Abstract
This essay focuses on the ontology of the virtual, looking especially at its historical connection with today’s technology. The work begins by discussing the metaphysical structure of the Aristotelian dynamis, understood as the conceptual root of the Latin virtus. Reading Aristotle, especially through bergsonian concepts, I show how his dynamis allows a proto-deterministic account of spontaneity, strictly related to goal-oriented processes of human serial production and with the possibility of a homogeneous area of manipulation. Thus we stress how the ‘reproductive’ model works in every ontological account of the virtual and especially in the Renaissance ones, connected with the idea of a full “enginerization” of the real. The core of metaphysical virtuality seems to lie rather in an ontological account of “form” that denies its processual becoming and its process of stabilization through an infrastructure. Finally, I reject any ontological use of the virtual in teleonomy, especially in its metaphysical attempt to identify autopoiesis and mechanism, and I conclude by stressing how current digital technology is fully oriented to the reproductive model, conceptually rooted in a metaphysical account of the virtual.
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Notes
- 1.
Later, the concept of “infrastructure” can be also be used relatively and mereologically, since it can individuates an already-formed techno-teleological apparatus—for instance, the collection of technologies A1 (A1.1 + A1.2 + A1.3, etc.)—ordered in the view of the formalization (that is, the “reproducibility”) of a “secondary” one, A2 (in turn, A2 can be the “infrastructure” of A3, as well as A0 could be the infrastructure of A1, and so on).
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Guidi, S. (2019). Virtuality Beyond Reproduction. Remarks on the History of Metaphysics. In: Braga, J. (eds) Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_12
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