Okay, so I have been asked to kind of elaborate on my philosophical project where I'm coming and then move toward the topic of this presentation. Basically, for the last few years, I've been working on a kind of revision of the projects of Enlightenment, starting with basically the evolution of modern knowledge, and then
inevitably I would let you philosophies are rational. So basically I started working on this what really caused the last you know philosophy of Scholastica's medieval philosophy to move toward the kind of scientific revolution at the beginning of Renaissance. My main focus was really kind of a survey of the conceptual
changes that led to scientific, you know, radical, drastic change at the beginning of Renaissance. Exactly what happened to concepts of scholasticism and medieval philosophy that led to this kind of scientific evolution. The traditional view is that the scientific revolution was in fact some sort of radical rupture from these earlier scholastic and medieval philosophies and antiquity. But the more we look at later scholastic philosophy and late medieval achievements, we see that it's not really a rupture, it's basically an inevitable outcome of certain conceptual
changes. So it started from this, and then my main focus was basically this evolution of modern systems of knowledge. For the most part, I was resisting the idea of a rational walk over, you know, kind of canonical portrait of reason. especially people who are familiar with continental philosophy of 20th century, there is much hostility, and to some extent they are valid. That reason is understood as rigid, as too stable,
as it simply re-inscribes a pre-neal image of man at the center of the universe. which basically Copernican revolution tries to eject man from the center of the universe. But as I started to read, you know, the works of certain philosophers, more specifically Wilfred Sellars and Robert Brandom, two American philosophers, I see that this is not really the case. in fact Kant was right that basically the only thing that can unbind
humanity no no it's okay so I was saying yes Kant was right in a way that the only thing that can unbind the human from its canonical portrait from man being the center of the universe is in fact reason. And this has something to do with the structure of reason itself. That reason, the structure of reason is essentially social, but not every social practice counts as reasoning. Reason is socially instituted, but that doesn't mean it's socially constituted.
Only certain specific practices are the ones that determine the social structure of reason. And those are what we call discursive practices, social discursive practices. and through this social discursive practices and a picture of reason man can be renegotiated in fact the only thing that defines sapience the human is really the significance of reason in so far as rationality provides a picture of the human no longer as a species that have a privileged ontological status,
but simply as a project. That human is not a species, it's a project. And the only way that we can conceive and work and engage in this project is by a form of revisionary approach to the structure of rationality through which the human can be conceived as a practice, as a struggle, rather than as the meaning that is already naturally given or determined by God. hence in a sense its rationality somehow unbinds some sort of Promethean irreverence
but there is a massive amount of critique against this Prometheanism of reason but the majority of them are not convincing if any of them precisely because the core component of this critique is that they want to make the human humble but humble in faith in the in the face of whom exactly it's always back into God that's you know human needs to be rendered humble in confrontation with a notion of nature or a notion of God basically it's a notion of
of an exorbitant entity. And this can be anything. We see it, for example, Bataille, it's nature. You know, for theological projects, it's God. And then that kind of humbleness, precisely because it divests human from the kind of responsibility that the reason provides him with These kinds of, you know, these kinds of the project of, you know, basically humiliation in the face of God or nature, they result in different kind of pathologies that are much worse than even the pathologies of reason that can be in fact renegotiated, that can be critically approached and be revised step by step.
So what I'm going to talk about is this precisely this idea of approaching the human and humanity in general, not as a species being, not as a form of essentialism, but simply as a project that is susceptible to construction and revision. In fact, I would like to propose that this kind of approach to humanity, the first consequence of it is that we face the human as an artificial project, as an artificial edifice.
the artificiality is the truth of human is the truth of rational agency an artificial what I mean by artificiality is not that it means man made artificiality in a precise sense means adaptation to purposes and ends which are not given in advance whether they are prescribed by God or prescribed by nature or the system of causation or mechanism so on and so forth and this adaptation to new purposes and ends which are not given in advance does not imply violation of natural laws so artificiality doesn't mean that you are basically isolating yourself from your natural history but simply bring it critically bringing it under you
you know, under the kind of dominion of a project of construction and revision. And basically, one of the curious aspects of a rational agency, and what do I mean by rational agency means a form of agency that is not only responsible for what he or she is judging, but also in the act of judgment becomes responsible to do something. This is what Immanuel Kant calls positive freedom. That freedom is not only freedom from constraints,
but most importantly, it is freedom to do something, to become responsible to do something. to have an entitlement and that entitlement is basically according to constraints, various constraints, whether they are constraints of our environment, whether the constraints are material organization or the constraints of reason as such, we become entitled to do something. We are forced to do something, to elaborate the consequences of our freedom. Now, and as I said, one of the most curious aspects of rational agency is that the rational agency
has a history rather than mere past or a nature. What it means to have a history means that it develops a concept out of itself, a normative concept. A concept is basically a reason rather than a cause. It develops a concept out of itself and it transforms itself according to a concept. And in so far as the concept is socially instituted, socially can be revised and modified, not only the concept by which the human approaches itself, but also the way that it transforms itself according to the concept can be revised and be negotiated. So this means that the rational agency becomes the artifact of its own concept.
