Original scientific paper Izvirni znanstveni članek
DOI: 10.32022/PHI33.2024.130-131.16 UDC: 165.72:007
The Technosphere and Nihilism
Autopoiesis as the End of Metaphysics
Žarko Paic
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Textile Technology, Prilaz baruna Filipovica 28a, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
zarko.paic@ttf.hr
Abstract
The "essence" of the technosphere is no longer human or inhuman, because it is not a thinking machine or an instrument for other purposes. After all, the "essence" of artificial intelligence is that it is a thing, rather than an object that thinks and moves. It tends to be an autopoietic machine of cognitive calculation/planning/construction of events that do not exist in reality. Therefore, the onto-logic of the technosphere is pure digital constructivism. The technosphere becomes consequently a synthesis of
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metaphysics and cybernetics in post- and trans-humanism. This synthesis presupposes a transition, or becoming (devenir), into the post-biological or post-human condition that we call singularity. Autopoiesis is thus the last fundamental word or concept of metaphysics at its realized end. I attempt to offer a discussion of this problem, taking into account the question whether "contemporaneity" under the rule of the technosphere can be thought from the horizon of the figure of Übermensch, which, incidentally, with homo kybernetes, loses its "ontological" meaning.
Keywords: technosphere, nihilism, artificial intelligence, metaphysics, homo cybernetes.
Tehnosfera in nihilizem. Avtopoeza kot konec metafizike
Povzetek
»Bistvo« tehnosfere ni več človeško ali nečloveško, ker ni misleči stroj ali orodje za druge namene. Navsezadnje je »bistvo« umetne inteligence v tem, da je stvar in ne 346 predmet, ki misli in se premika. Teži k temu, da bi bila avtopoetski stroj kognitivnega računanja/načrtovanja/konstruiranja dogodkov, ki v resničnosti ne obstajajo. Zato je onto-logika tehnosfere čisti digitalni konstruktivizem. Tehnosfera posledično postane sinteza metafizike in kibernetike v post- in transhumanizmu. Takšna sinteza predpostavlja prehod oziroma postajanje (devenir) v postbiološko ali posthumano stanje, ki ga imenujemo singularnost. Zato je avtopoeza zadnja temeljna beseda ali koncept metafizike ob njenem uresničenem koncu. Poskušam podati obravnavo tega problema, pri čemer je treba upoštevati vprašanje, ali je »sodobnost« v znamenju vladavine tehnosfere mogoče z obzorja figure nadčloveka, ki pravzaprav, tako kot homo kybernetes, izgubi svoj »ontološki« pomen.
Ključne besede: tehnosfera, nihilizem, umetna inteligenca, metafizika, homo kybernetes.
Žarko Paic
1.
The original or initial (arche) is considered far-reaching and decisive for the understanding of Being. So, it applies equally to the mythical and religious determination of the origin and becoming of the world. The Greeks begin with the story of the origin of the gods and their share in Theogony, and the Bible reveals that the absolute creator of the world, Yahweh, shaped in seven days what cosmologically has the power to establish the earth and its creatures. Thus, the human inhabits the position and place of mediating with the divine light of eternal presence. It is not just a connection of creation with time as a dividing line of what belongs to eternity. There is still something before the emergence of Being, beings, and being human in the historical context. And that "something" is nothing but the moment of the emergence of thinking as an event. With it, all that "is" takes on the possibility of synthesizing Being and time beyond nothingness and emptiness. Therefore, the original or initial (arche) for metaphysics is straight to the event, without which nothing can be thought.	347
Moreover, it seems that the very first as well as the One and the singular "something," which comes from the abyss of Being and time, cannot be only the mystery of the origin of Being in general and as such, but, above all, the mystery of thought as "another creation." What is secondary or different is always the product of difference. And it stems from the identity of Being. To create in the way of the artistic production of worlds (poiesis) means, therefore, necessarily to imitate the reproduced "original" in the sense of Being as nature (physis in Greek, natura naturans and natura naturata within the modern understanding, for example, in Spinoza; cf. Heidegger 1998, 10-11). The second/another creation cannot be credible, if it does not simultaneously bring the "new" into the world. This seems true, even when it seemingly mimics the work of the divine creation of nature in the "realistic" mode. The distinction between the original or the initial (arche) and that, which is secondary and different, proves essential for the ontological determination of art, architecture, and design, as well as the essence of philosophy and science. If the difference always denotes that, which presupposes the same or the identity of Being with itself, then its provision is that it should be already always in a state of difference
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and otherness from the same. But suppose its essence cannot be derived from Being, but is a difference as such or one that Deleuze claims derives from itself. In that case, we encounter a grounding of metaphysics and its fundamental structures and conceptual-categorical relations (cf. Deleuze 2011).
