Toward an Epistemological Diplomacy

§32. Acceleration, Automation, and the Prosthetic Future

We have thus far drafted a “dramaturgy” that starts with Hegel’s state as the vernunftige construction of the historical progress and its justification in the organism of the state, which, however, could hardly confront the problem that we are facing today regarding climate change, ecological crisis, and the imminent threat of wars. In our exposition of Hegelian political philosophy, we showed that the state is the projection of an organismic structure and operation, which Ernst Kapp later described. This ideality of the state as an organism is not simply a metaphor but is also logical and historical, as Hegel demonstrated in the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. The public servant system plus the division of the powers in the state allowed Hegel to think of a machine that functions like an organism so that every part could be organized and interact with the other parts of the organism, such as the organs of the body. The state completed what civil society failed to achieve. Civil society produces inequality and poverty because it is an interest-oriented society. The rabbles represent the failure of civil society since they are the disorganized part of it, which, for Hegel, represents the most dangerous group and, therefore, must be organized or subject to organization. Because organization is central to the state as a technological phenomenon, rather than understanding the state as a legal or theological concept, we attempt to analyze the state from the standpoint of political epistemology. Therefore, what we have been trying to demonstrate is that, since early European modernity, during the quarrel between mechanism and organism, organism was simply the projection of an ideal state, and it was only in Hegel that such an organism is developed logically and distinguished from an unanalytic concept based on animal organisms. In chapter 3, we turned both with and against Hegel; we looked into bioeconomy, cybernetics, and noosphere for the traces of Hegelian reflective logic in order to speculate on a post-Hegelian imagination of a planetary organism and its limit.

By pushing the Hegelian problem to the extreme to search for a solution, at this extreme, we also precisely encountered the Schmittean problem. Schmitt relentlessly attacked the vision of the “unity of the world” or the “unity of the East and West” by showing the imperialist hypocrisy that lays behind it. We identified Schmitt’s deliberate endeavor to separate himself from the antagonism between organism and mechanism and establish a political vitalism that is characterized by the decision on exceptions. This political vitalism at the same time seeks another political form that is more adequate than the nation-state in view of the new technological condition. Schmitt thus proposed Großraum as a political form that would succeed the nation-state, one that is inspired by the element of air, after land and sea. In chapter 6, we turned against Schmitt’s political vitalism through a close reading of Bergson’s speech on war and his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. We distinguish two Bergsons: the vitalist who opposes vitalism and mechanism, and the organologist who gives a new vocation to mechanism.

Political epistemology corresponds to a fundamental operating principle of the megamachine. With the development of cybernetics in the 1940s, the dream of a mechano-organism is ever closer to becoming a reality, and technological advancements now mean that one can do even more than what was originally imagined in the nineteenth century. In other words, with current technologies, one can postulate that it is possible to sublate the state and move toward a new political organization empowered by automation—considering that the number of active users of Facebook or Google is probably more than the population of any existing country and that they have been actively delegating the management to AI. Many governmental services that can be determined by facts (de facto) have already been automatized, ranging from the application for passports and ID cards to the payments of bills and juridical judgments. Automation could improve the efficiency of the government and eliminate the defects due to human error and malmanagement. We are witnessing something Simondon already observed in the 1950s—that machines are becoming organic. Contemporary digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are completing this epistemological paradigm, and the development of biotechnology and neurotechnology is also progressing toward a more and more intimate integration with biological organs. The completion of metaphysics is becoming more and more self-evident, while philosophy is still either falling prey to the opposition between organism and mechanism, thinking matter and mechanical matter, or naively leaning to the other side by equating machines and humans. As we have tried to show throughout the book, all these oppositions have ended since the second half of the twentieth century.

Fichte’s imagination of the police state is already actualized, and the organic state that Hegel deduced from his dialectical logic is becoming a technological reality. We sought to show that the state could be realized as a mechano-organism; this demonstrates Hegel’s prediction and illustrates how the exteriorization of reason has reached a new stage, where reason must reinvent itself in the face of contradiction. In other words: if reason continues to progress, it will have to go beyond the organic state, the Großraum and the identification of it with sheer rationalism now increasingly reduced to the calculation of machines. The automatic society we live in will only advance toward higher efficiency and faster speeds over time. People fear whether machines will replace them, wondering what human tasks will and cannot be replaced. However, this is not a productive way of thinking about the future of society, because to think in such a manner is to simply fulfill industry’s self-prophecy. Industry reproduces this myth of the machine constantly while at the same time fulfilling its prophecy by producing machines that imitate the way humans complete tasks. This industrial self-fulfilling prophecy not only produces the exhaustion of the imagination but also incites constant anxiety.

More than a century ago, when trains and automobiles were invented, people were shocked and frightened by the metallic monsters and their speed, but today most people are not discouraged from taking them simply because cars move faster than humans; instead, humans have become themselves faster through the use of such machines. Technology must become a stepping stone for humans to develop an ethical life in the sense of Hegel. Future planetary thinking has to start with an organological motif. For this purpose, we have to cultivate and ameliorate a culture of prosthesis and not a culture of replacement. A culture of replacement sees machines as competition for the human being and that the human will be gradually replaced by machines in all domains; a culture of prosthesis recognizes the organological value of machines and goes beyond the instrumentality of machines; that is to say, to go beyond both productivity and creativity in its calculative form. As Bergson proposed, the new vocation of machines will have to deviate from the materialization of the spirit and search for the spiritualization of matter.

This indicates that expecting the economy to be fully automated does not inevitably result in human emancipation. Marx responded to a similar question in his time by citing John Stuart Mill’s statement: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”1 On the contrary, it may intensify the process of proletarianization, and by that we mean the loss of knowledge of the workers. Today it is not limited to workers but also to the farmers. If we look at the countryside in the near future, which has been considered to be the resort of burned-out urban dwellers, we will be overwhelmed by the application of digital farming, which succeeded mechanized farming and precision farming. Automation pervades and will continue pervading every aspect of individual and collective life. There is no certainty that it will lead to happiness though, as it gives rise to many low-level and not-yet-automatable tasks, such as those in food delivery and car-hailing services, where troops of workers are commanded by algorithms. It is extremely likely that the majority will become mere consumers, as Hannah Arendt anticipated in The Human Condition. Arendt speculated that the artists might well be the last Homo faber, still making things after the event of mass automation.2 Today, applications such as Midjourney, TensorFlow, and ChatGPT have already made many artists question their own existence. We have yet to ask how, in an automatic society, reason might continue to progress without being stuck in calculation, or how machines, the essential part of reason, could facilitate the latter’s progress.

Maybe we should return to the concept of acceleration itself. Acceleration does not necessarily mean an increase in speed, since this would still be too linear a conception. Speed, as we know in physics, is a scalar quantity, which measures how fast an object moves; velocity, however, is a vector quantity, measuring the rate at which the object changes its position. A scalar quantity has mere magnitude, and a vector quantity has direction. Acceleration is also a vector quantity, defined as the rate at which an object changes its velocity (and not speed). Therefore, the acceleration produced by a car making a U-turn could have a much higher value than the linear increase in speed. The automation of society does not always provoke the greatest increase in acceleration, though it may cause significant increase in speed. However, a change of perspective in political economy and politics might do so by providing automation with a new purpose, in the sense of Bergson; it is also a way to change the nature of power instead of merely modifying its configuration. This is, however, not necessarily a call to degrow by reducing population, food production, and so on, but rather to redirect the progress of our civilization. Therefore, reason is not that which is waiting to be replaced by automation technology but rather that which will be able to make such a significant turn toward rationalization of the machine beyond rationality.3 This consists of the fundamental question of spirit: since the spirit is neither virtual nor symbolic, the spirit is always at the same time within and beyond any form of externalization.

§33. Universality Seen from the Perspective of Technodiversity

Our habit of viewing technology as an abstract entity and as a metaphysical force fails to grasp the concrete role it plays; conversely, when we see it as just a concrete object, we also fail to grasp the fundamental role that it plays in politics (beyond, that is, sociological studies of phenomena such as the use of Facebook or Airbnb). The concept of technodiversity that was raised in the previous chapter consists of two dimensions. The first dimension is cultural (or culturally constrained ontological, epistemological, and cosmological knowledge). As we tried to show, we can find different technological thinking in different cultures, which is not exclusively techno-logos. This is not to say that technologies guided by this thought have nothing to do with mechanical causality. For sure, all machines have to follow the laws of physics in order to set themselves into motion. Still, we also have to recognize that technology is not defined only by its working principles but also by its place of use, its way of use, and its maintenance and improvement, to name a few. The working principles or the techno-logos understood in a strict sense as logic must be resituated in a broader reality and in a genesis of which it takes part.

