“In this post I will revisit both Negarestani’s and Brassier’s Prometheanism, which implies a critique of all those philosophies that have been based on forms of Will and Voluntarism.”
“Our notions of voluntarism would arise out of the nominalist traditions of the late Middle Ages theology of such thinkers as John Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1288-1349) who inaugurated the modern secular separation of nature from the supernatural and the concomitant divorce of philosophy, physics, and ethics from theology that was reinforced by influential early modern figures such as Francisco Suarez (1548-1616).”
“St. Thomas Aquinas was a defender of Intellect as a guide to the Good, over the voluntarist notions of Will and the arbitrary interventions of God into human affairs by way of his absolute power.”
“As Pope Benedict XVI would remark “Duns Scotus developed a point to which modernity is very sensitive. It is the topic of liberty and its relation with the will and with the intellect. Our author stresses liberty as a fundamental quality of the will, initiating an approach of a voluntaristic tendency, which developed in contrast with the so-called Augustinian and Thomistic intellectualism. For St. Thomas Aquinas, who follows St. Augustine, liberty cannot be considered an innate quality of the will, but the fruit of the collaboration of the will and of the intellect.””
“William of Ockham would affirm the supremacy of the divine will over the divine intellect, and in doing so would encounter a problem: if universals are real (i.e. natures and essences exist in things as Aquinas said they did following Aristotle) then voluntarism cannot be true.”
“Ockham’s solution was unique: he simply denied of the reality of universals.”
“Ockham adopts a conceptualist position on universals: while the universal (or concept) exists in the mind beholding a certain particular, it does not exist in the particular itself. Because there are no universals or common natures, there can only be a collection of unrelated individuals (and arguably the rise of modern individualism). With universals removed from the picture, God is free to will as he chooses.”
““Voluntarism denotes those philosophers who generally agree, not only in their revolt against excessive intellectualism, but also in their tendency to conceive the ultimate nature of reality as some form of will, hence to lay stress on activity as the main feature of experience, and to base their philosophy on the psychological fact of the immediate consciousness of volitional activity.”
– Susan Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism”
“Nominalism and Voluntarism became eternal bedfellows from that time forward.”
“With universals removed humans, too, are free to do and make as they see fit.”
“For only what we make can we understand.”
“And in our age we are learning to re-engineer ourselves beyond the confines of those old theological norms that once constrained us to a false equilibrium, and thereby free to experiment in new modes of being and rationality. Beyond the balance lays the contingent realm of creation rather than possibilities, only the new Promethean dares to enter that medium of exchange.”
“The voluntarist understands free action as the uncaused expression of a “sovereign self”.”
“Brassier rejects this supernaturalist understanding of freedom, arguing that we should view freedom not as the determination of an act from outside the causal order, but as the self-determination by action within the causal order.”
“Ray Brassier in contradistinction to the above tells us that a modern Prometheanism “requires the reassertion of subjectivism, but a subjectivism without selfhood, which articulates an autonomy without voluntarism (471)””
“Brassier will go to the core of the conflict that Dupuy and Arendt see in such transhumanist discourses for human enhancement as breaking of the pact between the given and the made, the fragile equilibrium between human finitude as an ontological fact and its transcendence as Dasein.”
“He will put it pointedly: “Prometheanism denies the ontologisation of finitude” (478).”
“Brassier remarks our “self-objectification deprives us of the normative resources we need to be able to say that we ought to be this way rather than that” (383).”
“Brassier will bring everything round to his notions of subjectivation from which he started: that a modern Prometheanism “requires the reassertion of subjectivism, but a subjectivism without selfhood, which articulates an autonomy without voluntarism (471)”.”
“Such is the great task before us, Brassier remarks, a new Prometheanism that “promises an overcoming of the opposition between reason and imagination: reason is fuelled by imagination, but it can also remake the limits of imagination” (487).”
“Reza Negarestani: Inhumanism and the Promethean Labors of Intelligence”
“Inhumanism … finds the consequentiality of commitment to humanity in its practical elaboration and in the navigation of its ramifications. For the true consequentiality of a commitment is a matter of its power to generate other commitments, to update itself in accordance with its ramifications, to open up spaces of possibility, and to navigate the revisionary and constructive imports such possibilities may contain. ……– Reza Negarestani, The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman”
“I’ve already covered two earlier essays from e-flux by Negarestanin on his Inhumanism: here and here (plus links to his original essays: here and here). In these essays he would elaborate a program for philosophy as a sort of deprogramming initiative, one that espouses the notion that “freedom is not liberation from slavery. It is the continuous unlearning of slavery.” (ibid.)”