The question of the first or the initial (arche) cannot be answered essentially by positive sciences, such as mathematics and physics, but neither by modern cosmology nor astrophysics. The reason is that the original or the initial (arche) is not hidden in the essence of the number, with which the infinite sequence begins. However, cosmological speculation about the distribution of matter, energy, and information also cannot be resolved. Why? This is the original and initial (arche) ontological problem par excellence, which for metaphysical notions becomes simultaneously a question of the fourfold that for Heidegger represents the structural unity of Western metaphysics in general: Being— God—World—Human (cf. Heidegger 2003a). To think means always to think within this historically formed framework or paradigm, even when, as in the case of radical deconstructionists of metaphysics, like Nietzsche and Deleuze, 348 resorting to the abolition of God as the authoritative concept and idea. Thinking does not mean merely presenting something as something, nor can it be reduced to volitional-perceptual processes used today by neurocognitive scientists to convince us that the thought process presupposes always a will and action beyond the traditional relationship between subject and object. To think means to be focused on the purity of the creation of thought as the production of ideas and conceptual formations, on the event, with which Being and time become the task of thought. Heidegger said all this during his "journey of thought" as "a task of thinking." The matter of reasoning proves to be a relation between the original or the initial (arche) and the secondary or different from the same. An essential problem of all metaphysics already opens up, consisting in the fact that every creation presupposes the idea of creation: either as what is the first cause and last purpose of Being in general or as what transcends such a circular structure of thought and reaches for the way out of that "fateful" fourfold, with which Heidegger ended his thought journey. But instead of an onto-theo-cosmo-anthropological structure, the path ends with the fourfold of earth and sky, mortals and immortals—as a path to "another beginning" (der andere Anfang; cf. Heidegger 2005).
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Getting out of "the vicious circle" does not mean abandoning metaphysics as executing arbitrary decisions. The necessity of metaphysics being established throughout the history of the West, both at its beginning and at its end, does not mean that thought is merely the realization of its "laws" and "forms" of utterance in language as the abode of logos and mythos. Necessity denotes only that, which is, admittedly, different from possibility as difference. But it proves to be the last possibility of a thought act to realize the purpose of man's existence. What is necessary can never be so inevitable, for the primary or initial (arche) is the possibility of thinking in the openness of the horizon, within which the telling of Being becomes a measure of one's own time. We cannot, therefore, leave the soil of the country, from which we think "about" the world and "of" Being as such, because the language, by which we always already think, is "necessarily" determined by a rootedness in the homeland and its shadow of life. What arises and opens as original or initial (arche) has the character of an ontological puzzle. How do we come to think of something as original or initial (arche), if we also start from the idea that "what" is "is" in the original sense uncreated and eternal, as Parmenides said? Is it not logically 349 contradictory to speak of the original or the initial (arche), if Being as such and as a whole has neither a beginning nor an end, because, in its permanence, it is unchangeable and eternal?
Dealing with the issue of the end of metaphysics from the original question of the meaning (truth) of Being, Heidegger, in his lectures on the beginning of Western philosophy in Greece, "began" with the reflection upon "the first philosophers," primarily Anaximander and Parmenides, on "the first beginning." In doing so, he credibly linked the origin or beginning of philosophy with what he called "the end of philosophy" as the realizing of the possibilities of metaphysics. This connection designates, at the same time, a question of the possibility/reality/necessity of a philosophy that begins with the thinking of Being and ends with the idea of cybernetics as the realization of metaphysics in a technologically determined "world." In short, Heidegger's consideration of the issue of beginning cannot be merely a question of the "necessity" of philosophy as the beginning of Western history, but above all a question of the actual possibilities of the historical event of Being itself in its original time. In this sense, philosophy cannot be separated from its own
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"mission" and "event" as the essence of Western history in the sign of "the first beginning" (arche) and "the last purpose" (telos). However, history can still be directly related to the condition of its ability. Undoubtedly, the first and last aspiration is to merge with Being and beings. The archaic age can never fall into the irreversible past. It is alive, only when there exists an urgent spiritual need for "the origin."
