Yuk Hui on Modernity, Technology and Cosmotechnics

 

In this essay, philosopher Yuk Hui articulates an alternative route to the impasses of postmodern thought and exposes his critique of other attempts such as the various propositions to uncover national or regional alternative modernities. Most specifically, it is philosopher Enrique Dussel and his notion of the transmodern that are discussed at length, which, for Hui, like most postcolonial discourses, unconsciously undermine the question of technology. Instead, for Hui, ‘to reopen world history’, one must rather engage with non-modern knowledge and conceive a future for them, an orientation enabled by his notion of cosmotechnics.
 
 
“”Farewell, phantoms! The world no longer needs you – or me. By giving the names of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. A certain confusion still reigns; but in a little while all will be made clear, and we shall witness at last the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill.”
 
Paul Valéry, The Crisis of Spirit
 
 
1919, right after World War I, Paul Valéry lamented the crisis of the European spirit in the form of two letters. In view of the devastation of many lives and cities seen at the culmination of the modern epoch, Valéry wrote: ‘Europe in 1914 had perhaps reached the limit of modernism.’1 The modern epoch had turned out to be a Faustian nightmare. Phantoms – symbols of the non-modern – were being expelled from the world as it turned towards mere scientific constructs and technological exploits. These phantoms, however, continue to haunt the modern. Modernity was characterised by a technological unconsciousness willing infinite progress. By a technological unconscious, I mean the supposition that human beings could advance history according to their will and desire while ignoring the apparatus that makes the will possible, and that turns desires into nightmares. Philosopher Gilbert Simondon saw in it a progressivist optimism, which was paradoxically motivated by technology and the desire to lay transparent such technologies, which he identified, for example, among the eighteenth-century French encyclopaedists.2 This optimism confronted its own misery towards the end of the nineteenth century, just as Nietzsche had described decades earlier in aphorism 124 of The Gay Science, titled ‘In the Horizon of the Infinite’:
 
  “We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us – more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there – and there is no more ‘land’!3 “
 

Those who believe in infinite progress ultimately realise that the most fearsome thing ever is the infinite. Technologies they believe might assist them towards the realisation of humanity turn out to usher in a process of dehumanisation, or to result in nothing more than the realisation of an anthill. However, modernity didn’t end in 1919. World War II was yet to come, actualising the anxiety of the modern through the outbreak of one of the most miserable disasters in history, from which Europe more than 70 years later has not yet fully recovered. At that same time in East Asia, this anxiety was expressed in the explicit outcry of the Kyoto school philosophers, whose slogan of ‘overcoming modernity’ is now often associated with the philosophers’ engagement with ‘total war’, imperialism, nationalism and fascism.
 
While it is not possible to exhaust the complexity of the concept of modernity, the episodes above allow us to appreciate a certain discomfort with the term ‘modern’; and it is in this respect that we may understand the title of Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern.4 And yet, modernity remains with us. Decades of efforts to disprove the assumption that modernity is a monopoly of the West, there have arisen ideas of a Chinese modernity, a Japanese modernity, an East Asian Modernity and so on. In 2014, the exhibition ‘Modernités plurielles de 1905 à 1970’ at the Centre Pompidou in Paris showed more than a thousand works from almost four hundred artists.5 It was a large-scale attempt to demonstrate that the discourse of modernity should be extended beyond Europe.
 
But what is meant by modernity? And what does it signify, besides a certain pretention to cultural diversity and equality, to emphasise that there have been plural modernities? Is it not more urgent, in view of global technological acceleration, to consider the non-modern? I understand the non-modern not as that which is not yet, and will become, modern, but rather as that which resists becoming modern, and probably won’t ever be.
 
The effort of this essay is to demonstrate why I prefer to rearticulate the non-modern instead of, on the one hand, the pursuit of a national or regional modernity, which probably never existed, and in any case risks being parasitical on forms of nationalism, and on the other, the transmodern of Enrique Dussel, which like most of the postcolonial discourses, unconsciously undermines the question of technology.6
 
How can the non-modern be an exodus from modernity? One might ask if, by opposing the modern and the non-modern, we are not still in a sense falling prey to the modern, such resistance being its verso – its reactionary other? In order to think with and beyond the non-modern we will have to clarify confusions around the term modernity. This is beyond the scope of the present text but to briefly make the attempt: first, modernity must be distinguished from modernism as artistic and literary genres – the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, the prose of Charles Baudelaire and the painting of Paul Cézanne; second, it should not be confused with modernisation, which is a process of universalising epistemologies that emerged during and developed since the period of European modernity, and is often equated in vague terms with modern science and technology. The pursuit of the ‘modern’ in non-European countries concretises in the modernisation of agriculture, industry, defence, and science and technology. Modernity in its narrow sense is an epistemological and methodological rupture, which began in sixteenth-century Europe. Modernity, in this sense, concerns the production of knowledge, or rather – to use the language of Kant – the sensible condition under which knowledge is produced. Here we may want to echo Michel Foucault when he says, in What is Enlightenment?:
 
 “Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.7”
 
Modernity, for Foucault, is a particular way of thinking and feeling, or more precisely an episteme, to use the term of his earlier work The Order of Things, in which he characterises three epistemes in Europe since the sixteenth century, namely the Renaissance, the Classical and the Modern.8 This is also the reason for which I reinterpret the notion of episteme as the sensible condition under which knowledge is produced. I emphasise the question of sensibility because it is also that which makes the co-existence of different epistemes possible. Modernisation is a process that universalises these forms of thinking and feeling through a process of colonisation by the West, facilitated by navigation and military technologies that propagate this rupture outside of Europe. We can probably say there has been a process of modernisation in China, Japan and Korea, for example, but I am not sure if it is legitimate to claim that there has been a Chinese, Japanese, Korean or even an East-Asian modernity. I do not mean that modernisation without modernity is necessarily bad or vice versa, nor is such a dichotomy necessarily helpful to the question of ‘badness’; I mean only to say that modernisation in Europe was different from modernisation outside of Europe. Outside of Europe, there is little continuity in the nature of the rupture, nor does it take place in dialogue with its past. Indeed, it is only when history and tradition lose their grip on the ever-transforming technological environment that the process of modernisation can accelerate.
 
2. The Postmodern
 

 
I think it is necessary to distinguish modernity as an historical event from modernisation as a world historical process, or more precisely a process of technology’s universalisation of knowledge on a global scale. Modernity renewed an image of the world that, somewhat contrary to the Copernican turn, reaffirmed a certain geo- and anthropo-centrism. The concept of the modern here becomes a pivot on which the articulation of a world history turns, going from the pre-modern, through the modern, to the postmodern. Is the postmodern an overcoming of the modern? It is precisely around this question that Enrique Dussel has cast doubt, and proposes to talk instead of the transmodern:
 
“In effect, beginning with the ‘postmodern’ problematic about the nature of Modernity – which is still, in the final instance, a ‘European’ vision of Modernity – we began to notice that what we ourselves had called ‘postmodern’ was something distinct from that alluded to by the Postmodernists of the 1980s. [...] For this reason, we saw need to reconstruct the concept of ‘Modernity’ from an ‘exterior’ perspective, that is to say, a global perspective (not provincial like the European perspective). This was necessary because ‘Modernity,’ in the United States and Europe, had (and continues to have) a clearly Eurocentric connotation, notorious from Jean-François Lyotard or Gianni Vattimo through Jürgen Habermas, and in another, more subtle manner even in Immanuel Wallerstein, which I have called a ‘second Eurocentrism.’9”
 
Dussel is right that, seen from its outset, the postmodern is a reflection on and a critique of European modernity. As he continues: ‘Post-modernism is a final stage in modern European/North American culture, the ‘core’ of Modernity. Chinese or Vedic cultures could never be European post-modern, but rather are something very different as a result of their distinct roots.’10 It thus becomes intriguing to ask what it means for non-European cultures like China to embrace the postmodern without ever having been modern. Does this discontinuity not suggest the bankruptcy of the idea of a perfect world history structured around modernity? However, contra Dussel’s critique of Lytoard, I would like to argue that the perspective of transmodernity misses one central theme of the postmodern discourse, which I want to call technological consciousness.
 
I refuse – and I do so with reasons I have discussed elsewhere – to see Lyotard as a merely Eurocentric thinker.11 In comparison with the technological unconsciousness of the moderns, the postmodern discourse developed by Jean-François Lyotard from 1979 was largely driven by a technological consciousness. What is meant by technological consciousness? Lyotard’s 1979 publication The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge was a response to the rapid technological transformation of society, especially under the influence of information and communication technologies.12 Lyotard sees that a new epochal sensibility is demanded in order to, first of all, understand this transformation and, second (and more importantly) to destabilise the modern way of thinking. If the modern sensibility was characterised by a demand for certainty, order, domination and progress, the postmodern one is characterised by feelings of insecurity, anxiety, uncertainty and sublimity.
 
