment of life—a noetic culmination, we might say. In this formulation, Georgescu-Roegen has already presupposed a concept of the human, in which the human is not a moral being but a being capable of and largely dependent on exosomatization for its own survival. Therefore, the question of morality should be considered from an exosomatic point of view. Georgescu-Roegen did not coin the term exosomatization but took it from the biologist Alfred Lotka, who uses it to describe the externalization of the spirit, that is to say, the invention of tools:

Apart from a few insignificant exceptions, all species other than man use only endosomatic instruments—as Alfred Lotka proposed to call those instruments (legs, claws, wings, etc.) which belong to the individual organism by birth. Man alone came, in time, to use a club, which does not belong to him by birth, but which extended his endosomatic arm and increased its power. At that point in time, man’s evolution transcended the biological limits to include also (and primarily) the evolution of exosomatic instruments, i.e., of instruments produced by man but not belonging to his body. That is why man can now fly in the sky or swim under water even though his body has no wings, no fins, and no gills.26

Why is it necessary to consider them as exosomatic instruments when they could quite easily just be called instruments, and why exosomatic as opposed to endosomatic? It is also because exosomatization is the necessary product of noetic reflection and vice versa; these instruments are external to the soma but are nonetheless part of the soma precisely through reflection. The organic unity refers not only to the organic body but rather an organic totality between the organic body and the inorganic instruments. In this respect, Georgescu-Roegen joins organologists such as Bergson and anthropologists like Leroi-Gourhan in understanding the human as a prosthetic being; its evolution is precisely an exosomatic evolution.27 The exosomatic evolution helps the human being to adapt to the environment and adopt the environment more efficiently—for example, extracting energy and raw material to construct new amenities. Georgescu-Roegen’s reconceptualization of economy starts not only from a new epistemology (organismic instead of mechanistic) but also from a new way of understanding economic activities that are in contrast to and in tension with real politics that are constrained by a strategy of survival and victory according to numerical values such as GDP. This new epistemology also necessitates a return to anthropology, in which the human ceases to be a Homo economicus and is distinguished from other living beings due to its capacity to produce exosomatic instruments. In contrast, other animals are only capable of producing endosomatic instruments closely related to their instincts. This anthropological foundation of Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomy bears a significant Hegelian inspiration. It postulates that human economy should be viewed from the perspective of reflective movement instead of mechanistic determinations. This reflective movement has to be captured as a process of exosomatization, distinguishing human beings from other animals. The dialectics continues when the exosomatic activities produced an excess, a hubris, which submits the human being to, first, perpetual conflicts—a thesis that we can find in the modern political theories of Montesquieu and Rousseau, and second, to the human addiction to exosomatic instruments—“a phenomenon analogous to that of the flying fish which became addicted to the atmosphere and mutated into birds forever. . . . It is through this addiction that mankind’s survival presents a problem entirely different from that of all other species. . . . It is neither only biological nor only economic. It is bioeconomic.”28

To concretize his theory in realizable terms, Georgescu-Roegen in “Energy and Economic Myths” suggests a minimal bioeconomic program29 consisting of eight rules that mitigate conflicts and addictions. The first rule concerns the prohibition of the production of all instruments of war; the second suggests financial aid to underdeveloped nations to attain a good (nonluxurious) life; the third concerns the degrowth of populations adequately fed by organic agriculture only; the fourth suggests that the waste of all energy should be avoided before solar energy can be fully put to use; the fifth and sixth concern a decrease in the abundance of luxury goods such as extravagant gadgetry and fashion; the seventh suggests the production of repairable goods; the last concerns the “the circumdrome of the shaving machine,” a neologism created by Georgescu-Roegen himself. This circumdrome is illustrated by a looping that characterizes infinite empty progress, where one invents an efficient, faster shaving machine to save more time that can then be dedicated to inventing an even faster shaving machine.30 But, of course, these are all rules we have been violating and will continue to violate in the coming decades. We will come back to Georgescu-Roegen’s rules in chapter 6. Georgescu-Roegen repeats the opposition between mechanism and organism in his critique of economy, and we must revisit this debate to understand Georgescu-Roegen’s program.

