A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO COSMOTECHNICAL PLURALISM
From the beginning, it has been the ambition of cybernetics to develop a higher and more certain science. For after, it seemed, the most general science of ‘being qua being’ that is metaphysics had, in the works of Immanuel Kant, been rationally superseded by critical epistemology, and epistemology had, in the works of Gottlob Frege, been rationally superseded by mathematical logic, the calculations of argument in logic could be recursively automated and reciprocally controlled by cybernetics. Willard Van Orman Quine’s ‘Double Reduction’ – of epistemology to psychology and psychology to neuroscience – is here interrupted by the projected computational automation of the essential logic of science in cybernetics. Before its second and higher-order expansions, the first wave of cybernetics issuing from the Macy conferences (c. AD 1940-1960) had thus expected cybernetics to claim the theoretical crown of ‘Queen of the Sciences’ (Regina Scientiarum) that had once been assigned to the study of God and things divine in theology.
However, scepticism of this regal pretension soon arose in and beyond cybernetics. The recycling of inputs as outputs in first-order cybernetics was reflected, first to the user in ‘second-order cybernetics’, and later to the social and environmental milieu in third-order and higher-order cybernetics. At the same time, the anti-foundationalist crisis of European science resulting from the failure of the Vienna Circle to justify analytic knowledge, along with the shock of Kurt Gödel’s ‘Incompleteness Theorems’, showed any mathematical or mechanical system to be if consistent then incomplete, including the mechanical calculators of computers. In interrupting the computational mastery of the world, this crisis has frustrated the 20th-Century fulfilment of Leibniz’s 17th-Century dream of a ‘universal language’ (characteristica universalis) that would operate as the cybernetic grammar of a complete science of ‘universal teaching’ (mathesis universalis). At the point of this interruption, the ‘digital’ thus passes beyond its aborted finality into the ‘postdigital’. Yet because the pivotal negation that defines this passage remains conceptually underdetermined, it can be carried aloft by higher transcendent powers, as it more ultimately passes into the hyperbolic summit, which I designate as the ‘hyperdigital’.
From this higher standpoint, the ‘cybernetic crisis of philosophy’ - announced by Martin Heidegger as the “end of philosophy” - calls for a new theological investigation. We can, as Yuk Hui contends, no longer assume a single occidental narrative of the origin (Plato) and destiny (Wiener) of cybernetics. Neither can we assume that the limits of such a narrative must exclude the mythical, the revelatory, or the religious. Rather, the incompletability of any absolute cybernetic system should be understood to imply in the parallel collapse of any closed hermeneutic and historicism of cybernetics that upholds the exclusive boundaries of the occidental and the secular. The initiative of ‘cosmotechnical pluralism’ thus invites a certain return to a religious horizon of cybernetic speculation, in which, as this chapter will illustrate, the basic concepts and cosmic vision of cybernetics stand ready to be pneumatically reconceived.