In other words, Lyotard sees that new technologies, products of the modern, dialectically destabilise modernity; therefore, instead of seeing these new technologies – from information- to nanotechnologies – as products of or continuations of the modern, he demands that they be understood, via a new sensibility, as means of subverting the modern.13 I would like to emphasise that Lyotard’s concern for technology is as something to be reclaimed – something with a transformative power to render the modern sensibility obsolete. Although Lyotard never calls postmodern sensibility an episteme in Foucault’s sense, it seems right to doubt what else could it be.14
 
The discourse of postmodernity that centres on technological consciousness is not a familiar one within discussions of the postmodern, neither in the West nor in Asia. For Fredric Jameson, for instance, the postmodern is the cultural logic of late capitalism – such logic is one aspect of the postmodern episteme, but it doesn’t necessarily capture the spirit of the postmodern itself. A neglect of technological consciousness is present in almost all secondary discourses around the postmodern. The same goes with Dussel’s discourse of the transmodern, in which the central role of technology is nowhere to be found.15 Not to say that Dussell paid no attention to technology, but simply that it never became a thematic in his theory of the transmodern. However, without such a technological consciousness, how can a true liberation be possible? Let’s look at Dussel’s solution:
 
  “Modernity will come into its fullness not by passing from its potency to its act, but by itself through a corealization with its once negated alterity and through a process of mutual creative fecundation. The transmodern project achieves with modernity what it could not achieve by itself – a corealization of solidarity, which is analectic, analogic, syncretic, hybrid and mestizo, and which bonds center to periphery, woman to man, race to race, ethnic group to ethnic group, class to class, humanity to earth, and occidental to Third World cultures. This bonding occurs not via negation, but via a subsumption from the viewpoint of alterity [...].16 “
 
What Dussel emphasises here are transversal dialogues between different cultures, creating a solidarity that incorporates their different points of view, including that of European modernity. In other words, non-European cultures can learn from modernity while at the same time developing a critique of it from their own standpoints. However, how such a transversal dialogue is possible when the whole world is transformed by an overpowering technological force remains unclear. For Martin Heidegger, this gigantic technological force is the realisation of a specifically Western metaphysics. Realisation here means at the same time end and accomplishment. The development of technical systems and their constant convergence on a global scale is an expression of this kind of great completion. In 1964, Heidegger writes that: ‘[t]he end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world. The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world-civilization based upon Western European thinking.’17  If Heidegger is right, a reopening of world history can only be achieved by starting with this as necessity in order to go beyond it and to render it contingent.18 I am not sure how many transversal dialogues have really been developed in the past decades; to the contrary, what we have been witnessing are wars, wars of every form. The gigantic technological force that is in the process of transforming the Earth cannot be subverted unless this force itself necessarily becomes the subject of interrogation and transformation. Or as Heidegger says in ‘Wozu Dichter?’ (‘What Are Poets For?’), an essay dedicated to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘[I]t may be that any other salvation than that which comes from where the danger is, is still within the
unholy [Unheil]’.19
 
As an interlude to this section, a comment from Arnold Toynbee seems to us very relevant today, when he tried to explain Asian countries’ naive importation of Western technology in the nineteenth century. Namely, he claimed that Far Easterners in the sixteenth century refused the Europeans because the latter wanted to export both religion and technology, while in the nineteenth century, when the Europeans only exported technology, the Far Eastern countries considered technology a neutral force that could be mastered by their own thought. The result is, as Toynbee rightly observed: ‘this technological splinter [...] which did succeed in pushing its way into the life of a Far Eastern society that had previously repulsed an attempt to introduce the Western way of life en bloc – technology and all, including religion.’20
 
3. The Non-modern
 
Today, decades after the emergence of the transmodern discourse, the term has resurfaced to haunt us, along with the non-modern. What remains of it that can be reaffirmed? And what has yet to be updated? I believe that Dussel’s critique of a perfect history, recounted as the succession of the pre-modern – modern – postmodern, is worth bringing back to the table. It remains problematic to situate non-European countries in a world history based on a European discourse. However, merely deviating from European discourse is not enough, since a true ‘world history’ remains to be opened up. To the prevailing linear history, I would like to add one more milestone: pre-modern – modern – postmodern – apocalypse. The apocalypse captures the sentiment of our epoch: ecological crisis, the Anthropocene, robot revolts, AI governmentality, the colonisation of outer space and the coronavirus pandemic that we are confronting. The Übermensch that we will all become thanks to the promises of human enhancement remains a cowardly longing for an eschatology, in the hope that after catastrophe a new beginning ought to begin.

 

In recent years, in view of the ecological crisis and the declaration that human beings have entered the era of the Anthropocene – an era that reaffirms a historical anthropocentrism – there has been another wave of thought proposing to overcome modernity by rearticulating the non-modern. The so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, closely associated with the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro among many others, is such an attempt to overcome modernity by undoing those categories that are central to the modern project. These thinkers do so by returning to the non-modern. Descola, the successor to Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France, has proposed to re-examine the concept of nature. Nature as it is understood today in the globalised world refers to the non-man-made environment surrounding us. It is a modern construction based on the opposition between nature and culture that Descola calls ‘Naturalism’. Nature is here considered to be the opposite of culture and at the same time an object to be mastered by culture or the ‘spirit’. However, this naturalism is not a default, but rather a fault. In Beyond Nature and Culture, Descola cites the diary of Henry Michaux, written when the writer returned to Paris in 1928 after having visited a friend in Ecuador.21 The trip required that they canoe alone for a month along the Amazon river. Upon their arrival at Belém do Pará, Michaux describes an amazing scene that problematises the modern concept of nature: ‘A young woman who was on our boat, coming from Manaus, went into town with us this morning. When she came upon the Grand Park (which is undeniably nicely planted) she emitted an easy sigh. “Ah, at last, nature,” she said, but she was coming from the jungle.’22 The role that the non-humans – the jungle, leopards, plants – play for the Amazonians is not that of nature understood today. Indeed, in these Indigenous groups, one finds forms of knowledge irreducible to those based on the division between nature and culture.

 

It was in the process of globalisation that Naturalism was universalised, at times seeming irreversible. This universalisation of naturalism was exemplified in a song composed for the Science Society of China founded in 1915. The melody was composed by Chao Yuen Ren in 1923, a linguist who later joined the Macy Conference on cybernetics (1946–53) and the lyric was written by Hu Shi, one of the most celebrated Chinese intellectuals of the twentieth century:

 

“擬中國科學社社歌詞

曲﹕趙原任；詞﹕胡適

 

我們不崇拜自然。他是一個刁鑽古怪；

我們要捶他，煮他，要叫他聽我們的指派。

我們要他給我們推車；我們要他給我們送信。

我們要揭穿他的秘密，好叫他服事我們人。

我們唱天行有常，我們唱致知窮理。

明知道真理無窮，進一寸有一寸的歡喜。

 

Song of the Chinese Science Society
Melody: Chao Yuan Ren; Lyrics: Hu Shi
 
We do not worship nature. He is a tricky and weird;
We have to beat him, boil him, and tell him to listen
    to our assignments.
We want him to push wagons; we want him to deliver
    letters for us.
We need to expose his secrets so that he can serve us.
We sing that heavens act perpetually, and that we dare
    knowing the truth.
We know that truth is infinite, still feel joyful when
    moving every inch forward.23 “
 
What we can see in this lyric is the idea that meaning is no longer to be deducted from nature, as was central to ancient Confucian and Daoist thought, but rather that nature is something to be explored and exploited. Can we say that this is an advancement of history in the sense of becoming modern? Or does it rather suggest a need to problematise the knowledge that we today call modern? How can we make sense of any reminiscence of the non-modern besides being haunted by it? Alas, how relevant is Confucian moral philosophy to the autopilot cars and sex robots of the twenty-first century? Could such thoughts realise anything other than a new age of psychotherapy?
 
By rearticulating the non-modern, anthropologists call for what they term multinaturalism. Let a hundred natures blossom, in order to re-enchant the Anthropocene. But is it sufficient to just go back to multinaturalism? Or, is this return to nature a mere reiteration of what Dussel calls a transversal dialogue, which ignores the technological consciousness on which Lyotard relentlessly insisted?
 
For my part, I am convinced that in order to reopen world history in the wake of this linear caricature, the task is no longer simply to do with preserving non-modern knowledge forms, which constantly haunt us, but rather with conceiving a future for such knowledge. To have a future means to be active and relevant; to be active means to be able to participate in the life of the mind. We must therefore consider the technological consciousness of postmodern discourse a critique but also a supplement, to the transmodern.
 
In The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, I propose to reopen the question of technology by asserting a multiple cosmotechnics, as well as multiple histories of cosmotechnics.24 ‘Cosmotechnics’ is a concept I use to redefine the concept of technics as a deviation from its conception in the twentieth century, in which it was typically limited to the Greek technē and modern technology. However, the question of whether Chinese technology or Indian technology can be reduced to the Greek technē remains. Or despite the common role played by technology in the process of hominisation, namely the becoming of human being, shouldn’t we also reassert the existence of a technological diversity within this process, and render it visible for re-examination? How, then, can we articulate a multiple cosmotechnics and to what extent is this articulation useful to imagining a technodiversity in the Anthropocene? Here lies what I call an antinomy of the universality of technology:
 
Thesis: technology is an anthropological universal, understood as an exteriorisation of memory and the liberation of organs as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology have formulated.
 