§14. Cybernetic Reflection: Toward the Consciousness of Machines

When the planet is observed from the perspective of thermodynamics, we can see that global warming and ecological crises are just outcomes of an economy that is not understood bioeconomically but rather as development. Development is colonialism from a European perspective (later, in chapter 5, we will discuss this thesis of Kojève); though, of course, such a pursuit is now no longer only European: certain Asian countries such as China have been aiding infrastructural development in other Asian countries and most notably in African countries. Nevertheless, developmentalism as a colonial discourse is not to be dismissed so quickly since it also belongs to the process of globalization, which is preparing itself for a new phase to appear following the end of the first phase marked by the recent pandemic and geopolitical drift. Can we, therefore, govern the whole planet according to the principles of thermodynamics? The concept of entropy perhaps remains too abstract to understand economic activities because what determines something as entropic depends largely on time and space. A short-sighted development project might bring about well-being for the people in the short term, but it might cause long-term negative effects and suffering in the future. After stating his minimal bioeconomic program, Georgescu-Roegen asks:

Will mankind listen to any program that implies a constriction of its addiction to exosomatic comfort? Perhaps, the destiny of man is to have a short, but fiery, exciting and extravagant life rather than a long, uneventful and vegetative existence. Let other species—the amoebas, for example—which have no spiritual ambitions inherit an earth still bathed in plenty of sunshine.31

In the end, maybe only the most basic reflection will stay, for higher levels of reflection will lead to the system’s saturation, which might only be resolved through self-destruction. Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomy is concerned more with the question of tendency than numerical values, such as calculating how entropic the industrial world is becoming or determining when a critical threshold in the amount of entropy will be attained. If we focus on a numerical definition of entropy, giving it a value or situating it within a value scale, then it paradoxically becomes an equivalence of GDP. The importance of Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomy does not lie exactly in the calculation of the entropic value but rather in his capacity to reverse the tendency of economic development to construct a new framework based on biology and thermodynamics.

Philip Mirowski reproached Georgescu-Roegen for the latter’s exclusion of the use of entropy in information theory: “Georgescu’s gloss on entropy was misleading in at least one idiosyncratic sense: he was implacably opposed to the extensions of the entropy concept in the direction of its interpretation as a measure of ‘information,’ and therefore he missed out on one of the most consequential aspects of the cyborg genealogy in the late twentieth century.”32 Here Mirowski referred to an entry on entropy written by Georgescu-Roegen for The New Palgrave Dictionary for Economics, in which Georgescu-Roegen, after introducing the concept of entropy in thermodynamics and his theory of economics, reproached the use of this concept by Claude Shannon in his information theory. Georgescu-Roegen writes, “A real imbroglio involving the entropy concept grew from the seminal work of Claude H. Shannon (1948) on the purely technical problem of communication, which is to find out how many distinct sequences (messages) of a given length can be formed by a code, a set of different single signals.”33 The reason for which Georgescu-Roegen calls it an imbroglio is that Shannon’s use of the term creates confusions, that “the concept of entropy started travelling from one domain to another with hardly any discrimination.”34 Mirowski’s critique of Georgescu-Roegen is that because he dismisses the use of entropy in information theory, he missed out on being a figure of the genealogy of cyborg science, which Mirowski outlined in Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Mirowski’s reproach is more a regret than a criticism, considering that his first book was dedicated to Georgescu-Roegen.35

Should we reconcile these two concepts of entropy, one in thermodynamics and one used by Shannon in information theory, into a singular notion? It may seem no urgent need to do so. Indeed, as Georgescu-Roegen writes, the use of entropy in these two domains should instead be further discriminated. The problem with this, however, is that it is impossible to think about the transmission of information without energy.36 For example, Maxwell’s demon would not be able to detect the speed of the particles, obtain information about them, and sort them according to their kinetic energy without itself consuming energy. The existence of a living being depends on material, energetic, and informational conditions. For our purpose here, instead of defining information, albeit an urgent task, we want to look into the similarity between the reflective models of cybernetics and the organismic model of economics, elaborations of which can be found more in the work of F. A. Hayek than Georgescu-Roegen.