This might be one of the great contributions of Simondon: by exposing the limits of a Marxist economic analysis of technical objects, he insisted that a technical object should be considered as that which possesses a life, entailed by its birth, maintenance, prolongment of life, and evolution (however, this doesn’t mean that a technical object is a living being). The problem of alienation stems from the fact that the life of technical objects is not prolonged because workers do not comprehend the operating principles of these machines—the automatic machine presents itself as an abstract being to them, consisting of mere inputs and outputs. Therefore, they are unable to maintain and hence prolong the life of technical objects.4 We see here the fundamental question of technical knowledge, that is to say, proletarianization is primarily a deprivation of knowledge: it renders the workers’ knowledge useless and reduces them to laborers who merely handle inputs and outputs without being able to engage with the machines on other levels—a phenomenon that has been well documented and described by nineteenth-century writers such as Marx and William Morris. Technical knowledge became the monopoly of technicians, and the state is handed over to technocracy. This does not mean that workers do not or could not develop an intimate relationship with the machines they use, but, as Simondon argues, they only understand the machine from the perspective of its technical elements but not as a technical individual and beyond.

In the 1920s, during his sojourn in Positano, the economist and philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel observed a rather astonishing phenomenon: every technical apparatus in Naples failed. His observation was published in a 1926 newspaper article titled “Das Ideal des Kaputten. Über neapolitanische Technik” (The ideal of the broken down: On the Neapolitan approach to things technical).5 Sohn-Rethel described a rather anti-intuitive phenomenon in Naples: technical objects only work when broken down. This phenomenon did not paralyze the Neapolitans. However, instead of being able to repair or maintain machines, and transform their internal structure and operation, they invented some nontechnical solutions to making machines work in one way or another, as in Sohn-Rethel’s description of a Neapolitan igniting the engine of a car: “In a display of matchless mastery, he succeeds in restarting his broken-down car by, in some impossible manner, attaching a small piece of wood which just happened to be lying in the street—only, that is, until it soon, and this much is certain, once again breaks down.”6

This form of knowledge that Sohn-Rethel describes is different from the technical knowledge of engineers and technicians.7 A machine cannot be reduced, in a strict sense, to techno-logos; a machine is not only the result of a set of prefigured causal relations between materials. Following Simondon, we would like to understand a technical object by situating it in a reality beyond techno-logos. As is often the case, this reality could be social, economic, and political, but it could be broader, namely, moral and cosmological—it is in this sense that Simondon was able to talk about the co-naturality between technical objects and their milieux and I develop into what I call cosmotechnics. A philosophical intuition—and there he explicitly refers to Bergson—is central to the search for co-naturality because it first allows a nonlogical schematic understanding of beings, for example, how he distinguishes what he calls the minority (childhood) from the majority (adulthood). Adults learn technologies through abstract logical schemas, as how engineering is taught in university textbooks today, while children learn technologies through intuition and embodiment. Today, many children are capable of using an iPhone or an iPad without any pregiven instructions. They interact with the device like running into an old friend—immediate strangeness is soon overcome after exchanging a few gestures. However, what is at stake is more than just designing better human-computer interfaces. Instead, it is about another way of understanding technology. Moreover, intuition provides access to the genesis of technicity: it allows us to understand the relation between technological thinking and other forms of thinking, such as religious, aesthetic, and philosophical.

In Simondon’s speculative genesis of technicity, we see how science and religion were born after the bifurcation of the original magic unity. As mentioned in chapter 6, Simondon’s theory of bifurcation retains the traces of Bergson’s analysis of the laws of the dichotomy of tendencies. In the magic unity, there is yet to emerge any distinction between subject and object, but ground and figure (terms he borrows from Gestalt psychology) are already distinguished though not separated (i.e., the figure is the figure of the ground and the ground, the ground of the figure).8 The bifurcation into technics and religion means the separation of the figure from the ground. In this separation, technics carries the figure characters (below unity), and religion carries the ground character (above unity). Technics and religion will then each bifurcate into a theoretical and a practical part, while all bifurcations also call for a unity of the ground and figure. Aesthetic thinking, and later philosophical thinking, was born as a unifying force for ground and figure. Technological thinking is seen within the constellation of other forms of thinking and always in interaction with them; however, technological thinking tends to dominate since it is the most materialist thinking among all, and materiality, in comparison with thinking, has a much stronger immediate agency in the world, which means that it can effectively undermine other forms of thinking. Therefore, to resituate technology in a broader reality is precisely to reverse this tendency and make other forms of thinking explicit so that they can intervene and shape technology. Simondon’s philosophical and anthropological analysis of the genesis of technicity is based on the separation and unification between ground and figure. It stands analogically to the genesis of sacrality formulated by Mircea Eliade. The return to a unity, akin to that of the magic unity, was a response to Eliade’s thesis on the disappearance of sacrality in the modern age.9 In this sense, Simondon’s work could be read as an elaboration of Bergson’s thesis on mechanism and mysticism discussed in chapter 6, a discussion that we extend here.

Social and political thought was also born at some point in the genesis, and like religion, it carries the background character. However, social and political thought’s moment of birth remains obscure in the genesis outlined by Simondon; moreover, Simondon refuses to elaborate on it, stating that “this study does not propose to deal with the problem of establishing continuity between the religious and social and political forms of thought.”10 Nevertheless, we can understand the religious character of social and political thought, aiming to reconcile the ruptures caused by technological and economic development. Ground and figure are always waiting to be symbolically unified; however, when the figure becomes the ground, we see a perversion where evil emerges. Perhaps the greenhouse example Simondon also uses will help us understand this better. A greenhouse plant always grows apart from the ground since it is fully dependent on the greenhouse’s environment; as Simondon writes, “The artificialized plant can only exist in a laboratory for plants, the greenhouse, with its complex system of thermal and hydraulic regulations.”11 Now paradoxically, we can also say that the plant becomes independent from the environment. The plant with the greenhouse is portable, no matter whether it is in India or Germany. The greenhouse is the figure; in this setting, the original ground, the combination of soul, climate, and relations to other organisms, such as birds and worms, is lost. When the ground is lost, the plant “can no longer reproduce except through procedures such as grafting, requiring human intervention.”12 The co-naturality between the technical object and its milieu is like that between the figure and the ground; the ground is its place, the cosmo-geographical specificity. This is why the question of technodiversity can be partially grasped from the perspective of locality and not identity.

Given that we would like to understand the planetary from the perspective of technodiversity, how can we resolve the question concerning unity? Unity is understood in two dimensions: the unity of the spirit, or the Weltgeist, and the unity of technologies, how they communicate without being reduced to certain closed and incompatible standards. Here we must avoid a superficial misunderstanding of technodiversity, namely, technodiversity means something like the difference between electrical sockets that are without standards across countries, or the suggestion that, one day, China might invent a superchip with Chinese, non-Western logic. We will address the first dimension here and the second dimension later in the section dedicated to the anatomy of technical objects. The Weltgeist, as a synonym of reason, if it exists, does not necessarily mean a unification in the sense of homogenization, and this is precisely the ambiguity in Hegel’s thought insofar as a concept such as the concrete universal is concerned. If the universal is supposed to mean something vernünftig, then it should allow differences to emerge and flourish. Reason has to be expanded in situations of incompatibility, as demonstrated by Kant in the confrontation between theoretical reason and practical reason concerning the existence of God (and the immortal soul). Theoretical reason cannot recognize the existence of God as it is not a phenomenon, while practical reason must postulate the existence of God, without which the highest good is not thinkable.