2.
In the aforementioned lectures on Anaximander and Parmenides from the summer semester in Freiburg in 1932, Heidegger expounds on the ruling origin of Being as the enabling power of appearance. In doing so, he refers to Anaximander's fragment arche ton onton to apeiron. In free translation, Heidegger says that this fragment represents the origin or source of Being as such, concerning Being as "the boundless" (das Grenzenlose; cf. Heidegger 2012, 27). The following reflections explain why the term "Being" should be used 350 as such, and not as an individual being. It is not, therefore, a "coincidence," a mere singularity of Being in many appearances, but an internal connection/ relationship between Being and beings. In doing so, it becomes clear that Being cannot be superior to beings in the meaning of a theological understanding of God, who rules and governs the world, and to whom beings submissively serve as stewards of his absolute will. With the notion of the origin, source, or beginning of Being as such (arche), Greeks mean the free relationship between beings, not from the framework of thought that presupposes a complete hierarchy of beings. Hence, this arche, the archaic in itself, opens and enables the appearance of Being as the boundless as such. When we keep in mind that Anaximander's fragment is a rounded insight into the primordial understanding of the relationship of Being and beings as such, then it becomes self-evident that the relationship between apeiron and arche should be mediated by the need for connection and relationship between Being and beings. The Greeks denote this by the word chreon, which Heidegger translates with the German word "Not" (necessity or destiny; cf. Pimentel 2019, 13). What is "necessarily" and "fatefully" determined here? Nothing but the relationship/connection between what is original or initial (arche) and the way Being appears as such:
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[...] arche is that, which precedes everything and from which everything derives. This concerns the beginning of Being, the appearance of. (Heidegger 2012, 27.)
Appearance, however, must not be equated with something that belongs only to the world of phenomena in contrast to what is beyond any appearance. Thus, arche in Greek is not the a priori that allows the a posteriori, as it is customary for the modern transcendental metaphysics of the Kantian orientation. Heidegger explicitly argues that this is not the beginning of the appearance of beings, but of Being as a whole. Hence, Anaximander's fragment is about the start or beginning of what appears as the preceding and originating, and is thus simultaneously the pre-metaphysical "credo" of the Greek philosophy. To think of the primordial beginning of the appearance of Being means to reveal the horizon of the appearance itself as such. It is, therefore, not at all surprising, why Heidegger would consider that, in essence, these instructive and "fateful" words/concepts, such as arche, are the beginning of all Western history. Of course, history is impossible without thinking, just as thinking cannot be conceivable without the historical occurrence of Being in time. This mutual familiarity of Being and thinking shows how the narration in Greeks takes place as an attempt to "establish" the world in its original appearance, in the purity of all other determinations. Therefore, all words or sayings about Being derive from this source/origin of Being. The idea of a common source of Being is undoubtedly what Reiner Schurmann calls "the broken hegemony" of Western metaphysics (cf. Schurmann 2003). Primacy, in the ontological sense of the beginning (arche) of Being, does not mean that its essence is outside of Being and that Being must be superior to that, which is subordinate in the sense of absolute command. The archaic cannot be anything "archaic" in the mind of the irreversible past, because primordial or original time is timed precisely in the unity and harmony of the three dimensions—past, present, and future. What was "original" as the beginning of Being never really passed. The priority of "the original" signifies what was as self-evident to the Greeks as to all the archaic peoples of the world: namely, that the past as Being was that dimension of time that physically determines the meaning of Being in general (cf. Severino 2016). In the sign of the rule of what this word signifies, Heidegger may say affirmatively:
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Arche as the ruling origin remains present in everything, coming first and finally appearing in all its appearance and disappearance. (Heidegger 2012, 28.)
