Notes — Continued (2 of 2)

1. Bergson’s The Meaning of the War was published in English in 1915; the French text is available at: http://14-18.institut-de-france.fr/1914-discours-henri-bergson.php; English translation is also available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17111/17111-h/17111-h.htm.

2. See Die Bibliothek Carl Schmitt, edited by the Carl-Schmitt-Gesellschaft, https://www.carl-schmitt.de/forschung/privatbibliothek-carl-schmitts/.

3. Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in The Knowledge of Life; In Recursivity and Contingency, I tried to reconstruct Bergson’s general organology through a reading of Creative Evolution and Canguilhem’s commentary on Part III of Bergson’s Creative Evolution; this chapter constitutes the further interrogation of this subject.

4. Bergson, The Meaning of the War, 34.

5. Bergson, The Two Sources, 268.

6. Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto (1909),” https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-marinetti/the-futurist-manifesto/.

7. Bergson, The Meaning of the War, 36.

8. Kapp, Der konstituierte Despotismus und die konstitutionelle Freiheit, 85.

9. See Kawakami and Takeuchi (ed), Overcoming Modernity (近代の超克); On the discussion of war and the Kyoto School, please see the second part of Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China.

10. I was made aware by the Russian editor of one of my books, Eugene Kuchinov, that a book published by the nationalist agitator Maxim Kalashnikov was entitled Robot and Cross: Technosense of the Russian Idea.

11. Bergson, The Two Sources, 249.

12. Varela, “Steps to a Cybernetics of Autonomy,” 117.

13. Negri, The End of Sovereignty; see also my discussion in the Introduction.

14. As Charles Taylor said, today Hegel’s ontology of Geist is “close to incredible,” but at the same time highly relevant, see Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 69, 72.

15. Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” 1358.

16. Wiener, God and Golem, 73

17. Simondon, “Cybernétique et philosophie,” in Sur la Philosophie.

18. Bergson, The Two Sources, 268.

19. Lapoujade, Powers of Time, 81.

20. Bergson, The Two Sources, 265.

21. Bergson, The Two Sources, 263.

22. Lapoujade, Powers of Time, 63: “The intelligence is precisely what distracts man from life itself; it is a form of inattention to life. The pure intelligence is in effect characterized by a ‘natural inability to comprehend life’ insofar as it always perceives life from the outside. The intelligence is life having become external to itself.”

23. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 59–62.

24. Simondon, “Cybernétique et philosophie,” in Sur la Philosophie, 43. Simondon used the term holistic (holique) to describe this form of organization of cybernetics.

25. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 17.

26. Bergson in The Two Sources proposed what he calls “attachment to life”; however, this attachment to life is not about abandoning technology. Instead, this attachment to life is an act of overcoming. For the discussion between the tension of “attention to life” in his Matter and Memory and “attachment to life” in The Two Sources, please see Lapoujade, Powers of Time, 65–67.

27. On the concept of tragist, see Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics.

28. Schure, Bergson and History, 199.

29. Schure, Bergson and History, 200.

30. It could be equally interesting to compare Bergson’s interpretation of the external obstacle in evolution and the Hemmung in Schelling’s recursive form of nature.

31. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 47–48.

32. Bergson, The Two Sources, 257.

33. See Miquel, “Bergson and Darwin.”

34. Even though Bergson never mentioned the name Hegel, and he rejected any telos of history, one wonders how far this is from Hegel’s own dialectics and the concept of sublation not as cancellation but as reconciliation.

35. Bergson, The Two Sources, 234.

36. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 13.

37. Bergson, The Two Sources, 268. “Ne nous bornons donc pas à dire, comme nous le faisions plus haut, que la mystique appelle la mécanique. Ajoutons que le corps agrandi attend un supplément d’âme, et que la mécanique exigerait une mystique. Les origines de cette mécanique sont peut-être plus mystiques qu’on ne le croirait; elle ne retrouvera sa direction vraie, elle ne rendra des services proportionnés à sa puissance, que si l’humanité qu’elle a courbée encore davantage vers la terre arrive par elle à se redresser, et à regarder le ciel.”

38. Hawking, “Artificial Intelligence Could Spell the End of the Human Race.”

39. Schure, Bergson and History, 204.

40. Lapoujade, Powers of Time, 66. Lapoujade sees the paradox between delusion (délire) and believing, for delusion can only become vital when it is believed.

41. On the nonrational, see Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics, where we elaborated what we call “epistemology of the unknown.” The nonrational is distinguished from the irrational, because the nonrational is that which remains unknown and unknowable, however essential to the plane of consistence of a spiritual life.

42. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et Technique, 338–39.

43. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et Technique, 339.

44. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et Technique, 95.

45. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et Technique, 338. “Mais la simple observation d’un animal ou d’une technique démontre que la tendance générale ne contient pas toutes les caractéristiques: le sabre, qui réalise dans tous ses types un ensemble harmonieux, offre pourtant des formes extrêmement nombreuses conditionnes les unes par la matière, les autres par l’usage particulier de l’arme, les coutumes de l’escrime locale, les traditions esthétiques, etc.”

46. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et Technique, 342.

47. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et Technique, 396. “Nous avons fait la part de deux notions qui semblent dominer les faits, parce qu’elles fournissent une vue primordiale sur l’Évolution: la tendance et le milieu extérieur.”

48. See Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China.

49. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et Technique, 344.

50. This leads to the association of modernization and resistance, in the sense that the history of modernization of the non-West is a history of resistance against the West. See Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?.

51. Lefebvre, Le manifeste différentialiste.

52. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 218.

53. See Ober, Demopolis.

54. Lenin, State and Revolution, 54, italic original; also cited by Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 85.

55. Lenin, State and Revolution, 51.

56. Lenin, State and Revolution, 53–54.

57. Lenin, State and Revolution, 129.

58. Democracy as an act that allows the system to differentiate is a key argument of Niklas Luhmann against the classical concept of democracy, which means eliminating other options, such as choosing between A and B. Luhmann believes that systems theory provides a concept of democracy more appropriate to our time. See Luhmann, “Komplexität und Demokratie,” 36.

59. Chérif, Islam and the West, 43: “Democracy is always to come, it is a promise, and it is in the name of that promise that one can always criticize, question that which is proposed as the facto democracy. Consequently, I believe that there doesn’t exist in the world a democracy suitable for the concept of the democracy to come.”

60. Chérif, Islam and the West, 50.

61. Chérif, Islam and the West, 44.

62. However, to be noted is that Derrida’s democracy to come is neither a Kantian idea such as the world republic of Karatani nor is it a messianic politics like that of Walter Benjamin. See Derrida, “The Force of Law,” 965: commenting on the idea of justice, Derrida said, “I would hesitate to assimilate too quickly this ‘idea of justice’ to a regulative idea (in the Kantian sense), to a messianic promise or to other horizons of the same type” (italics in original).

63. See Gille, Histoire des techniques.

64. Hui, “For a Planetary Thinking.”

65. Wilson, Biophilia, 11.

66. Wilson, Biophilia, 71.

67. Wilson, Half-Earth, Prologue.

68. Wilson, Biophilia, 138.

69. Shiva, “Monocultures of the Mind,” 237–48.

70. Günther Anders made an interesting remark when he said that even if one stops experimenting on the atomic bomb, and destroys all the existing bombs physically, the risk of the atomic catastrophe still exists; see Anders, “Commandments in the Atomic Age, 1957.”

71. Hui, “Machine and Ecology.”

72. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine. Vol. 2., 271; Mumford reflects on the American megamachine after the Second World War.

1. Marx, Capital, 492.

2. Arendt, The Human Condition, 127.

3. This is the subject of Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics.

4. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.

5. Sohn-Rethel, “Das Ideal des Kaputten: Über neapolitanische Technik,” 41–48; the English translation by John Garvey, “The Ideal of the Broken Down,” is available at https://hardcrackers.com/ideal-broken-neapolitan-approach-things-technical/.

6. Sohn-Rethel, “The Ideal of the Broken Down.”

7. For a discussion on Sohn-Rethel and Simondon on the question of technical knowledge, see Hui, “Notes on Technical Normativity.”

8. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 176–77.

9. Hui, “Apropos Technophany.”

10. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 234.

11. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 49.

12. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 49.

13. Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 20.

14. Kojève, Kant, 70; Kojève argues in the book that Kant’s Critique of Judgment marks a turn from the discursive mode of truth to the mode of “as if” by eliminating the thing-in-itself; by doing so, Kojève also claims that the Kantian system is transformed quasi-automatically into a Hegelian system of knowledge (103).

15. Achilles Skordas defines these sets of conflicts as that which characterizes a neo-Hobbesian age; see Skordas, “The Rise of the Neo-Hobbesian Age.”

16. Gaché, “Foreword,” xiii.

17. Macron, “L’autonomie stratégique.” A similar proposal was made by Habermas in 2003, arguing that Europe should maintain distance from the unilateral policy of the United States; see Habermas and Derrida, “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together.”

18. Cacciari, The Withholding Power, 110. This reading of Epimetheus seems almost opposite to Schmitt’s; see discussion in chapter 5.