The universal is a dimension of existence such as the particular, the individual, or the singular. Every one of us is singular; for example, we differ from each other in terms of talents, family background, and temperaments. This, however, does not mean that we cannot talk about the universal. The universal is not the common feature of all the individuals that one can induce empirically—for example, all individual human beings have eyes and noses—because this is only universal in its mechanical sense. Universal is what we do not have but ought to have—it is an object of desire. In other words, the universal is rational because it presupposes differences; and as far as it is desirable, it does not exist in the form of reduction but projection. We might want to recall here a passage from the historian Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of the European Mind 1680–1715, where Hazard describes a group of French missionaries sent to Siam in 1685. The missionaries were trying to exhort the king of Siam to become a convert to Christianity, and the king’s answer completely blew them away:

Had it been the will of Divine Providence that a single religion should prevail in the world, nothing could have been easier for Divine Providence than to execute its design. Inasmuch, however, as it had pleased the Almighty to suffer a host of dissimilar religions to flourish simultaneously, it was obvious that he preferred to be glorified by a prodigious number of his creatures, each worshipping him in his own way.13

What astonished the missionaries was that the universal, thus understood as homogenous—everyone has to be converted to Christianity—is too simple, and this could not have been the idea of God. God would not prefer the world to be simple and homogenous. The universal is neither European nor Chinese but rather the possibility of coexistence without contradiction. However, without contradiction does not mean without differences or conflicts; reason is precisely called to act by the seemingly contradictory situations, such as antinomy or aporia. Coexistence without contradiction is fundamental for planetary morality, which is simultaneously logical and axiological. Considering that, for Kant, the universal cannot be found in any specific deed or specific object but rather as a maxim without contradiction, Kant was acutely aware of this. Thus in Kant we find a universal that functions mechanically by imposing the universal onto the particulars; at the same time, we also find another universal, which is not given a priori and cannot be known in the discursive mode of truth, but only in the mode of “as if.”14 Therefore, the opposition between the universal and the particular or the universal and the relative risks being too simple to be true. We know that this was an important issue during the Enlightenment, after what Hazard called the “crisis of the European mind,” and that it has been debated by everyone from Voltaire to Frederick the Great. However, tolerance becomes problematic when exceptions break certain legal and social norms. If we follow Esposito, this constitutes an immunological phenomenon. Because if the community can absorb the disturbance (i.e., the exception) to prevent a larger and more serious interruption, similar to how immunity to disease is generated when the body is attacked by antigens present in vaccines, then tolerance itself may be a proper immunological response. However, it is also possible that such a disturbance constitutes a strong dose of poison or can trigger organ failure, as Covid-19 vaccines sometimes do. Tolerance is not a language of coexistence; it is that which is exploited or will explode when pushed toward an extreme. Nonetheless, this does not prevent us from seeing differences as fundamental to the universal or the current philosophical task as the search for a logic of coexistence that breaks away from the techno-economic competition. This was fundamental to Cacciari’s questioning. The consequential problem that Cacciari had to address is that if Europe is to restructure itself beyond the nation-state, how could it maintain its relation to the non-European lands without becoming completely vulnerable?

If the techno-economic game has dominated the terrain of politics, then it is very unlikely that any state will withdraw, since doing so will render itself vulnerable. If so, are we not in a vicious circle where either no one can ever quit, or everyone has to quit simultaneously? What kind of power can one aspire to? It has to be something beyond all values crucial to the military and economic competition that maintains the current humancentric world and its sets of polar conflicts.15 In this sense, we can understand Derrida’s unconditional and Cacciari’s unreachable not as an irrational force but as a different way of rationalization, one in which the incalculable is presupposed and becomes the point of orientation. However, reintroducing the incalculable in the age of calculability is like reintroducing God to atheists. That is also the reason why we had to explore different understandings of technology and resituate technology within a broader reality.

Technodiversity aims at reflecting on such a possibility, as well as radicalizing the concept of difference or heterogeneity, which, at present, only bears a market value, and encouraging the renewal of the relations between human beings and technologies as well as our living milieux. Therefore, we need not a unification that effaces differences but rather a unification based on fragmentation; however, it is important to note that fragmentation does not mean decoupling or disconnecting, as it has now come to mean in the mass media, especially regarding international relations. On the contrary, fragmentation means developing new rules or new games to exit the impasse of the old game. Here we can refer to the concept of the fragment among the Jena Romantics. Each fragment is an individual that recursively produces a small system and joins with other fragments to create an organic whole. The system is not a closed system since, unlike the dialectical method, fragments join each other through resonances but not through borders or doors. The fragment constitutes a literary genre of the early Romantics, like Novalis and the Schlegels; it is not an idea opposed to an organic totality, but organicity is made possible through fragments. Rudolph Gaché, in his foreword to the English translation of Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophical Fragments, gives us a synthesis:

If fragmentation is thus the specifically Romantic thought of the system, it is . . . a self-jointure of what makes up a whole. In contradistinction from the Idealist position strictly speaking—Hegel, for instance—according to which the system consists of an ordering totally transparent to itself, the early Romantics think the system through fragmentation, that is, as presenting itself, not in a pure medium of thought and in absolute figureless, but as always an individuality, and hence, in principle, multiple.16

Gaché’s words capture the similarities and differences between the organic totality that dialectics search for and the unity that fragments want to achieve. Therefore, we see that fragments do not necessarily mean the destruction of unity or segregation but rather that they provide another way to search for unity, another way to understand the commons that will be fundamental to future communities. If we are able to understand that technology means primarily a form of life, and if alternative forms of life are more desirable than the current consumerism, then it seems that fragmentation in the form of technodiversity might reopen different forms of life. This is why, with China as a primary example, we suggest rediscovering multiple cosmotechnics and reflecting on their implications in the technological imagination and development. In The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics and Art and Cosmotechnics we tried to show the varieties of experience of technology and art by using China as an example, that one could reconstruct a technological thought in China through a reading of the two fundamental categories Dao and Qi (utensil). China is a resource for rethinking the relationship between locality and technology, such as Greece, Japan, Germany, and Brazil. The universality of technology has to be fundamentally questioned from the perspective of technodiversity. We did not intend to claim that a particular Chinese thought could or should succeed European philosophy to rescue the planet; this is anything but philosophical argument. Philosophical thought derives its strength by responding to a particular problem of its epoch, and another will necessarily succeed it in a different time. The reconstruction of a Chinese or Japanese thought of technology does not pretend to claim that ancient philosophy is adequate to address contemporary issues; rather, it signifies a reinvention of philosophy in light of the planetary technological condition. This is the contribution of non-European thought, not in any form of the ready-made or mystification, but as individuation qua reinvention of thinking.

If reason progresses throughout the course of world history, then it must not progress into an endpoint qua a dead end, where it will become unreason. This is why the eschatological thinking of our time should be challenged, not just because it is a particular temporal concept but also because it dominates the imagination of technological development: a technological apocalypse awaits us in the near future. When reason marches planetarily, it must allow and facilitate a diversity to manifest as the universal and simultaneously sublate the contradictions without imposing domination, namely, to turn a particularity into a universality. The universalization of diversity should be strictly distinguished from the universalization of homogeneity, for the latter does not mean becoming negentropic; on the contrary, it could mean becoming highly entropic, in the sense that it disrupts the whole milieu. For example, if a pesticide is used universally without respect for the specifics of the ecosystem, the devastating result could be far more costly than the problem it was intended to cure. The universalization of pesticides is a counterexample of technodiversity, albeit a simplistic one as it doesn’t encompass the spiritual dimension.

§34. Sovereignty Seen from the Perspective of Technodiversity

Where could we identify sovereignty in this fragmented world? Will it wither away, or will it take a different form? Throughout this work, we have emphasized that sovereignty is that which dwells in the megamachine and that which attempts to take control of it from within. When the sovereign loses control of the megamachine, there is no longer sovereignty—this is the lesson Schmitt derived from his reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan. The megamachine evolves, and sovereignty has to renew itself in order to catch up with new types of machinery. The sovereign is always in tension with the megamachine while, at the same time, it cannot do without the megamachine. A third party that tries to unify all the nation-states without paying attention to the nation-states’ specific relation to their own megamachines will also fail to understand the dynamics of these states. Therefore, it can only try to mitigate the tensions through negotiation and administration; however, it does not eliminate the problem. The competition of the megamachines becomes increasingly synchronized in the process of planetarization so that a country can only show the power of its sovereignty through technological means, directly reflected in military power, and indirectly through the implication of techno-science in the economy. In this sense, we live in the epoch of the planetary enframing in the sense of Heidegger.