Let us add to the saying that Heidegger uses the German word Verfügung instead of the Latin word principium, in order to give an appropriate meaning to what arche means in Greek. And this, as we have seen, is both principle and order, as well as direction and command in the sense of the rule of the original and "founding" even in the disappearance of appearance. This is important to mention, because the meaning of the essential Greek words for philosophy, such as "metaphysics," has more than the metaphysical rank of narration. Language and speaking cannot be reduced to a mere exchange of information. Speech that combines the apophantic and performative meaning of narration simultaneously refers to an event, by which Being and time are understood pre-ontologically, on the border of silence and ineffability. To that extent, the discourse on the initial, the original, that which commands the course of 352 history in a commanding manner, even when this does not seem so visible, needs to enable the emergence of Being as a whole. Orientation cannot be just a displaying of the path from beginning to end, with cause and purpose. What enables direction lies at the origin of the path of thought. And this is what Heidegger takes from the primordial narration of the Greeks in Anaximander and Parmenides. Arche opens the possibility of the appearance of beings in the light of the meaning (truth) of Being and is therefore inextricably present in the entire history of Western thought or philosophy as metaphysics, and also at its end in cybernetics. As a contemporary, it is not enough to live in modern times with the rule of enframing (Gestell) as the essence of technology. It should be necessary to understand time as a connection/relationship between the initial and directing course that has never really passed. It is that time that does not last, but is timed in memory as the existential relation of the essence of man to Being in general. The past, therefore, acquires its essential meaning only from the future as an impending event. But the "actual future" connects the past and the present into an open event of the coming world, with which Being gains meaning.
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3.
In his lectures on the beginning of Western philosophy, Heidegger exposed the uncanniness of "modernity" concerning the trinity of Anaximander's reference words, such as chreon, arche, and apeiron. With this, in the 20th century, the Greek language became ambiguously mythopoetically "alive" thanks to Heidegger's merit, and after him, this hermeneutic path was continued by HansGeorg Gadamer. Of course, traces of this path in the 19th century were outlined primarily in Nietzsche's thought and Holderlin's poetic mythology. However, only thanks to Heidegger, the attempt to explain the accurate modernity of our times, which is marked by scientific and technical innovations, shone with full splendor through turning towards "the beginning" (arche). In this, we must see the absolute "novelty" of philosophizing beyond Hegel's dialectics and beyond Husserlian phenomenology, not to mention various neo-Kantian renewals of the notion of the subject or metaphysical positivism of multiple orientations. When, therefore, we establish a living relationship with the Greek experience of the thinking of Being before Plato and Aristotle, then the main reason for this 353 "long journey through the night" denotes the never-bygone past in an attempt to regain what was lost over time, which is the erosion of the metaphysical soil of history—what remained deeply repressed into the abyss of memory. Neither Anaximander nor Parmenides is "modern" without the mediation of Heidegger, Gadamer, Severino, Schurmann, and other thinkers of our time.
On the contrary, their place cannot be only determined by "newer" philological-philosophical contributions. More important should be something else: how can this "deep" reading of sources and origins be understood as the experience of thought after "the end of metaphysics?" Does it have other prospects than those set out in the postulate that the ancient past has an entirely different meaning for modernity than "the dead tradition" of conservatism of all colors?
Let us discuss the orientation and rule of the beginning (arche) in Heidegger's postulates about Anaximander. It should be said that the fundamental reason for this reckoning with "the forgetting of tradition" lies in the notion of the meaning of Being, without which it is impossible to emancipate authentic history from history as a scientific-positivist approach to the past. With this
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in mind, it should be obvious, why modern thinking in the wake of Heidegger "seeks" a different understanding of the essence of philosophy in general than the one, which belongs to the circle of metaphysical tradition from Plato to Hegel. Heidegger persistently "translates" Greek classical texts in almost the same way as Nietzsche, which means that his reading is contrary to the mainstream of modern philology dedicated to the Greek pre-Socratic thought. We will not engage in these controversies here, because they are not topics to consider. However, it should be noted that Heidegger's way of approaching the Greeks is nothing but "credibly unreliable," i.e., it is aimed at trying to dissolve, through the German language from Meister Eckhart to Hölderlin and Nietzsche, that, which in the narrative bears a trace of the non-metaphysical origin of history, and which shows itself precisely, because it is alive and cannot be reduced to the fossils of the positive nihilism of the humanities of modernity and contemporaneity. And this only means that talking about Anaximander, for example, must pave the way for thought that speaks an ancient language, often on the border of myth and poetic ambiguity, in order to open the possibility for 354 philosophy and art, that is, for thinking and creating, and to aspire to meet the event (Ereignis) of "the second beginning." If in "the first beginning," the event was given without the participation of man, now it is up to him to "give birth" to new gods of "self-creative chaos" from the essence of philosophy and art.