Antithesis: technology is not anthropologically universal, it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is not one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.
 
The antithesis is where we can identify and position the non-modern. It is that which refuses to be reduced to a linear historical process and which resists expulsion from the world. In the first volume of his Science and Civilisation in China, the great sinologist Joseph Needham has asserted multiple times that it is not productive to compare Chinese science and technology with that of the West as if they were the same, one being more advanced than the other in different periods of a linear and unique history.25 In the second volume, with the subtitle History of Scientific Thought, Needham continues his assertion that Chinese scientific and technological thought is fundamentally organistic and that unlike the early European moderns, for example, Descartes, it has never been mechanistic.26 Today, as an après-coup, we may want to understand what Needham said as an invitation to look into different scientific and technological regimes of thought.
 
I have proposed to use China as an example through which to speculate on a possible technological thought, with a specific history, that is centred on the discourse of unity between Dao and Qi. This unity could be analogically understood in terms of the unity of the ground and the figure in the sense of Gestalt psychology.27 I attempt to use these two categories Dao and Qi to develop a line of thought that deviates from the understanding of a universal technics, and to demonstrate that this thought has its own history, indeed demands such a history if it is to have a possible future. Yet, this is only the beginning of a long journey. I think that if we want to go beyond modernity, and if the non-modern is to mean something beyond the modern’s mere reverse, or that which negatively adheres to the modern, then the persistence of the non-modern has to be understood as a transformative power, which allows, or at least serves a starting point, for the reopening of a technodiversity.
 
Footnotes
1
Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’, in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry Vol. 10, History and Politics (trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews), New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1962, p.28.
 
2
See Gilbert Simondon, ‘The Two Fundamental Modes of Relation Between Man and the Technical Given’, in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (trans. Cecilia Malaspina and John Rogove), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp.103–27.
 
3
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (ed. Bernard Williams), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.119.
 
4
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (trans. Catherine Porter), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
 
5
‘Modernités plurielles de 1905 à 1970’, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 23 October 2013–26 January 2015.
 
6
See Enrique Dussel, Filosofias del Sur: Descolonización y Transmodernidad, Mexico: Akal and Inter Pares, 2016.
 
7
Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p.39.
 
8
Here, Foucault defines an episteme as follows: ‘In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.’ M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p.183.
 
9
E. Dussel, ‘Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol.1, no.3, 2012, p.37, available at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6591j76r (last accessed on 20 January 2021).
 
10
Ibid. Emphasis original.
 
11
See Yuk Hui, ‘§25, Anamnesis of the Postmodern’, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2016/2019, pp. 269–82; Y. Hui, ‘The Inhuman that remains’, Recursivity and Contingency, London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019, pp.233–78.
 
12
See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; it is said that the report itself was a response to another report authored by Simon Nora and Alain Minc under the title L’informatisation de la société, a report to then President of France Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, later translated into English as The Computerization of Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981.
 
13
See Y. Hui, ‘Towards a Relational Materialism. A Reflection on Language, Relations and the Digital’, Digital Culture & Society, vol.1, no.1, pp.131–47.
 
14
The postmodern as episteme was instead elaborated by Jean-Louis Déotte. See J.-L. Déotte, ‘Ce que je dois à Foucault’, Appareil, no.4, 2010, available at http://journals.openedition.org/appareil/913 (last accessed on 22 March 2021).
 
15
Here I would like to thank my friend Walter D. Mignolo for confirming my claim.
 
16
E. Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the Myth of Modernity (trans. Michael D. Barber), New York: Continuum, 1995.
 
17
Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, On Time and Being (trans. Joan Stambaugh), New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco and London: Harper & Row, 1972, p.59.
 
18
See Y. Hui, ‘Machine and Ecology’, Angelaki, vol.25, no.4, 2020, pp.54–66.
 
19
M. Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’, Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. Albert Hofstadter), New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2001, p.115.
 
20
Arnold Toynbee, The World and the West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953, p.67.
 
21
See Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (trans. Janet Lloyd), Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
 
22
Ibid., p.32.
 
23
See Chao Yuan Ren’s library, hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, http://chaoyuenren.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/music01.htm (last accessed on 18 March 2021). Translation the author’s.
 
24
See Y. Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China, op. cit.
 
25
Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 1, Introductory Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.
 
26
J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956. However, whether Chinese thought is organismic in the sense Needham gave to it is another question.
 
27
This is further elaborated in Y. Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
 

 
On the Persistence of the Non-modern. By Yuk Hui.  Afterall. Spring/Summer 2021.

In his articles, lectures, and books, Hong Kong-based philosopher Yuk Hui shows how the philosophy of technology, once seen as a narrow and specialised field, opens an enormous, almost all-encompassing, range of topics. In a time marked by dystopian determinism – often cast in variants of transhumanist ideology – Hui calls for a fragmentation of the future in which a multitude of deeply different developments can cross-pollinate: His goal is to help understand and nourish the kind of dynamic openness that tends to get lost in a globalised technological monoculture. Going beyond the mere proliferation of technological gadgets and systems, such diversity involves rediscovering forgotten techniques as well as new ways of dealing with technology based on different purposes and ways of experiencing the world.

 

Hui’s work draws on both Eastern and Western philosophy, especially twentieth-century philosophers known for their thoughts on technology like Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, and Bernard Stiegler, as well as his early training as a computer engineer. Recently, his writing has increasingly taken on geopolitical issues. Technology unites the world, but it is also a topic well suited to discuss differences. In The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016), he made East Asia a testing ground for his concepts of technodiversity and cosmotechnics, which are pivotal to his technological approach to cultural difference. In his latest book, Art and Cosmotechnics (2021),Hui expands this project to involve artistic and aesthetic thought. Moving beyond the established premise that new technologies transform artistic practices, Hui envisions another process: transforming technology through art. As he excavates the roots of our cultural history in order to probe the future, he shows us how, in the multifarious landscape of thought, art, and technology, a deeper transformation needs to be brought forth. If our desire to calculate everything has only succeeded in making the end predictable, then in order to regain the future we must nurture our relationship to the unknown.

 

AD : Art and Cosmotechnics, is a work about aesthetics, but the underlying premise comes not so much from art, but from the deepest interconnections between technology, philosophy, and geopolitics. The appeal of this combination is a strong sense that the future as such is at stake in thinking.

 YH : My point of departure is that we are living in the epoch of technology, but also that technology today constitutes an enormous metaphysical force that pushes us to an unknown destination which we are now more and more collectively experiencing as something catastrophic, for example, aggravating climate change, intensive competition of military technologies, and so on.

 AD : Yet every country on the planet strives for technological progress and the many new possibilities it offers, not least in Asia. Our desires for tangible improvements prove stronger than our somewhat vague fears or worries over technology. In pre-modern times, the old traditions were systematically valued higher than the new. How did we begin to value the new over the old?

 YH : Even if they are everywhere today, it is fair to say that modern technologies originate from Western thought. In the West, modern sciences were applied to technology at the beginning of the industrial revolution, until technoscience began to operate autonomously later on, changing everybody’s lives and becoming a planetary phenomenon. While it is true that technoscience and industrialisation created ruptures throughout Europe in modern times, there was still a certain continuity and a gradual development. This was not the experience in China and Japan, where the technological acceleration has been so much faster. In Asia you find a strong fascination with the modern, which still can be felt today, where technology really is an object of desire.

 AD : On the other hand, you have the geopolitical competition which you describe in The Question Concerning Technology in China. Even if fascination and desire help usher in modernisation, you point out that the deeper sources of the rapid change we see in Asia is historically Japan’s competition with the West and China’s efforts to supersede the West after the historical humiliation of the Opium Wars. The revolutionary changes transform everyday life and the social geography, but you explore the deeper cultural effects, a break with the past so drastic that it sometimes is experienced as a cultural breakdown. How does this affect philosophy?

 YH : The modernisation we have seen in China, in Japan, in India, and which is now happening in Africa, has completely transformed the landscape of thinking. You could say that it has changed the sensibility towards what is new and what is normal, but also that it makes traditional thought irrelevant. Today, when one asks how you apply the ancient moral philosophy of Confucianism to the question of sex robots, for instance, it might sound ridiculous, not only because they are from two different epochs, but also because firstly, the philosophical tradition didn’t treat technology thematically, and secondly, the technologies it has conceived were so different from Western technologies, epistemologically and ontologically. So, there is an incompatibility between the old and the new, between traditional thought and modern technologies, just as between Eastern and Western modes of thought. But instead of seeing it as an “unhappy consciousness,” I consider this incompatibility as precisely what can give rise to new possibilities: to transform our technologies, our thinking, and our thinking about technology.

 AD : The unhappy consciousness, as Hegel saw it, is a kind of powerless criticism where the freedom of thought, which senses that things could be otherwise, nonetheless comes up against what seems to be unbending realities. To get out of such an impasse, you often bring up the need for what you call “technodiversity.” With the call for diversity you seem to imply that for all the varieties of gadgets and systems, we suffer under a technological monoculture – not just in technologies that are globally ubiquitous and interconnected, but in a certain mindset that underpins them.