Today the relationship between sovereignty and the megamachine is in full tension, and indeed, a gap seems to be enlarging further and further. Because the megamachine cannot be tamed by the legal, social, and political system, the decisionist approach is intuitively adopted to allow the sovereignty to attain its highest power by suspending laws that used to maintain the functioning of the megamachine. While the megamachine is growing planetarily, sovereignty is losing its power to intervene in the operation of the megamachine. In this case, a state of exception is likely to be declared. Cryptocurrency could be a good example here when we see that its extrastatic property—in the sense that it does not fall completely within the legal system of a particular state—tends to subvert the existing financial system under the control of the state. Extrastatic entities have increased significantly in the past decade mostly because of the rapid development of digital technological systems, which is moving faster than that of the human system. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that the manifestation of sovereignty as that which decides on exception is becoming more and more normalized today. In other words, it is not only that the state becomes more and more abusive with power, but also because it is no longer in control of the planetary situation, and in order to maintain its internal stability, it has to frequently suspend laws or establish new laws in order to restore the stability of the society; this endows itself with more and more power to intervene into the everyday life of citizens. The second approach could be achieved by using surveillance technologies in all aspects of every life so that no accidents will be allowed, or all accidents could be normalized.

We are not attempting to defend the state, but rather we want to illustrate the idea according to which the tensions between the sovereign power and the megamachine constitute the drive of its individuation. Technological competition, together with its economic implication, will continue enlarging the megamachine and its organs. At the same time, state sovereignty will struggle to increase its power through surveillance technologies and declaring states of exception. As a result, we might observe two extreme situations: first, the state will become increasingly vulnerable to social media, as already observed in some presidential elections, and it will continue to become so, while liberals will continue to speak about the freedom of speech and at the same time contradictorily attempt to limit technological innovation; second, the state will dominate the innovation of technology, which also means that innovation will be largely limited. The first extreme case today is likely found in the so-called liberal states, and the second extreme case is in the so-called authoritarian states. In other words, neither liberalism nor authoritarianism can answer today’s technological question.

Therefore, the immunological analysis of Esposito and, to some extent, that of Giorgio Agamben is witness to the disjunction between the state and the megamachine, even though the root of this disjunction for them was never formulated as a technological question but rather analyzed as a philological problem by tracing the history of political concepts in European thought. This is also the limit of the immunological analysis, even though Esposito is aware of the challenge of technological globalization, and his philological work is more than plausible. The limit is not so much due to the immunological analysis since the logical operations such as self–other, inclusive–exclusion (or exclusive–inclusion) are still effective today. Instead, the limit comes from the fact that the megamachine has been largely undermined in the immunological analysis—it only appears at the end of Esposito’s genealogy. Legislation was once an effective approach to regulating the development of the machine by defining its range of use. However, globalization has intensified the possibility of autoimmune attacks, so the attack against the other could easily become an attack against oneself. During the preceding unilateral globalization, it was still possible to distinguish between self and other, friend and foe. After the Covid-19 pandemic and especially since the Sino-American conflict, the return to state sovereignty as the affirmation of a multipolar world—hence why Emmanuel Macron after his visit to China in 2023 declared that “Strategic autonomy should be the combat of Europe”17—does not resolve the immunological problem, but only affirms it. This return risks being a demonstration of the Schmittian discourse and the failure to avoid the same destiny, but more fundamentally, the question of technology is reduced again to an economic one.

We demonstrated in chapter 6, via our reading of Bergson, that this immunological problem is precisely an organological one. Today’s hubris, produced by an organological expansion far beyond Bergson’s imagination, cannot be resolved by adding new laws or producing more surveillance machines. On the one hand, we see how the spatial revolution (in the sense of Carl Schmitt) has imposed a new challenge to the international order and its legal framework; on the other hand, we are not dealing with one or two technologies but rather a new industrial revolution based on artificial intelligence. AI is the new industrial revolution’s equivalent to the steam engine and electrical power. In the same way that the steam engine constituted a mastery over the thermodynamic process, AI constitutes mastery over the information process. Here we will have to understand information in two senses: first, in-formation, that which implies the autopoietic process of the system (in the sense of Varela, as seen in chapter 3), which we call self-organization or unsupervised learning; second, in-formation, that which gives form to things, and we should probably add that not only forms but also that which gives commands and permissions. The nomos of the Earth will cease to be of human affairs; it will be determined more and more by the power of machines—as we have been trying to point out through our reading of Schmitt’s elementary philosophy. The evolution of AI is driven by data and the increasing computational power of microchips (there are, of course, many other factors behind the evolution of AI since a planetary network of technologies virtually sustains it); in other words, whoever has more structured data is likely to develop a stronger AI in the long run, because empiricism and pattern recognition are still the basic principles of the “intelligence” in question, which has already unleashed a tremendous amount of power.

Currently, ethicists are worried that the race toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) will become destructive because there is not enough time to enact new regulations, and artificial intelligence’s strong competitiveness will unleash evil. The technologists are the modern equivalent to Epimetheus, those who will finally open Pandora’s box. When the box is opened, we may imagine that if legislation cannot totally limit the development and use of AI, a state of emergency would most likely be declared to suspend certain access to technologies or the operation of certain technical systems. Should we then open Pandora’s box? If Epimetheus knew what would happen upon opening the box, would he still have opened it? However, could we then still pose this question? Massimo Cacciari suggests that the age of Prometheus came to pass, and it is now succeeded by the age of Epimetheus. Cacciari goes back to the meaning of Prometheus as foresight and Epimetheus as hindsight and identifies Prometheus with the Christian katechon, which is not reduced to technē but rather understood as sophia.18 The age of Epimetheus marks the dissolution of political wisdom and the reduction of the world to a system, where all conflicts could be reduced to calculation.19 Thus Cacciari announces that “Prometheus has withdrawn—or has once again been crucified on his rock, and Epimetheus is at large and in our world opening ever newer Pandora’s boxes.”20 By this he means that the age of Epimetheus will be the age of insecurity and permanent crisis, in contrast to great wars and revolutions that belonged to the age of the Christian katechon.

Cacciari’s analysis of the Christian katechon, however, ends in a despair, a position that is shared by many others who identify technology with calculation. It is also on this point that we could recognize the value of Cacciari’s analysis and at the same time the weakness of it due to a conventional interpretation of technology. One thing is clear, Epimetheus has no other option but to open Pandora’s box, since it is a gift. Bergson recognized this “natural gift” clearly when he commented on what was to be machines’ new vocation. The decision is not to reject mechanism outright but rather to recognize mechanism itself as a gift, with the responsibility of incorporating it into an opposing tendency: Elpis in Pandora’s box.21 What is urgently demanded is a social-political thought capable of interrupting the stereotype of technology and formulating a political economy of the spirit that incorporates such a countertendency. It is not our intention to reconstruct a political theology by identifying this countertendency with Cacciari’s definition of the katechon—in this sense the project of Cacciari remains a political theology, and we could understand both of them as an epoch-making power. However, this social-political thought can only arrive from a thorough analysis of the genesis of technicity—and this is precisely the unfinished project of Simondon.

Indeed, the purpose of the current work has been to analyze the megamachine from the perspectives of political epistemology.22 And it is through this analysis that we would like to outline a political thought that addresses the impasse we are currently confronting. We must conceive a new interpretation of sovereignty along this line of inquiry. But, given that many authors have declared the end of sovereignty, stating that sovereignty is a mere fiction, should we still keep the concept of sovereignty? In chapter 5, following Derrida, we considered sovereignty as an unconditional power, and this is the pharmacological nature of sovereignty: it could impose a totalizing tendency, and it could equally use this power to shield off from external influences such as imperialism. For example, today the European political leaders, in the wake of the Sino-American conflict, want to return to state sovereignty and autonomy. However, our reading will inevitably impose a new task on sovereignty if we want to preserve it—a question that we raised at the end of chapter 5. This new task will require sovereignty to open a new epistemological condition that transforms the megamachine and radically renews its relation to it. We have been trying to address this with the cosmopolitical question through the lens of technodiversity and cosmotechnics.

