PHILOSOPHY IN THE LIGHT OF AI

Abstract

Philosophy already has a long history of coming to terms with artificial intelligence (AI). But if the future of the concept is indeed inseparable from artificial languages and ubiquitous computing, then philosophy must also be able to understand and rewrite its own history in this unnatural light. To this end, I distinguish two manners in which modern philosophy has pursued the artificial cultivation of intelligence. The first is Hegelian. Recently, Yuk Hui and Reza Negarestani have pointed to the affinity between the Hegelian notion of absolute spirit and the functioning of intelligence found in cybernetics and systems theory, as well as in cognitive science. As technology has become our destiny, this leads them to the problem of the continued relevance of humans to the history of a general self-authorizing intelligence. By contrast, I propose to bluntly identify intelligence itself with a rather different sense for relevance, that is, for singularity. Philosophically speaking, this identification reaches back to the proto-structuralist system of Leibniz, which aims for universal communication. Leibniz’s many inventions of formal languages, from the binary system and the universal characteristic to magic and mechanical calculating devices, constitute a proto-AI that functions as the operative code of an inclusive civility. My thesis is the following: if Hegel offered the first grand narrative of the recursive self-critique of common-sense immediacy in the form of artificial good sense, Leibnizian cosmotechnics instead bet on a proto-cybernetic reason that contributes to the distributive composition of an unnatural common sense, all the while protecting multiplicity against its collectivization by a self-naturalizing good sense.

Keywords:

• care
• common sense
• cosmotechnics
• artificial intelligence
• mathesis universalis

ai and philosophical temperament

All systems are true in what they assert, false in what they deny. (Walter Benjamin)

Philosophy already has a long history of coming to terms with artificial intelligence (AI). But if the future of the concept is indeed inseparable from artificial languages and ubiquitous computing, then philosophy must also be able to understand and rewrite its own history in this artificial light. Looking back from the vantage point of contemporary AI, how do we interpret and evaluate the various artifacts with which philosophy has sought to cultivate intelligence?

Recently, Yuk Hui and Reza Negarestani have pointed to the affinity between the Hegelian notion of absolute spirit and the functioning of intelligence found in cybernetics and systems theory (Hui), as well as in cognitive science (Negarestani). Hui’s approach is historical. He traces a fault line between the organicism of post-Kantian philosophy on the one hand, which marked a clear break with the preceding “mechanization of the world view,” and, on the other, the technological organology of post-war cybernetics (the “organized inorganic”) and the rise of a planetary noosphere running on algorithms equipped with big data (the “organizing inorganic”) (Hui, Recursivity). Negarestani’s approach is more atemporal. He emphasizes that Hegel’s characterization of spirit already came with the awareness of its being the “artefact of a deprivatized semantic space,” and that its task has always been to retrospectively recognize its own inorganic conditions of realization (Negarestani 1).

Perhaps we could say that Hui’s and Negarestani’s approaches to AI relate like the phenomenology of spirit and the science of logic. Regardless of their differences, they share the intuition that the current exponential growth of AI marks a critical threshold in the self-fulfillment of the speculative reason of metaphysics. For Hui, it indicates a rupture between concept and life that goes by the name of “the necessity of contingency” (the equivalent of what Hegel called the cunning of reason); for Negarestani, the history of metaphysics turns out to have been only the prehistory or “prototype” of a posthuman intelligence. More importantly, the approaches share an understanding of intelligence as self-authorizing and self-propelling, that is, as exterior to our entrenched experience of ourselves as human. The “totalizing tendency of far-too-humanist modern technology” for Hui means that technology is no longer an instrument in the human exploration and exploitation of the world, but the cybernetic organization (Gestell) in which humans are fated to live. Borrowing the drastic formulation of Negarestani, this inversion of the relation between humans and intelligence raises the question of how critical self-consciousness can “become a part of the veritable history of intelligence”? (3).

I fully agree that intelligence should be seen as having always been artificial in its publicly and linguistically conditioned nature and that, increasingly, what is put into question is the continued relevance of – what is traditionally called – reason to its external, existential conditions. Yet here I would like to propose an alternative to the Hegelian understanding of what it means for spirit or reason to configure itself in the world – an understanding in which there is not one general AI that realizes the unified idea of itself, not even that of technics as such, but one which is capable of divergent becomings, as well as of maintaining and enhancing a stronger sensibility for the multiplicity of historical, material, and technological practices.