“His diagnosis is that the Liberal Humanist Subject is unfree and is obsolete: “Liberal freedom, be it a social enterprise or an intuitive idea of being free from normative constraints (i.e. freedom without purpose and designed action), is a freedom that does not translate into intelligence, and for this reason, it is retroactively obsolete.” (ibid.)”
“The inhuman project of freedom that he proposes is that we adapt to an autonomous conception of reason, one that shall require the “updating of commitments according to the progressive self-actualization of reason”, a struggle that will coincide with the “revisionary and constructive project of freedom”.”
“In these essays his project will further the Promethean agenda with an up to date influx of normative clarity from the Chicago school of neo-Hegeliansm, and especially Robert Brandom’s notions of a new pragmatics.”
“In this upgrade of Kant’s insight into judgments and actions we discover that one must make a normative distinction between knowing and claiming, because the “things we do with language” (pragmatics) is in this model prior to semantics.”
“Why this should be is never fully qualified yet it becomes a part of Brandom’s inclusion of Wilfred Sellars framework in which normative appraisals must be placed within a “space of reason”, and within this space one discovers the inferential patterns by which human “entitlements and commitments” are made explicit.”
“Instead of tying thought to real world referents in some exhaustive manner, the new pragmatists hope to instead work through systematically all our claims and actions that these commit and entitle us to which bring the two practices after Hegel of understanding and reason together.”
“Karl Marx: Fragments on Machines”
“… it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc., just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. (Fragments on Machines, 1858)”
“The Age of Machines had begun. At first they were but the crude labors of a shift toward total abstraction, a world ruled by intelligence rather than based on voluntarist notions of will and freedom. Notions of efficiency, organization, auto-determination, second-order elaboration and algorithmic determination would graft themselves onto both philosophical and scientific projects fit for an age of capitalist accumulation, crisis, and revision.”
“As Marx would reiterate:
The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. (ibid.)”
“Already we see intelligence as a distributed program not within the “living workers,” but rather in the “living (active) machinery”. The Inhuman was from then on determining its own agenda, one that would make humans as a species obsolete.”
“Let us be clear all these new Promethean projects in one form or another, whether on the Right (Land) or Left (Brassier/Negarestani) seek to empower the inhuman at the expense of the human agenda.”
“Many of these so called turns toward the non-human in philosophy and the arts are playing into the hands of such programs whether consciously or not.”
“Slowly but surely all the philosophies of the last hundred years bound to consciousness and the human project are being de-programmed, obsolesced in favor of impersonalism, inhumanism, and the Promethean Agenda.”
“As Marx would have it:
The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and skills, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital… (ibid.)”
“This notion that Capital is the power behind this transmigration and inversion of the human into inhuman, organic into inorganic or machinic civilization is no accident.”
“Nick Land puts it succinctly, stating, “Capital has always sought to distance itself in reality – i.e. geographically – from this brutal political infrastructure. After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace.””
“We’ve seen this in the EU where politics and economics are divorced, where nation states become nothing more than the waystations for taxation and slavery, and citizens of Left or Right have little authority or power over change since their de-throned sovereignty is bound to impersonal rules and norms imposed by the Economic Tribunals out of Belgium.”
“The modern European is living in a totalitarianism without a Leader, an economic inversion of the old fascist state turned corporate instilling the blank impersonal and machinic systems of markets, banks, and bureaucratic anonymity that cannot be reasoned with nor challenged by politics.”
“Marx adeptly remarks that the “workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself—‘as though its body were by love possessed’”. (ibid.)”
“Nick Land: All That Is Over Now”
““All that is over. We are all foreigners now, no longer alienated but alien, merely duped into crumbling allegiance with entropic traditions.””
“Land is the obverse or reactionary contributor to this elaborate manifestation, Negarestani and Brassier or its Left Accelerationist harbingers: the Right (Land) seeks exit and escape for the intelligent explosion of this chameleon intelligence to determine its own fate; while the Left (Negarestani/Brassier) seek to govern and regulate this agent to the “space of reasons”, where under normative rules and regulatory algorithms it can be induced to work for the Good.”
