After the Organic

Yuk Hui
Rio de Janeiro
23 September 2019

One can regard the history of the human species in the large as the
completion of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an inwardly and,
to this end, also an externally perfect state constitution, as the only
condition in which it can fully develop all its predispositions in
humanity.

Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim

It might very well still take a considerable time to recognize that the
“organism” and the “organic” present themselves as the mechanistic-
technological “triumph” of modernity over the domain of growth,
“nature.”

Martin Heidegger, GA94 Ponderings XII–X

I would like to open this lecture with two epigraphs that I used for latest book
Recursivity and Contingency, the first one is from Immanuel Kant and the other
from Martin Heidegger. Both quotations address the concept of the organic, but
in two significantly different ways; first of all they are from two very different
epochs, and therefore also reflect different tasks upon which thinking takes up as
response to its epoch. For Kant, it was an epoch in which the concept of the
organic became a powerful conceptual tool against the Cartesian mechanism
which has triumphed philosophy since the 17th century. We can probably say so
without exaggeration that mechanism was the condition of philosophizing,
which characterizes the early modern thought in Europe. By condition of
philosophizing, it means that thinking has to assimilate to this condition and
work in accordance with it. After Kant, for philosophy to exist, it will have to
become organic. While for Heidegger, it was an epoch in which cybernetics
stands for the end and the accomplishment of Western philosophy, and in which
European modernity also came to its end as completion: the world civilization is
based on Western European thought. This concept of the organic from Kant to
Heidegger, as I would like to argue, obliges us to identify a new condition of
philosophizing and therefore the task of thinking today. What exactly has
happened in Kant and Heidegger? And how can we articulate this new condition
of philosophizing and what is the role of technology in this regard? This is what
we hope to clarify in this talk.

§1.

Kant’s understanding of the organic is largely spelt out in the Critique of

Judgement, a book divided into two parts, the first part “Aesthetic Judgement”
concerning the beautiful and the sublime; the second part “Teleological
judgement” concerning organism and nature. The two forms of judgement
repose on a specific operation and structure, which were vaguely called
reflective judgement. A reflective judgement has to be distinguished from a
determinate judgement, which is the foundation of the critique of pure reason, a
book dedicated to the grounding of a transcendental logic and the condition of
possibility of cognition.

A determinate judgement is one that subsumes the particular to the universal

laws, like the subsumption of sense data to the twelve categories in the
understanding; I can recognize this object in front of me since these data are
subsumed to the categories so that the process of schematization can take place,
and give us the concept of such an object. A reflective judgement is
fundamentally different, since it doesn’t subsume the particular to the universal,
but rather it attempts to derive its own rules from the particular, a necessary
passage from the particular to the universal. A reflective judgement is one that is
open to contingency, which is necessary for its own determination by going back
to itself. This circular movement, which is not mere repetition, but rather what I
would like to call recursive; it designates a new operation and new structure.

A determinate judgement is mechanical. What does it mean that something is

mechanical? When we say something is mechanical, it doesn’t merely mean that
it is or is part of a machine. Mechanical has to be understood in terms of linear
causality. A linear causality suggests that when there is an effect, there must be a
cause prior to it, and this cause is distinguished from the effect itself. A linear
causality is finite, otherwise it would merit what Hegel calls bad infinity. Like
what Aristotle has already emphasized in the Book A of Metaphysics, that “…
those who maintain the infinite series destroy the good without knowing it. Yet
no one would try to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit.” Because
if the series is infinite, then there is no telos, and in so far as the telos is not
concerned, there is no Good. Therefore, Aristotle demands a prime mover, which
is the unconditional cause, meaning that it is not the effect of another cause. This
linearity characterises what was called mechanical today, and it was incarnated
in the Cartesian mechanism. For Descartes, mechanism is a monism which
governs all beings. If you remember, “Second Meditation” of his Meditation on
First Philosophy, Descartes has raised a question. He asks, are the people passing
by his window not automata powered by spring wearing coats and hats? In order
to give life to the mechanical body, Descartes proposes a soul sitting in the pineal
gland in the brain and it is able to give command to the mechanical body. This
linear causality was best illustrated with a spring driven clock, in which the
movement of one gear leads to another, and finally set the whole complex into
motion.

