Okay, okay. I'm sorry, I saw you in the restaurant and then I turned around and you were just a part. It's okay, no, I thought it was in the first one, so I went back to that. I've just asked for a chair, but I'll be fine, I just need to, I seem to concentrate better.
I'm just going to make it very short. Sure. Thank you. Do you want to just hold the ring? Or is it how I need it? Yeah, okay. Do you want to need it? Yes, yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. Hello. Hi. Thanks everyone for coming. I'm Sarah and I'm an editor of Triple Canopy. We organized this event today as part of our series called Speculations, the Future Is.
It's 50 days of lectures and discussions. We've invited technologists, writers, artists, philosophers scientists to come in and think about a future that they might like to see and then describe that future and think it back into the present day and address what implications it might have for the present day so coming up over the weekend we have Agnes den here on Sunday the artist and as well Natalie German Janko those are both on Sunday on Monday then Hirschman Leeson will be joining us as well so you can pick up a calendar
across the hall actually we're entering it we're at we're entering into our final week so maybe you can come back for another one but today we have with us Raymond Brassier. Very honored to have him here. And Ray is a teacher in philosophy at the American University in Beirut. He is also the author of Nile Unbound. And please join me in welcoming him. Okay, can everyone hear me okay? Okay, it's a bit funny with having this thing pointing straight at my head, but it's necessary for the recording.
Okay, well thanks Sarah, thanks very much. Thanks for the invitation. I'm going to talk about, the topic of my talk is Prometheanism. and the philosophical debates about the desirability of the Promethean ambitions, which were sometimes associated with the legacy of the radical Enlightenment. And I'm going to talk in particular about some philosophically significant critiques of Prometheanism in, you know, recent philosophical work,
mainly focusing on an essay by Jean-Pierre Dupuis, who's a French philosopher. Dupuis is not very well known, but he wrote a very interesting history of cognitive science published in France in the 90s, which has also, which I think was translated by Princeton, if I'm not mistaken, it's called Introduction to Cognitive Sciences, but it's a very interesting intellectual history of cognitive science, tracing its roots in artificial intelligence. And he's also, he recently published, I think, in the mid, in the middle of the last decade, a book called Towards an Enlightened Catastrophism. The paper I'm focusing on is called Pitfalls in the Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics.
and it's in which Dupuis lays out his, what he thinks is wrong with debates about human enhancement and so-called transhumanism, which I assume people are familiar with. Okay, so this relates to the topic of the, you know, the topic for these lectures is speculations, the future is. So I think it's really, once again, it's a question about what does it mean to orient oneself towards the future? And is the future worth investing in? In other words, what sort of relationship can we collectively have towards the future?
Not just as an individual, but as a species. This is a very simple question. The question is, what should we do with time? We know time will do something with us, regardless of what we do or don't do. So should we try to do something with it or to it? This is also to ask what we should do about the future. Should we abandon the future and the preeminent value afforded to the future in the so-called modernist project? To abandon the future means to relinquish the intellectual project of enlightenment. And there is no shortage of thinkers urging us to do just that. Its advocates on the right propose to rehabilitate ancient hierarchies, mirroring an allegedly natural or divine order.
But it also has, this anti-modernism also has, the critique of enlightenment also has many kind of influential advocates on the left in the 20th century. who think that the best we can hope for via radical scaling down of political and cognitive ambition is to achieve small-scale rectifications of universal injustice by establishing local, temporarily fleeting enclaves of civil justice. I mean, it's quite striking so that, you know, in the wake of the alleged, you know, kind of collapse of the communist project, communism as a kind of, well, the Promethean ambitions of communism, there's been a kind of a remarkable scaling down of political
ambition by those who espouse the ideals of justice and emancipation. The best you can hope for, apparently, is to try to kind of create little enclaves of, you know, equality and justice. But the idea of remaking the world according to the ideal of equality or justice is routinely denounced as a dangerous totalitarian fantasy. And I'm sure you're all familiar with the kind of the narratives that draw a direct line from, you know, the rationalist, you know, post-Galilean rationalism and the kind of the advocacy of kind of the whole state of rationalization of nature to the evils of totalitarianism. You've all heard this narrative many times before.
Now, I want to suggest, I'm going to try to kind of challenge this philosophical critique of Prometheanism, of Enlightenment Prometheism. So I'm going to do it conceptually. The cardinal epistemic virtue of Enlightenment consists in recognizing that this equilibrium which time introduces into knowing. Knowing takes time, but time impregnates knowing. And enlightenment in this sense, and the rationalist legacy of the enlightenment, affirms the disequilibrium of time. And this is, for those of you who took part in the discussion of Ballard, this is one of the most interesting, the catastrophic logic that I think is articulated
in Ballard's best narratives is about this cognitive appropriation of disequilibrium, which springs time out of joint, restructures the linear succession of past, present, and future. So this disequilibrium is what Hegel called, to affirm this disequilibrium is to do what Hegel called tarrying with the negative, which, as Zizek helpfully points out, is the virtual Hegel accords to the understanding, the faculty of opposition, rather than reason, the faculty of conciliation. In other words, it's the understanding, the understanding which is the faculty of judgment,
which dismembers, objectifies, and discriminates. And the point is that this is indispensable to cognition. Before you can presume to overcome an opposition, you have to be capable of articulating it. Therefore, it is a kind of dialectical myopia simply to oppose reason to understanding or contradiction to judgment. So if disequilibrium is an enabling condition of cognitive progress, then we have to find a way of defending, we have to kind of defend the normative resources
or the normative grounds that allow us to make sense of an assertion like this. In other words, we have to defend the normative status of the claim that things are not as they should be or that things are better or that things ought to be understood and reorganized. This is a question of what can we make of ourselves, okay? Again, Prometheanism is the claim that there is no predetermined limit on what we can achieve and the ways in which we can transform ourselves
and the world in which we live, okay? So what I want to, this talk today, which is not, is kind of the sketch or the beginning of a kind of project that is going to be devoted to Prometheanism. is full of, you know, I apologize for its incomplete nature, but I'm just trying to kind of lay out some of the basic problems that I think need to be addressed in this debate about the legacy of enlightenment. It's a question of what can we make of ourselves, and should we simply abjure, should we scale down our ambitions and learn to be modest, as everyone simply kind of seems to be enjoining us to.
Prometheanism requires the reassertion of subjectivism, but a subjectivism without selfhood, which articulates an autonomy without voluntarism. Because the critique of Prometheanism in the philosophical literature of the 20th century is tied to a critique of metaphysical voluntarism, whose most significant representative is Heidegger, Martin Heidegger. And in fact, there's a line from Dupuis' critique of Prometheanism to Hannah Arendt, who is his chief inspiration, to Heidegger. It's this lineage that I'm interested in kind of examining today. So, why then is this, why is Prometheanism still not simply kind of an antiquated metaphysical fantasy?
Well, because it's still very much alive in the form of the so-called NBIC convergence. The June 2002 report of the National Science Foundation, the American government's National Science Foundation, entitled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, claims that the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science, aka NBIC, will bring about a transformation of civilized...