Abstract
Our experience of the present is defined by numbers, graphs and, increasingly, an algorithmically calculated future, based on the mathematical and formal reasoning that began with the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, this reasoning is further modified and extended in the form of computer-executed, algorithmic reasoning. Instead of fallible human reasoning, algorithms—based on mining databases for ‘information’—are seen to provide more efficient processes, offering fast solutions. In this paper, then, I will follow Jan Patočka, who suggests that we live in an age of supercivilisation, one in which human reasoning has become self-sufficient, ceasing to depend on the supernatural or cultural traditions that previously guided human lives. My argument is that Patočka’s analysis of supercivilisation can open up a different way to reflect on the ‘spiritual foundation of our times’. As Patočka says, to reflect on our situation does not mean that we can change it, but reflection can give us a new understanding that will open up different ways to think about our human future.
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Notes
Translations are by the author, unless otherwise attributed.
On “The Meaning of the Mathematical,” see Williams (2015).
Ed Finn, for example, writes, “computation becomes a universal solvent for problems in the physical sciences, theoretical mathematics, and culture alike. The quest for knowledge becomes a quest for computation, a hermeneutics of modelling” (Finn 2017, 23).
Originally, the study of universal history was a 12-volume work, published between 1934 and 1961.
At the time of his writing, Patočka spoke of two supercivilisations: the USA, which he termed moderate supercivilisation, and the USSR, which he called radical supercivilisation.
Patočka’s analysis of ‘supercivilisation’ can even be called ‘visionary’—the term that is usually applied to Michel Foucault’s lecture course on The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault 2008). For readings and the influence of Foucault, see Binkley and Capetillo-Ponce (2009), Esposito (2008) and Nilsson and Wallenstein (2013).
Andrey Zhdanov, using Stalin’s definition of writers as “engineers of human souls,” defined the responsibility of a writer or filmmaker as being to represent reality not in “a dead scholastic way, not simply as ‘objective reality,’ but to depict reality in its revolutionary development” (R.S.F.S.R. 1979).
His notion of heretical history and asubjective phenomenology is one of the ways he confronts this quandary. See Chvatík (2017).
On ‘method’, see Husserl (1970, §9h, 51–52).
See also Nietzsche (2001, §373; §358).
See Heidegger’s discussion in The Principle of Reason (1996b).
As Byung-Chul Han suggests, the claim is that “the patterns of behavior identified by Big Data’s analyses enable accurate prognostication. This, in turn, means that the hypothetical models of theory” are superfluous. After all, we can directly relate various data in the pool to match them according to different patterns that the power of computers helps us to discern, and we can, then, discover significance in them, which we were unable to see previously. “Correlation takes the place of causality. Why is an idle question in view of simple fact: that’s how it is” (Han 2017a, 78, italics in original).
“Computational systems, as tools, emphasise one of the most powerful aspects of humanity: our ability to act effectively in the world and shape it to our desires. But uncovering and articulating those desires, and ensuring that they do not degrade, overrule, efface, or erase the desires of others, remains our prerogative” (Bridle 2018, 16).
For a different translation and enumerations, see Pascal (1999, XLVll, §690, 172).
“Now the conclusion we should draw from these considerations is not that arithmetic and geometry are the only sciences worth studying, but rather that in seeking the right path of truth we ought to concern ourselves only with objects which admit of as much certainty as the demonstrations of arithmetic and geometry” (Descartes 1985, I, Rule 2, 366 [312–313]).
“Those who possess data are put in a position of special access and authority over the world. Flows of data correspond to flows of power and profit. […]At the same time, the rhetoric of data universality reframes everything as within the domain of digital capitalism” (Sadowski 2020, 34, italics in original).
He returned to this study in his last book, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Patočka 1996a).
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Učník, Ľ. The Allure and impossibility of an algorithmic future: a lesson from Patočka’s supercivilisation. Stud East Eur Thought 73, 249–270 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09394-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09394-y