§35. Technodiversity Analyzed via an Anatomy of Technical Objects

The description of technodiversity that we introduced in the previous chapters might reveal its limits since it could be deliberately reduced to ethos, which is often associated with a people; as a result, it risks reverting to localism or nationalism that, in turn, leads to mutual isolation. By defending itself based on cultural specificity and historicity, in the name of antiuniversalism, localism often undermines reason and develops into unreason, which is itself unhistorical. It is unhistorical because it claims culture to be static and permanent and thus refuses to act in accordance with the progress of reason. It produces a misunderstanding or even hatred toward locality because it confuses locality with a closed and exclusive localism; indeed, what we mean by locality has nothing to do with localism. The cultural dimension of technodiversity provides a source for us to reflect on the contingency of modern technologies and on ways of resituating them into a locality. To distinguish locality from localism, we will need another element, which I proposed in Art and Cosmotechnics as the individuation of thinking.23 The philosophical task today is not to replicate Heidegger’s inquiry into “what is called thinking” but to explore “what is individuation of thinking.” It is also where non-European philosophy could contribute. The individuation of thinking is pivotal to the vitality of locality, because it challenges both essentialism and arbitrariness. We define individuation in the Simondonian sense, emphasizing incompatibility rather than hybridity. We recall here that individuation only occurs when an incompatibility emerges and attains a threshold in a saturated system. These incompatibilities will be resolved in individuation, and a new structure will take shape once the system reaches metastability. The process of individuation presupposes incompatibility, and therefore difference and antagonism.

We would like to distinguish between individuation and cross-breeding or métissage as Édouard Glissant attempts to do with what he calls creolization. Creolization normally means that elements of different cultures are blended to create a new culture, but for Glissant, it means something more. Creolization is like a rhizome that creates multiple roots. For him, creolization is a diversification, “one of the poetic dreams of the expanding West,” but at the same time, an “antidote to the universal empire that this expansion subsumed.”24 This diversification through language, literature, and technology is essential for our imagination of a world to come; as Glissant asks, “How is it possible to come out of seclusion if only two or three languages continue to monopolise the irrefutable powers of technology and their manipulation, which are imposed as the sole path to salvation and energised by their actual effects?”25 For example, during the colonization of Hong Kong, the locals invented a drink called yuenyeung (literally, “mandarin duck”), which is a mixture of milk tea (a strong black tea with condensed milk) and coffee. This might stand as an example of métissage, which might well become important for one’s everyday life once developed into a habit, but it does not take thinking further; it is simply a mixture of coffee and tea. On the contrary, thinking is not a patchwork; it actualizes itself not through collage but by individuating itself. It is not certain that creolization is entirely equivalent to what we call the individuation of thinking. However, they can both be seen as efforts to think through the difference between simply mixing and diversifying. If creolization is to be understood as a historical process, then perhaps the individuation of thinking could be understood as an analytic model, offering hints concerning future diversification strategies.

In contrast to localism, which is associated with statism and nationalism, we may really only speak of a locality when said locality is capable of transformation. Such a transformation is not motivated by a search for a permanent identity but by individuation. We can see that when the development of a locality is only in the hands of a few patriots and nationalists, then that locality is already doomed. The individuation of thinking does not only take place in the mind of an intellectual; it may occur through intellectual exchange but may also, perhaps more importantly, be realized in the invention and use of technology—this is also the moment when technology becomes philosophical and philosophy becomes technological.

Besides reflecting on the role and meaning of technology in different cultural contexts and thoughts, we have to return to the technical objects themselves to understand their operations and structures anatomically. This anatomical study should extend beyond the understanding of technical objects as a materialized causal complex (what Simondon calls concretization). Following Simondon, we could call this approach mechanology. We should emphasize that Simondon’s understanding of technology tends to be universal, that it is limited by Western tradition and anthropological imagination.26 Simondon’s is an attempt to reflect on the contemporaneity of technology from the perspective of a very generalized notion of “culture.” While the term culture appears often in Simondon’s work and he distinguishes culture (in a narrow sense, meaning upper culture) from Culture (in a general sense),27 his examples predominantly originate from European contexts. This generalized notion of culture is modern since all cultures converge toward the modern industrial culture. According to Simondon, mechanology is the discipline capable of taking technology seriously, not only in understanding the development and evolution of technical objects but also in integrating technology into culture. What he means by the integration of technology into culture is related to the fact that culture has so far only represented technology or technical objects as alien to humanity; for example, we can find in popular literature the depiction of robot revolts and technological apocalypses. Culture (in its narrow sense) is, therefore, not able to do justice to technology and consequently fails to understand the significance of it and its impact. The development of cybernetics for Simondon opens an epoch for a new encyclopedism that might finally make the integration of technology into culture possible. This is also why in the previous section, we called for a prosthetic culture; it is because culture still does not see technical objects as prostheses but only as replacements or as commodities, a problem frequently observed within Marxist analyses. A mechanologist is not an engineer but more a philosophical engineer or an artist who is able to analyze technical objects both technically and philosophically.

Mechanology is a term that Simondon proposed in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, but it is yet to be systematically developed. We should carry his task further in order to formulate a systematic methodology for the study of contemporary technical objects. This task will involve an “anatomy” of technical objects, and in so doing, we will have to show how such an anatomy will open a new field of investigations and actions for us. The task, reminiscent of Simondon’s endeavors, warrants multiple monographs; here we will focus on three layers (from an engineering perspective, we can speak about different levels of abstraction). The first layer is hardware, namely, the material support of technical objects; the second is software, which drives the hardware to execute certain commands; and the third is usage. We should note that this division only became possible in the twentieth century when software and hardware were developed separately. This would not have been possible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when software and hardware could not be completely separated. In the twenty-first century, with the development of cloud computing, the separation between hardware and software from the user’s perspective is completed. This dualism (software versus hardware) is a true demonstration of the false philosophical assumption of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The third layer concerns the use of technical objects at different scales, from the individual to the regional and global application of technical objects. The present problem, however, is that technology has been abstractly thought of as an entity that is simultaneously necessary and universal. Therefore, the space of imagination concerning technical objects is reduced to the constant attempt to catch up with the so-called most advanced technologies. We will have to look into each layer from new perspectives.

First, the potential of separating software and hardware has to be taken as a new possibility. The separation between software and hardware liberated a more speculative form of knowledge from the logical and material constraints of hardware. This epistemological realization in machines may be difficult for many to accept since it appears to be an affirmation of a certain classical dualism; yet, this distinction in machines between hardware and software opens a new approach that is profoundly different from a knowledge of cognition modelled on the human. The human is one whose body and soul cannot be separated; however, the separation between soul and body is precisely the feature of the machine. To be more precise, this does not mean that software can function without hardware, but rather that the software could run on any hardware of the same model or those compatible. Even Simondon did not notice this radical change in his analysis of technical objects, since, for him, living in the time of electronic components such as the diode, triode, and transistors, the individualization of technical objects was still very much limited to hardware, while a modern portable, pocket-sized computer only belonged to fictional scenarios.

Second, the use of technical objects has been dominated by the economic rationality of profit making; in other words, the participation of technical objects is more concerned with economic activities than technical activities. For example, the duration between launches of new products within the same series has shortened, with the new products showing minimal or insignificant technical progress. In this sense, the development of technical objects is conditioned by economic considerations, and it often sacrifices the technological possibilities in favor of some decorative functions. The economic reason that dominates the development of technology in the name of innovation blinds people from understanding the potential of technology in liberating human beings from social and political constraints, which were often unwisely and unreasonably imposed from without. This argument conflicts with historical materialism because the latter implies technological determinism by amplifying the relation between technology and economic activities. The reduction of the technological to the economical obscures the complexity of the structure and operation of technical objects.

For sure, each of these layers carries its own significance. However, it appears that the second layer is increasing in importance because it is only recently that a complete separation of software and hardware has become achievable (we stress and confine the debate to technology without extending to that between the body and the mind). We will, therefore, focus on this layer in the following section and discuss the other layers in the later part of this chapter. Indeed, software opens a new form of participation, or we might say a new form of democracy. That is, software should not merely be understood as operation or execution; instead, we would like to push forward the claim that every software contains a set of assumptions. These assumptions are, at the same time, epistemological, ontological, and cosmological. We will use three examples to elaborate on this claim and suggest some entry points where interventions could be carried out.