This can only happen with such a unique conatus. Reflexive thinking seeks to overcome obstacles along the way, to free itself from the siren calls of realism and idealism, and to find in the singularity of the conceptual speech of the thinker a safe place of mediation without external intermediaries. Thus, thinking as a philosophical path focuses on a completely different mode of creation (poiesis vs. creation) than that, which belongs to art. However, their discourses overlap and have coincided since Nietzsche. Why, then, so much almost "messianic" expectation from the thinking of early Greek thinkers with their instructive philosophical words—directions that last for centuries and define our thought as the only real life? For Heidegger, Anaximander's fragment about the beginning or emergence of Being as such (arche) also tells that everything comes from the source and origin, and returns there by the nature of the thing of thinking itself. What does this mean for contemporaneity, and does it have any deeper meaning in the age of the rule of astrophysics
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and theories of singularity and contingency? First of all, Heidegger reads from it the necessity of "the eschatology of the West," because Being is thought starting from this beginning, which is indestructible and uncreated, eternal and permanent (cf. Heidegger 2003c, 327; also Diels 1983, 76-86). But the eschatological denotes nothing other than the "necessary" arising from Being and hence "fatefulness" in a completely different sense from the fulfilment of a predestined mission in the sign of God's graceful election, as it appears with the theological heritage of Christianity. To think of Being as an eschatological mission means to think of the direction of what was once created and never disappeared, except that it was pushed into oblivion by history, thanks to the rule of historicism as one version of modern nihilism.
4.
What does an ancient saying at the beginning of Western philosophy mean for modernity? Indeed, its meaning appears, only when it becomes apparent that the time of today's technical nihilism starts from the notion of the novelty 355 of the new from the perspective of actuality. Returning to the past from there can never be a mere nostalgia. It is a resistance to the time of complete reduction of the world to the effects of "benefits" and "pragmatics." Heidegger cares to expose the riddle of this Anaximander's fragment, precisely because remembering the beginnings of Western philosophy requires a reorientation of the understanding of the essence of modernity. The opinion that unravels this riddle is philosophical, although its closeness to artistic creation is undeniable. At one of the decisive points in the discussion of the "The Anaximander Fragment" from 1946, we come across the following assumptions:
Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed more than one kind of poetizing, more than poetry and song. Thinking of Being is the original way of poetizing. Language first comes to language, i.e. into its essence, in thinking. Thinking says what the truth of Being dictates; it is the original dictare. Thinking is primordial poetry, prior to all poesy, but also prior to the poetics of art, since art shapes its work within the realm of language. All poetizing, in this broader sense, and also in the narrower sense of the poetic, is in its ground a thinking. The
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poetizing essence of thinking preserves the sway of the truth of Being. Because it poetizes as it thinks, the translation which wishes to let the oldest fragment of thinking itself speak necessarily appears violent. (Heidegger 1984, 19; cf. Heidegger 2003c, 328-329.)