Philosophically speaking, this more “well-tempered” understanding of intelligence reaches all the way from contemporary authors such as Isabelle Stengers and Michel Serres to the (pre-Kantian, non-organicist, but perhaps pan-organicist and by all means a-mereological) system of the greatest polymath of the classical age, Leibniz (who, in turn, hoped that through contact with the Chinese, Europeans could rediscover Christianity under modern conditions (Opera Omnia 188)). At stake in this alternative lineage is what Hannah Arendt, following Kant, has called “the life” of the mind, that is, the unnatural possibility of a common sense which cannot be realized, but only actualized in the transversal communication and reciprocity of different perspectives. Accordingly, common sense has little to do with the false immediacy of what Negarestani dismisses as the “everyday talk which, lacking objectivity, is in every way arbitrary and dogmatically subjective” (17) and therefore in need of unrelenting critique. It is indeed a multi-agent, externalized and enlarged capacity for thought, maintained and adjusted through regular feedback loops (“habits,” in more philosophical parlance), but it is to be approached as a virtual structure with both entropic and negentropic tendencies. As such it is in need of protection against those accelerationists who are ready to “abolish what is given in history” in their Platonic ascent towards “the good as the ultimate vector of cognitive and political emancipation” (504).

This means that I share more sympathy for Hui’s call for a multiple cosmotechnics than for the hyper-rationalism of Negarestani. Not unlike Félix Guattari’s well-documented fascination with the Japanese “singularity,” the combination of technological modernism with pre-industrial cultural traits in Japan (Genosko 122–54), Hui’s project is that of seeking “another version of world history,” one that is not simply that of the global synchronization with Western modernity, whether in the form of US imperialism or the Cultural Revolution of Mao (with current Sino-futurism as the apocalyptic conclusion of modernity), but rather that of a different integration of technoscience into the continuity of historical cultures, especially non-Western and non-modern ones. It is precisely by “relativizing” what Heidegger once called the question of technology that we can also raise the cosmopolitical question whether Another World, and therefore another framing of the globe, is possible. If the West has lost the cosmos to astrophysics and tends towards an apocalyptic endpoint, perhaps other traditions enable us to retrieve a capacity for thoughtfully participating in a shared cosmos, by which Hui means modes of thinking more integrally and more differentially at the same time. The task of philosophy is “to negate the totalizing tendency in organic thinking” (Lovink, “Cybernetics”) and thereby reopen the future of technology. Only through the affirmation of “technodiversity” does technics become universal. This means that we do not deduce difference from sameness (as in the identity politics of multiculturalism) but induce sameness through the affirmation of differences. “We can relativize a concept in order to universalize, to come to ‘the same’” (Lovink, “Philosophy”).

In what follows, I will contribute to this project from within the European philosophical tradition by sketching some contours of a portrait of Leibniz following the Deleuzian method of dramatization (Deleuze and Guattari 61, 84). The aim is to displace Heidegger’s reading of Leibniz as the first full expression of the cybernetical destiny of Western metaphysics. I want to invite us to consider the possibility that it is precisely from Leibniz that we can learn what it means to desubstantialize tradition (or what we have called “common sense”) from nationalism or the culture industry without subordinating it to the perfectionist optimization of science and technology. Is another way of framing digital technology possible, based on a destitution of good sense? At stake in the future of AI is the care for the possibility of a true sense for the common, a sense that is currently everywhere in crisis, whereas critical good sense is always eager to usurp into its own totalitarian image of thought what it simultaneously reduces to a folkloristic obstacle.¹ When we go back to Leibniz, this is not to deny scientific progress, nor to give an exhaustive account of his philosophical system, which is anyway impossible, as the Leibnizian system only exists as the cumulative effect of its various philosophical and mostly non-philosophical models. Rather, the aim is to exhibit, by means of a small number of vital anecdotes that unify thought and affect, the gestures by which Leibniz, as a conceptual persona, moves back and forth between his artefacts for thought and their plane of immanence, which I argue goes by the name of common sense.

hegel and leibniz

In his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), Hegel offered the first grand narrative of the self-overcoming of common sense in the form of what I suggest could be described as an enhanced good – mono-directional, self-universalizing – sense that we gradually learn to become the possessors of. Whereas scientific experts provide specialized knowledge, spirit is communal. What renders it absolute is that the community in the full diversity of its historical practices sets the standards of rationality for itself and accepts no exterior authority. At the same time, Hegel finds the most coherent articulation of this internal reflection (or, to paraphrase Hui, the “recursivity” of the negative) at the greatest possible distance to common sense in its immediate givenness. While both science and natural experience get stuck in contradictions between false abstractions (“totalities,” as Negarestani calls them), only their infinite mediation by the concept could lead to the concrete and universal self-understanding of the human spirit. The artificial movement of the concept thus constitutes the self-learning system in which common sense is reproduced in its only legitimate form. It is ultimately at the level of the critical reason of philosophy that the judgment over what is and what is not superfluous for the community in its organic totality can be made.