First, let us consider Chinese medicine. In Chinese medicine, there are a set of ontological assumptions, for example, ch’i, yin, and yang, and these entities are not to be found in physical forms; they are instead adopted from cosmology, with the body considered a microcosmos. These ontological entities—ontological in the sense that it concerns what there is—greatly contrast with modern medicine, where ontological categories are proved either by demonstration or induction. Besides these ontological and cosmological assumptions, in Chinese medicine, we also find epistemological assumptions such as those that might assimilate to the modern notion of “holism,” that is, there is an emphasis on the harmony between the yin and the yang. In the above example, we could say that all these assumptions are grounded in a cosmological and noetic specificity. It is possible, as many researchers do today, to analyze the biochemical compositions of the herbs used in Chinese medicine and evaluate them by confirming if they match those used in Western medicine; however, this reductionism is a restricted scientism that destroys conceptual distinctions.

Second, epistemological assumptions are not only limited to cultural differences; sometimes, they stem from sociological stereotypes. Generally, we can question the assumptions in a contemporary application, such as a social network. A social network assumes different entities, such as an individual, a friend, a group, or a community; a social relation is a line between two dots, and a group is known as an assemblage of atoms. These assumptions are already present in the design process foreran by the social psychologist Jacob Moreno’s sociometry, and today they are applied in graph analysis by computer scientists.28 We can also extend the concept of the social network to that of the modern state, in which each individual is considered a social atom, and the society is a cluster of collective social atoms; the state is, therefore, that which organizes these atoms and groups of atoms. And it remains to be seen if these assumptions can be generally accepted or whether they are merely contingent or even problematic in the sense that they could be otherwise. From an anthropological point of view, there has been no society that started with a bunch of random individuals; instead, we see that the collective is always presupposed, be that a family or a tribe. The contemporary social network reflects the individualism of our society; however, it also amplifies this individualism to a greater extent than what Hegel observed in his time. Today, the state lacks the necessary capacity to counteract this individualism effectively. Over a decade ago, I worked with a group of computer scientists on a social network based on collectives rather than individuals, and this might serve as an example of how to carry out research on technodiversity. While all technologies claim to be universal, they are all predicated on certain epistemological, ontological, and cosmological assumptions. Unfortunately, the ability to question these assumptions is not fostered in engineering courses, at least not in present university curricula.

Third, this methodology could be extended to studying the most advanced technologies we are confronting today. Historian Slava Gerovitch did an excellent job showing that even though most AI scientists claim to have developed a universal human intelligence model, such models always incorporated different social, cultural, and political considerations. This difference was reflected in the distinctive paths of Soviet cybernetics and American cybernetics. For example, the Simon-Newell model assumes that “search” is the most fundamental intelligent activity. However, Soviet scientists rejected this approach by criticizing that the “search model” already assumed a given problem, whereas the point is to define a problem, something that was then developed as the Pospelov/Pushkin reflection (soobrazhenie) model. The same goes for the Von Neumann model, which is based on competition and the understanding of the rules of the game. In contrast, the Soviet Gelfand/Tsetlin Model emphasizes expedient, minimum interactions and fundamental uncertainty.29 Indeed, Gerovitch convincingly showed how these differences were shaped by their social, cultural, and political environment. He gave two metaphors to understand the difference between American AI and Soviet AI: American AI could be symbolized as a rat race in the labyrinth, and the Soviet AI as a bat hunting a moth in turbulence. Gerovitch’s historical work allows us to understand how a locality determines contemporary technology without being aware, since the researcher or inventor might simply regard it as universal. In other words, we require an epistemological reconstruction of major technological paradigms, such as cybernetics and artificial intelligence.30

This line of thinking has not been taken seriously enough, and the approach toward technodiversity has not been adequately analyzed; instead, capitalism in its abstract form often haunts the dream of any alternative since all alternatives risk either fading away into obscurity or being absorbed by capital itself. The truth is that the operation of capitalism is also based on a set of ontological, epistemological, and cosmological assumptions. Capitalism is neither an object nor a persona but rather a dominant system of knowledge that effectively mobilizes all forms of energy to obtain optimal and long-lasting profit. Such a system must evolve to overcome antiquated ontological, epistemological, and cosmological assumptions, such as how neoclassical economic theory was criticized due to its outdated epistemology based on Newtonian mechanics, as discussed in chapter 3. The separation of society into base and superstructure completely misses the epistemological question because it is still based on a mechanical model; disregarding its epistemological foundation could lead to conceptual mistakes. Instead, we suggest that resistance emerges from questioning and challenging these assumptions and the finality of the system. Even when one stands on the opposite side of capitalism to criticize every aspect of it, one might not be producing anything new, that is, other than changing some conditions to make it more “ethical” and “humanitarian”—for example, allowing a longer lunch break or improving operational equipment and the working environment. The overcoming of capitalism will not occur through the technological development of full automation; instead, it has to be done through an epistemological shift. One cannot also reduce machines to purely economic terms, such as fixed capital; it is precisely on this point that Simondon reproached Marx. Simondon did not formulate it as we do here. Still, he clearly showed how the epistemological paradigm brought about by cybernetics must be taken as a critical occasion to reconsider a new social, technological program, or a third encyclopedism, as he calls it. Therefore, accelerating toward full automation or not is a false response to capitalism because it does not necessarily produce an epistemological change. It is true that by accelerating something to an extreme, it may turn toward a different direction, but this is only possible when a strong vitality is already assumed in the system, such as in dialectics. Technodiversity should be thematized and consciously integrated into the thinking and making of technology instead of being only a subject of historical reflection. If we are going to imagine planetary politics, then a conscious take on the question of technodiversity will be necessary.

What we have done so far is to show, first, how the concept of universality and sovereignty could be reinterpreted from the perspective of technodiversity. Second, through the anatomy of technical objects, we have tried to reopen the question of technology that has thus far been methodologically closed both in the humanities and the engineering disciplines. Furthermore, since we can claim that there has been a technodiversity and that this technodiversity has been undermined in the process of modernization, then the question is not only how to preserve nonmodern technologies as if they are dead specimens to be displayed in a museum of technology, but also, and more importantly, how to reflect on the future of technodiversity through these traditions and beyond them. The question of the matrix between technodiversity, noodiversity, and biodiversity constitutes what I call epistemological diplomacy. It is also a framework we would like to advance for the future of planetary politics. This epistemological diplomacy also responds to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide, meaning the displacement and disappearance of local and indigenous knowledge due to modernization.31

§36. Technodiversity as Epistemological Diplomacy

Epistemicide leads to homogeneity, the entropic becoming of nonmodern society—the subject of an entropology à la Lévi-Strauss.32 Epistemological diplomacy diversifies and surpasses the limit of diplomacy based on economic and military negotiations. We want to emphasize that we are not opposing philosophy to technology. On the contrary, we are more tempted to say that the future of philosophy is technology, and the future of technology is philosophy. This is also the condition for developing a Tractatus Politico-Technologicus. If we follow Heidegger that Western philosophy is already completed by and in cybernetics, then to avoid the self-destruction of the human being in the age of the Gestell, Heidegger proposes to think what is called thinking, for he distinguishes thinking from philosophy. Thinking, in contrast to philosophy, is the other beginning of the Western civilization. The other beginning is the one that negates the tendency of mere calculation. But does this mean that one should abandon technology in favor of thinking? Certainly, if everyone decides to abandon technology simultaneously, then a negation of the tendency of mere calculation would be conceivable; however, even if this were to happen, it wouldn’t reduce the destructive potential of modern technology, nor would it bring reason to a new terrain. Technology should once again become philosophical (or vernünftig), in the sense that it will have to become reflective of itself, not only constructing reflective models to execute certain functions. This reflectivity of technology does not imply either the superbrain envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin, or the singularity envisioned by transhumanists, but rather an organology capable of producing differences. If we suggest technodiversity as a challenge that reason has to take up, it is because for us, fundamentally, the organic totality—which is the aim of the superbrain and the singularity—has to be fragmented into different orders and the spiritualization of matter has to take place by contesting the homogenization of digital technology that has been solely guided by speed and efficiency.