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We see now how important it is in thought within and outside the metaphysical circle to preserve the memory of the beginning (arche). Things never change so that they would be opposite to their emerging essence. Moreover, the origin or source of Being shows us this simple "necessity" as the first and last "possibility" of all change. Thinking at the moment of "the first beginning" cannot be divided into systems and classifications. It belongs to the narrative-poetic essence of language, because it is expressed only through speech that conveys meaning in dialogue with the governors of the utterance itself. Poetry and the poetic, as well as the aesthetic and the in-aesthetic, come after the event of thought has spoken the language-speech of "the original way of poetry." It is therefore not at all surprising, why the Greeks, at the origin of Western thought, could not strictly distinguish between philosophy and art, that is, between that, which belongs to wisdom (to sophon), and that, which appears as a creative act of idleness in poetry (speech and singing). In both cases, conditionally speaking, thinking seems to be a telling poeticization of the meaning (truth) of Being. The immediacy of the approach to the openness of the meaning (truth) of Being, as Heidegger puts it, has the power of the genesis of the world. In the case of Anaximander, three fundamental words, such as chreon, arche, and apeiron, refer to the permanence, necessity, and infinity of Being and beings as a whole. Therefore, what we call today, thanks primarily to the Christian tradition and the theological narrative of the revelation of God, "the idea of creation" is impossible to divide between the sacred and the secular, because in the pre-Socratic era of myth and philosophy the epoch of primordial sense of Being was the singular event without any main differences in the matter of things. What is puzzling here is the relationship between the beginning and origin or arche with the origin of Being and the beings as a whole (genesis). In his discussion of the Anaximander fragment, Heidegger explains in detail, how the concepts of this early Greek thought developed from the inner necessity of the ontological complex, with which philosophy begins. But philosophy cannot be superior to language as narrative poetry (Dichten). What
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must amaze us as contemporaries of the technosphere (artificial intelligence and gene manipulation) is that in an almost "primitive" form of narration, Anaximander not only made cosmologically important speculation about the nature of Being and beings as a whole, but "founded" a way of thinking that unites and separates philosophy and art.
From the word as an idea, which arche is in a far-reaching sense, not only the beginning of Being, but also the whole of Being as such develops. Something else grounds the relationship between philosophy and art, creating a relationship of necessity and an unbreakable bond. This is, of course, the mother of all the arts in the classical understanding ofbuilding and construction of the world—architecture. However, it is already associated with the definition that Aristotle attributes to the Being of human in the Nicomachean Ethics. It denotes a work or activity (ergon) in the form and materiality of a job that combines technical art and poetic or aesthetic action in shaping the world (cf. Agamben 2019, 7). The archaic peoples are adorned with a commitment to building in a cult festival, which is precisely those "works" that have the character of permanence and aspiration towards eternity. Therefore, the 357 Greeks cannot have any aesthetics or theory of art as a reflective activity of giving the work its meaning and significance in the world. Architecture exists like the narrative poetics of thought, the initial or the primordial. With it, a form of human existence emerges as the realization of the possibility of the work itself in practice. Construction only serves the external purposes of human habitation, even when fully functional, such as constructing modern skyscrapers and railway terminals. And we will admit they have nothing of the mythical religious past, when architecture still glorified the gods and God in building temples and cathedrals. Its essence lies in the relationship between arche and ergon. In fulfilling the possibilities of the human being as its existential necessity of dwelling in the world, the creative act becomes an event. The difference between the artistic urban planning and functional planning of cities according to the model of the machine of mechanical reproduction (Camillo Sitte vs. Le Corbusier) represents only an ambiguity of the historical sequence, by which architecture "lands" and from the governor of the sacred becomes a means/purpose (cf. Paic 2019). What seems decisive for the event of this "necessary" alienation and realization of life itself, which becomes part of
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absolute construction, is that at the end of metaphysics, in the age of realized nihilism of architecture and art, creation itself becomes an opinion about the act of creation. Sloterdijk, in his treatise on Nietzsche, finally speaks of the cybernetic corporeality of the world and calls this the mythopoetic eye, "with which Dionysus observes himself" (Sloterdijk 1986, 170).
5.
