But in the parable that Dupuis cites, which is too long to recapitulate here, he'll say that when the golem responds to the magician who's manufactured him, that by creating me you've introduced a radical disorder into creation. you've introduced, you've done something you've violated the distribution of essences, okay, because there are now two things that exist two living things that exist but whose essence is indiscernible so therefore the Gollum immediately enjoins his creator to unmake him in other words, even if you have the power
to create life, you shouldn't do it, because if you could create an artificial life or a synthetic life For instance, cloning, to take the most obvious example, is metaphysically dangerous because it seems to jeopardize the principle of the identity of indiscernible. Here you have two things that could be, you know, that seem to be identical in all their properties and characteristics. All their biological and psychological characteristics might be identical, but nevertheless there would have to be some, there's a fundamental difference between them that can't be accounted
for. The fact that there's two of them, not one. And according to Dupuis, this is, you know, what is disturbing about Prometheanism is because by generating life, if you can manufacture life, which is singular and allegedly singular and incomparable, you have generated a rule for the rule-less. And this is what is objectionable about it. Now, but interesting, Dupree doesn't say why. He just says in the parable he cites, this is taken to be disturbing. You know, the Gollum says, you have introduced disequilibrium into the cosmos, into the nature of existence.
But he doesn't say exactly what this disequilibrium consists in. And what I want to suggest is that it's precisely the assumption of equilibrium, which is ultimately theological. The claim that there is a way of the world, or that reality has a kind of a determinate, you know, that reality is kind of that there is a ready-made world, even if we can't access or know it in itself, is precisely a theological presumption. The idea that the world was made, and it was made this way and not that way. Prometheanism is the attempt that we can make, you know, we can participate in the creation of the world, but without having to respect a divine blueprint.
So in other words, if we introduce the disequilibrium that we will generate through our creative activity, is no more or less objectionable than the disequilibrium that is already there in reality. Okay, I was going to say, okay, finally, one final word. So there's an account of rationality. Okay, Heidegger, you know, Heidegger has a critique of rationality, which basically kind of characterizes a form of metaphysical voluntarism. What I want to propose is that there's a way of rehabilitating Prometheanism, or philosophical Prometheanism, which understands rationality as rule-governed activity.
In other words, rationality is simply the faculty of generating rules and being bound by rules. And this is precisely the characterization of rationality provided by Kant. But these rules are not fixed in advance. They're not eternal and ahistorical. They are historically mutable. But the fact that they are historically mutable doesn't make them contingent in the same sense in which other historical phenomena are contingent. In other words, instead... So, again, instead of trying to recapture this theological equilibrium between imminence and transcendence, between the made and the given,
the task is to recognize the stratification of imminence and the fact that there are structures of involution and of reflection within the natural order whereby rules or concepts or rationality itself can emerge out of physical patterns and processes. So this conception of rationality, of understanding, you know, you understand rules as ways of coordinating and subsuming phenomena, but ways that can themselves be revised.
In other words, they are not, they are themselves historically revisable. And this is, in other words, the way in which we understand the world and the way in which we change the world on the basis of our understanding is perpetually being redetermined. It's a kind of auto-catalytic process, which is about not trying to kind of re-establish an equilibrium, but getting beyond the opposition between order and disorder, and recognizing that the catastrophes, the unforeseeable consequences of our technological ingenuity
are not an objection to the desire to be able to foresee and control. In other words, the fact that something has... In fact, there's a quote from Ballard. Ballard says that all progress is savage and violent. And the point about the story, The Voices of Time, is that the cognitive progress made by the various protagonists in the story is savage and violent. But the fact that progress is savage and violent is not necessarily an objection to it. Because there is indeed a savagery recapitulated in rationality.
But it's a kind of sentimentalism to think that some savageries are not better than others. In other words, you can discriminate between savageries or modes of instrumentalization and say that some of them are just superior to others. and the claim that all the claim that you know any attempt to kind of to circumscribe, delimit, manipulate is pathological is the kind of sentimentalism that just perpetuates the most objectionable characteristics of the so called of our existence, the way we live so you can either resign we can either resign ourselves to this
and say that's just the way the world is. Or, more interestingly, try to kind of re-examine, you know, I think the kind of the philosophical foundations of a Promethean project that is actually, you know, there in Marx, I think. This project of re-engineering reality, which is, you know, I think something that needs to be kind of, you know, reconsidered. And it's not, you know, the one thing to be said, you know, it's one of the great virtues of, you know, Badiou's philosophy is that he's one of the only people in recent years to have defended Prometheanism against this kind of, you know, this facile doxa,
which has castigated it and chastised it for so long. And even if one disagrees with the details, the philosophical details of Badu's account, of the relationship between events and subjectivity, there is something nevertheless very, you know, very powerful. In other words, what's missing, the point would be to reconnect this account of the necessity of rational subjectivation to an analysis of biological, economical, and historical processes. Now, obviously a huge task, but the fact that it's a research program, it's a research program that I think whose philosophical legitimacy needs to be defended
because it's too often simply dismissed as a fantasy. And even if it does have phantasmatical residues, they can be diagnosed, analyzed, and perhaps transformed on the basis of the analysis. Everything is more or less phantasmatical. You know, you can't reproach a project for its kind of, you know, phantasmatical residues unless you yourself hold out the dream of something that is completely, some model of rationality which would be wholly devoid of imaginary influences. And the point is not simply to oppose imagination and reason.
The point is that reason is fueled by the imagination but can also remake the limits of the imagination. Okay, I should stop. So I would just ask if you have a question that you come down and ask the question into the microphone. Well, this is less of a question and more something that I would like to expand and
hone it to complete sharpness. First I think, as you said, the Dupuis critique entails a kind of a foundationalist account of the system, insofar as, you know, let's start with this idea that the system, what we understand the system is simply its systematic construction that distills in its behavior. In other words, system is furnished with a modern kind of emptiness, and it's precisely this modern kind of emptiness that kind of, you know, cuts to this foundation of this account. This is also something that Catherine brought it up, that we can only object to the construction
once we tether it to a foundationalist account of the system. Because there is systematicity, what we call the systematicity, is the rule of the construction. And this rule of the construction has, in fact, has its own functional hierarchy. But this functional hierarchy shouldn't be imposed upon by some sort of foundationalist account that creates this kind of a, I think, what a fundamentally myopic idea of what construction entails and what we should do with construction. So this is one thing. Now this is what I'm going to take it to another step. Is that, you see, with the Ballard talk that you had,
you had. I think, you know, I think we both agree that, you know, in orienting ourselves toward the future, we need to treat this orientation as an extreme hypothesis. And this is, you know, what I mean by extreme hypothesis is basically this is the logic of catastrophe that allows us to actually develop a logic of action and understanding of this, of this basically what manipulative or abductive hypothesis is. So, in treating it as an extreme hypothesis, and there is no other way actually to understand orientation towards future,
because any other form of orientation in fact curtail the scope of understanding and action implicit to the orientation as such. So this is the case. Now, it seems that the whole legacy of neoliberalism and foundationalism, not fundamentalism, foundationalism, it seems that they set themselves against this orientation. and the kind of aesthetic demands that this orientation and it's a vector of extreme hypothesis demands both the individual and the collective to look beyond the localist immediate resources and opportunities that rest in past or present, the given, so on and so forth.
Now, an example of this, as we have already discussed, seems to be really the idea of a space exploration as simultaneously being a conceptual limit presented against the overgrowing lineage of planets.