The rebellion against the human condition, part 1

Today the trajectory of Science leaves us behind to tally and bear the costs of our technologists’ search for order. In the guise of secular priests, they insist the benchmarks of our human complement are misinformation lingering from less enlightened eras. Even the intellectual frameworks underpinning cognition are described as illusions to be wiped away, our limited human identities one day to follow. But the soul, the essence which makes us human, may prove harder for nihilism—or cybernetics—to destroy.

This is the first part of a two-part essay originally published in issue 2 of RETURN magazine.

My book, Sur l’origine des sciences cognitives, was first published in French in 1985. It seeks to disabuse readers of a number of ideas that I consider mistaken. Cybernetics calls to mind a series of familiar images that turn out, on closer inspection, to be highly doubtful. As the etymology of the word suggests, cybernetics is meant to signify control, mastery, governance – in short, the philosophical project associated with Descartes, who assigned mankind the mission of exercising dominion over the world, and over mankind itself.

Within the cybernetics movement, this view was championed by Norbert Wiener – unsurprisingly, perhaps, since it was Wiener who gave it its name. But this gives only a very partial, if not superficial idea of what cybernetics was about, notwithstanding that even a philosopher of such penetrating insight as Heidegger was taken in by it.

In my work, I have relied on the notion, due to Karl Popper, of a metaphysical research program, which is to say, a set of presuppositions about the structure of the world that are neither testable nor empirically falsifiable, but without which no science would be possible. For there is no science that does not rest on a metaphysics, though typically it remains concealed. It is the responsibility of the philosopher to uncover this metaphysics, and then to subject it to criticism. What I have tried to show is that cybernetics, far from being the apotheosis of Cartesian humanism, as Heidegger supposed, actually represented a crucial moment in its demystification, and indeed in its deconstruction.

To borrow a term that has been applied to the structuralist movement in the human sciences, cybernetics constituted a decisive step in the rise of antihumanism. Consider, for example, the way in which cybernetics conceived the relationship between man and machine. The philosophers of consciousness were not alone in being caught up in the trap set by a question such as “Will it be possible one day to design a machine that thinks?” The cybernetician’s answer, rather in the spirit of Molière, was: “Madame, you pride yourself so on thinking. And yet, you are only a machine!” The aim of cognitive science always was – and still is today – the mechanization of the mind, not the humanization of the machine.

“Continental” political philosophy has yet to acknowledge the notion of posthumanism. On the other hand, the idea of antihumanism has been debated for at least four decades. My contribution will bear on the latter only. My hope is that our workshop will enable us to explore the possible connections between the two notions and, beyond, perhaps, bridge the gap between two cultural worlds so far apart.

Heidegger’s error

I will start with a classic question: can the idea that we have of the human person, which is to say of ourselves, survive the forward march of scientific discovery? It is a commonplace that from Copernicus to molecular biology, and from Marx to Freud along the way, we have had steadily to abandon our proud view of ourselves as occupying a special place in the universe, and to admit that we are at the mercy of determinisms that leave little room for what we have been accustomed to consider our freedom and our reason.

Is not cognitive science now in the process of completing this process of disillusionment and demystification by showing us that just where we believe we sense the workings of a mind, there is only the firing of neural networks, no different in principle than an ordinary electric circuit? The task in which I have joined with many others, faced with reductive interpretations of scientific advance of this sort, has been to defend the values proper to the human person, or, to put it more bluntly, to defend humanism against the excesses of science and technology.

Heidegger completely inverted this way of posing the problem. For him it was no longer a question of defending humanism but rather of indicting it. As for science and technology, or rather “technoscience” (an expression meant to signify that science is subordinated to the practical ambition of achieving mastery over the world through technology), far from threatening human values, they are, in Heidegger’s view, the most striking manifestation of them. This dual reversal is so remarkable that it deserves to be considered in some detail, even – or above all – in a reflection on the place of cybernetics in the history of ideas, for it is precisely cybernetics that found itself to be the principal object of Heidegger’s attack.

In those places where Heideggerian thought has been influential, it became impossible to defend human values against the claims of science. This was particularly true in France, where structuralism – and then poststructuralism – reigned supreme over the intellectual landscape for several decades before taking refuge in the literature departments of American universities. Anchored in the thought of the three great Germanic “masters of suspicion” – Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – against a common background of Heideggerianism, the human sciences à la française made antihumanism their watchword, loudly celebrating exactly what humanists dread: the death of man.