Mechanism, however, fails to explain life, since it attempts to explain life without
life. The Cartesian mechanism was countered by the Spinozist immanent cause,
which has to be distinguished from a transitive cause, meaning a linear and
external causality. An immanent causation means a self causation. The prime
mover or the unmoved mover of Aristotle is a figure of linear causality, since if
causes are limited, and if one can trace upstream, then there must be a first cause.
However, in the non-linear causation, here we associate with what Kant calls
reflective judgement, the prime mover can only be understood as the totality of
the being itself, namely it is immanent. In contrary to the clock, an organism
demonstrates this new form of operation and structure, which cannot be
exhausted by mechanical causality. The Kant of the pre-critical period wrote,
“[I]t is astonishing that something like an animal body should even be possible.
And even if I could fully understand all its springs and pipes, all its nerve ducts
and levers, its entire mechanical organization, I should still continue to be
amazed. . . . Nor, indeed, is the ground of my amazement removed once I have
convinced myself that all the unity and harmony I observe around me is only
possible because a Being exists which contains within it the grounds not only of
reality but also of all possibility.” 


How can something like an animal body be possible? The irreducibility between
the mechanical and the organic leads to two major interpretations after Kant,
one is organicism, and it is the subject that we will focus on in this talk; the other
one is organology, associated with Henri Bergson, Geroges Canguilhem, Gilbert
Simondon and Stiegler, which we may only be able to address during the
discussion. For Kant, the clearest definition of the organic form can be found in
§64 of the Critique of Judgment, where he defines the organic being as follows: “a
thing exists as a natural end if it is (though in a double sense) both cause and
effect of itself.”11 Kant then provides the example of a tree, highlighting three
elements that de ne it as an organic being. Firstly, the tree reproduces itself
according to its genus, meaning that it reproduces another tree; secondly, the
tree produces itself as an individual, absorbing energy from the environment and
turning them into nutrients to sustain its life; thirdly, different parts of the tree
establish reciprocal relations and thus constitute the whole—as Kant writes, the
“preservation of one part is reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the
other parts.”12 The concept of the organic being consists in the reciprocal
relations between parts and the whole and the capacity of reproduction. It also
affirms the two important categories of relation: namely, community
(Gemeinschaft) and reciprocity (Wechselwirkung).13 In other words, they
constitute a primary form of self-organization. As Kant writes: “[N]ature, on the
contrary, organizes itself, and does so in each species of its organized products—
following a single pattern, certainly, as to general features, but nevertheless
admitting deviations calculated to secure self-preservation under particular
circumstances.”

These two concepts, community and reciprocity also characterize Kant’s political
philosophy, which we can vaguely identify with the help of Hannah Arendt in her
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.

One can regard the history of the human species in the large as the
completion of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an inwardly and,
to this end, also an externally perfect state constitution, as the only
condition in which it can fully develop all its predispositions in
humanity.

Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim

If the history of the human species is a completion of a hidden plan of nature,
then it is so because this plan is organic and teleological, which ensures
community and reciprocity through a republican constitution. Therefore we see
that Kant’s notion of the organic is not simply a mode of operation, but rather
that which conditions all territories of philosophical thinking: practical reason,
aesthetic judgement, and cosmopolitanism. This short excurse allows us to see
how the concept of the organic, which came largely from the naturalists of the
18th century, not only gave us a new form of operation and structure, but also it
allows philosophy to identify a new condition for itself. In other words,
philosophy had to become organic. This is why we see in the Post-Kantians,
notably Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, both the mechanism of reflection and
concept of organic are central to their philosophy projects. We will not be able to
go into Schelling and Hegel’s organicism because of the lack of time, but I hope
this clarifies our first claim that the organic was a new condition of
philosophizing since Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

§2.