And here, you know, the idea that history of humanity in this sense can be understood as elaboration of the artificial potencies of the human to treat yourself as the artifact of your own concept. Now, so what is exactly how we can conceive human as a project? And basically, what are the, what does this project consist in? So I'm just going to, you know, briefly talk about two main aspects of this project.
One is that, you know, any kind of project, I mean, this is the whole idea of a project, needs to be understood as a systematic endeavor. It's basically a labor rather than a kind of attempt that you can see its consequences immediately. Already the Stoics had this idea that the agency is not a thing but an activity. an activity that culminates in the conception of agency
as a project. That's, we can only understand our freedoms, our entitlement, our responsibility in light of understanding ourselves as project. And the project always transcends the finitude of the agents as such. And this means that, and this is basically the main, was the main project of the Stoics to one of the main consequences of agent being finite, whereas a project being extended in a space and time, is that in so far as the agent is mortal
and cannot see the consequences of this contribution to the project of itself, namely the agency, it becomes basically disgruntled. It becomes psychologically debilitated to move further. If I cannot see the consequences of my action to the projects of humanity right away, then I might just as well give up on it. And this is exactly one of the pathologies of 20th century kind of anti-humanism. That in so far as it cannot conceive humanity as a project, it repudiates the entire project, you know, outright.
So the Stoics try to come up with, you know, forms of emotional management, psychological, you know, mind hack in a certain sense, to be able to cope with this inability, disability, to not seeing the immediate consequences and achievements stemmed from our contribution to the project of humanity or the project of agency. So, yes, back to this idea that project needs to be understood systematically.
And in order for us to understand systematically, we need to have a different form of psychological, emotional approach to the idea of ourselves as mortal individuals, but also the broader picture, which is the, you know, humanity as a project. as a project, as a project that tells us that no one knows what human means. The meaning of humanity is not given in advance. It's a cognitive practical enterprise. It's a form of exploration. So this is the main scope of the project.
And as a project, it can be divided into two sections. One, the actual complexity of the structure. And the other one is how we conceive the complexity of this project as we move forward. So this already gives us two kind of broad perspective as what it means to conceive humanity as a project. One, as an exercise in complexity, engineering a structure, basically developing, you know, various hierarchies of a complex system, of a complex project.
And the other one is simply cognitively register the complexity of the project and then be capable of basically to come up with how we can emotionally, psychologically, cognitively, conceptually approach and tackle with the complexity of our own basically mode of practices, mode of construction, and mode of revision. The first one, which is, you know, the complexity aspect of it, effectively means that we can no longer see our environment, ourselves, nature as totalities.
Basically, in philosophy, especially in philosophy of 20th century, we have these kinds of concepts like totality, nature, you know, human, that are taken as basically total entities. Totality means that we approach entities in terms of wholes. And that wholeness, that totality of things, does not allow us to see basically the details. complexity always lies resides in the details which means that and this is a that's why I brought the concept of engineering into the equation engineers are the first you know
kind of people that tell us in order to approach something in order to elaborate the constructive potencies of something, you cannot see things as totalities. You cannot see things as holistic forms, but you need to break down to the kind of hierarchies that constitute them. And this is exactly how complexity science tell us that the nature of complexity consists in. Complexity is not rhizomatic horizontality, it's not flatness. It's a register of a stabilization of a structure over time. One structure give rise to another structure on top of it, and then it gives
to different forms of structure on top of it. And this allows for a structure to gain a form of stability that this stability basically is a register of its complexity. What they call it a generative entrenchment in so far as structures the functions and you know the attributes the behaviors of these structures are entrenched you know in lower structures. And this brings back this idea that when we have a complexity, we have hierarchies.
When we have hierarchies, then we cannot conceive complexity in the sense of some sort of, you know, immediate or short-length task is something that basically needs to be constructed over time. Freedom, and this is why freedom is associated with some sort of complexity, with this hierarchical complexity, that we cannot construct freedom overnight. Freedom, if you think that freedom can be delivered, imported, or exported overnight, politically, socially, psychologically, you are basically unable to implement freedom.
Freedom is really an expression of this complexity, of this stability, of things being built on top of one another. There is an stability at a stake. There is a form of generativity of a structure, and that generativity enables you to, you know, make additional changes, come up with different modifications to do something, you know, to further do something with this structure, with this project. So the first aspect is this understanding that if we want to understand humanity as a project,
first we need to understand, we need to approach this project in terms of the vocabulary of complexity. And the vocabulary of complexity is hierarchical. It's a register of stability over time, generativity. And generativity can only come if a structure is stabilized. So it allows the structure to generate further functionalities, further activities, and affordances. Afford you to embark upon additional tasks. So this is the first part.
And by complexity here, I mean the complexity we need to, you know, understand that how we can, you know, come up with new modes of organization, social organization, economic organization to basically decompose, for example, our economic condition, our political condition to our economical conditions, structures, layers of structures, to criticize and to approach what we can do with our politics in terms of the economic substrate, and what we can do with the economic substrate in terms of different forms of substrate, with the idea that when we are talking about complexity, it is no longer top down or bottom up.