This unfortunate creature, or rather a certain image that man created of himself, was reproached for being “metaphysical.” With Heidegger, “metaphysics” acquired a new and quite special sense, opposite to its usual meaning. For positivists ever since Comte, the progress of science had been seen as forcing the retreat of metaphysics; for Heidegger, by contrast, technoscience represented the culmination of metaphysics. And the height of metaphysics was nothing other than cybernetics.

Let us try to unravel this tangled skein. For Heidegger, metaphysics is the search for an ultimate foundation for all reality, for a “primary being” in relation to which all other beings find their place and purpose. Where traditional metaphysics (“ontotheology”) had placed God, modern metaphysics substituted man. This is why modern metaphysics is fundamentally humanist, and humanism fundamentally metaphysical. Man is a subject endowed with consciousness and will: his features were described at the dawn of modernity in the philosophy of Descartes and Leibniz.

Heidegger completely inverted this way of posing
the problem. For him it was no longer a question of defending humanism but rather of indicting it. As for science and technology, or rather “technoscience”
(an expression meant to signify that science is subordinated to the practical ambition of achieving mastery over the world through technology), far from threatening human values, they are in Heidegger’s view the most striking manifestation of them.

As a conscious being, he is present and transparent to himself; as a willing being, he causes things to happen as he intends. Subjectivity, both as theoretical presence to oneself and as practical mastery over the world, occupies center stage in this scheme – whence the Cartesian promise to make man “master and possessor of nature.” In the metaphysical conception of the world, Heidegger holds, everything that exists is a slave to the purposes of man; everything becomes an object of his will, fashionable as a function of his ends and desires. The value of things depends solely on their capacity to help man realize his essence, which is to achieve mastery over being. It thus becomes clear why technoscience, and cybernetics in particular, may be said to represent the completion of metaphysics.

To contemplative thought – thought that poses the question of meaning and of Being, understood as the sudden appearance of things, which escapes all attempts at grasping it – Heidegger opposes “calculating” thought. This latter type is characteristic of all forms of planning that seek to attain ends by taking circumstances into account. Technoscience, insofar as it constructs mathematical models to better establish its mastery over the causal organization of the world, knows only calculating thought. Cybernetics is precisely that which calculates – computes – in order to govern, in the nautical sense (Wiener coined the term from the Greek xvbepvntns, meaning “steersman”): it is indeed the height of metaphysics.

Heidegger anticipated the objection that would be brought against him: “Because we are speaking against humanism people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more logical than that for somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity?”

Heidegger defended himself by attacking. Barbarism is not to be found where one usually looks for it. The true barbarians are the ones who are supposed to be humanists, who, in the name of the dignity that man accords himself, leave behind them a world devastated by technology, a desert in which no one can truly be said to dwell.

Let us for the sake of argument grant the justice of Heidegger’s position. At once an additional enigma presents itself. If for him cybernetics really represented the apotheosis of metaphysical humanism, how are we to explain the fact that the human sciences in France, whose postwar development I have just said can be understood only against the background of Heidegger’s philosophy, availed themselves of the conceptual toolkit of cybernetics in order to deconstruct the metaphysics of subjectivity? How is it that these sciences, in their utter determination to put man as subject to death, each seeking to outdo the other’s radicalism, should have found in cybernetics the weapons for their assaults?

From the beginning of the 1950s – which is to say, from the end of the first cybernetics – through the 1960s and 1970s, when the second cybernetics was investigating theories of self-organization and cognitivism was on the rise, the enterprise of mechanizing the human world underwent a parallel development on each side of the Atlantic. This common destiny was rarely noticed, perhaps because the thought of any similarity seemed almost absurd: whereas cognitive science claimed to be the avant-garde of modern science, structuralism – followed by poststructuralism – covered itself in a pretentious and often incomprehensible philosophical jargon.

What is more, it was too tempting to accuse French deconstructionists of a fascination with mathematical concepts and models they hardly understood. But even if this way of looking at the matter is not entirely unjustified, it only scratches the surface. There were very good reasons, in fact, why the deconstruction of metaphysical humanism found in cybernetics an ally of the first order.

At the beginning of the 1940s, a philosopher of consciousness such as Sartre could write: “The inhuman is merely . . . the mechanical.” Structuralists hastened to adopt this definition as their own, while reversing the value assigned to its terms. Doing Heidegger one better, they made a great show of championing the inhuman – which is to say the mechanical. Cybernetics, as it happened, was ready to hand, having come along at just the right moment to demystify the voluntary and conscious subject. The will? All its manifestations could apparently be simulated, and therefore duplicated, by a simple negative feedback mechanism. Consciousness?