How can technodiversity be developed when all states compete on a homogeneous technological platform judged by speed, efficiency, and volume? The Großraum Schmitt aspired to realize did not take us much further than the nation-state promised in the eighteenth century. The multipolar world is no other than the redistribution of world power to the major geopolitical players; the nature of politics will remain the same as that of the nation-states if technodiversity is not considered. Beyond the rhetorical façade, the Großraum is nothing other than a military and economic program of the superstates that establishes military bases and economic centers beyond the sovereign territories and expands military influence through space exploration. Outer space is integrated into the Großraum as well as being a battlefield for future warfare.

Can philosophers still dream of perpetual peace, or is the pursuit of perpetual peace something that should no longer be aspired to? Maybe here we can return to Kant’s treatise, in which the philosopher confronts the inevitability of war and the desire for perpetual peace. Kant suggests free trade as a candidate to investigate the possibility of perpetual peace. Trade could be considered an extrastatic element here since it exceeds the state as an enclosure of people and natural resources. Trade is necessary to any society but produces something external to the state. We are aware that what was once external to the state through trade may be reabsorbed or reintegrated by the market, the “invisible hand,” or the cunning of reason, but, in Kant’s political thinking, trade also generates extrastatic ties and cosmopolitan rights. Trade builds a community between different parties, and those who want to abuse the system will be condemned by the whole network. The unity of the network and the reciprocity between different members will create an equilibrium. However, we know that Kant does not presuppose a preestablished harmony. Instead, Kant is more a Hobbesian in the sense that, for him, asocial sociality is what characterizes human existence. Nature desires discord, and no matter how much humans desire harmony and comfort, nature understands what is best for humans, inflicting them with conflicts.33 However, in Kant, we find a Rousseauist solution counters the Hobbesian presupposition, for the conflicts have to be balanced by an organic dynamism—international trade.34 Trade is that which can realize the unity of reason at the international level, as Kant expresses so beautifully:

The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.35

Kant emphasizes one and everywhere to express the part–whole relation in the organic system: every state has to behave correctly, otherwise they would acquire a negative reputation and be denied entry into other nations. Kant gave us the example of China and Japan and praised their wisdom: when confronted with Western colonizers, China resisted, while Japan only opened to the Dutch. Kant’s development of commerce or trade into a political program is consistent with his major philosophical projects laid down in the three Critiques. The systematic unity of reason could not be completed by mechanical rules alone, which linearly infer effects from causes; instead, the systematic unity can only rely on a purposiveness without purpose—namely, a purposiveness that cannot be reduced to empirical need. For example, when we ask about the purposiveness of vegetables, it cannot be reduced to providing food for humans or animals. As we mentioned in the previous chapters, in the “Architectonic of Pure Reason” of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s ambition was to articulate the systematic unity of reason by inquiring into the schematism of ideas as he had done with the schematism of concepts in the Analytic.36 For Kant, architectonics means the “art of systems,” and system, here, implies an organic relation between the parts and the whole:

By a system, however, I mean the unity of the manifold cognitions under an idea. This idea is reason’s concept of the form of a whole insofar as this concept determines a priori both the range of the manifold and the relative position that the parts have among one another. Hence reason’s scientific concept contains the whole’s purpose and the form of the whole congruent with this purpose.37

In other words, systematicity implies purposiveness, and purposiveness implies an organicity that cannot be reduced to a linear causality. “The Architectonic of Pure Reason” is an unsatisfactory attempt to search for unity between the theoretical-speculative use of reason (a metaphysics of nature) and the practical-moral use of reason (a metaphysics of morals), and the term purposiveness only analogically mediated such a unification. This is because the Critique of Pure Reason was largely a treatise on the apodictic use of reason, and the hypothetical use of reason only came to its centrality in the Critique of Practical Reason with its clarity determined in the Critique of Judgment. The difference between the apodictic and hypothetical use of reason lies in the fact that the former derives the particular from the given universal in the act of subsumption, while for the latter, the universal is only postulated, and it has to be recursively reflected through experience.38 In this sense, the hypothetical use of reason is often regarded as a precursor to reflective judgment.39 It is also why, for Kant, the third Critique is the bridge between the first and second Critiques. The third, as a bridge between the first two, means that the first two Critiques did not yet satisfactorily attain a systematic unity. Purposiveness is not only a structure but also an operation that constantly searches for the universal through reflection. It recursively negates empirical inclinations and immediate interests, exemplified in the aesthetic judgment of the beautiful as pleasure without interest and purposiveness without purpose. This purposiveness without purpose, when transformed into the language of international politics, is perpetual peace; this, however, also implies the impossibility of arriving at perpetual peace. The possibility to think about the end of morality and the end of nature demands two further assumptions. First is the existence of a higher intelligence, such as the divine being, that makes the a priori nature of purposiveness possible—an argument we find in metaphysics before Kant.40 Second, since the universal a priori is absent, the end remains hypothetical, and the searching heuristic and recursive, this searching could be infinite; therefore, the moral law has to postulate the existence of the immortal soul, as only such a duration is adequate.41 Despite its indefiniteness, we are interested in such a model of operation, one that allows us to grasp how the hypothetical use of reason (or reflective judgment) works and how it might contribute to both the moral end of the individual and the cosmopolitan end of the species.

In the Introduction, we attempted to establish a dialogue with Karatani’s The Structure of World History by showing that Karatani does not sufficiently discuss the question of unity, and therefore from this point of view, his project undermines the question of political epistemology, which is central to the current work. Karatani’s project attempts to renew Kant’s proposal for perpetual peace by speculating about a “world republic” or a federation of states. Karatani takes Kant’s speculative use of reason seriously. The world state, the hypothetical end, would be a renewal of the gift economy; at the same time, it sublates both capital and state. The world state would be something unrealizable while remaining desirable; even though we might never arrive at it, without such an idea of the world state, we would “lapse into schizophrenia.”42 The world republic is founded on universal religion, and in this sense, it must become a faith, one that permits us to build a plane of consistency:

Kant’s world republic is a regulative idea: it is an index toward which people should gradually attempt to draw close. It is of course only a semblance, but because it is something we cannot do without, it has the status of a transcendental illusion. . . . World republic would be a society in which mode of exchange D has been realized. In fact, this can never be fully realized. Nonetheless, it will persist as an index toward which we gradually move.43

The world republic remains a moral end, analogical to a natural end. As we know, the moral end has legitimacy in this natural end. It is also the reason why Karatani calls it a “cunning of nature,” paraphrasing Hegel’s “cunning of reason.” Here, we are tempted to deconstruct Karatani’s interpretation of Kant by showing that the cunning of nature does not exist, that in Kant there is no philosophy of history, and therefore, a structure of world history would not be possible. However, our aim is not to deconstruct Karatani and his Kantian inspiration. Karatani’s insight is that if there is a world republic in the future, it will be based on exchange. Therefore, one has to approach it from the exteriority of the state. This is, however, a blind spot to many European thinkers because they believe that once Europe changes, the whole world should change in good course. Karatani chose Jürgen Habermas as his straw man; however, there are far too many who think solely from the perspective of interiority. The key questions are: What is to be given as a gift, and how is it to be exchanged? Karatani gave us an imaginary scenario at the end of the book:

Suppose, for example, one country has a revolution that ends with the country making a gift of its military sovereignty to the United Nations. This would of course be a revolution in a single nation. But it wouldn’t necessarily result in external interference or international isolation. No weapon can resist the power of the gift. It has the power to attract the support of many states and to fundamentally change the structure of the United Nations. For these reasons, such a revolution in one country could in fact lead to simultaneous world revolution.

Karatani did not argue that this would necessarily occur; on the contrary, as a moral end, this may never transpire. Whether a country can truly relinquish sovereignty to the UN, which is ruled by a few superpowers, is one concern, but whether this might lead to a simultaneous global revolution is another. As we already saw in the introduction, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright in Climate Leviathan followed Karatani’s approach, sketching a quadratic scheme of climate international politics: Climate Leviathan, Climate Behemoth, Climate Mao, and Climate X. Climate X is analogical to the Mode of Exchange D in the sense that it is not yet realizable and probably will not be realized. Climate X is a refusal of sovereignty in general, as the authors write, “Must we have sovereignty? Is a nonsovereign entity impossible? Even if it is a utopian gesture, the answer must be no.”44 Both refusing sovereignty and giving sovereignty as gifts are direct refusals of the nation-state-capital, which would certainly open a new planetary situation. Unfortunately, the recent Covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical drift have further postponed such a possibility. Even though Karatani argued that the growth of India and China would not impose a new hegemony because capitalism would have ended by then,45 he seems to have ignored Carl Schmitt’s work on the Großraum and the epistemological foundation of reciprocity and community in Kant. This is not to discredit Karatani’s analysis. On the contrary, his insight on exchange should be taken further. And for this reason, we should return to Kant and his contemporaries.