What is the status of the organic, or organicism today? We know that organicism
as a philosophical thought informed by embryology was developed in the 20th
century by various philosophers, notably Alfred North Whitehead, as well as
biologists who identified themselves with him, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Joseph
Woodger, Joseph Needham among others. Indeed, we may be able to associate
different schools under this condition of philosophizing: organicism/embryology,
systems theory, Gödel’s recursive function and Turng machine, and cybernetics.
Organicism wants to go beyond both mechanism and vitalism. It was a remedy to
the catastrophes produced by industrialism in the 19th century, as Bertalanffy
writes in his General System Theory “The mechanical world view, taking the play
of physical particles as ultimate reality found its expression in a civilisation
which glorifies physical technology that has led eventually to the catastrophes of
our time. Possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to
reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost in the
last sanguinary decades of human history.” In the 18th century, the opposition
between organism and mechanism remain conceptual, in the 19th century the
triumph of mechanism in the process of industrialization. However, is it still the
case today? Does organism necessarily stand against mechanism as it was the
case in the 18th century? In view of the triumph of industrial technologies, many
critics want to oppose technological development with organicism of one form or
another, as if the organic is the safe backyard and as if the technology that we are
talking today is the 18th century mechanism. This critique based on opposition
organism and mechanism often leads to a fantasy towards a political naturalism
which sees the organic as the ideal model for art, philosophy and politics. It
seems to me that in order to give wing to philosophy today, we must re-examine
this opposition, in order to understand what would be the new condition of
philosophizing today. Lets ponder upon the verdict of Heidegger in the notorious
Black Notebook (GA 94 1931-1938).

It might very well still take a considerable time to recognize that the
“organism” and the “organic” present themselves as the mechanistic-
 technological “triumph” of modernity over the domain of growth,
“nature.”

Martin Heidegger, GA94 Ponderings XII–X

What Heidegger says here has to be thought against the backdrop of the
mechanism and organism debate of the 18th century. Heidegger wants to point
out that such opposition between the mechanical and the organic was already
obsolete, and therefore the organic is no longer an ideal of the humanity and
perpetual peace. What made Heidegger come to this conclusion and what does it
mean for us today? We must go back to what we said at the beginning of this talk,
Heidegger’s claim that cybernetics means both end and completion of western
philosophy and metaphysics. Instead of simply understanding it as a claim out of
his geopolitical and philosophical quest for the question of Being, we have to
align it with our quest concerning a new condition of philosophizing.

In order to understand this claim, we must look into cybernetics, especially

Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. Control and Communication in Man and Animal
published in 1948. Before going into this, there is a chronological fact worth
paying attention to, the above mentioned Black Notebook was written in the
1930s, while Wiener’s work only came out 10 years later, and Heidegger had
read Wiener carefully when it was translated into German, he has also
commented almost on every page of Gotthard Günther’s The Consciousness of
Machine. A Metaphysics of Cybernetics, which clearly demonstrates that
cybernetics is a realization of the Hegelian reflective logic.

The first chapter of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics was titled “Newtonian and
Bergsonian time.” Netwonian motion is mechanist, and time-symmetric, hence
reversible, Bergsonian time is biological, creative and irreversible. It is not until
the second law of thermodynamics proposed by the French physics Sadi Carnot
in 1824 (almost a century after Newton’s death, 1727) that we recognize the
“arrow of time”, and that the entropy of the system increases with time and is
irreversible. Already in his first book Essai sur les données immédiates de la
conscience (1889), Bergson launched a fierce attack on the way that time is
conceptualized in western science and philosophy, time is understood in terms
of space, for example, intervals which can be represented in space, therefore the
time that was thus conceptualized is timeless. It is homogenous, like the intervals
marked on a clock. Instead, time, suggests Bergson, cannot be fully understood as
extension ordered in spatial terms, rather it contains heterogeneity or
qualitative multiplicity in organic forms. Time is force which is singular in every
instant, like the Heraclitean river, it doesn’t repeat itself twice like a mechanical
clock. Indeed, mechanical or linear causality doesn’t exist in duration.
Bergsonian time provides a new way to understand human consciousness and
experience.

These differences between the Newtonian time and Bergsonian time define the
boundary between physics and biology, machine and organism. The task of
cybernetics, was to show that, with the advancement in physics, especially
statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, it is possible to employ notions of
feedback and information to construct a cybernetic machine which breaks this
boundary. Therefore, towards the end of the chapter, Wiener claims that “The
modern automation exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living
organism, and here there is no reason in Bergson’s considerations why the
essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same as
that of the automation of this type…In fact, the whole mechanist-vitalist
controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions.”[Hans
Dierich’s entelechy and Bergson’s élan vital, organizer experiment] In Wiener’s
conceptualization, when we grasp a glass of water and bring it towards our
mouth, it involves multiple feedback loops and adjustments according to the
information evaluated which in turn measures the level of organization.
Feedback simply means that the difference between the output and the expected
output is fed back to the system in order to improve the operation. For example,
when we reach out our hand to grasp an object, there are multiple feedback
loops taking place among muscles, motors, and perception, and this feedback
allows us to adjust our positions and gestures. It also occurs in technical objects,
like the example given by Rosenblueth: Torpedoes possess a target- seeking
mechanism by following the magnetic pull of the hull of the ship or the
submarine or the sound of the propeller. The concept of feedback is rather
simple, however, it opens a new way to conceptualize a non-mechanistic
machine. Or in other words, Wiener is claiming that a Bergsonian machine is
possible: “The modern automation exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as
the living organism, and here there is no reason in Bergson’s considerations why
the essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same
as that of the automation of this type.”