“Reza Negarestani: Philosophy is a Program”
“…philosophy is, at its deepest level, a program—a collection of action-principles and practices-or-operations which involve realizabilities… – Reza Negarestani, What Is Philosophy? Part One: Axioms and Programs”
“From the time of Kant till now philosophy has slowly and methodically replaced the old humanist conceptions of life, self, and culture with an inhumanist and machinic culture based as Deleuze and Guattari and others would admit on madness, schizophrenic acceleration, and capitalism.”
“At each step in the process an inversion and perversion of the older Medieval humanist religious world-view was replaced by a conception of the cosmos as impersonal and indifferent to human wishes and needs.”
“Against voluntarist notions of the advent of God as an arbitrary agent of intervention, whether of Occasionalist causation or parodies of debates between nominalist/realists we’ve emerged into an age when machinic intelligence by way of algorithmic culture, programing, and advanced AI’, Robotics, Nanotechnology, and Biogenetic sciences is remaking the very perimeters of life and matter as we’ve come to know from the early Greek metaphysicians till our latest fads of speculative realism or libidinal or dialectical materialisms. We stand on the cusp of strangeness.”
“Negarestani’s vision incorporates much of this heritage in a way that seeks to revise these depleted frameworks and put them on a new footing under the guiding hand not of some theological God, but rather of the self-determining machinic processes of our latest algorithmic progeny: the machinic intelligences.”
“Philosophy as an engineering project and handmaid of the sciences, creating conceptual tools that allow a pragmatic evaluation and “exercise of a multistage, disciplined, and open-ended reflection on the condition of the possibility of itself as a form of thought that turns thinking into a program.” (ibid.)”
“In his algorithmic conceptuality he puts it this way, these programs are based on the “selection of a set of axioms, and the elaboration of what follows from this choice if the axioms were treated not as immutable postulates but as abstract modules that can act upon one another” (ibid.).”
“Anyone versant in today’s object-oriented programing, Java or C++, or any number of other variations will understand this language of algorithmic culture and philosophy.”
“Based on abstraction, impersonalism, mathematics, logics, and axiomatic operational closure this framework “commits the program to their underlying properties and operations specific to their class of complexity. To put it differently, a program constructs possible realizabilities for the underlying properties of its axioms, it is not essentially restricted to their terms” (ibid.). That being said, Negarestani would not reduce or suture philosophy to software development models, for him it need not matter at what scale of the socio-cultural or functional the system is applied. His scheme allows the Program to be used in a number of functional sets that can repeat the basic axioms operating under a multiplicity of data and behavioral models.”
“The two essays work hand in hand. The first elaborates the Axioms and Programs: philosophy as a program that is deeply entangled with the functional architecture of what we call thinking. While in the second part he elaborates on Programs and Realizabilities, in which the realizabilities of the philosophical program is elaborated in terms of the construction of a form of intelligence that represents the ultimate vocation of thought.”
“This is a high-level abstract overview of a philosophy framework within which he seeks to lure engineers, scientists, and the economic powers in an alliance that entails nothing less than the common thesis underlying these “programmatic philosophical practices as that in treating thought as the artifact of its own ends, one becomes the artifact of thought’s artificial realizabilities” (ibid.).”
“He sees the various traditions of philosophy transformed by this new framework: the idealist-rationalist and materialist-empiricist trajectories have been converging in the most radical way has been computer science, as a place where physics, neuroscience, mathematics, logic, and linguistics come together.”
“This has been particularly the case in the wake of recent advances in fundamental theories of computation, especially theories of computational dualities and their application to multiagent systems as optimal environments for designing advanced artificial intelligence. (ibid.)”
“Even though he tries to dissuade us that he is not a technologist at heart, his program is aligned with the machine culture of algorithms and the artificial rather than older humanist traditions.”
“One day our artificial children will attain the ethics of the Real that we could only attempt, one based not on some external authority or institution, but rather as part of its own self-determining initiative based on the algorithms of a self-programmed and self-revising culture of the machinic intelligence. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Negarestani he has a clear and precise framework within which he is placing the hopes and dreams of Reason toward other goals than the human.”