 YH : Exactly, ever since the modern technological developments began in the 18th century and the industrial revolution, the logic of technology hasn’t changed very much. It revolves around what we – with Weber, Marcuse, or Habermas – would call rationalisation, which involves a calculative and instrumental use of reason to control the surroundings; it is a form of domination. That also resonates with Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology. He drew up a distinction between the ancient Greek techne and modern technology, whose essence he named gestell– meaning that everything is regarded as a resource, or standing reserve, to be exploited. It is also in modern technology that Heidegger sees the end or completion of Western philosophy or Western metaphysics. This end comes about as thinking increasingly becomes a matter of calculation, while at the same time the technoscience which originally sprung forth in Europe becomes planetarised.

 AD : In Art and Cosmotechnics, you devote much more attention to the ancient Greeks and to Taoism in the East than to discussions on contemporary art, artificial intelligence, and high-tech. This is perhaps not what people immediately expect when they hear talk about the relationship between art and technology, since in most people’s minds “technology” is squarely identified with new technologies, instruments, and systems.

 YH : Today, in almost every university around the world, people want to work on arts and technology, and it happens in departments of engineering just as much as in art schools. Lots of funding is channeled into the emerging new fields of art and technology, exploring things like virtual reality and artificial intelligence. In Asia, in particular, we have seen lot of discourse on arts and technology. Some decades ago, in Europe, we saw what is called new media arts – and the interest in new technologies has been going on intensely for decades. Yet it seems to me that the relation between art and technology is not yet determined.

 We could perhaps say that there are two dominant ways of thinking here. The first simply regards technology as a tool and adopts new technologies to do art, such as what we see now with virtual reality, augmented reality, Metaverse, etc. This is the common perspective on art and technology, even for laymen. For artists, new technologies provide new ways of making art more interactive and more means to access the art market, for example the current hype of NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

 AD : These NFTs not only use blockchain to guarantee the authenticity of artworks, but can also make buyers shareholders in a work of art, attempting to create communities of shared ownership to empower the artist. At the same time, the speculative side of art is encouraged even further. Adopting a new technology is more than just using a new tool, since the tool tends to radically change the nature of what you are doing.

 YH : Such observations give rise to a second approach, which we find exemplified already in Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility [1935]. Whereas his colleagues Horkheimer and Adorno worried about art becoming an industrial product – something commercial, seductive, and shallow, cultural commodities for deceiving the mass – Benjamin tried to say something very different. Instead of questioning whether photography or film is art, he suggested asking how photography and cinema transform the concept of art itself. From this materialist point of view, the concept of art has to be renewed constantly. I would say that these two views, technology as an artistic instrument and as a materialist power transforming art, dominate in the common as well as the intellectual understanding of art and technology today. Benjamin’s great text once had a revolutionary potential, since it rejects existing categorisations of art, but now it might have become dogmatic in a way. Maybe it is time we turn the question around. What if we don’t just ask how technology transforms the concept of art, but instead try to do the opposite and ask how art can transform technology? I want to make this question a turning point, to see if it will allow us to peek into a new field of possibilities, to readdress the relationship between art, technology, and thinking.

  

AD ; Does this mean reviving through technology the utopian potential of art that the avant-garde was hoping for: a transformation of our world in a time when it is increasingly dominated by our technologies?

 YH : Yes, I think this is precisely how I have been trying to rethink the avant-garde. Technology and art have tended to be seen as separate, but now with the great emphasis on technology and art, and all the energy and talent that go into it, there might be a possibility to make some changes. Otherwise, we’ll just keep on pursuing what is new while following the same logic.

 AD : In exploring the relation between art and technology in the East, you go back to some of the most traditional art forms. How can these ancient traditions be brought to life and really make a difference in a modern world?

 YH : In the context of East Asia, there have been a lot of efforts to preserve traditional thinking, not just in the philosophy departments, but also, for example, through the popularisation of Chinese classics and so forth. Such preservation is not oriented towards the future, but the past. It is the same in the arts, where there is a lot of emphasis on traditional craftsmanship, also.

 AD : Such efforts at reintegrating tradition was also central to the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe – as well as in regional schools of design today.

 YH : Similarly, in China today, we have seen a revival of Shanshui painting. The name literally means “mountain and water,” which is the term for traditional Chinese landscape painting. Historically, one way of modernising tradition would be to try to absorb the Western art of the 20th century. Academies sent people to Paris and Berlin to learn painting and tried to integrate realist painting in Chinese traditions. It contributed to the creation of styles and exchange of skills, but not much beyond. In the revival of Shanshui painting today, there is also a desire to live in the mountain and water environment in retreats, seeking a kind of zen spirituality, but this opportunity is often only available to the ultra-rich or burnt-out nihilists. In an effort to integrate technologies, there have even been international competitions to design Shanshui cities – mountain and water urban projects.

 AD : Are you implying that all these attempts at integrating past and future, the East and West, remain too superficial?

 YH ; Their failure testifies to an unelaborated incompatibility. But if traditions are incompatible with modern technologies and modern life, this incompatibility can also generate new thought. The question is how to elaborate it. In China, Shanshui painting was an intellectual art, just as tragedy in the West was always considered intellectual. Ever since Baumgarten declared aesthetics a kind of cognition, but of an inferior kind, it would never be seen as something as clear and distinct as logic; Leibniz famously termed this un-conceptualisable experience “je ne sais quoi.” We can also take note of the fact that Kant defined the beautiful negatively, as purposiveness without purpose, as pleasure without interest. One thing I tried to do in Art and Cosmotechnics is to elevate aesthetics to logic, or, more precisely, recursive logic – the continuation of my previous work Recursivity and Contingency [2019]. For example, in the philosophy of tragedy, a distinct tragic logic has been developed after Aristotle in the West by Schelling, Hegel, and others. For this tradition, I employ the concept tragist. In the same vein, I am searching for a logic of Shanshui painting, or a Daoist logic. Shanshui landscape painting builds on oppositions, like that which falls and that which rises, the visible and the invisible, but they are oppositions which are at the same time continuous and in harmony.

 AD : It is also interesting that you point out how Chinese art seeks to evade the strong emotions and sad passions of tragedy, giving a preference to harmony, and to “blandness,” as the French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien has emphasised in his book In Praise of Blandness (1991/2007).

 YH : During a symposium in London in 2016, I had a panel discussion with François Jullien. We were asked why there is nothing resembling tragedy in China. Jullien answered that it is because the Chinese have developed a thinking (pensée) to avoid tragedy. The problem with this statement, interesting as it may be, is that the Chinese can hardly try to avoid tragedy, since they didn’t know what it was. The fact is that Chinese culture was no soil to Greek tragedy; this has been discussed by authors such as Jean-Pierre Vernant and George Steiner, among many others.

 Some people would misread Jullien’s response and see him as culturalist, or even an orientalist, ascribing an essential mentality to certain regions or peoples. Even my own books have been misread this way, when people refuse to read the book and judge from the title. The fact is that when I speak of Chinese thought, I am trying to find out how one can start out from a locality and, by identifying the incompatibilities, to help a new thinking emerge. This is what I term the individuation of thinking in Art and Cosmotechnics.

 AD : How should we understand what you call individuation here?

 YH : I use this term in the sense of Gilbert Simondon. He saw it as a process of formation, which can take place even in lifeless nature as in crystals, and evidently there is individuation when a plant or animal takes shape, as well as in the development of psychological humans or social structures. If we look at Simondon’s example of crystals of sodium chloride, that is salt, they take shape in a saturated solution in water. Before this happens there is a moment of instability with a lot of tension, with incompatibilities between positive and negative ions. Then [the solution] reaches a threshold – for instance, if you heat it up – where crystallisation begins. We see a restructuration where crystals germinate and spread, where information is distributed, until the solution has fully crystallised. Simondon insists that this model of tension, threshold, and restructuration can be applied also to living beings, to psychological and social processes. My idea is that the differences or incompatibilities between the old and the new, the tensions between the East and the West, could be appropriated from a height which allows individuation to take place, and also a new vision for art and technology. Indeed, for myself, it is inevitable to be a tragist Daoist or a Daoist tragist.

 AD : So, we have to think of a plethora of technologies and arts, each with different roots and corresponding traditions of thought and interpretation, while maintaining that they can be compared as different approaches to the same, or at least similar enough to be brought into a fruitful dialogue?

 YH : There are of course millions of technologies in the world, and if you set out to describe them and their differences you become a sociologist or an anthropologist. That is why the philosopher searches for something more essential, like Martin Heidegger claimed at the beginning of his essay The Question Concerning Technology [1954]. In Heidegger’s text on art The Origin of the Work of Art [1935-37/1950], which was written almost at the same time as Benjamin’s essay, he emphasises that for the ancient Greeks, both art and technology are described by the same concept of techne. Art and technology have another concept in common, namely that of poiesis, bringing forth – a process which has a certain telos, a goal. To Heidegger, this means that in techne one experiences the unconcealment of Being. Modern technology, whose essence Heidegger calls Gestell, still has the possibility of unconcealment, albeit in the form of what he calls “challenging” [Herausforderung], namely a confrontation, something overwhelming, even catastrophic. Technology, which is increasingly about making all thought into a form of calculation ends up revealing and provoking the incalculable, for example, in the uncanny and disastrous possibilities like Fukushima and Chernobyl. That is why I see Heidegger as a tragist.