Hayek as we know, like his friend Karl Popper, was very critical of Hegel though in a more serious manner than Popper. Hayek’s reading of Hegel appeared mainly in his younger writings, especially The Counter Revolution of Science, in which a chapter titled “Hegel and Comte” is dedicated to a comprehensive comparison between Comte and Hegel from various perspectives. Nevertheless, Hayek already showed interest in a spontaneous interaction model between individuals. He refused to conceive an organismic model of the state but rather an organismic model of the market, or perhaps we can say, a rebirth of civil society. On the contrary, Hayek found in both Hegel and Comte a tendency to grasp the whole as the real while undermining individuals:

The concern with the movement of Reason as a whole not only prevented them from understanding the process through which the interaction of individuals produced structures of relationships which performed actions no individual reason could fully comprehend, but it also made them blind to the fact that the attempt of conscious reason to control its own development could only have the effect of limiting this very growth to what the individual directing mind could foresee.37

This spontaneity that we find in the interaction among individuals is for Hayek something more fundamental than the concept of the whole grasped a priori. In an article published in 1945 titled “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek was already interested in how local information or knowledge functioned in the market because the market (versus the state) cannot be managed and controlled by a single mind. The market without a king’s head acting as the sovereign has a different order and dynamics. In the more current language, we might say that Hayek’s ideal market is decentralized to the extent that a central force cannot command it; it is the synthesis of different actors in the market each intervening according to their local knowledge or information:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.38

Hayek wants to apply the biological model to the market, but conceptually this might commit the same mistake that he thought Hegel and Comte committed: explaining the market with a “mysterious teleological force.”39 It is only later through cybernetics, as well as through Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory, that Hayek finds a new language to explain his theory, which he stated in the preface to his three volumes of Law, Legislation and Liberty: “It was largely the growth of cybernetics and the related subjects of information and system theory which persuaded me that expression other than those which I habitually used may be more readily comprehensible to the contemporary reader.”40 What he means by the language of cybernetics consists in several key concepts such as “negative feedback” and “self-organizing system,” terms that he associates with the mechanism of the market.41 We have already explored the philosophical foundation and the historical development of cybernetics in Recursivity and Contingency; readers might want to refer to this treatise for a more detailed exploration of the subject, but for the purpose of this work, we will briefly reiterate how we conceive cybernetics as a mechano-organicism, a term we also assigned to Hegel.

In Recursivity and Contingency, I attempted to show that cybernetics presents itself as a rupture with seventeenth-century mechanism, and in the words of its founder Norbert Wiener, that in cybernetics, one finds the reconciliation of Bergson’s vitalism and Newton’s classical mechanics. The first chapter of Wiener’s Cybernetics was titled “Newtonian and Bergsonian Time.” Newtonian motion is mechanist and time-symmetric, hence reversible, whereas Bergsonian time is biological, creative, and irreversible (as per thermodynamics). Indeed, it was not until 1824 that the French medical engineer and physicist Sadi Carnot (almost a century after Newton’s death in 1727) demonstrated the irreversibility of heat engine cycles, essentially showing that time flows in a unidirectional manner, what then become known as the “arrow of time.” Already in his first book, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Bergson launched a fierce attack on the way time was conceptualized in Western science and philosophy: that is, time is understood in terms of space (for example, as intervals), and this conceptualization is, therefore, itself timeless. It is homogenous, like the intervals marked on a clock. In contrast to this view of time as an extension ordered in spatial terms, Bergson argues that time contains heterogeneity or qualitative multiplicity in organic forms. Time is a force that is singular in every instant, like the Heraclitean river; it does not repeat itself twice as does a mechanical clock. Indeed, mechanical or linear causality does not exist in duration. Bergsonian time provides a new way of understanding human consciousness and experience.