Interestingly, Hegel finds in Leibniz’s philosophy the first concept of “contradiction in its complete development,” albeit still developed in terms of common-sense logic or “ordinary perception,” that is, as “an artificial system” too much rooted in a narrow determination of the understanding (Lectures on the History 330, 348; see also Guyer). The contradiction Hegel refers to lies in the antinomous belief that, on the one hand, there is a multiplicity of independent substances, each determined in their complete concept by their own nature, and, on the other, that each substance is related to every other, so that what is true of a single substance is not dependent on this substance alone but in fact on every other substance in the universe. Hegel wants to go beyond what he sees as Leibniz’s valiant but vain attempt to reconcile concept and multiplicity, or indeed an analytical rationalism and a synthetical empiricism, by arguing that while contradiction is inherent to the multiple or the finite, the unified concept takes us beyond the immanent limitations of particular things in the more general movement of their dialectical becoming.

And yet the Leibnizian monad is itself already a prefiguration of the Hegelian Begriff, perhaps even more. Just as Hegel conceives the self-developing content of spirit as ontological form problem, a monad is the individually determined unity of everything that changes or becomes over time. It is the formal unity of a sensible series determining itself as intelligible “law,” a thinking-feeling that perceives and grounds the phenomenal world in its own ideal activity. Both subjective and objective, both for itself and in itself, every monad is a kind of absolute knowledge: both the universal logicizability of the individual and the concept as concrete essence or real efficacy.² One could even speak of such a thing as “objective spirit” in Leibniz, to the extent that collectivities of individuals are realized in aggregate phenomena. Composite substances incarnate thought, from organic bodies to the institutions of the state and the church.

The main difference between the post-Cartesianism of Leibniz and the post-Kantianism of Hegel is perhaps that, in the former, absolute mediation or the identity in structure of becoming and thinking is not general but realizes itself only in the individual and in the confederation of individuals. If, for Hegel, this means that Leibniz remains stuck at the level of diversity and particularity, for Leibniz it means that the structure of rationality is never self-present, but only implied. Although both Leibniz and Hegel are pan-logicists, for Leibniz the progressive logic of the mind has the inherently incomplete structure of open-ended resonances. It is regulated through the process of what Gilles Deleuze once called “vicediction” (Difference and Repetition 46–80) as opposed to contradiction. Leibniz does not construct his philosophy as the Bildungsroman of the subject. As a radically distributed thought, it is composed through elective affinities between irreducible standpoints. Hegel and Leibniz thus stand for two kinds of infinity differentiated in itself, summarized by the following extremes: only the whole is the true vs. only the individual is the true.

the patron saint of cybernetics

As an example of a cybernetic reason that composes and saves what is given in the singular plural as opposed to what is subsumed under the general, let us therefore turn to that other encyclopedic tradition in philosophy, which I would like to invite you to consider as the potentially more “ecosophical” one. Norbert Wiener regarded Leibniz as “the patron saint of cybernetics” (Cybernetics 12). If for Leibniz, monads are mirrors that manage information, for Wiener they are matter-mind/particle wave phenomena. But what is exciting about Leibniz is less that he is the “godfather of the modern algorithm” (Gray), than that, as initiator of the Berlin Academy (where scientists worked together alongside practitioners and to which Leibniz gave the motto theoria cum praxi) and firm believer in universal knowledge, he repeatedly identified himself as Pacidius, peacemaker in the tradition of Hermes, the agent of rapprochements who believed in networks to eliminate war and contradiction, not heterogeneity and multiplicity. Where Descartes, looking out of the window, saw nothing but hats and clothes under which might lie automata, and Kant saw integral self-organizing wholes, Leibniz, like cybernetics, sought to reconcile mechanicism and organicism. His encyclopedic project is not the privileged object of philosophy or, for that matter, of any other kind of medium or technology of thought. Excluding all hierarchy between experts and amateurs, rather, it is a referential system for universal communication and circulation, in which each proposition entails every other proposition. To speak with Michel Serres, it is metaphysics as a formal “structure” or “tabular space” (Le système de Leibniz), a “site,” “protocol,” “knot,” or a “crossroads” – in short, it is philosophy understood as a “distributor of concepts” (Hermès I 1, 2).