Can thinking open the way to create without the beginning (arche) and work as a work in the form of a created thing (ergon), reaching what determines the essence of the technosphere as a realized set of calculations, planning, and construction in the idea of self-organization, self-government, and self-movement, a thing, "which becomes a thinking object" (autopoiesis; cf. Paic 2023)? We have seen that at the origins of Greek pre-Socratic thought in Anaximander, the poetic saying of language reached three mutually coordinated ideas for the origin of philosophy and art: chreon—arche— 358 apeiron. With Aristotle, on the other hand, metaphysics is organized on the principles of the activity of Being (ergon) in terms of the rule of dynamis and energeia. The third, the monstrously inhuman and, at the same time, the only "necessary" condition for creation to become, from the original act of the divine and the natural as borderless (apeiron), possible as human self-activity in artistic production requires a connection/relationship of poetry as narration and art as the creation of the new (poiesis and techne). The event that leads to the creation of the "new" by uniting imagination and technology can no longer be purely human and cannot be deduced from the logic of Being as primordial nature (physis). The pre-Socratic thinking of Anaximander and Parmenides seems to no longer be a guide for us here. Let us recall that in Homer's Iliad, that monstrous wooden horse, built as "the cunning of the mind" of the wise Odysseus, in order to deceive the Trojans and allow the Achaeans a final victory, which ends an exhaustingly long war, is nothing more than a fascinating technical construction with an aesthetic addition of form (eidos) of horse (mimesis). Understanding the creation from the essence of art presupposes an insight into the essence of this connection/relationship of the poetic and the technical, imagination and invention. Creation as the
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technical production of the "new" means the introduction of "the third," which transcends the human mind and organically understood nature. In Greek mythology, these are creatures that are a combination of mixing different, opposing substances, such as cyclops and centaurs. For the technical construction of the "new" to appear in the world at all, it is necessary to reach the inhuman and the monstrous, which only allows creation to take on the characteristics of the human/inhuman act of shaping the "Great Third" in contrast to the divine and natural. It is a notion of hybridity or a hybridization process. What arises and becomes thanks to the act of technical construction is no longer just what Maurice Blanchot gathers in the sentence "sculpture glorifies marble" (Blanchot 2015, 274), but is a matter of transcending the organic and the inorganic, the living and the inanimate.
What seems clear to archaic peoples, and especially to the Greeks, is often distorted in the understanding of artistic creation: that it is at once inhuman and frightening, like the encounter with the invisible and inexpressible (unheimlich), and that this is why it transforms into a demand for the Human/too-Human. The experience of this contact with the incomprehensible and the boundless 359 arises from the gap between the divine and the human. The Enlightenment model of escaping into the harmony of nature and the infallibility of relation to the world modelled on the natural sciences, especially mathematics and physics, cannot resolve it. No one has described it better than Nietzsche. In the booklet of prefaces for unwritten books from Nachlass (1870-1873), in one such preface entitled "Homer's Contest," we read at the outset:
When one talks about humanity, underlying this idea is belief that it is humanity which separates and distinguishes human beings from nature. But there is, in reality, no such distinction: the "natural qualities" and those properly called "human" grow inseparably. The Human, in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and bears within himself its uncanny dual character. Those abilities that are thought to be terrifying and inhuman are perhaps even the fruitful soil from which alone all humanity can grow in emotions, deeds, and works. (Nietzsche 1996, 1.)
Creation and creator are the titanic powers confronting the relationship/ connection between the inhuman and the human. Nietzsche is right, when he
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takes the Greeks as witnesses of the emergence of a unique and unrepeatable world that remains a model for all future generations of "humanity" in childish wonder, harmony, and unheard-of aspiration to master history according to creative madness (the conflict between the Dionysian and the Apollonian). All this opens the space to the metaphysical splendor of life itself. But still, he was wrong about one thing. The Greeks created the word "idea" for the technically monstrous, for constructing the world seen by the eye, "with which Dionysus observes himself." But they could not transcend the boundaries of that infinite, in which their world was the abode of gods, Humans, and hybrid beings created by imagination. What was lacking in this pastoral symphony of harmony and nobility of soul was transformed with the modern turn of metaphysics into the rule of thought as the subjective calculability of Being in the mode of representation (repraesentatio). Heidegger should be mentioned once again. In the 1938 treatise "Die Zeit de Weltbildes," he unequivocally argued:
The age that is determined from out of this event is, when viewed in retrospect, not only a new one in contrast with the one that is past, but it settles itself firmly in place expressly as the new. To be new is peculiar to the world that has become picture. When, accordingly, the picture character of the world is made clear as the representedness of that which is, then in order fully to grasp the modern essence of representedness we must track out and expose the original naming power of the worn-out word and concept "to represent" [vorstellen]: to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself. Through this, whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being. That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man's becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is. (Heidegger 1977, 84.)