The “Cybernetics Group” had examined the Freudian unconscious, whose existence was defended by one of its members, Lawrence Kubie, and found it chimerical. If Kubie often found himself the butt of his colleagues’ jokes, it was not because he was thought to be an enemy of human dignity. It was rather because the postulation of a hidden entity, located in the substructure of a purportedly conscious subject, manifesting itself only through symptoms while yet being endowed with the essential attributes of the subject (intentionality, desires, beliefs, presence to oneself, and so on), seemed to the cyberneticians nothing more than a poor conjuring trick aimed at keeping the structure of subjectivity intact.

It is remarkable that a few years later the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, along with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, one of the founders of structuralism, should have adopted the same critical attitude toward Freud as cybernetics. The father of psychoanalysis had been led to postulate an improbable “death wish” – “beyond the pleasure principle,” as he put it – as if the subject actually desired the very thing that made him suffer, by voluntarily and repeatedly placing himself in situations from which he could only emerge battered and hurt.

This compulsion (Zwang) to repeat failure Freud called Wieder- holungszwang, an expression translated by Lacan as automatisme de répétition, which is to say the automatism of repetition. In so doing he replaced the supposed unconscious death wish with the senseless functioning of a machine, the unconscious henceforth being identified with a cybernetic automaton. The alliance of psychoanalysis and cybernetics was neither anecdotal nor fortuitous: it corresponded to a radicalization of the critique of metaphysical humanism.

There was a deeper reason for the encounter between the French sciences de l’homme and cybernetics, however. What structuralism sought to conceive – in the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, for example, and particularly in his study of systems of exchange in traditional societies – was a subjectless cognition, indeed cognition without mental content. Hence the project of making “symbolic thought” a mechanism peculiar not to individual brains but to “unconscious” linguistic structures that automatically operate behind the back, as it were, of unfortunate human “subjects,” who are no more than a sort of afterthought.

“It thinks” was destined to take the place once and for all of the Cartesian cogito. Now cognition without a subject was exactly the unlikely configuration that cybernetics seemed to have succeeded in conceiving. Here again, the encounter between cybernetics and structuralism was in no way accidental. It grew out of a new intellectual necessity whose sudden emergence appears in retrospect as an exceptional moment in the history of ideas.

The self-mechanized mind

It is time to come back to our enigma, which now may be formulated as a paradox. Was cybernetics the height of metaphysical humanism, as Heidegger maintained, or was it the height of its deconstruction, as certain of Heidegger’s followers believe? To this question I believe it is necessary to reply that cybernetics was both things at once, and that this is what made it not only the root of cognitive science, which finds itself faced with the same paradox, but also a turning point in the history of human conceptions of humanity.

The title I have given to this section – the self-mechanized mind – appears to have the form of a self-referential statement, not unlike those strange loops the cyberneticians were so crazy about, especially the cyberneticians of the second phase. But this is only an appearance: the mind that carries out the mechanization and the one that is the object of it are two distinct (albeit closely related) entities, like the two ends of a seesaw, the one rising ever higher in the heavens of metaphysical humanism as the other descends further into the depths of its deconstruction. In mechanizing the mind, in treating it as an artifact, the mind presumes to exercise power over this artifact to a degree that no psychology claiming to be scientific has ever dreamed of attaining.

The mind can now hope not only to manipulate this mechanized version of itself at will, but even to reproduce and manufacture it in accordance with its own wishes and intentions. Accordingly, the technologies of the mind, present and future, open up a vast continent upon which man now has to impose norms if he wishes to give them meaning and purpose. The human subject will therefore need to have recourse to a supplementary endowment of will and conscience in order to determine, not what he can do, but what he ought to do – or, rather, what he ought not to do.

These new technologies will require a whole ethics to be elaborated, an ethics not less demanding than the one that is slowly being devised today in order to control the rapid development and unforeseen consequences of new biotechnologies. But to speak of ethics, conscience, the will – is this not to speak of the triumph of the subject?

The connection between the mechanization of life and the mechanization of the mind is plain. Even if the Cybernetics Group snubbed biology, to the great displeasure of John von Neumann, it was of course a cybernetic metaphor that enabled molecular biology to formulate its central dogma: the genome operates like a computer program. This metaphor is surely not less false than the analogous metaphor that structures the cognitivist paradigm. The theory of biological self-organization, first opposed to the cybernetic paradigm during the Macy Conferences before later being adopted by the second cybernetics as its principal model, furnished then – and still furnishes today – decisive arguments against the legitimacy of identifying DNA with a “genetic program.”