If Hegel could still describe the encyclopedia as a circle of circles, Leibniz envisioned a world without a center and without a model. Or rather, a world whose center lies everywhere and has no circumference: the world as infinitely complicated curve, made up of continuities, overlapping invariances and isomorphisms, that appears to be accidental but which must nonetheless be mathematized (Hermès III 2, 3). What appears to make self-learning in Leibniz more sophisticated than Hegel – in both senses: more of a sophist and more refined – is that, although both are philosophers of order, he always puts the emphasis on the ars inveniendi. In a time of “alternative truths” and argumentative deafness, inventiveness is a sign of intellectual modesty (cf. Wiener’s “care and feeding of ideas” (Invention)) as well as of challenge and competition. Reality itself is nothing but the feedback effect of the choices between possible worlds that each of its habitants is constantly making. Irreducible to the past, this means that the common is no longer a question of what is but of what can be. The totality of the system only exists as implied by a concept or field of knowledge. Every specialized discipline, laboratory, artistic practice, political or religious institution, and every new technology must be understood as a partial mirror of this implicate order, as a “transversal optic” (Serres, Le système de Leibniz 3) that, in its difference mode of producing resemblance, allows us to “see deeper” (Leibniz, Philosophical Papers 153), but in such a way that what is anamorphically reflected is not the more universal movement of the Idea but a superdiverse world in endless variation.

Such is the specificity of Leibniz’s logic of versions: a model – for example, in mathematics or urban planning or software design – is never an original, let alone an aim in itself, but a further problematization of the common world. It is not some improvised management of uncertainty that, like the derivate market in financial capitalism or the neoliberal university, is always in need of further optimization and self-critique, all the while evacuating from the planned obsolescence or even preemptive destruction of its always much too complex historical context. That is to say, it is not a self-referential demo that mitigates the question of “the best of all possible worlds” by curtailing temporality into short recursive intervals between one version following upon the next in the name of the resilience of any generic system.³ (NB: things like the university can always be more inclusive, equitable, or just, provided that they never really are.) Rather, every model is a means for returning to life, every technology is a path towards a multiple cosmotechnics.

Systematically closed but combinatorially open, the Monadology immediately affirms an all-inclusive, cornucopian world under infinite construction. Comparable to John Cage’s permutational work, it is an a-mereological structure based on the dynamic mediation of all by all (see Irrgang). It describes a virtual world of machinic interactivity of which the flywheels are the individuating but not always well-adapted habitudines, each spontaneously constituting a perfect world on its own: a “monad” with “no windows and doors,” yet simultaneously expressing all the others in a labyrinthine polyphony. In the baroque system of resonances between monads, there is no such thing as a commonplace, neither in the form of the dictates of “smartness” nor in the form of a natural common sense. Instead, history is itself turned into a database for endless “applications.” Things and concepts never cease to emerge out of chaos in a grinding, nonlinear fashion.⁴ It is not the orderly world of a classical metaphysician but the anarchic world of a mannerist diplomat who has no fear of going beyond common sense but is always confident enough to take care of it.

leibnizian sophistication

Instead of multiplying common sense in the service of the specialist forms of good sense, as is the habitus of specialist science and post-Kantian philosophy, Leibniz’s method was to multiply and decenter good sense in service of a common sense to come. Always ready to meet the demands of endless varieties of good sense, he betted on their convergence in that mostly unlikely structure called universal harmony. Well over two centuries before pragmatism in philosophy, he thus formulated the following constraint for his own philosophical enterprise:

A metaphysics should be written with accurate definitions and demonstrations, but nothing should be demonstrated in it apart from that which does not clash too much with established sentiments. For in that way this metaphysics can be accepted; and once it has been approved then, if people examine it more deeply later, they themselves will draw the necessary consequences. (Leibniz, Akademieausgabe 573–74)