19. Cacciari, The Withholding Power, 114.

20. Cacciari, The Withholding Power, 118.

21. Elpis, meaning hope or expectation, according to Hesiod’s Works and Days, is the last object in Pandora’s box. As expectation, it is also a form of anticipation, and in this sense, it complicates Cacciari’s metaphorical and oppositional play of the collapse of the Promethean foresight and the replacement by the Epimethean calculation.

22. In the history of philosophy, the philosophical epistēme and the sophistic technē were opposed, and technē was devaluated in face of epistēme. Since the Second Industrial Revolution, we observe a transformation of the relation between them, that they have been integrated through the idea of constant innovation. See Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 1, 1, 40–43.

23. For an elaboration on the individuation of thinking, see Hui, Post-Europe (forthcoming 2024)

24. Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas,” 82.

25. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 108.

26. Simondon’s anthropological analysis of the genesis of technicity in the third part of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects was influenced by James Fraser, Bergson, Leroi-Gourhan, and others.

27. Simondon, “Psychosociologie de la technicité,” in Sur la Technique, 33.

28. See Hui and Halpin, “Collective Individuation,” 103–16, for an analysis of the history of social networks, its ontological and epistemological assumptions.

29. Gerovitch, “Artificial Intelligence with a National Face.”

30. See Hui, Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol. 1, which aims at an epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics in the twentieth century across various regions, including the United States, Soviet Union, Poland, France, China, Japan, and Latin American countries.

31. Santos, Epistemologies of the South.

32. Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques coined the term “entropology,” which suggests renaming his own discipline of anthropology. Entropology describes the disintegration of cultures under assault from Western expansion. See Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 414: “Anthropology could with advantage be changed into ‘entropology,’ as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of this process of disintegration.” For the question of entropy and ecology, also see White, “Outline to an Architectonics of Thermodynamics.”

33. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Aim,” in Political Writings, 45.

34. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 328.

35. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Political Writings, 107–8. Italics in original.

36. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A833, B861.

37. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A832 B860.

38. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A646–47, B674–75.

39. Rajiva, “Is Hypothetical Reason a Precursor to Reflective Judgment?”

40. Kant, Critique of Judgment (KU 438, 305), cited by Ypi, The Architectonic of Reason, 117: “There actually lies in us a priori an idea of a highest being, resting on a very different use of reason (its practical use), which drives us to amplify physical teleology’s defective representation of the original ground of the ends of nature into the concept of a deity.”

41. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 168.

42. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 232.

43. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 233.

44. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan.

45. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 283–84. Karatani’s optimism is based on a set of seemingly mistaken observations, which he states further on the next page: “The growth of industrial capitalism required three preconditions: first, that nature supply unlimited resources from outside the industrial structure; second, that human nature be available in an unlimited supply outside the capitalist economy; and, third, that technological innovation continue without limit. These three conditions have been rapidly disappearing since 1990.”

46. Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, 80.

47. Fichte, The Closed Commercial State, 145; also quoted by Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, 77. (Here I used the official translation published by SUNY Press.)

48. Fichte, The Closed Commercial State, 198–99.

49. The launch of Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro in September 2023 has created polar responses: on the one hand, the national pride of Chinese citizens who celebrated the breakthrough against the U.S. sanction on microchips; on the other hand, an even more fierce restriction might be imposed on Chinese firms from the U.S. side to weaken China’s capacity of producing 7 nanometer microchips on a large scale.

50. Henry Kissinger, “How the Enlightenment Ends”: “The Enlightenment started with essentially philosophical insights spread by a new technology. Our period is moving in the opposite direction. It has generated a potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy.”

51. There are many wonderful works on the intellectual history of the Enlightenment and its plead for nonpartisan reason. One of the outstanding works on this account is Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, especially chapter 8, “The Process of Criticism (Schiller, Simon, Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopédie, Kant).”

52. Zammito suggests an “ethical turn” in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, as he writes that “Kant is really concerned with the kind of world which would exist were everyone to be fully moral. In a world of full worthiness, everyone should also be proportionately happy. What is required to compel the natural order to make happiness for man as a species a real possibility is nothing less than God.” Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 339. We know that the pursuit of the systematic unity of reason has its main aim (Hauptzwecke) in what Kant called a general happiness (allgemeine Glückseligkeit), which ended his section on “The Architectonic of Pure Reason” in the Critique of Pure Reason, A851 B879. The possibility of general happiness is taken up as the “highest good” in the Critique of Practical Reason, a moral world in which actions are guided by moral laws defined according to the categorical imperative, and happiness is proportional to virtue.