 AD : We have perhaps regarded technology in this way in the Western world ever since the Greeks. They dreamed up the origin of fire, the first technology, in the tragic destiny of the titan Prometheus, who stole it from Zeus and the gods of Olympus. We seem to always suspect technologies as a transgression, something dangerous, that gives mastery, but which might also lead to enslavement. Are we still thinking tragically about technology in the West? And what is the essence of the tragic here?

 YH : We see ourselves as rebellious, but we also see ourselves as suffering – as suffering from the fate in which one has no choice. One form of tragist gesture would be that of Goethe’s Prometheus from his poem written between 1772 and 1774, where he has Prometheus say to Zeus that “you can go away as you like, the earth will still go on,” because Prometheus has created humans in his own image. In the tragic world, you cannot stop in front of contradictions, but must rather take your destiny upon yourself; the essential tragic gesture is to go all the way.

 AD : That notion is interesting because this is exactly the rhetoric of the new Prometheans – the transhumanists and ecomodernists in California. New technological possibilities have to be explored and implemented because it is our destiny to always advance further, irrespective of the direction. When climate change sets in because of our domination of earth, we need to dominate it even more, use more technology to control the climate and the weather. In one of your essays on technodiversity, you even warn us about the temptation to cast ourselves as tragic heroes in the fight against environmental disasters – a position which leads us not only toward hubris, but also to postures of tragic defeat.

 YH : This rhetoric you mentioned is of course problematic, but it is not tragist; it is only tragic. That is why I avoid the word tragic and use tragist instead, which means taking up technologies as necessary things, precisely so that we can change them. This is what Bernard Stiegler wanted to do in his life – and in this sense he was a real tragist. For him, it was crucial that we cannot turn our backs on the knowledge that generated modern technology. Only by seeing it as necessary can we begin the work of transforming it.

 AD : In your discussions of Taoist or Shanshui logic, you circle around the concept of the unknown. Can the unknown help us to regain our future as something open, as it should be – rather than something catastrophic?

 It is clear to me – and this is no longer a question, it is a postulate – that what Heidegger calls Being is the unknown. The unknown is the incalculable, which is more than incomputable because the incomputable is a mathematical concept opposed to the computable, meaning reducible to an algorithm. In Western philosophy, the unknown is an old topic; it implies immediately the limit of knowing, going back to Socrates, who says that he “knows that he does not know.” In Eastern thought, however, the unknown is really fundamental. In my book, Art and Cosmotechnics, I begin with the words of the Daodejing: “The dao that can be said is not the eternal dao/ The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” However, this is not just mystification, just like Wittgenstein talks about the mystic [das Mystische] without committing to any mystification.

 AD : With him, as perhaps in the Dao-dejing, it had to do with the limits of knowledge, but also with knowledge about limits, for instance, the limits of language. But it had little to do with withdrawal to tradition, or irrationalism for that matter.

 YH : For this reason, I attempted to articulate what I call an epistemology of the unknown, which is a kind of paradoxical concept because the unknown as such remains unknowable, so that no epistemology will be applicable. However, one engages with the unknown even knowing that it is impossible to know it, or one assumes that one will know it one day. But only through the awareness of its existence and contradiction is one able to establish a plane of consistency with the unknown.

 AD : For Deleuze, such a “plane of consistency” is a minimal requirement for thought to be possible, or for thinking about something at all. How can it help us approach the unknown, or even the unknowable?

 YH : “Undemonstrability” also conditions the consistency of spiritual life. For example, we cannot demonstrate the existence of God, but through religious practice and institutions one is able to create a plane of consistency; one can find in poetry an extraordinary experience of the unknown, through the unconventional use of language, the breaking apart of words, and so on.

 AD : If our access to an open and unknown future begins with different potential futures at a local level, where traditions meet modern technologies, it follows that the contradictions and incompatibilities are different in each region. You engage not only with the past and future of China, but also with Latin America, Russia, and also with Indigenous knowledge. How are your ideas about the local connected to what you call “planetary thinking?”

 YH : In the very last paragraph of my book on cybernetics, Recursivity and Contingency, I propose a post-European philosophy. And I should repeat what I said there: this is a collective task. When Heidegger says that cybernetics – the triumph of calculation – marks the end of European philosophy, he also means that there will be a post-European philosophy and this post-European philosophy is called “thinking.” So, this is also a moment to think about the landscape of thought, where thinking has always been limited to a region. We are confined in an eighteenth-century concept of culture and nationality; even the most radical thinkers unconsciously label their thinking according to nationalities.

 I want to engage with people from different regions to think about this from their perspective and from their locality, but not nationality. When I say a post-European thinking, I’m not saying anything against Europe because I believe that Europe also needs to go beyond this European thinking. A new philosophy for Europe, even within Europe itself, cannot simply import Taoism or Buddhism, but must have the courage to confront incompatibility and see how individuation can take place. This is the first sense of planetary thinking, a thinking based on diversities, namely biodiversity, noodiversity (i.e. diversity of thought), and technodiversity.

 To think about the planetary, especially when we talk about that which we found in Hegel or in Carl Schmitt, it is still very much based on the nation state and the necessity of enemies. I think it necessary to think with theorists like Schmitt, but also to think beyond such political realism. If we follow realpolitik to the end, we are going to end up with catastrophes because political realism means relentless military and economic competition.

 AD : The term realpolitik was coined by Ludwig von Rochau, a journalist and politician who wrote about political realism in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848. He was worried about his fellow idealists, revolutionaries, and radicals who believed that moral arguments and claims of injustice could really change the political landscape, and felt responsible to remind them that 99 per cent of all politics was determined by the logic of power. And that if you don’t have that in mind, you will not succeed with your 1 per cent of moral persuasion – or an artistic attempt to change people’s sensibilities for that matter. Against the utility and sheer power of technology, art seems to be a weak and feeble force. So, the question is: How is art supposed to influence or change a force of such magnitude?

 YH : I appreciate that you mention realpolitik and the relation between it and my own project. When realpolitik is put at the front, there are hardly alternatives available, since even the most basic things for making changes are conditioned by this same realpolitik. On the other hand, this might also equally mean that we still don’t think, or we failed to think. I believe this is probably the reason we still study and teach philosophy today. We should not underestimate or undermine the power of thinking in a time when the real is so poorly understood.

 Planetary Thinking :  Philosopher Yuk Hui asks how art can transform technology.  By Anders Dunker. Kunstkritikk , November 19,  2021.

In his book  On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui drew on his background as a computer engineer and programmer to investigate digital entities like computer viruses, video clips, algorithms, and networks. In the foreword to the book, the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler described Hui’s thinking as a “generous and open theoretical milieu for exploration of human experience in connection to the infosphere.” A distinctive trait of Hui’s philosophy is its combination of Eastern thought with the European philosophical tradition. In The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016), Hui analyzes China’s hyper-rapid modernization in light of its long history of technological development and its relationship to the West. His most recent book, Recursivity and Contingency (2019), explores cybernetics and its merging of the artificial and the natural — i.e., machines and organisms. More than mere reflection, the philosophy of history underlying Hui’s work can be read as a program for practical change.

 After a video-call with Hui in Hong Kong, where he was teaching aesthetics, I met with him in Los Angeles, where we continued our conversation on a visit to the Griffith Observatory, with its fitting double view of metropole and cosmos. In our discussion, Hui demonstrated his wide range of interests and his singular capacity to focus on philosophical problems in order either to solve them or to move beyond them. As the conversation unfolded, we continued over video-call, this time from Berlin, where Hui now lives and teaches.

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 ANDERS DUNKER: In your book about technology in China, you discuss the concept of “sinofuturism” — a Chinese vision of the future that is distinctively different from the one we have in the West. At the same time, you point out that China is becoming more like the West and thus risks cutting ties with its own traditions. You describe the new relationship between the Occident and the Orient as a “dis-orientation.” What does this process entail?

 
YUK HUI: The Greeks made a distinction between the Occident, which Germans still call das Abendland, and the Orient. What counts as Occident and Orient has changed many times. For the Greeks, the Orient was Egypt and Persia, not China and Japan. Geographical orientation was also a technical issue, because it was only through novel navigational instruments that the West discovered the globe. From the 16th century onward, China and Japan found themselves lagging behind the West in technology and knowledge. As a direct consequence, the empires of the East were at last forced to open their gates and accept the colonizing powers of the West. China wasn’t conquered by the writings, values, or ideas of Europeans, it was conquered by technological discoveries and inventions. If we look at the history of East Asia (say, Korea, China, and Japan) we see that each of these countries at some point decided that they wanted to “catch up with the West.” One of the reasons was warfare — competition and military activities were closely connected to colonization. In fact, China started modernizing only after defeat in the opium wars against the British Empire at the end of the 19th century.