These differences between Newtonian time and Bergsonian time define the boundary between physics and biology, machine and organism. The task of cybernetics was to show that, with the advancements in physics—especially statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics—it is possible to employ notions of feedback and information to construct a cybernetic machine that breaks the boundary between machine and organism. Therefore, toward the end of the chapter, Wiener claims that “modern automation exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living organism; and hence 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. . . . In fact, the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions.”42

Vitalism, as we know, was often associated with Hans Driesch, Bergson, and others, but it was often reproached by biologists and mathematicians of the organismic school on the grounds that notions such as entelechy and élan vital are mystifying and unscientific. The overcoming of the mechanist-vitalist controversy does not mean that a machine is now vitalist, but rather that this duality has been overcome by an organicism of which cybernetics is its mechanical realization. In Wiener’s conceptualization, when we grasp a glass of water and bring it toward our mouth, this involves multiple feedback loops and adjustments according to the information evaluated, which measures the level of organization. Or in other words, Wiener claims that Bergson’s vitalist definition of organism can no longer differentiate itself from the design of a cybernetic machine. This claim could produce misunderstandings. The machine will not be the same as an organism, for an organism is already concrete, while a machine is always in the process of becoming more and more concrete. In this sense, a machine can only be “becoming organic.” However, it is also because of its “becoming organic” that opposition between mechanism and organism cannot be absolute. Wiener’s claim inaugurates what we may call digital vitalism today. It holds the view that all forms of being could be reduced to digital algorithms and that it is possible to produce an algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves.

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 association between feedback and reflection is more than analogical. Although we related this to Kant earlier, we should also recall, as Gilbert Simondon already remarked in his article “Epistemology of Cybernetics (1953),” that “Kant could only deal with cybernetics by situating it in the Critique of Judgment.”43 Simondon’s insight is profound and illuminating, enabling us to retrace the history of modern European philosophy through the prism of technology. Wiener refers to the first feedback system as the “governor”—a design used to automatically open and close a valve according to the speed of the centrifugal movement of a pendulum—in James Watt’s steam engine (Hayek saw this at work in the invisible hand of Adam Smith). 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 environment [milieu intérieur].”44 Homeostasis is a mechanism that can keep a system within a certain range of constants: for example, temperature or the amount of potassium in the bodily liquid. 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”: “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.”45

Earlier on we suggested that for Hegel, the fundamental element in his philosophy is reflection. To be conscious is to be conscious of something, but to be conscious of something, we need to be conscious of our consciousness of something. Consciousness in its general term is the reflection of consciousness on itself. Therefore, we understand that Hegel’s interpretation of Aristotle’s De Anima deviates from the classical interpretation because, for Hegel, it is impossible to talk about the soul without dealing with the circularity of reflection. Consciousness is that which reflects. Perhaps in the twentieth century, the question of whether Hegelian logic is realized in the state will be replaced by another, namely, whether Hegel’s logic is realized in cybernetics. The Hegelian scholar Gotthard Günther claims that cybernetics realizes the Hegelian logic: “In 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.”46 In Recursivity and Contingency, we endeavored to demonstrate a philosophical history of cybernetics. We tried to show that Kant’s Critique of Judgment imposes an organic condition of philosophizing; that is to say, for philosophy to be, it has to become organic. In chapter 2, titled “Logic and Contingency,” we discussed the question of recursivity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and via Gotthard Günther demonstrated an affinity between cybernetics and Hegel’s logic, thereby positioning cybernetics in the history of philosophy, especially in relation to German idealism or, as Heidegger termed it, as the end of Western philosophy or metaphysics. In other words, the imaginary organic machine ceases to be imaginary. The megamachine metamorphosed from its seventeenth-century mechanistic image to that of an organic one.

Perhaps we can even argue that cybernetics, and its manifestation in modern digital technology, theoretically foretold the end of Hegel’s philosophy—end in the sense of realization. Not only is Hegel’s organismic thinking realized in bioeconomy and governance, but also because the cybernetization of bioeconomy and governance surpasses the Hegelian logic, with the spirit progressing toward another milestone. We must, however, be fair to Hegel because we cannot just see Hegel as a cybernetician. Hegel is more than a cybernetician because Hegel had no intention of simulating organisms; rather Hegel was aiming to grasp an “organic unity” that could be realized in all spiritual domains. Therefore, on the question of consciousness, Hegel treated the externalized seriously and beyond the process of hominization. This is not to say that cyberneticians overlook the prosthetic nature of technology, which the late Wiener frequently discussed, but rather that Hegel went further than the cybernetician in applying his logic to the state, art, and history. It might be possible to consider Hegel’s dialectics as “universal cybernetics” in the sense of Simondon,47 though Hegel’s concept of reflection departs from an anthropological understanding, while cyberneticians take it from the perspective of behaviorism and functionalism. Cybernetics is a functionalist proof of Hegel’s concept of reflection but not yet an anthropological one. Only in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and James Lovelock can we find a more profound anthropo-political understanding.