This demand clearly runs the risk of a much too clever lack of resistance on behalf of Leibniz, in which case it would be yet another demand for a good sense that, like a categorical imperative of critique, is equally available to all. But Leibniz’s demand is first of all a specific constraint that forbids us to pass judgment on what doesn’t measure up to our standards and instead enables us to take responsibility for the potentiality of a situation. In addition to demands, there are also obligations, especially those stemming from the consequences drawn by others. “I despise nothing,” he used to say in explaining his art of perspectives, “one must always see people from their good side” (Leibniz, Akademieausgabe 377). Unlike Kant, for whom existence is a matter of judgment, and unlike Hegel, for whom this judgment became a matter of life and death in the lord–bondsman dialectic, for Leibniz existence was a matter of degrees of perfection. Leibniz does not see an obstacle in the self-maintaining inertia of the masses. Harmony is not taken for granted as a moral starting point that must therefore be destroyed by critical reason, but as the end of a system for which the new is only the means.

Moreover, the inseparability of reason and passion is far from an anti-intellectualist or anti-rationalist attitude. As emphasized by Stengers, it is precisely good sense that risks stupefying thought and blocking the immanent becomings of the common, as it can easily make us indifferent to its efficacy as a ready-made reason to act or judge.⁵ It was Kant who reinstalled a dualism between the intelligible and the sensible and blamed Leibniz for intellectualizing appearances as “a mere play of imagination or of understanding” (Kant A271/B327). But for Leibniz, rationality, the cohering of things, does not happen internal to the subject but behind our backs, in the world itself. Which is also to say that without the sophists there would be no philosophy.

Perhaps it was the sophisticated pessimism typical of someone torn between the roles of Renaissance mage and baroque court intellectual that led Leibniz to demand that philosophy should never be opposed to established sentiments. Perhaps it was this sophisticated pessimism typical of someone torn between the role of renaissance mage and baroque court intellectual that led him to demand that philosophy should never break with received opinion. While this demand clearly runs the risk of a much too clever lack of resistance, it is also a specific constraint that forbids us to judge over what doesn’t meet up to the model’s standard and that enables us to take responsibility for our present becomings and the potentials of which we are made up. Not breaking with established sentiments means saving and redressing them “much as a mathematician ‘respects’ the constraints that give meaning and interest to his problem” (Stengers, Invention 14). In other words, common sense remains a part of the grounds on which we reason. This inseparability of reason and passion is far from an anti-intellectualist or anti-rationalist attitude. On the contrary, it is generic abstractions that risk stupefying thought, as they can easily make us indifferent to their concrete efficacy as readymade reasons to act or judge.

Unlike the dialectical optimism of Hegel, the irenism of Leibniz goes back to humanist theologians such as Erasmus and Melanchthon, but it is equally inspired by the great sixteenth-century discourses on social comportment of Castiglione and Gracián. On the one hand, the brutal reality in Europe – of class struggle, religious wars, and Ottoman invasions – stood in grave contrast to the development of a trade bourgeoisie, the scientific revolution, new techniques of government, and an elitist culture of extraordinariness and excellence. On the other hand, the mannerist world itself emerged out of a desire to civilize the harsh contradictions of the inchoate modern world. Just as the Council of Trent set the terms for the liturgical discipline of priestly etiquette and protocols that effectuate the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, there appeared a whole civic culture of social presence, of effective being in society. War itself acquires an aesthetic destiny, becoming a question of art and technique.⁶ If, in warfare, the available options are to attack or defend, at the institutions of the court it is to associate or separate yourself. Here artificiality is not a flaw but an expression of endurance for, and “passibility” towards, incommensurability: a power to be affected by alterity.⁷

Just as contemporary communication technologies arose out of World Wars I and II, moreover, the Thirty Years’ War had impelled new ways of articulating the common. With Latin on the retreat as the pan-European language, Leibniz, like Athanasius Kircher before him, hoped to increase our capacity for thought by constructing a new universal language of permutations, variations, and combinations. Rather than referring experience to a model serving as a normative benchmark, his many inventions of the characteristica universalis, combinatory algebra, the binary system, and even music are inclusive languages that come flush with a feeling for singularity. That is, instead of replacing vernacular languages with a pure, Adamitic metalanguage of unambiguous meaning, they remain imbricated in the vernacular’s infinite and continuous variation, augmenting it by realizing the virtual structure of common sense in an exemplary manner. They do not deny what other languages say but enhance them with new implications (without themselves being implied by these other languages).