 AD : Being defeated often means you have to copy the conquering enemy. Must we accept this logic when it comes to modernization, no matter how much we want to reject cultural imperialism and a universal history wherein some countries and regions are more advanced while others lag behind?

 YH : Let us remember that Oswald Spengler, in Man and Technics (1931), remarks that Europeans made a major mistake in exporting their technologies to other countries at the end of the 19th century. In his opinion, Europeans should have kept their technologies to themselves to make sure they kept their lead. That Japan vanquished Russia in 1905 was a signal that they might soon have the power to surpass the West in technological capacity.

 AD : For centuries, Japan resisted direct competition with the West — for instance, limiting their artilleries to bows and arrows and banning guns for over 200 years to protect traditional samurai sword fighting. Isn’t it striking that Japan started modernizing only after American warships forced them to open up for world trade?

 YH : The West needed hundreds of years to modernize. Japan completed the task in record time, moving from the middle ages to hypermodernity in 150 years. The same goes for China. Martin Heidegger wrote in the 1940s that only when communism comes to power in China will technology be “free.” What does he mean by that? Free means that it can be everywhere — that there is no longer any resistance. Heidegger talks about a technological planetarization. He says that civilization as such will be based on Western European thought, since non-European cultures haven’t managed to resist European technology. There is little point in writing local history and bolstering up regional traditions if you don’t know what to do when Google enters the world stage. Typically, you withdraw and defend your culture against the new technology, or you marginalize yourself as a subaltern. What has happened in globalization is that Western cultures have infiltrated other cultures and turned them upside down.

 AD : For a long time, as you point out in your book, China had a higher technological level than the West. And yet, China’s modernization still followed a Western blueprint. Did the world lose the opportunity to see an authentically Chinese modernity?

 YH : This is the big question. It was meticulously examined by the great sinologist and philosopher of technology Joseph Needham, who was a world-famous biochemist before he became a sinologist, writing and editing a great work in 26 volumes called Science and Civilisation in China (1954–2016). The question he asked was: If we accept that certain sciences were more advanced in China and the East than in the West before the 16th century, what were the crucial conditions that stopped China from developing modern technology and science? I have tried to ask this question in a different way. If we assume instead that China and Europe moved in two different directions in their scientific development, we can also avoid saying that one part of the world is ahead of the other.

 AD : Still, the act of resisting technological change means lagging behind, even in our times. Is there any viable alternative to the planetarization of technology — what you call a synchronization of the history of technology?

 YH : Instead of a universal history describing one technology with various stages of development, we can step back for a moment and instead describe technological development as involving different cosmotechnics. I call this technodiversity. Here, we must revisit the question of locality, which doesn’t necessarily entail that we take part in a discussion of ethnic groups and ideologies: Aryan, German, Russian, or whatever. We must rather think of locality in terms of systems of knowledge. Michel Foucault called knowledge systems epistemes and understood them as ways of life — ways of sensing and ordering experience, producing in turn certain forms of knowledge. Foucault emphasizes different epistemes in European history and orders them into epochs: Renaissance knowledge, classical knowledge, and modern knowledge. In his famous article “What is Enlightenment?” — which he prepared before his death in 1984 — he says that we also can understand knowledge as a way of thinking and feeling, as a sensibility.

 AD : In other words, different places and times have their own epistemes. What would it take for this diversity not to be effaced by the complete synchronization of cultural development?

 YH  : First, we must recognize the diversity; then we must develop it further. Let me give you an example. I grew up in Hong Kong. My father had a Chinese pharmacy where he sold plants and herbs. Chinese pharmacists walk mountain paths collecting herbs to be made into medicines. Making medicine is a complicated procedure: some plants must first be treated, to extract the poisonous substances they contain, before they can be made beneficial to human health. Chinese medicine is based on Daoist cosmology, with Yin, Yang, and five kinds of Qi. If, from a Western perspective, you approach a Chinese doctor and ask, “Can you please show me your Qi and prove that this energy exists?” the answer would have to be no. If you can’t prove the existence of the energy at the base of your practice, how can you say that you practice a science? Here lies the problem.

 But this doesn’t mean that Chinese medicine isn’t scientific. As an empirical science, it has functioned for 2,000 years based on a different epistemology. For a long time in Hong Kong, Chinese medicine has been ranked lower than Western medicine. If you go to a Chinese doctor, it won’t be covered by your health insurance because Chinese medicine is seen as unscientific.

 AD : Is this how Western technology establishes itself as universal, by monopolizing credibility and marginalizing what is different?

 YH : Here we must be careful. I am not aiming to pit the relative against the universal, or see the particular in contrast to the universal, as philosophy often has done. I would rather point out that the universal is just one dimension of what is. You and I are both humans, but we are individual and different humans. In the same way, technology has some universal traits: from an anthropological perspective, technology is an extension of the body and an externalization of memory. But these gestures don’t work in the same way in all cultures. Chinese writing and the Latin alphabet are both externalizations of memory, but they are still extremely different. Chinese pictogram has a very different philosophical foundation compared to Western phonogram.

 Derrida tried to explore this difference in On Grammatology (1967) in terms of a philosophy of relation versus a philosophy of substance — Leibniz versus Hegel — but he didn’t carry it further. Writing is a system for both memory and education of sensibility, and it can also be seen as a technology to preserve the distinctiveness of our culture. We cannot say which is better than the other. For the same reason, I don’t claim that Chinese medicine is better, but that different systems have different merits. If you have cancer, you might have to remove the tumor immediately, using surgery, because it can spread aggressively. Afterward, Chinese medicine can help you recover your health and strength.

 AD : Even granting that technological diversity has its advantages, is simply promoting diversity enough to combat the impending and fatal ecological disaster that you think synchronous technological development is causing? Isn’t it also necessary to change our technologies en bloc on a global scale?

 YH : Western thinking always draws a distinction between good and bad, and seeks to remove what is deemed bad. We want to implement everywhere only the good side of technology. Peter Sloterdijk distinguishes between a dangerous “allotechnics” manipulating nature and a good “homeotechnics” cooperating with it. Bernard Stiegler says that technology is always both a poison and a cure, and he wants to separate the good pharmakon from the bad pharmakon. The division between good and bad is a philosophical gesture that goes back to Plato. He presents the philosopher as a judge with the task of determining what is good for the people.

 For me, this is all very problematic. I don’t think we can come to a global agreement as to what is good and what is bad. Even if we have common problems we are trying to solve, that doesn’t mean there is a universal solution. There is no single way to respond to the collapse of ecosystems. We must understand that variation is a consequence of local adaptation. Biodiversity develops because of climatic variations, biological niches, and relations between particular plants, animals, and microorganisms. Something similar should hold for technologies. We need to explore the problem of the local, but we must be careful, since this is an extremely sensitive topic these days. Who is concerned with the local today? Marine Le Pen in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Aleksandr Dugin in Russia.

 AD : Dugin is influenced by a reading of Heidegger that tends to see technology as a tool for the spread of the moral hollowness he sees in liberal Western societies. To reject what is foreign and romanticize tradition seems an altogether obvious and dangerous mode of resistance.

 YH : Dugin misinterprets what Heidegger says. Heidegger doesn’t say that we should resist technology. He says that we mustn’t forget that there is also something else. This something else is the unconcealment of Being, which is forgotten in modern technology. Or, more precisely, the unconcealment in modern technology can only be carried out through a mode of challenging, of violence. With this statement, Heidegger abruptly ends his argument, but the way I understand him, he doesn’t call for a resistance to modern technology but rather a transformation of it. This transformation is at the same time a stepping back and a leap ahead.

 If we want to deepen our understanding of the local, we should perhaps give a fresh look at the pre-romantic German thinker Herder, as Peter Sloterdijk told me he aims to do in a forthcoming book. Herder was the origin of German nationalism with all it entails, because of what he writes about the spirit of the people — der Volksgeist. In one way, he was the inventor of “the people.” Herder’s ideas are dangerous, but if you don’t dare confront danger, as Heidegger says, you end up with catastrophe.

 AD : Herder was worried that everything distinctive and original would be erased through the course of history, as the exchange between cultures makes them all similar. He despaired that Europeans were all speaking French, were forgetting their national customs, and seemed to dislike their own history and traditions. Today we find the same process all over the world, evidenced not only by the rapid loss of languages but also by technological unification. Is the world inevitably becoming more and more homogeneous?

 YH : Herder defends difference: different ways of life, different languages, different aesthetics. All these differences he sees as irreducible, as something that can’t and shouldn’t be replaced by something more universal. At the same time, we need to remember that Herder is not only a thinker of the local also an early cosmopolitan thinker, maybe even in a more interesting and theoretically credible way than Kant, whose courses he has attended in Königsberg. We must have the local as our point of departure, Herder says, but the local doesn’t need to be exclusive.