§15. Noospheric Reflection: In Search of a Planetary Freedom?

Bioeconomy and cybernetics have converged on a planetary scale. If for the cyberneticians, feedback (Günther rendered it compatible with reflection) is fundamental to a new type of intelligent machine, in Teilhard de Chardin, reflection is fundamental to life as a whole. Therefore, Teilhard de Chardin often refers to an “organic totality” (totalité organique) in contrast to Hegel’s “organic unity” (Organische Einheit). We can envision the world being enveloped with a layer of life, known as the biosphere, a phrase coined by E. Suess and later developed by Vladimir Vernadsky together with synergy from Édouard Le Roy and Henri Bergson. The biosphere is a layer of “living matter” that effectively transforms the sun’s radiations into various chemical activities, such as photosynthesis.48 The biosphere is not an extra layer as something separable from the crust of the earth; on the contrary, Vernadsky suggests that the biosphere is essential to it since without the biosphere “the crustal mechanism of the earth will not exist.”49 At certain moments in history, the earth witnesses the emergence of thinking, namely, a reflective matter, together with the living beings. According to Teilhard de Chardin, evolution could be understood as the development of this thinking layer at the planetary scale. The human being has, therefore, a special role in the formation of a new layer above the geosphere and the biosphere: the noosphere. The prefix noo- comes from the Greek word nous, noesis, thinking as per our use of the term noetic. Teilhard de Chardin claims, “The animal knows, of course, but certainly it does not know that it knows.”50 We do not really know how animals “think,” therefore, we cannot verify this statement; however, at least, from our observation, it is fair to claim that in comparison with other living beings, human beings have a richer symbolic world since they are capable of producing tools—an ability that Bergson used to define intelligence and distinguish it from the instinct.51 The symbolic world of the human has expanded and complexified exponentially in the past fifty thousand years.

Following the paleontologists, we know that the evolution of the human, or hominization in general, could be understood in terms of a long history of technical fabrication. One could understand it in terms of two dimensions, the externalization of memory—for example, through tools (the flint corresponds to a gesture of making fire that was developed throughout millions of years) and writing—and a liberation of bodily organs, that is to say, the human being could liberate their hands and their other organs that had to be in direct contact with the object of treatment: “Thanks to the bipedalism freeing the hands the brain could enlarge; and thanks to it at the same time the eyes, drawing near to each other on the diminished face, could begin to converge and fix their gaze on what the hands took hold of, brought near, and, in every sense of the word; presented: the very act of reflection, exteriorized.”52 The technical objects are exteriorized reflection in the sense of the objective spirit described by Hegel. Exteriorization is essential to reflection; it is that which extends reflection from the immediate object to an object that is not readily available. The formation of the noosphere is the historical accumulation of human intelligence through artifacts. However, these technical objects are not dead, inorganic matter; rather, they are also capable of reflection, as the objective spirit. Teilhard de Chardin was not discussing artificial intelligence or machine learning because these technologies did not exist at the time. Instead, he was hinting at the possibility of producing a thinking layer made possible by technical objects.53 Thinking converges thanks to these technical objects because they function as a channel of communication (for example, writing) but also facilitate thinking to evolve through the accumulation of knowledge exteriorized in the technical objects. A reflective center is formed on the noosphere, and once it is formed, Teilhard de Chardin argues in a rather Hegelian tone, “it can change only by sinking deeper into itself.”54 This might remind us of our discussion in chapter 1 that concerned the last paragraph of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where the consciousness returns to itself as if sinking into the infinite dark night. This capacity of reflection belongs to life on Earth in general, and it is also through life that the Earth has gained this important capacity. Therefore, for Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere is not simply a new skin, but rather it is that which gives soul to the earth: “Over and beyond the biosphere there is a noosphere. . . . The earth ‘makes a new skin.’ Better still, it finds its soul.”55 The biosphere is a skin above the geosphere, but the noosphere is rather its soul, one that results from the convergence of technologies. The development of the noosphere for Teilhard de Chardin is no longer about survival because in the Holocene, with reasonably constant geological activity and the technologies humans have developed, survival does not appear to be an imminent problem. Instead, for Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere aims for a “super life.”56 The noosphere is not simply biological, nor is it only tied to the human species, because we cannot assert that humans created technology, for the opposite is equally true: technology created the human. Unfortunately, technology is often misunderstood as merely a human affair that blocks us from understanding technology itself. However, one must clearly distinguish his thesis from this type of humanism, which is becoming more and more confident that one day it will be able to reinvent the human anew, propaganda closely associated with the transhumanists: “The change of the biological state ending up in the awakening of thought does not simply correspond to a vertical point passed through by the individual, or even by the species. Vaster than that, it reflects life itself, in its organic totality, and consequently it marks a transformation that affects the state of the whole planet.”57