For the same reason, Leibniz was interested in the operative languages of hermeticism and magic. Just as the courtly rules of decorum have a projective and conjectural function, signs and images work as transformative gestures, not consolidating ones. Like myths, they have the function of collectively recording a state change, ritualizing into being what they are about. Aimed at practical rather than theoretical problems, their end is in their means. They serve not to claim the truth and expose things to the natural light of human reason – the archetypal gesture of raising consciousness through enlightenment critique – but to decenter them in the scintillating swerve of obscure intuitions. Between signifier and signified, after all, there are all sorts of corporeal exchanges and incorporeal transformations. This explains Leibniz’s interest in the ars magna, the ultimate general art of Ramon Lull, which he discovered through a group called the Herborn Encyclopaedists. We could say that here the encyclopedic drive becomes a wild schematism that turns the thinking subject into a “spiritual automaton,” a cog in the machine of his own collective initiation, processing sign-indications of the possible.

Instead of a simple, even protomythological opposition between noise and information, or between sensibility and thinking, the hermetic philosopher knows that there is a reversibility between the two. There is a layering of the clear and the obscure and of the confused and the distinct. Too much of the same becomes noise, whereas what is really new information falls on deaf ears if context and criteria of pertinence are lacking. All this implies a statistical theory of communication – statistical, because information is distributive, not collective. On the one hand, to articulate is to give a body to the noise that precedes and surrounds meaning. It is to produce mutually implicative and reciprocal bonds between disparate energies in a language that communicates with what otherwise remains mute. On the other hand, noise is also the redundancy of good sense, as is the case in what nowadays reappears as the problem of the confirmation bias in filter bubbles. Only by staying close to the multiplicitous conditions of emergence of sense can we extend the scope of relatively clear knowledge without a totalizing claim. For Leibniz, every text is only a pretext and every communication an initiation. “Those who know me only by my published works, do not know me” (Leibniz, Opera Omnia 64–65). By moving in and out of the shadow, we protect what we communicate against the risk of overgeneralization and immediately implicate ourselves within a kind of shared intimacy.⁸ The very improbability and self-referentiality of formal languages are warrants against the seemingly natural claims of established, and therefore exclusive, ways of thinking. They disarm the situated as oversaturated by what has already been said and endow it with the possibility of new translations and inner variations.

an ecology of thought

For Leibniz, the ars combinatoria is not a necessary logic but a procedural code of civility at the interface of mind and technology. Different from the scientific object, which is an object of contestation, the technical object is an object of compromise, which is not the same as conformity (Simondon 125).⁹ Where the vernacular hinders the imagination, Leibniz’s project is the construction of new forms of communication in the informal dimension between established forms of good sense and a common sense-to-be. It situates itself in the noise to which we are exposed and that allows for a cunning revirtualization or “per-version” of the varieties of good sense. How to convince the Holy See to withdraw its damnation of Copernican astronomy? By proposing that there is no absolute space, such that it is equally possible that the earth circles around the sun and vice versa.¹⁰ How to overcome religious strife? By suggesting that the laws of the soul are Protestant, while those of nature are Catholic. Another combination is always possible. Whenever we find ourselves among double binds, our aim should not be to get to the truth as quickly as possible but to invent a new language – perhaps we could say, a queer language in the German sense of quer – that maximizes friction in such a way that the various partisans of good sense slow down and effective aggregation in affective learning processes becomes necessary.

A reluctance to speaking in the name of either the love of truth (a reduction of truth to good sense) or the relativity of opinion (a reduction of truth to a naturalized common sense) leads Leibniz to the more tempered “truth of the relative” (Deleuze, The Fold 20), or what Stengers calls a “humor of truth (humour de la verité, a variation on amour de la verité)” (Cosmopolitics I 4, 11). There is certainly more humor in tact than in truth. Whereas the ironist never puts himself at stake, the humorist sets aside any prior distinctions between himself and the other. If you get a joke, you’re inside the mode of that joke where you start sharing perceptions that lie beyond your own good sense. The joke is an artifact that makes the human capacity for judgment more magnanimous towards other perspectives, including those of nonhuman agents, and, by consequence, to become more intelligent and concrete. In this sense of a constant mutual attuning such that no voice drowns out the other and thereby impoverishes the whole, Leibniz is a radical opportunist. Arguing “from the outcome” (Leibniz, Textes inédits 341) rather than from truth, he multiplies principles in such a way that self-definitions, normative ideals, the sense of manifest destiny (aka modernity), or other delusions of grandeur no longer impede the slow process of composition by which we acquire a sense of what might be commonly possible.