Nonetheless – and this is the crucial point – even though this identification is profoundly illegitimate from both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, its technological consequences have been considerable. Today, as a result, man may be inclined to believe that he is the master of his own genome. Never, one is tempted to say, has he been so near to realizing the Cartesian promise: he has become – or is close to becoming – the master and possessor of all of nature, up to and including himself.

Must we then salute this as yet another masterpiece of metaphysical humanism? It seems at first altogether astonishing, though after a moment’s reflection perfectly comprehensible, that a German philosopher following in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, should have recently come forward, determined to take issue with the liberal humanism of his country’s philosophical establishment, and boldly affirmed that the new biotechnologies sound the death knell for the era of humanism. Unleashing a debate the like of which is hardly imaginable in any other country, this philosopher ventured to assert: “The domestication of man by man is the great unimagined prospect in the face of which humanism has looked the other way from antiquity until the present day.” And to prophesy:

It suffices to clearly understand that the next long periods of history will be periods of choice as far as the [human] species is concerned. Then it will be seen if humanity, or at least its cultural elites, will succeed in establishing effective procedures for self-domestication. It will be necessary, in the future, to forthrightly address the issue and formulate a code governing anthropological technologies. Such a code would modify, a posteriori, the meaning of classical humanism, for it would show that humanitas consists not only in the friendship of man with man, but that it also implies . . . , in increasingly obvious ways, that man represents the supreme power for man.

But why should this “superhuman” power of man over himself be seen, in Nietzschean fashion, as representing the death of humanism rather than its apotheosis? For man to be able, as subject, to exercise a power of this sort over himself, it is first necessary that he be reduced to the rank of an object, able to be reshaped to suit any purpose. No raising up can occur without a concomitant lowering, and vice versa.

Let us come back to cybernetics and, beyond that, to cognitive science. We need to consider more closely the paradox that an enterprise that sets itself the task of naturalizing the mind should have as its spearhead a discipline that calls itself artificial intelligence. To be sure, the desired naturalization proceeds via mechanization. Nothing about this is inconsistent with a conception of the world that treats nature as an immense computational machine. Within this world man is just another machine – no surprise there.

But in the name of what, or of whom, will man, thus artificialized, exercise his increased power over himself? In the name of this very blind mechanism with which he is identified? In the name of a meaning that he claims is mere appearance or phenomenon? His will and capacity for choice are now left dangling over the abyss. The attempt to restore the mind to the natural world that gave birth to it ends up exiling the mind from the world and from nature. This paradox is typical of what the French sociologist Louis Dumont, in his magisterial study of the genesis of modern individualism, called:

the model of modern artificialism in general, the systematic application of an extrinsic, imposed value to the things of the world. Not a value drawn from our belonging to the world, from its harmony and our harmony with it, but a value rooted in our heterogeneity in relation to it: the identification of our will with the will of God (Descartes: man makes himself master and possessor of nature). The will thus applied to the world, the end sought, the motive and the profound impulse of the will are [all] foreign. In other words, they are extra-worldly. Extra-worldliness is now concentrated in the individual will.

The paradox of the naturalization of the mind attempted by cybernetics, and today by cognitive science, then, is that the mind has been raised up as a demigod in relation to itself.

Many of the criticisms brought against the materialism of cognitive science from the point of view of either a philosophy of consciousness or a defense of humanism miss this paradox. Concentrating their (often justified) attacks on the weaknesses and naiveté of such a mechanistic materialism, they fail to see that it invalidates itself by placing the human subject outside of the very world to which he is said to belong. The recent interest shown by cognitive science in what it regards as the “mystery” of consciousness seems bound to accentuate this blindness.

The nanotechnological dream

I want now to broach not so much the intellectual evolution of cognitive science itself as its embodiment by new technologies, or, as one should rather say, its instantiation by ideas for new technologies. For the moment, at least, these technologies exist only as projects, indeed in some cases only as dreams. But no matter that many such dreams will acquire physical reality sooner or later, the simple fact that they already exist in people’s minds affects how we see the world and how we see ourselves.

Since my book was first published, I have thought a great deal about the philosophical foundations of what is called the NBIC Convergence – the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science – and about the ethical implications of this development. Here I have found many of the same tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions that I discerned first within cybernetics, and then within cognitive science. But now the potential consequences are far more serious, because we are not dealing with a theoretical matter, a certain view of the world, but with an entire program for acting upon nature and mankind.