“Addendum:
Sometimes when I read all these various arguments I return to Nietzsche’s perspectivism: a sense that as the Analyticals would have it we’re seeking to get the concepts honed down to a descriptive or propositional pragmatics or axiomatic system, but that reality is more like Zizek’s an ideological screen or fantasy split between the Real and the Symbolic (big Other), which like the ancient Proteus (Greek Myth) is ever changing and metamorphic; and cannot be locked down to any one specific semantic context or meaning. That seems to be the central problem of our time of transition: the various philosophical and theoretical/naturalist discourses/frameworks are stuck in the older metaphysical universe seeking to slay that dragon of Instrumental (Enlightenment) Reason, and find a way into a new scientific/philosophic framework/reasoning that is more in alignment with the anomalous data of our empirical world and scientific apparatuses, along with an inversion of the past two hundred years of anti-platonic thought. We’ve uncovered data that cannot be reconciled or reduced to the older metaphysical conceptuality, and seem forever stuck in a repetition of transitional forms which echo but do not step outside the older circle of our Kantian despair.”
“The post-phenomenological framework – whatever it might entail, will begin with a new conceptuality, one that has worked through the old circles of Kant’s errors, and transformed its problems into something utterly new and wild. Of course philosophy never did lead the sciences, as Badiou rightly says: the sciences are but one of the conditions of philosophy. It goes both ways. What’s funny is that after two centuries of anti-Platonism, we’re seeing Plato return in the guise of a hypermaterialist in Badiou, Zizek, and Johnson… how strange bedfellows cast such altered forms. Materialism in both its dialectical (Badiou, Zizek, and Johnson) and vitalist (Deleuze/Braidotti/DeLanda,SR etc.) forms seems to have gone immaterialist in our time, siding more and more with a transformation of the older Platonic notions of the Substance/Subject and Form/Idea debate into a immaterial materialism, whose discourse on Substance is no longer substantialis or Aristotelian, and whose causality is breaking free of its reasons, determinations, necessity (Meillassoux: After Finitude, et. al.); becoming part of a pure contingent universe that is no longer determined by Ananke (Necessity), but totally determined by contingency (Whim/Wildness).”
“*Semantic Apocalypse: the thought being that, as we come to know more about how the brain really works, the more it will seem as though meaning and intent(ionality) are a sort of illusion (folk psychology) — something that the brain generates in order to organize information — and in no way corresponding to what’s really going on. Since the brain is adapted to modeling what is going on in the external environment (including the social environment), it doesn’t need to be good at modeling itself. So the categories we use to describe “mental phenomena”, such as “intentionality”, are just cognitive reductions (metaphor: tropes) we rely on to compensate for the lack of the brain’s transparency to itself. We are essentially blind to our own lack of knowledge, and assume we know what we in fact do not know.”
“In Lacan’s terms what we are blind too is the Real – the paradox of the Mobius Strip upon which we live, never able to directly access this realm of being or know it (epistemically) for the simple reason that it cannot be reduced to the Symbolic (big Other: Culture, Language, Discourse etc.). Yet, we interpellate its effects indirectly on our subjectivation as signs which waver between the Imaginary (fantasy of reality) and its ideological screen of materiality (Zizek).”
“I think his use of axiomatic systems is to differentiate his own notions, which are based on epistemic relations (psychology) rather than the forms of ontological based axiomatic systems such as Badiou’s matheme = ontology, etc.”
“I’ll have to read this paper, but it may be true that computational and algorithmic descriptive terms may differ but the truth under the hood is that programs are algorithmic all the way down and up. Even the functional models are based on algorithmic designations. (But I’ll hold off since I haven’t read this paper to see what he’s offering as the ‘difference’ between the two.”
“As I’m reading this makes the point between intrinsic and algorithmic computation. Intrinsic concerned more with the governance and regulations that constrain functional structures and maintain them from one state to another, while algorithmic is more concerned with the actual state and behavior itself: the input/outputs of the execution of single or multiple programs.”
“Reza will see in the several decenterings or revolutions of the Copernican, Darwinian, Newtonian, and Einsteinian turns a methodical displacement of the human, but with Turing we see not a decentering of the human but rather the elimination of the human from the equation of intelligence. (Page 149). After this the functional conceptuality of the mind is no longer bound to the human equation, and is set free to enable a post-intentional and post-human philosophy and science.”
“He’ll describe it this way:
Whatever arrives back from the future—which is in this case, both the mind implemented in a machine and a machine equipped with the mind—will be discontinuous to our historical anticipations regarding what the mind is and what the machine looks like. (Page 149).”