Teilhard de Chardin provides a theological and mystic perspective on technological possibilities. Moreover, Teilhard rejects that technology is only an affair of any individual or species. Instead, technology is planetary in the sense that it is already beyond the human phenomenon. It is via the technospheric reflection, that we see “a noogenesis rising upstream against the flow of entropy,”58 which resonates with the general thesis of Georgescu-Roegen and Norbert Wiener. The future of humanity does not lie in a return to the original human but rather in becoming more than human. Progress is here something material, scientific, and rational—a feature that Teilhard de Chardin identified with Western religion. However, it must be added that for Teilhard de Chardin the rational is not on the other side of the mystical; on the contrary, the rational can also function as the possibility of the mystical and vice versa. Humans are only the “midwife” who takes care of technology, but they are not the masters of technology. The noosphere has been developing the ability to reflect on itself, and at some point, it will arrive at an omega point, a “supremely autonomous focal point of union.”59 What will happen when the noosphere reaches the omega point? Teilhard de Chardin provides us with a theological meaning, a “‘parousiac’ establishment of the Kingdom of God.”60 However, Teilhard de Chardin’s determination of the driving force of the noosphere must be debated, namely, that the progress of the noosphere is advanced by the West, with the East understood as struggling in an almost opposed direction. The West progresses and the East regresses.61 We can get a glimpse of this position by considering what Teilhard said about China (and also India):

A civilization that was certainly incredibly refined, but just like the writing in which it so ingenuously reveals itself, one that had never changed its methods from the beginning. It was Neolithic, right in the midst of the nineteenth century, not a rejuvenated Neolithic as elsewhere, but only endlessly and increasingly complicated in itself—and not merely along the same lines, but on the same level—as though it had never been able to wrest itself free from the soil in which it had been formed.62

Like Hegel and many other Western thinkers, Teilhard de Chardin sees the West as the synchronizing power of planetarization. However, he is also a step ahead of Hegel in terms of thinking planetarily—not that Teilhard de Chardin would not also have claimed that Siberia has no value of existence on the earth, but rather Hegel’s planetary thinking stopped at the nation-state, while Teilhard’s thinking, as Stafford Beer proposed in his essay “Recursion of Powers,” goes beyond the individual, communal, and national level.63 As a Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin does not see the border of territories as an obstacle to realizing the noosphere, but rather the development of the noosphere will finally transcend the limitations of the nation-states, anticipating the arrival of the kingdom of God. The advancement and acceleration of the noosphere in the past four hundred years is led by the West through its technological advancement, colonization, and scientific revolution. However, we must not forget that Teilhard de Chardin lived in China for more than two decades between 1923 and 1946 during which the war in Europe prevented him from returning to France, and as a paleontologist, he has more insight than most of the scholars regarding this civilization. Is not the change in China today astounding in retrospect? In 150 years, China’s technical acceleration has caught up with the West, and currently appears to be accelerating faster than the West in many sectors. Teilhard might be surprised that today China contributes much more than many Western countries toward the omega reflection. However, does this mean that modernization in China and its technological acceleration is, in fact, only the triumph of Western rationality?