International trade establishes relationships between different states that are not solely the property of any one state but rather form a whole and are governed by the whole. In this sense, trading is the assimilation of the regulative principle in which Kant sees the possibility of a balance of power based on reciprocity. Trading is, of course, not possible without the use of transportation tools—an essential part of the megamachine, and it was during Kant’s time that marine power became the dominant power in economic and military domains. Königsberg was an important port of the Baltic Sea, and Kant observed the importance of the economic value of trading and the knowledge it brought. However, all technologies that rely on dominant technologies, and trade is no exception, are pharmacological. Any technology that might appear as a remedy could quite as easily become toxic, and a new configuration of the various pharmaka has to be attempted in order to make use of the toxicity by turning it into something beneficial. Reason goes astray when trading is no longer guided by the purposiveness of cosmopolitan right and perpetual peace, but rather its end is reduced to the economic desire of colonialism and the desire to dominate others.

This extrastatic entity was later problematized by Fichte in his The Closed Commercial State (1800). Fichte’s treatise picked up what Hume called the “jealousy of trade” and showed that economic rivalry between the European states will not lead to perpetual peace but its opposite. In our contemporary language, we might say that trade is war by other means; as we read in the news almost every day, the trade war between the United States and China is exemplary of this fact. Trading does not necessarily imitate nature so as to become the guarantee of perpetual peace. Fichte cites the Dutch as a prime example, who uprooted spice plants and dumped spices overboard to raise the price of spices in the European market.46 International trade as an algorithm of peace fails, but instead, we observe the hubris engendered in its advancement, which may eventually lead to a return to Hobbes’s state of nature:

This war will become ever more fierce and unjust and dangerous in its consequences as the world’s population increases, the commercial state grows through additional acquisitions, production and the arts advance, and finally, as a result, the quantity of goods coming into circulation, and with this the needs of the population, increase and multiply. When the way of life among the nations was simpler, this had gone on without great injustice or oppression, but now that needs have grown greater, it has turned into the most screaming injustice, a source of great misery.47

Fichte suggests isolating commerce by building a national financial system based on its own currency. In this vision, the closure of the commercial state will mitigate the jealousy of trade and eliminate the rivalry from economic competition. Fichte, however, does not intend to prevent people from contacting those from different territories. Instead of trade, he proposes knowledge or science (Wissenschaft) as the universal subject that might bind all people together. Science, therefore, replaces trade as the extrastatic entity that, better than the economy, will promote reason among the peoples. Fichte suggests a decoupling of politics from economy and economy from science. Science alone will be the candidate that unites all the people on Earth:

The only thing that entirely eliminates all differences between peoples and their circumstances and that belongs merely and solely to the human being as such and not to the citizen, is science. Through science, and through this alone, men will and should continue to be connected to one another once their separation into peoples is, in every other respect, complete. This alone will remain their common possession when they have divided up everything else among themselves. No closed state will eliminate this connection. Instead it will encourage it, since the enrichment of science through the unified force of the human race will even advance the state’s own isolated earthly ends. Academies financed by the state will introduce the treasures of foreign literature into the country, with the treasures of domestic literature offered in exchange.48

Of course, we remain skeptical when we consider Fichte’s suggestion that science, as the incarnation of reason, shall stand outside human affairs and replace the transcendent that unites the human species. We might also add to Fichte’s observation that, nowadays, it is not just trade, as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century, but also techno-science, which has become more than ever a battlefield between nation-states. On the one hand, international trade becomes a means of warfare—for example, the United States’ relentless effort to block China from accessing microchip technologies and prevent China’s technological products from entering the Western market.49 War, on the other hand, now takes the shape of cyberattacks and the purposeful spread of disinformation, misinformation, and so on. Could we, of course, imitate Fichte by suggesting a treatise on the Closed Technological State, in which not only commerce but also technology would be fully isolated and where only fixed, small amounts of import and export of necessities remain possible? If this were to occur, it might multiply the products that would be restricted beyond commerce and technology, and we might end up with isolated tribes. Unfortunately, this seems to be the tendency now regarding the technological war, in which the competition is centered on transfer of technological knowledge.

Extending Fichte’s question, we might want to ask whether epistemological diplomacy in the twenty-first century is at all possible for us. If there is diplomacy in Fichte’s closed commercial state, then it is a diplomacy of knowledge or, more precisely, scientific knowledge. It was, therefore, knowledge, instead of trade, that should become the guarantee of perpetual peace for Fichte. However, the Enlightenment, as we know it, in the name of reason, promotes a particular type of knowledge (i.e., philosophy) with its advanced technologies. In his 2018 article “How the Enlightenment Ends,” Henry Kissinger made a rather controversial claim that the Enlightenment, as a movement of the universalization of philosophy, was put to an end by artificial intelligence because the latter completed the age of reason. He suggests that today’s task is no longer how the use of technology might spread Enlightenment philosophy but is to find a guiding philosophy for AI technology.50 In other words, the relation between Enlightenment philosophy and technology is reversed. Technology is no longer in the service of philosophy, and Fichte’s thesis that science or philosophy is that which maintains the connection of humanity no longer holds. Consequently, philosophy has to reinvent itself, given this reversion.

We have no intention to negate the Enlightenment if the Enlightenment entails the planetary reason discussed throughout this book and not the homogenization of knowledge and thought.51 Today, it might be too easy to claim that the West manipulates reason because that would imply that reason is homogeneous and substantial, which we know is not the case. The progress of reason should be the opposite of homogenization: it should enable diversity and renew the language of coexistence. In this sense, Kant’s most profound comment on the Enlightenment is probably not his “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment’” but rather “The Architectonic of Pure Reason.” However, today we need new diplomacy to exploit the new extrastatic relations other than what Kant speculated regarding trade, which in its modern form includes logistic and economic transactions, tourism, and so forth. This epistemological diplomacy must go beyond the current economic and military competition. It is not only about building scientific communities, as universities have been doing for centuries, but also the development of programs that might facilitate the development of technodiversity, noodiversity, and biodiversity. This is the path we intended to take, beginning with Hegel’s political state and Schmitt’s Großraum to demonstrate how the philosophical justifications of political forms could be viewed through the lens of political epistemologies and technologies. The debate on mechanism and organism has been fundamental to European thought and the inquiry concerning humanity. The epistemological diplomacy that we envision should be seen as a program that allows for the development of technodiversity, noodiversity, and biodiversity under the guidance of reason but also allows for reason to move beyond territorial boundaries and toward the planetary. Technodiversity does not mean that we will have to abandon Western technological inventions such as the internet simply because they are Western; this would be both impossible and foolish. However, it has become necessary to produce bifurcations in the current technological tendencies by inquiring into technodiversity and, consequently, formulating a new critique of political economy, as Stiegler proposed.

Like Kant’s Perpetual Peace and Karatani’s World Republic, we do not know the end; we can only hypothesize and speak “as if” an end is imaginable and attainable. The telos of history remains unknown when the organic condition of philosophizing is surpassed or transcended by the new technological condition, which we suggested in Recursivity and Contingency and continued in Art and Cosmotechnics. A planetary thinking has to respond to the new condition of philosophizing, seeing it as a beginning rather than an end. However, we are not aspiring to the intervention of a force from without that changes the situation, be that a world war, a climate collapse, or an alien intrusion. This does not mean that it is impossible, but it inevitably regresses into a form of nihilism, and worse, cynicism. A radical transformation of society has to be at the same time material and spiritual. This is also the reason why we have been trying to articulate the possibility of approaching our planetary impasse from the framework of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity. Readers will certainly find limits in any discourse addressing the planetary, and probably will find any planetary thinking not expansive enough. A philosopher can only show under what conditions a planetary thinking shall not be possible, and he or she can only attempt to search for it like one crossing the river by feeling for the stones; but what if these stones are unstable under force or are monsters in disguise? It is the task of reason to limit the philosopher’s speculation and the task of the philosopher to expand reason, so as to move toward “planetary happiness.”52