We have already said that Nietzsche's interpretation of pre-Socratic thinking in Greece was undoubtedly a signpost for Heidegger. We have shown how subtle the similarities and the differences are in understanding the relationship between nihilism as the essence of metaphysics and the effort to overcome this inescapable necessity and the "severe disease" of Western history. It is not uncommon for Heidegger to bring together in the lectures and the discussion of Anaximander's fragment the arche and
Žarko Paic
the setting of the will to power as the eternal recurrence of the same. But what seems particularly important in this case is that Heidegger saw more decisively that the problem was not in the artistic management of human existence beyond any reduction to the positivity of metaphysics in science and modern philosophy, which tends to be close to Kant and Hegel, when the form of a system of the absolute science of spirit as a transcendentalism of history becomes the matrix for a new nihilism. And so, his diagnosis of the state of things with regard to nihilism is the most persuasive in modern times. The reason is that the so-called representing thought, which begins with Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, reaches the culmination of the contemporary metaphysics of subjectivity, establishing pictorial creations as an inner possibility of different thought. This is precisely the opinion that Heidegger proposes in the book Was heißt Denken? (1951-1952), where he contrasts what he calls "calculation" (Rechnen) to "poetic narration" (Dichten). The first includes scientific thinking, modelled on mathematics and physics, and the second is philosophy and art (cf. Heidegger 2002). Images are the result of calculation, planning, and construction. This triad 361 determines the essence of the technosphere. However, an opinion that is no longer determined by the "necessity" and "destiny" of the first beginning and is no longer limited by what Aristotle called deed and activity (ergon) radically changes the whole of modern nihilism, primarily in such a way that now the very thing of thinking becomes an object that thinks. In cybernetic system theory, this is called autopoiesis (cf. Paic 2018, 155-166).
What makes the fundamental definition of this turn in the essence of metaphysics? Nothing other than the reversal of the whole structure, upon which metaphysics rested: the idea of foundation/reason, everything that both Nietzsche and Heidegger explained in thinking about pre-Socratic philosophy, but mainly in the analysis of the metaphysical structure of Being, in general, starting from Plato's keywords and concepts. When the matter of thought is shown to be an object of thought itself, the world, instead of onto-theology and cosmology, becomes the result of cybernetic anthropology. The production of virtual worlds is no longer an "illusion," nor can a "simulacrum" be considered an illusion of some powerful reality that governs the world through God's or human transcendence.
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On the contrary, autopoietic systems govern the world independently and within themselves as a set of information, feedback, control, and communication. Things are no longer "in" space. Instead, spatializing constitutes a dynamic category of the absolute techno-genetic construction of the inhuman. With the help of "artificial intelligence" or the new thinking of cybernetic machines, life becomes a singular multitude. This event is best described by Deleuze's "ontology of multiplicity and difference" (cf. Deleuze 2011). Overall, what is self-produced and self-governed brings philosophy and art to the wall of time. In other words, the fundamental question for the future can no longer concern the nihilism of modern technology and its completion in the idea of cybernetics, as summarized by the late Heidegger, especially in his lecture "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" ("Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens") from 1964 (cf. Heidegger 2007).
Instead, everything is redirected to the future as the construction of "computational planning." With the disappearance of uncertainty and the neutralization of the secret of what is to come, thinking that only creates its 362 object can no longer be a representing thinking. It has become self-presenting and self-conscious within "the third order of cybernetics." Machines that think what they produce themselves are objects of thought as images of the technosphere. From cosmos and mundus, the world has reached the endless techno-genesis, pure and indifferent self-production of ready-to-use information. The circle is closed. The first and the initial revolve in the last and the final as "the eternal recurrence of the same." But this is no longer Nietzsche's most difficult thought, with which the overcoming of metaphysics truly begins as a praise of the creative act of art that does not need any divine and human "foundation." Now, it becomes "a task of thinking" in the creative destiny of the world itself, left at the mercy of the technosphere. There is no going back to the beginning. All that remains lies in the future as a possible openness of a secret different from the one that marked metaphysics with the structure of Western thought. The only question is, with what other thinking can the future be freed from the nihilism, with which life sinks into formlessness and chaos? The pre-Socratic philosopher who first used the word logos, Heraclitus the Dark, may have had a solution to this spiritual discomfort we face day and night. In the 18th fragment, he said:
Žarko Paic
If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult.
To think means to approach what the unexpected event allows.
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