The question of a planetary reflection is taken further by Lovelock in his Gaia theory in which he describes the awakening of Gaia through the stimulation of satellites and new telecommunication technologies. Lovelock’s theory of Gaia originates from his task at NASA to investigate the possibilities of life on Mars. His research into the atmosphere reveals that the atmosphere, noosphere, biosphere, and geosphere all create feedback loops and are linked into a self-regulating system. Gaia as a gigantic cybernetic system provides a new way of understanding the relation between humans and the Earth. However, the ecological movements associated with Gaia theory missed Lovelock’s main point that the ultimate goal is not to protect mother earth but rather to arrive at the reflection of Gaia. Such a reflection is an awakening, and humanity has not yet fulfilled its role to facilitate the taking place of this extraordinary reflection. In this sense, Lovelock’s Gaia could be seen as a continuation of Teilhard de Chardin’s conceptualization of the noosphere, the difference being that Gaia theory starts with the atmosphere and takes cybernetics as a departing point to conceive Gaia as a homeostatic system. Later, with the joint force of Lynn Margulis, we know that Gaia is no longer considered as a single organism, but rather a system made of multiple species, or of multispecies symbiosis. In short, Gaia is conceived as a giant nonequilibrium thermodynamic system, or more precisely a planetary life form.64 The noospheric reflection or the awakening of Gaia for Lovelock is a task of technological development, and it is not a return to some form of philosophy of nature. The only thing that one can relate in this to a philosophy of nature is that it attempts to reconcile the rational and the mystical,65 in the sense that the technological that has the rational as its ground doesn’t point toward the disappearance of the mystical, but rather the very possibility of the mystical—a theme we will return to in chapter 6.

Is this omega reflection, understood as the destiny of humanity, similar in form to the apocalypse? Today we can easily associate it with the technological singularity; we can imagine that artificial intelligence will be joined together to create a noospheric reflection beyond all territories, and beyond attempts that have been carried out to link all computers in the world to produce a supercomputer. Maybe one day we will witness planetary unification through technology, and it is up to Silicon Valley to tell us how fast and how far it can go. In 1995, Wired magazine rediscovered Teilhard de Chardin and named him the founder of a “philosophical framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness” fifty years prior to the birth of the internet.66 Let us not forget that in 2018, Ray Kurzweil argued that by 2045 it might be possible to attain immortality.67 “The singularity is near” is like the prophecy of the second coming of Jesus Christ, and Kurzweil is John the Baptist.68 Politics starts with anthropology, an understanding of human nature and humans’ relation to the other beings in the world. This future of humanity is fictional; at the same time, it is a prophecy that is more relevant to us today than any previous epoch because technological acceleration has blurred the fictive and the actual.

The question of anthropology, which we have tried to sketch here, is no longer concerned with ethnology and ethnography but rather the future of the Anthropos itself. The anthropological question takes humanity as a whole and attempts to go beyond racial and ethnic differences. Such an anthropology is, however, inseparable from the Christian religion. As a result, noospheric reflection is not a human achievement alone but rather the possibility of Christian universal love. Moreover, the anthropological reflection provides a different path to think about the universal history of humanity; unlike Kant, who sees the realization of history as the hidden project of nature, we see here nature being englobed in a reflection that originates from it but at the same time exceeds it:

Once formed, a reflective centre can no longer change except by involution upon itself. To outward appearance, admittedly, man disintegrated just like any animal. But here and there we find an inverse function of the phenomenon. By death, in the animal, the radial is reabsorbed into the tangential, while in man it escapes and is liberated from it. It escapes from entropy by turning back to Omega: the hominization of death itself.69

This image of the “hominization of death” is a return to the center, to the omega, contributing to the memory of the human species as well as to the future of this memory. The human being will be unified in the planetary process in the eyes of Teilhard de Chardin, in the sense that the noosphere will englobe the geosphere and the biosphere and form a cybernetic feedback loop with the atmosphere. Such a view takes the idea of the planetary as the a priori, the same way Hegel sees the idea of the state. In this process of convergence, human time is identified with geological time, just as how Dipesh Chakrabarty has analyzed the notion of the Anthropocene.70 However, does this identification give us a new framework of politics—a politics beyond the nation-state as well as the human species? Or, on the contrary, does it only mean the end of the human and the end of freedom?