This emphasis on how things become, rather than why things are what they are, enables us to read Leibniz as a minor key philosopher in the same sense that Deleuze and Guattari speak of a minor literature or a minor science. Major and minor refer to modes of thinking and feeling. Whereas it is easy to discover in Descartes or Hegel major key thinkers who had an optimistic conception of the power of truth and rationality whose heritage is generally claimed by contemporary enlighteners from all over the political and scientific spectrum, Leibniz’s so-called optimism is in fact much more pessimistic and moderate. A minor rationality has no model, we should say with Deleuze and Guattari (108), but only a possible world (“a people and an earth to come”) that is appropriate to it. Moreover, as he was writing before the rise of secular humanism, Leibniz’s idea of cosmopolitanism or civility is not limited to the Kantian version of a global moral community. On the contrary, it concerns a world that is much more inclusive than any overarching law can cover.

Perhaps we should say that philosophy for Leibniz was essentially a form of what Stengers refers to as cosmopolitesse. Contrary to a deduction of the world from first principles, but following the calculus of minima and maxima, it is a disciplined attempt “to minimize requirements and maximize obligations” (Stengers, Cosmopolitics II 403). Or in Leibniz’s own words, to perfect a system that is “the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in appearances” (Philosophical Papers 39). However, perhaps what Leibniz teaches us is that perfection does not know an economy, only an ecology. For what is harmony if not correspondence in diversity with no transcending principle or ground? The minimization of requirements (e.g., making do with a few letters or numbers) is achieved through a radical decentering of the theoretical point of view with respect to the diverging interests of the world. It is an operation associated with the empiricist constraint of always beginning from the middle rather than from our habitual selves. The maximization of obligations (never losing sight of the possibility of peace) is achieved through the all-inclusive ambition of rationalism. Everything given in our habitats must have a reason, the principle of sufficient reason says. For common sense to exist, nothing can be left out of the equation, even if this means turning reason into a convention or artificial protocol. After all, reasons, according to the principle of sufficient reason (principium reddendae rationis), are not simply given in nature but are founded on prudent judgment and the civic necessity of establishing laws.¹¹ They must be “rendered” or “returned” to what is already given in the world of appearances – not to render the world “accountable” to the necessities of good sense, as Heidegger thought, but in order to take responsibility for sufficient equity between what we consider rational and the real itself. Reasons co-determine how we fold the world, that is, let ourselves be affected and transformed by it and thus contribute to the activation and generation of further processes of composition.

In the modern world, never mind today’s posthuman triumphalism, this artificiality is simultaneously omnipresent and treated badly. And yet if we want to think technology beyond utility and efficiency, our task is to integrate the cosmic order with the moral order as different versions of the same universal process of globalization, that is, the same multiplicity of technicities. What makes Leibniz’s cosmopolitesse interesting for us, living in a pancomputationalist world, is that from him we can learn what intelligence comes down to when there are multiple worlds – intelligence understood not in a restricted sense, as privileged forms of knowledge and exclusive immunopolitics, but as generic, even abundant technologies of reasoning and judging about living together that actively contribute to livable habitats. In an artificial milieu in which everything can be counted and all combinations are possible in principle, there can be no particular rationality or privileged state of equilibrium that controls the real, least of all divine intelligence.

It is true that throughout his life Leibniz kept searching for principles of reasoning that could turn thought into a formal symbolic system, a calculus ratiocinator in which every controversy could be settled on the basis of calculation. Yet I think we need to take Leibniz’s hope that conflicts, grievances, prejudices, and misunderstandings would all give way to consensus with a grain of salt. My aim here has been to make Leibniz figure in a new mirroring relationship, in which his mathesis universalis functions not so much as a subsumption of the real under a one-dimensional language that would only communicate truths, but more as a machine for making us think, that is, as a construction that bets on its relevance to the further tuning of a reality made up of opinions and passions. Its basic adage: if you can’t beat them, multiply them. Or put yet differently: instead of feeding them to the Algorithm, create a different computational imaginary. At stake for Leibniz as not a critique of what we are but care for how we become. If, for Hegel, the restless movement of the concept constitutes an infinite moving away from common sense, for Leibniz, the endless invention of concepts serves their convergence towards common sense. The ultimate question remains which future forms of AI can perform this kind of cosmopolitics.