In searching for the underlying metaphysics of this program, I did not have far to look. One of the first reports of the National Science Foundation devoted to the subject, entitled “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance,” summarizes the credo of the movement in a sort of haiku:

If the Cognitive Scientists can think it,
The Nano people can build it,
The Bio people can implement it, and
The IT people can monitor and control it.

Note that cognitive science plays the leading role in this division of labor, that of thinker – not an insignificant detail, for it shows that the metaphysics of NBIC Convergence is embedded in the work of cognitive scientists. It comes as no surprise, then, that the contradictions inherent in cognitive science should be found at the heart of the metaphysics itself.

One of the main themes of my book is the confrontation between Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, Wiener embodying the ideas of control, mastery, and design, von Neumann the ideas of complexity and self-organization. Cybernetics never succeeded in resolving the tension, indeed the contradiction, between these two perspectives; more specifically, it never managed to give a satisfactory answer to the problems involved in realizing its ambition of designing an autonomous, self-organizing machine. Nanotechnology – whose wildest dream is to reconstruct the natural world that has been given to us, atom by atom – is caught up in the same contradiction.

The most obvious element of the nanotechnological dream is to substitute for what François Jacob called bricolage, or the tinkering of biological evolution, a paradigm of design. Damien Broderick, the Australian cultural theorist and popular science writer, barely manages to conceal his contempt for the world that human beings have inherited when he talks about the likelihood that “nanosystems, designed by human minds, will bypass all this Darwinian wandering, and leap straight to design success.” One can hardly fail to note the irony that science, which in America has had to engage in an epic struggle to root out every trace of creationism (including its most recent avatar, “intelligent design”) from public education, should now revert to a logic of design in the form of the nanotechnology program – the only difference being that now it is mankind that assumes the role of the demiurge.

Philosophers, faced with the ambition of emerging technologies to supersede nature and life as the engineers of evolution, the designers of biological and natural processes, may suppose that they are dealing with an old idea: Descartes’ vision of science as the means by which man may become the master and possessor of nature. Again, however, this is only part of a larger and more complicated picture. As another influential visionary, the American applied physicist Kevin Kelly, revealingly remarked, “It took us a long time to realize that the power of a technology is proportional to its inherent out-of-controlness, its inherent ability to surprise and be generative. In fact, unless we can worry about a technology, it is not revolutionary enough.”

With NanoBioConvergence, a novel conception of engineering has indeed been introduced. The engineer, far from seeking mastery over nature, is now meant to feel that his enterprise will be crowned by success only to the extent that the system component he has created is capable of surprising him. For whoever wishes ultimately to create a self-organizing system – another word for life – is bound to attempt to reproduce its essential property, namely, the ability to make something that is radically new.

In her masterful study of the perils facing mankind, The Human Condition, of which we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary, Hannah Arendt brought out the fundamental paradox of our age: whereas the power of mankind to alter its environment goes on increasing under the stimulus of technological progress, less and less do we find ourselves in a position to control the consequences of our actions. I take the liberty of giving a long quotation here whose pertinence to the subject at hand cannot be exaggerated – keeping in mind, too, that these lines were written fifty years ago:

To what extent we have begun to act into nature, in the literal sense of the word, is perhaps best illustrated by a recent casual remark of a scientist [Wernher von Braun] who quite seriously suggested that “basic research is when I am doing what I don’t know what I am doing.”
This started harmlessly enough with the experiment in which men were no longer content to observe, to register, and contemplate whatever nature was willing to yield in her own appearance, but began to prescribe conditions and to provoke natural processes. What then developed into an ever-increasing skill in unchaining elemental processes, which, without the interference of men, would have lain dormant and perhaps never have come to pass, has finally ended in a veritable art of “making” nature, that is, of creating “natural” processes which without men would never exist and which earthly nature by herself seems incapable of accomplishing....
[N]atural sciences have become exclusively sciences of process and, in their last stage, sciences of potentially irreversible, irremediable “processes of no return”...

The sorcerer’s apprentice myth must therefore be updated: it is neither by error nor terror that mankind will be dispossessed of its own creations, but by design – which henceforth is understood to signify not mastery, but non-mastery and out-of-controlness.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is a Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris. He is the Director of research at the C.N.R.S. (Philosophy) and the Director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, which he founded in 1982. At Stanford University, he is a researcher at the Study of Language and Information (C.S.L.I.).