 AD : So, we might aim for a universality that is inclusive of diversity? The Chinese philosopher Zhao Tingyang has suggested that the Chinese concept of tianxia — “all under heaven” — is precisely such a concept of inclusive universality.

 YH : The problem, as I see it, is that the concept of tianxia is only relevant as long as “Heaven” exists. And in a Chinese context, Heaven is Cosmos. Tianxia was the cosmotechnics of the Chinese government, connecting morality and the cosmos, legitimizing laws and practices (as well as the government itself). The emperor was called tianzi, the son of Heaven. As such, he had the legitimacy to be at the center of the political sovereignty, and to govern the people, including the fringe “barbarians.”

 AD : And what is cosmotechnics, exactly?

 YH : For the Greeks, “cosmos” means an ordered world. At the same time, the concept points to what lies beyond the Earth. Morality is first and foremost something that concerns the human realm. Cosmotechnics, as I understand it, is the unification of the moral order and cosmic order through technical activities. If we compare Greece and China in ancient times, we discover that they have very different understandings of the cosmos, and very different conceptions of morality as well. The arbitration between them also takes place in different ways, with different technologies. A cosmotechnics of the tianxia type is no longer possible in a time that no longer has a conception of “Heaven,” as people did in the past. Like other big nations, China has satellites orbiting the Earth. The heavens have become a secular place, utilized by humans, and can no longer play a role as a morally legitimizing power.

 AD : In Recursivity and Contingency, you speak about the need to “recosmicize the world.” You borrow this term from Augustin Berque, who pointed out that the modern world no longer has a cosmos, understood as a moral and meaningful order, and that colonization by the West has robbed other cultures of their distinctive conceptions of the cosmos. He says that the universe, as it is described in science, has nothing to do with the classical cosmos, since scientific explanation has no moral significance whatsoever. Does this mean that we are faced with the task of recosmicizing not only our world, but the universe itself? Is the universe, discovered by astronomy, still waiting to be given a proper moral significance?

 YH : When we think of astrophysics, we see the universe as a thermodynamic system that inexorably moves toward destruction and heat-death, where stars are nothing but basic elements in nuclear reactions and where their twinkling has nothing to do with us. In this sense, it seems absurd to recosmicize the Earth and the universe; it can’t lead to anything but superficial mysticism and naïveté. Astrophysics only informs us of certain facts about the universe. It has no ambitions of telling us how to live. What kind of life should we imagine in light of recent astrophysical discoveries? Physics has no ambition to answer these questions.

 “Recosmicizing” doesn’t mean giving some mystique back to the stars and cosmos, or giving technology a mystical meaning, but rather understanding that we must develop ways of life that solve the conflict between modern science and tradition, between technology and mysticism — whether we choose to talk about the Chinese Dao or Heidegger’s Sein. We must give the non-rational a place in a culture that is otherwise rational — the way, for example, that poetry gives the unknown a place in communication through an unconventional and paradoxical use of language. Art and philosophy can’t choose science as their point of departure. If they do, they become footnotes to positivism. They should not abandon science either, but rather tend to it and show the way to other modes of understanding the world. To paraphrase Georges Canguilhem, we must return technology to life.

 AD : What about people who want to develop new technologies in order to establish a new life in outer space? Does this also represent a cosmotechnics? For instance, the rocket billionaires, Bezos and Musk, who dream of colonies in space and a colonization of Mars?

 YH : There is a great passage in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882), where he talks about “the horizon of the infinite.” It describes the moderns who have abandoned land for the pursuit of the infinite, yet, when they are in the middle of the ocean, there is nothing more fearful than the infinite — there is no more home to return to. The desire of the moderns, described by Nietzsche, continues to produce an effect of disorientation, while the sentiment that there is no longer any home to return to provides a huge market for psychotherapy and spiritual salvation. The longing for the infinite transports us toward the inhuman.

 For Jean-François Lyotard, there are both positive and negative infinities, which are connected to different forms of rationality. Positive inhumanity captures us in rigid technological systems, like we see in China with the social credit system. The positive inhuman is one that is “more interior in myself than me” — for example, God for St. Augustine. We humans carry something inhuman in us, which is irreducible to the human and which maintains the highest intimacy with us. At the outset of his book L’Inhumain (1998), Lyotard asks if the ultimate goal for science is not that of preparing for the death of the sun, which, granted, lies unimaginably in the future, but which also entails the destruction of all living beings on Earth.

 Rocket billionaires, who are all transhumanists, want to overcome finitude: the finitude of human life and of life as such. This longing for the infinite also implies no limit to capital accumulation. Overcoming human limitations — the search for eternal life — also implies an infinite market. In a way, the same happens in space exploration: investors want to profit from the Earth losing its meaning, as if leaving the planet were a matter of leaving one spaceship to enter another. I don’t think it is wrong to explore, or to try to understand the universe, but the conquest we see today seems to me to be merely a preparation for tomorrow’s consumerism. Transhumanists impose on us a false choice because they connect the question of the future of human existence with the question of immortality and describe Earth as a mere spacecraft.

AD : In your last book, there is a passage about the secularization of space in which you mention that Elon Musk has launched his Tesla roadster into orbit around the sun. You see this as the first step in the commercialization of the cosmos and the next step as mining on other planets, effectively reducing them to mere natural resources, raw material.

 YH : As far as I’m concerned, Elon Musk can send his car into space or even travel to Mars, but we should not believe that these projects are the necessary next step in a certain technological development. This doesn’t mean that I see travel in outer space as irrelevant or dangerous in itself. Humankind has speculated for a long time about what is out there among the twinkling stars. It is the same curiosity that has brought forth science and technology. The progressives choose science and the reactionaries choose tradition, but we can also choose to follow a third path — the way of thinking.

 I have meticulously followed this third path by asking if we can begin from a cosmological perspective and find new ways of coexisting that will allow us to transform modern technology. My aim is not to refuse modern technology nor to see it as a cause for uprootedness, but rather to see the irreconcilability of technology and science with tradition as something fruitful, as a gesture I call “tragist.” This is a main subject of my new book Art and Cosmotechnics [published by the University of Minnesota Press in May]. The discrepancy can be fertile soil for new thinking. In The Question Concerning Technology in China, I try to find out how we can deploy Chinese philosophy to enable ourselves to think differently about the contradiction between tradition and modern technology. I hope to derive a Chinese technological thought from an interpretation of Qi and Dao, which should not be understood as mystical concepts but rather as frameworks for thinking about our relationship to the nonhuman — to the 10,000 beings that Lao-Tse talks about —  whereby the use of technology must follow Dao, as a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of life.

 AD : Since the Renaissance, nature has often been reduced to something solely material and mechanical that can be manipulated through human cunning. Is there a credible Western alternative to such a mechanistic worldview and its associated instrumental rationality?

 YH : Romantics and idealists in Kant’s time felt a need for something different from the mechanistic legacy of Descartes. They found a new metaphor in the “organism.” What we have here is an idealization of the organic, which also manifests itself in Kant’s cosmopolitan philosophy. The idea is that if a country misbehaves, it will be punished by losing the respect of other countries. More concretely, it will be subjected to boycotts and embargoes. The interests of trade make international politics into a self-regulating, organic system.

 AD : In Recursivity and Contingency, you explicitly read Kant’s organic thinking as an early form of cybernetic theory. Heidegger famously pointed out that cybernetics was about to take over our thinking, or at least the philosophical form of thought that seeks to reflect upon the world and play an active role in history. How could the idea of organic self-regulating systems look so promising and inclusive at first, and yet end up becoming such a threat to philosophy?

 YH : Cybernetics was promoted as an attempt to transcend the many contradictions of science. Hans Jonas, a pupil of Heidegger, discusses this in his book The Phenomenon of Life (1966). He said that with cybernetics we have, for the first time, a unified theory that is not dualistic. Instead of thinking in terms of logical contradictions, we think in terms of processes: inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. In the 20th century, organicist thinking was further elaborated in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, but it also became a part of the practical development of technology. Two centuries after Kant wanted to save philosophy from the mechanical by recourse to the organic, this way of thinking has become a part of technology. Using organic thinking, based on technology, to criticize modern technology becomes a fallacy — a misplaced fallacy, as Whitehead would say. When the organic already has merged with technology, cybernetic thinking has come to an end.

 AD : Do we end up in a position where a critique of technology functions as part of the same technological system — i.e., where criticism becomes just another piece of input, another feedback loop programmed into the machinery? If we really think cybernetically, when we repair or upgrade a machine, program, or mechanism, are we not also becoming a part of the machinery, an instrument for its improvement?

 YH : Yes, according to what we call second-order cybernetics, humans and machines are connected in a recursive movement, which becomes an instance of what Hegel calls a master-slave dialectic.

 AD :  For Hegel, this dialectic was about power, knowledge, and recognition. The master exploits the slave for work and services. But who is the master and who is the slave here?

YH : Machines are slaves but at the same time masters because human beings have to service them and come to depend on them. Once we look at ourselves as servants of machines, we arrive at what Hegel calls unhappy consciousness. To overcome unhappy consciousness, we need either a Hegelian reconciliation or a Nietzschean will to power. At the moment, however, there is difficulty in gaining recognition from machines unless we hardcode them to unconditionally subordinate themselves to us; this is what has been proposed in so-called “AI-ethics.”