Feedback here means reflection, a circularity between a being and its

environment, a nonlinear movement of self-adjustment toward a purpose or
telos that defines the whole. This association between feedback and reflection, a
word which we related to Kant earlier, is not simple analogical, but rather as
Gilbert Simondon says that only in the Critique of Judgement, was Kant able to
deal with cybernetics. It is unlike a Cartesian causal chain, which we can
visualize as a linear propagation from one proposition to another. Wiener refers
to the first feedback system as James Watt’s governor of the steam engine, which
is able to regulate its velocity according to different conditions of load. A more
contemporary example is homeostasis, a concept described by the physiologist
Claude Bernard and later coined by W. B. Cannon. Bernard, in his 1865
Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale, writes that “all the vital
mechanisms, however varied they may be, have only one object, that of
preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment [milieu
intérieur].” Homeostasis is a mechanism that is able to keep the system within a
certain range of constants: for example, temperature, the amount of potassium in
the body liquid, and so on. Homeostasis is also used by the British cybernetician
W. Ross Ashby to characterize life. Feedback here replaces the re ection of the
monads and prompts Wiener to reject notions such as “life,” “vitalism,” and
“soul”: “It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and
the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely
parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback.”
This analogy leads Wiener to associate both organism and machine by a common
telos, the resistance against “the general tendency for the increase of entropy.”
For Wiener, the concept of feedback is not limited to technical objects and
organisms; he also extends it to analysis in economy and other social phenomena.
Commenting on what he calls “long time feedback,” he gives the example of
Chinese idolatry, according to which the mandate of heaven is correlated to the
destiny of the emperor and the dynasty—the suffering of the people due to wars
and famines is an indicator that the emperor or the dynasty has lost the mandate
of heaven, and therefore that it is destined to fall. Wiener emphasizes this as a
feedback. With Wiener’s formulation, one can see feedback everywhere; it
constitutes a new epistemology.

§3.

As Heidegger claims that it might very well still take a considerable time to
recognize that the “organism” and the “organic” present themselves as the
mechanistic-technological “triumph” of modernity. The verdict of Heidegger
remains to be rethought carefully. However, shouldn’t we already see a parallel
between this mechanical-technological triumph of the organic and the end of
philosophy as such an accomplishment; and by seeing in this way, can we not
understand more concretely what Heidegger proposes to take thinking beyond
philosophy. It is not simply an announcement of the end of philosophy, but
rather a new condition of philosophizing has to be identified. In the 18th century,
it is based on the recognition that the organic condition of philosophizing that
has started as a counter-part of mechanism and which symbolizes humanity and
history, after cybernetics and its continuation in AI and machine learning today,
has already come to its end.

The end of philosophy announced by Heidegger doesn’t mean that no one will do
philosophy anymore, since we are all still practicing this discipline; it is more
similar to what Hegel announced about the end of art in his lectures on
aesthetics, but Heidegger goes further that philosophy is no longer the highest
expression of the life of the spirit, since such role is taken by cybernetics.
Heidegger wants to look for other thinking beyond those already said and
determined in the Western philosophical tradition. After the organic, where
could we start? After the organic, doesn’t mean that we want to renounce the
concept of the organic in its totality, in the contrary, we would like to identify its
position today in order to inquire into the condition of philosophizing. I would
like to summarize my arguments in three points:

Firstly the digital recursive machines that we live with today are
fundamentally different from the analogue mechanistic machines that we
associate with the 17th and 18th century, on the contrary, we are living among
recursive machines which are becoming more and more organic, in other
words, they are like what Simondon describes as becoming organic or
becoming natural objects;
 Secondly, the organic thinking assimilated by systems theory of for example,
Bertalanffy, Niklas Luhmann and others is no longer a conceptual tool of
analysis but rather a technological reality, meaning that they are realized in
material terms and therefore become tools of social control, the
performativity that Luhmann identified as the operation of the system could
be measured with all kind of censors and devices.