We have to confront the Kantian question regarding how far philosophical speculations can go without falling prey to the Schwärmerei. In the second volume of his The Myth of the Machine, Mumford launched a fierce attack on Teilhard de Chardin and ventured a “tentative but reassuring prediction: that planetary supermechanism will disintegrate long before ‘the phenomenon of Man’ reaches the Omega point.”71 Mumford’s attack is somewhat based on his strict definition of mechanism and his distinction between mechanism and organism. We will have to elaborate on this point. On the one hand, Mumford sees Teilhard de Chardin’s technological thought as a mere continuation of the mechanical world picture under the disguise of Christian fulfilment. The megamachine, since the beginning, presupposes what Mumford calls the “organization man,” that is to say, an artifact of the human that is deprived of any organic feature unconformable to mechanical organization. The planetary supermechanism for him will only produce a “depersonalized servo-mechanism in the megamachine.”72 Mumford alluded to an organicism that would be an antidote to such mechanization. On the other hand, even though he invokes Norbert Wiener and cybernetics on several occasions, he seems to have ignored that the cybernetic machine is no longer the same kind of mechanical machine he was reproaching. To be fair, Mumford saw the cybernetic machines as a technological improvement (which he calls “cybernation”), but he understands them as “the most ancient of organic devices, rather than the most modern: equivalent to the reflexes, not the cerebral cortex.”73 Paradoxically when he refers to Cannon’s homeostasis, he then claims that he wouldn’t call it a “mechanism.”74 Mumford’s analysis and diagnosis could hardly hold following the trajectory of political epistemology we have outlined so far; therefore, his theory of the megamachine in relation to political forms has to be updated. On the other hand, and this seems to be more solid as a criticism, is that for Mumford, Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of the development of consciousness toward the omega point is not science but risks being mere mythology and eschatology; its only merit is that it “made explicit the underlying dogmatic premises of the metaphysics and theology of the megamachine.”75

It is worth noting that, near the end of Gesture and Speech, André Leroi-Gourhan mentioned Teilhard’s omega point and speculated that it is most likely another word for the apocalypse. And before the apocalypse arrives, one will have to wait indefinitely because, as we know, the katechon delays the coming of the anti-Christ, and the length of this delay remains unknown: “We should be inclined to regard the Teilhardian vision as a powerful mystical approach that bears, however, the hallmark of all apocalypses. Humankind may well have to wait thousands of years for ‘point omega’ and, while waiting, it will have to organize itself and carry on living, just as it did in the year 1000.”76 Planetary reflection is a messianic event in the sense that it is an event that ends the limit of the human being. This planetary reflection is also the moment when the nation-states will lose all meanings and values, and through technology the kingdom of God will be brought to the earth. However, as Mumford and Leroi-Gourhan have remarked, this is but “mythology and eschatology” and thus bears “the hallmark of all apocalypses,” a trope that continues for today’s transhumanists.

However, unlike Teilhard, whose noble idea of planetary reflection aims at reconciling science and theology, transhumanists perceive it more in terms of market value. One shouldn’t categorize Teilhard as a transhumanist by any means, even though one could identify an apocalyptic end in both. The transhumanists propose the technological singularity as the ultimate possibility of the posthuman, where the human will no longer be and will remain a past; instead, we will all become Homo deus. Logically one cannot refuse such an anthropogenetic possibility since we do not know enough about how technology might advance in the coming decades. At the same time, this uncertainty leads to a constant confrontation between technology and politics within a certain epistemological paradigm, for in this paradigm technology wants to overcome politics and politics wants to constrain technology. The biological attributes of humans could be gradually substituted by artificial organs available for purchase at a certain price. Elements such as gender and human phenotypical differences become subject to engineering principles: they could be eliminated by technological means. One may anticipate that this will first be done in private clinics before becoming normal practice in public hospitals. This is the promise as well as the poverty of the present technological imagination, while it equally marks the end of the human and the end of politics—or perhaps an absolute depolitization.