Thinking from the future

When science fiction films depict how technology becomes uncontainable, the more advanced a human society becomes, does it not occur like an analogy of nature thinking from the future?  If we place this question within the Spinozist concept of nature, it is not difficult to draw the equation: nature thinks ahead so that human knowledge can catch up. Nature, however, is thinking from the future with a clear message – destruction, chaos, and complex forms of entropy define the temporality of the present of nature-fiction, which is posterior to our present. Enter, Elon Musk.

The problem with Elon Musk is that he does not see this future. He does not think that nature thinks from the future. Elon Musk is not a fictionist. He sees technology as external to culture, where culture is deemed more prone to uncontrolled entropy than his rocket-inspired posthuman world. He foresees technology’s future as singularly transforming the essence of being a human. He chose a perfect place for this future, the planet Mars

In short, humans can survive Mars with the robustness of the technological leap. As I mentioned in a previous post, this technical principle is far removed from the Heideggerian vision. As Heidegger argued in his last interview, ‘in the absence of a god, we founder.’ Heidegger means ‘we founder because we have yet to seek out an ‘adequate relationship to technology that has replaced God.’

In a related sequence, the famous blue planet photo, taken from space, technically transformed the Earth into a geocybernetic image of the globe, which could be mapped out, scaled, gridded, and compartmentalized in terms of geographical allocation and distribution of resources, not to mention lines of navigation and boundaries. The Earth becomes a site of multiple but invisible borders from the vantage point of the moon. From either vantage point, the moon or the Earth, the ‘essence of man’ or what he can do is ‘framed’ by technology. On the moon, man is a conqueror of space; on Earth, he is the anthropocentric fulcrum of measurement.

In both cases, man is either passively or actively framed by technology, ‘challenged by a power which … man himself does not control’ (Heidegger, ‘Only a god can save us’). Man is at the mercy of technology to become passive or active, which merely demonstrates man’s non-singularity or replaceability as an object of superior power. Philosophy itself will not be of help. As Heidegger argues –

[P]hilosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering (Untergang); for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder.

But without technology, humans would not be able to realize on a more profound ontological level that things break (and not only break, for that matter), regardless of how they appear formidable from the end of the machines that are necessary to build them. We ignore things under normal circumstances, taken for granted for what they are. This refers to the present-at-hand of things. Readiness-to-hand means that things become actively involved in human interaction and things’ interaction with other things in terms of their functions. We use tools to build infrastructure for human flourishing. However, the moment they break, they cease to function as readiness-to-hand and start to become fully present-at-hand. The only difference this time is that we are now conscious of what was formerly taken for granted. When observed under the conscious theoretical or scientific gaze, for purposes of fixing them, as an engineer would resort to, knowledgeable in the physical and mechanical laws that make things function, the presence of things begin to touch the deepest ontological core of reality – What is a thing? What is a being? These questions form the pre-ontological horizon from which things are extracted from matter to function for human ends and purpose.

One cannot just extract a plank of wood from a tree without knowledge of at least simple mechanics, which is coreferential to other forms of knowledge, such as the chemical properties of a tree per one’s intention to build a real and not a toy house. In short, one looks for a durable tree and must know which tree is and is not. He needs other forms of technicity to transport wood from the forest to urban construction sites, etc. A lot of interrelated technical or machinic phyla is at work here, so to speak, which is brought upon us by the conscious scientific gaze.

The trouble with the scientific gaze is that it tends to look at things as if they occupy the Cartesian res extensa. In this voided space, the language game of the scientific enterprise does the actual organizing of things.  But things ideally constructed in res extensa will always fall short of their essence as breakable.  Things in res extensa, the geometrical space, do not break. Thus, Mars’ voyage is the pilgrimage of things in res extensa, confident that its pilgrims will survive the Marsian ecology. 

Heidegger would not oppose space colonization. But what he would have sought out in advance of the exo-planetary voyage is how much thinking and poetry is involved in this quest. Thinking and poetry are Heidegger’s antidote to the Cartesian res extensa in terms of ‘thinking ahead (without prophetic proclamations) into the time which is to come, of thinking from the standpoint of the fundamental traits of the present age, which have scarcely been thought through’ (‘Only a god can save us’).

Is this other-thinking, the thinking-ahead, the thinking of thinking and poetry, not the same with science fiction in terms of thinking from the future?

Perhaps, we may answer this question with a form of other-questioning, typical of Heidegger: how much thinking and poetry does a Falcon 9 space launcher consist? How much speculative material is embedded in this technicity? How much of Plato’s world of Forms can its payload carry as humans flee from the Earth since Thales looked upon the stars and fell into a ditch?