Actually, complexity is always counterintuitive relations between top to bottom and up, down, bottom to top. There are intricate relations. And in order for us to elaborate the constructive potencies of a complex system, we need to unfold and investigate these counterintuitive relations between substrates and superstructures, between, you know, the upper level structures and, you know, bottom level structures. But the thing is that having a complex structure
is not the same as being capable of adequately recognizing what we can do with the complexity of our own social structure. Having complexity is not the same as rendering this complexity intelligible. We already have complex social structures and that's somehow, you know, capitalism shows this. Capitalism has in fact a complex structure. But does this mean that capitalism, in so far as it has a complex structure,
is adequate to elaborate, to be considered as a project that is suitable for understanding humanity as a cognitive practical exploration? Is it suitable for approaching the kind of species we are, we are, namely human? No. Because precisely capitalism has a complex structure, but in fact it does not cultivate the cognitive dimension of how we can critically encounter the complexity of this structure. In fact, what capitalism, and that's exactly the project of neoliberalism,
as a form of anti-intellectualism, as a form of anti-critique, to prevent us rendering the complexity of the structure intelligible so as we can meaningfully change it, meaningfully revise it. So, and this brings us to the second part, which is developing cognitive technologies, developing cognitive technologies in order for us to render the complexity of our own socioeconomic political structure intelligible. as we can basically what Plato says join carve the complexity of nature the
complexity of a system at its joint without this carving a system without this carving a complexity at this joint we cannot basically engage with the complexity which simply becomes the slaves of complexity and that's exactly you know is some sort of falling back on that idea of human as being natural nature is complex but does this mean that we need to be a slaves of nature We need to simply being, you know, simply a species who can only elaborate their potencies in terms of cause rather than reasons.
because if complexity gives rise to us, we simply become a being of causes. But as I said, if we take human no longer in terms of given meaning or given purpose, we need to conceive human not as a slave of causes but as a slave of reasons because reasons are susceptible to renegotiation. We can define and revise our own reasons according to how we develop, how we emerge. And that's exactly why we need to have cognitive technologies or technologies to render complexity
of our own, you know, sociocultural dimension intelligible so as to be capable of forming sites of a struggle, sites of critique to be able to, you know, turn complexity of our own species into opening it into basically revision, into further construction, bringing it from the causal dimension of the complexity, which is prevalent in the entire nature, into the revisionary constructive dimension
of rationality, of reasons, of concepts, truly become artifacts of our own concepts. How much time do we have? Okay. Okay, okay. Okay, so I will just go with some sort of, you know, kind of conclusive remarks to wrap up and then we open to the discussion.
So I see this kind of project is a project that obviously is not going to happen in our lifetime. It's an onerous task. But simply because it's a demanding task doesn't mean that we should forego with such a task. Because if we really are committed to things like freedom, both in the sense of freedom from being free from constraint and freedom to do something, if we are committed to the intelligibility of our action, if we are committed to unbinding ourselves from slavery in the broadest possible sense,
then we can only commit to such a project. The only project of exit out of the slavery of human, whether to itself or nature, is by committing to the project of human, conceiving human as a project. This brings us back to, so if we can't really see the immediate consequences of our action of contributing to this project, then how can we move forward with this project? Because obviously we are all individuals, And individuals, for the most part, have psychological needs that are in conflict with the social and collective dimension of, you know, contributing to such a project.
This brings, you know, how we can psychologically cope with this. And that brings the role of education into, you know, into the equation. That's in order for us to be able to cognitively and psychologically develop tools to contribute to such a project, we need to be educated in a certain sense, both psychologically and cognitively in the broadest possible sense, to be able to cultivate this project, to understand project humanity um in the broadest as a as a project of self-cultivation and this is something that already philosophers who were you know uh the disciples of socrates
like the cynics and the stoic the stoics have already you know elaborated The self-cultivation is not only individual self-cultivation, but also collective self-cultivation. In order for us to conceive agency, the intelligibility of agency as a species of freedom, we need to understand it as a collective self-cultivating project. But we cannot conceive this, we cannot contribute to this collective self-cultivation unless we devise a form of individual form of self-cultivation, which is basically a form of ethical education.
But of course, we have already tools in our disposal to understand ethics, ethic of individual self-cultivation necessary for project of collective self-cultivation, not simply in the old-fashioned terms of ethics, but in terms of some sort of individual self-engineering. We have neuroscience, we have education, we have different dimensions of ethics. And that's why I think any kind of education that is determined to make human ready, truly ready, for this kind of collective project of self-cultivation,
need to incorporate neuroscientific aspects of, you know, individual self-perception, ethical, you know, dimensions of, you know, self-cultivation, political, you know, psychological, all these aspects together. And that's precisely what is already missing in, you know, any form of education that is existing. And neoliberalism is in fact, you know, as a project that is complex, in fact, it's basically bootstrap itself out of the complexity of capitalism, is precisely committed to forms of education that are basically educations that are devised to cultivate individualistic.
endeavors rather than forming a wiring producing developing kind of individual that can be incorporated in the project of self-cultivation so I'm ready for any kind of discussion or question and argument Thank you.