Thirdly these machines are forming gigantic organisms in planetary scale,

they realize what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls the Noosphere. Teilhard
claims that with the realization of the noosphere, we will be able to arrive at a
super brain which is the brain of all brain. This superbrain is nothing
fundamentally different from what was called super intelligence in the 1990s
or the homo deus today. Geopolitics is characterized by the competition
towards such super intelligence, or what is known as technological singularity.

After the organic is a quest into a new condition of philosophizing today, again
when I say condition it doesn’t mean a specific idea or thought, but rather that
which thinking has to respond out of its own necessity. If since the 18th century
on, thinking has to become organic, today however it is no longer enough to
think along this line, but rather one will have to first of all think such organicity
together with machines but also beyond this organicity; to go beyond is to see its
limits. Therefore today, in the context of media labs, we shouldn’t just celebrate
how digital technology simulates organic life, but rather we must push beyond
this opposition between the organic and the mechanic which still presents itself
as either a dominant form of criticism against technology or in its opposite a
naïve defence for machines.

The task of thinking cannot escape machines, but rather it should orient itself
towards machines, meaning within the danger in order to orient, like what
Heidegger says while commenting on the poetry of Rilke “It may be that any
other salvation than that which comes from where the danger is, is still within
the unholy[Unheil/ catastrophe].” At the same time we must think beyond the
totalizing power of the organic—which Heidegger calls the Gestell. It means that
we will have to see the limit of the organic as well as the limit of our aspiration
for the organic. In the 20th century, philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead,
Lewis Mumford, sociologists like Georges Friedman among many others aspire
to the organic as a remedy to mechanism and industrialism, to what Marx
describes as alienation, it is because machines and tools were understood as
organized inorganic, meaning they could be reintegrated through the body.
However, today, machines ceases to be organize inorganic, they are becoming
gigantic system, for example Google, or the Chinese social credits system, which I
call organizing inorganic. To think beyond the organic, is also to break away from
the tendency of systemic totalization intrinsic in the concept of the organic,
which Gilles Deleuze describes as societies of control and that Lyotard
characterizes as postmodern society. The societies of control are nothing more
than gigantic cybernetic systems based on self-organization and optimization.

After the organic is an invitation to resituate cybernetics in the history of

philosophy and history of technology in order to reflect on our current condition
and the dominant ideologies behind it. I attempted to respond to these questions
in the last chapter of my book by pointing to what I term fragmentation. To
fragment means to disintegrate, to discompose. To what extent can
fragmentation be a response? I suggest elaborating on the notion fragmentation
in different terrains.

For technology, it means to break away from a dominant universalizing

epistemology which determines our imagination of scientific and technological
development. The organic constitutes today a triumph of scientific method, and
that a political naturalism based on the opposition between organic and
mechanic remains no longer effective. Instead of rejecting science and
technology by going back to indigenous ontologies, we should propose a new
agenda. It is not because indigenous thinking is obsolete like it was presented in
the modern non-modern dichotomy but rather because indigenous knowledge
can only exhibit its force and possibility when it is able to confront and
transform modern technology instead of just opposing it—this being another
dimension of the concept of recursivity. I suggest to develop further what I call
techno-diversity, or a multiplicity of cosmotechnics, in order to fragment the
system of knowledge and to reopen the question of technology and its futures in
the previous book The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in
Cosmotechnics.

For politics, the aspiration for an organic geopolitics since Kant’s Perpetual Peace
A Philosophical Sketch (1795) is already obsolete, while the development of
geopolitics seems to be dominated by the vision and desire for technological
singularity. All nation states are competing for the credo of AI, converging
towards a singularity, an apocalypse. A new geopolitics has yet to emerge, while
for such a new geopolitics to be possible, it is necessary to develop a techno-
diversity which doesn’t lead us to a unified and homogenous view of humanity
and of technology, but rather to allow thinking to emerge after the end of
European philosophy thus announced by Heidegger more than half a century ago.