 AD : For us to have a real choice with respect to the growing influence of new technologies, we also need to assume that technological evolution isn’t determined — that is, that we could have developed radically different technologies than those we have today. Are we really free to choose and shape tomorrow’s technologies?

 YH : History is contingent, which means simply that it could have been otherwise. If the Mongols had conquered the whole world, we would have a different world history, and probably another understanding of history as such. In light of this, it’s important to be open to different futures, to see numerous possibilities.

 That the conception we have about our technological future really matters in the present day is something I can illustrate with a personal experience. I recently gave a course in the philosophy of technology in Germany that had 25 students, mostly from the humanities. I asked them: “How do you see the future given the latest developments in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering?” Ninety percent of them said they found our future prospects despair-inducing. The reason is obviously that they have very determined ideas about the future — for instance, that they will be replaced by machines. They will have to upgrade themselves to find a place in society. Personally, I don’t think this needs to be the answer. We shouldn’t give in to such perspectives but rather actively resist them.

 AD : Isn’t technological determinism, so ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, just a lot of hype, as if to say: “These disruptions are on their way, so it’s better to get ahead of things than to bother resisting”?

 YH : This rhetoric is the reason why all these tech companies employ futurists. The worst is Ray Kurzweil, of course, who says that that the so-called singularity is near and by 2025 we will become immortal. I say it in all my books: we must not give in to this kind of deterministic propaganda from Silicon Valley.

 AD : What about Elon Musk’s research program, Neuralink, which aims to connect computers to the brain? What do you say to his argument that humans should upgrade themselves to stay relevant when artificial intelligence starts outperforming us?

 YH : It is very vague, if not illogical, to say that we need to be ahead of technology, since if the “we” is humanity, then it is constituted by technology itself. “We” will only find ourselves always being late. Human-machine interface research has existed for a long time, and the desire to perfect the human being (including intelligence, emotion, and lifespan) has been a major motivation for that research, also known as transhumanism. In the past, perfecting the human being was done through education — aesthetic training, physical discipline, intellectual development, et cetera. In Musk’s vision, education will be replaced by a brain-microchip apparatus. This undermines the idea of Enlightenment humanism because microchips, instead of reason, are to mediate between the human mind and its world.

 AD : So where do we go from here?

 YH : Human beings have created a problematic decision for themselves: “to cut” or “to connect.” Biotechnology is introducing a new eugenics, which is at the core of 21st-century biopolitics. Enhancement of intelligence suggests better chances for employment and success. If you remember the famous Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell (1995), the anarchists who decided to cut were finally raided and transformed into cyborgs.

 AD : So, what is the message here — is the general idea that we don’t have a choice to disconnect from these biopolitical networks and impending updates to our bodies and our lives?

 YH : Precisely because our idea of “progress” implies a historical movement toward a unified goal, it resists all fragmentation and diversity in evolution. As a consequence, freedom and democracy are placed under threat. On top of this, the ideology of Silicon Valley increasingly sees freedom and democracy as irreconcilable goals. This is the case, in particular, for the investor Peter Thiel: for him, there is no doubt that freedom first and foremost means economic freedom, freedom for multinational corporations. The enormous investments in biotech are a preparation for a time when ethical limitations will be overcome or set aside so that technologies of biological intervention can freely circulate in the market. This is a gigantic force that everyone feels, but nobody knows how it will manifest or how people will react. To me, this is the point where technodiversity becomes important and decisive. If we don’t manage to demonstrate that there are other alternatives, the transhumanist ideology will conquer the whole world.

 AD : Do globalized and ubiquitous technologies have to become universal, in the sense of being regarded as true, necessary, and binding?

YH : If you read Henry Kissinger’s article “How the Enlightenment Ends,” which appeared in a 2018 issue of The Atlantic, he discusses how the Enlightenment depended on the new technology of the printed word to spread its philosophy. Kissinger says that we now have technology that spreads itself, but which lacks a philosophy. This leads to the end of the Enlightenment. There is a blind spot in this argument, however — namely that the Enlightenment’s claim to universality persists, even after its end, in the guise of “technology.” In that sense, technology in itself becomes the universal. So, what we have to do is to radicalize Kissinger’s critique by rejecting this understanding of technological development as something given and predetermined — i.e., as something universal.

 AD : Still, shouldn’t we be able to accommodate the best of Enlightenment humanism, which educates us to reason and allows us to navigate between ourselves and the world?

 YH : Kissinger’s understanding of the Enlightenment is narrowly restricted to what we call the Age of Reason, which consisted in a fight against superstition, injustice, and poverty. The spread of Enlightenment ideals is important to understanding contemporary democracies. My response to Kissinger should not be understood as a claim against the Enlightenment. The problem, rather, is that, in his critique, he contributes to universalizing a dubious mentality. Kissinger’s article is an invitation to conceive of a new form of politics, a new form of technological globalization, and a new world order. Even if Kissinger’s article strikes a critical note, it leads us into a dangerous way of thinking, into a politics racing toward technological singularity, particularly with respect to military technology, surveillance, and administration. In the years to come, everything will revolve around artificial intelligence. China, Russia, and America all strive to be the leader in this field. This development cannot possibly be seen as a continuation of the Enlightenment. Technological singularity is a completely apocalyptic goal.

 AD : In this respect, do globalization and the synchronization of technology represent a world-historical level of risk? Are these factors present in the climate crisis, given that Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the by-products of modern technology? Can we call global warming a negative universality, as Dipesh Chakrabarty does, defining humanity by means of a common, grand-scale problem-complex?

 YH : What we now call the Anthropocene is a consequence of technological and industrial expansion after World War II. The basic premise for this period of growth was rapid industrialization. Industrialization over the last 70 years is the direct cause of global warming and the dawning of the Anthropocene. But that doesn’t imply that we can or should attempt to remove industry to try to solve our problems. We have become dependent on an industrial form of life, so the only conceivable solution is to change our industries.

 As Charles Fourier said in his time, we need to encourage a new industrial spirit. The kind of industrialization we have today is deeply problematic because it is so closely connected with industrial society. Constant abundance implies constant overproduction. If we look at agriculture, this is demonstrated flagrantly by the meat industry. Do we really need to eat this much meat? I don’t think so. When I grew up, I had chicken only once in a while, and I didn’t complain. We all know that the current industrial system is unsustainable.

 AD : Even those who promote organic agriculture emphasize that overproduction is harmful due to the development of monoculture and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, all of which contribute to the destruction of biological and cultural diversity. Would you consider a variety of local farming techniques to be an example of technodiversity?

 YH : Absolutely. If you want to avoid using pesticides, you will soon discover that there are a number of alternative approaches, including rotations of particular combinations of crops. There are also, for instance, specialized techniques of breeding certain insects that will eat harmful insects. This is technodiversity. My suggestion is that we organize a collective project to deliberate and discuss questions concerning technodiversity and the future of philosophy. And this is not a task for a single person — it is a task for a whole community.

 AD : Should we conceive of this community as planetary in size? Given that the problems we face are common to all, governance and decision-making regarding the development of technology is part of the destiny of the Earth itself. In your book about cybernetics, you also discuss James Lovelock and his Gaia theory. What is the relationship between your reconsideration of modern technologies and a planetary cybernetics?

 YH : Lovelock was a former NASA employee. He had worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory doing research on the atmosphere of Mars. Comparing the lifeless desert environment of Mars to the living Earth inspired him to develop his Gaia theory, which says that our planet works like a cybernetic system stabilizing itself through organic processes. He added another point: through technology we can “wake up Gaia.” Satellites and antennas, for instance, are technical extensions giving Gaia new senses and technological unity. We can start to understand its workings through intelligible feedback mechanisms. The early Lovelock was a cybernetician.

 Yet even with all of our satellites and antennae, we have yet to wake up Gaia. We have only just begun the technification of the Earth. Since cybernetics seems to transcend the divide between technology and nature, it is tempting to see it as a universal solution — a new universalism. If we really were to understand the Earth cybernetically, we would need to experiment with it, like a black box, where we find out, through trial and error, what works and what doesn’t. But how many times can we flirt with destroying the Earth in an effort to make that work? If we try to use cybernetic theory to solve environmental problems, we lose sight of the fact that our relationship to nature is integrally related to human sensibility, for which there is little room in cybernetics. When we think of humans and the Earth as a cybernetic system, we have already lost the world.
 
AD : How so?
 
YH : Because reducing the world is losing the world. This is what Heidegger calls forgetfulness of Being. Forgetfulness is not something that happens because we overlook Being, or because we fail to give Being a place in our understanding of the world, but rather because we think that the whole world is transparent and penetrable to our understanding — we think that everything can be calculated. The first thing we need to do is to reconsider the distinction between what is calculable and what is incalculable. Then we must learn anew how to approach the world as the Unknown.
  
On Technodiversity: A Conversation with Yuk Hui. By Anders Dunk. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 9, 2020.