conclusion

As we saw at the outset, the question of cosmotechnics is not a question of integrating nature and technology but of multiple ways of integrating culture and technology. According to theology, the cosmos is created out of nothing. For philosophy, by contrast, it is a problem of participation of humans and nonhumans, that is, a body of virtual reciprocity between extremely divergent articulations. Already for the ancient Greeks, the cosmos was a second nature, not the innocence of a first nature but a nature that is morally coded. For Kant (and perhaps Arendt), too, cosmopolitics could only mean the convergence of universal history and the teleology of first nature in a civic nature. But code and institutions are protocols and in this sense the cosmos has always been a problem of technicity. Cosmotechnics thus merely returns to this problem of coexistence by emphasizing the co-constitutive place of technology within it. Following Simondon and Hui, we could say that human, nonhuman, and technical are modes of reticulation that together make up the process of “cosmopoiesis” (Hui, “On Cosmotechnics” 11).

But while Hui’s approach is to set up a dialogue between the ontological turn in the anthropology of nature (Descola’s ontological pluralism, Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalism) and Simondonian philosophy of technology in order to imagine multiple, versions of this convergence, our aim has been to identify a minor mode within the Western tradition itself. We find in Leibniz a technical activity that has never been “modern,” while also having nothing to do with a pre-modern cosmology. Instead, it belongs to a derivative or secondary cosmology that knows no model of perfection, only degrees. Precluding the idea of mastery over nature, Leibnizian cosmopoiesis lies in distributed rather than collective learning processes.¹² This pluralism is also what sets Leibniz apart from Hegel. As inheritor of non-standard intellectual traditions in Western philosophy, and as inventor of so many artificial conventions and tools for thought, he did not shrink away from the implications of modern technology but embraced them precisely in order to save the diversity of traditions and contribute to sensible commons. His work thus offers a starting point both for thinking AI-diversity and for a cosmotechnical reconsideration of Western metaphysics and technology.

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a development of this Arendtian argument, see van Tuinen.

2 Leibniz’s “law of the series” has the Sollenstruktur that exists in fundamental reality and truth only in the lawfulness of its endless modifications (Horn; see also Belaval).

3 Distinguishing between the architectonic orders of the eternal ideas of traditional metaphysical reason and the cybernetical aim for homeostasis of Cold War rationalism on the one hand, and the notion of self-regulating processes of optimization and resilience derived from a systems approach to ecology on the other, Orit Halpern and her colleagues have criticized the logic of demoing as a mode of futurity and optimism espoused in the name of both perpetual growth and impending disaster. At the same time, she acknowledges that critique has itself become part and parcel of the “smartness mandate,” according to which the future can be optimized on the condition that collective reflection on historical ends is reduced to the short-term necessity of an ever deeper penetration of computational infrastructure into the environment: “Critique is itself already central to smartness in the sense that perpetual optimization requires perpetual dissatisfaction with the present and the premise that things can always be better” (“The Smartness Mandate”).

4 On Leibniz’s common-sensism as anarchically opposed to the overarching power of good sense, and as a direct inspiration to Proudhon, see the many references to Leibniz in Daniel Colson’s A Little Lexicon of Anarchism.

5

The problem designated by the Leibnizian constraint ties together truth and becoming, and assigns to the statement of what one believes to be true the responsibility not to hinder becoming: not to collide with established sentiments, so as to try to open them to what their established identity led them to refuse, combat, misunderstand. (Stengers, Invention 15)

6 Prévost gives the example of Andrea del Castagno’s David (1450), in which the real triumph is not a representation (the story) but the event of the presentation (the image) itself – that is, the new manner of combining the aggressive gestures of combat into a mutually inclusive individuation (Prévost 87–115, 103).

7 For Jean-François Lyotard, it is precisely the self-referentiality of language, of thinking feeling itself – in the tension between feeling incapable of dealing with the presence of the other that resists our understanding, and the pleasure of finding new words, phrases, and idioms to communicate this experience – that constitutes the possibility of language towards the inhuman (11–18).

8 In the spirit of the undercommons, Erik Bordeleau emphasizes the relevance of the image of secret society in the context of blockchain-based crypto-“networks with consequences.” It would be interesting to further explore the system of decentralized ledgers according to monadological logic with both dark and light aspects.

9 In this sense we must defend Leibniz against William James, who presented his own philosophy of compromise (understood as enthusiastic modus vivendi of turning everything into richer consequences and finding prestige in it) as an alternative for Leibniz’s artificiality and alleged lack of empiricism (James 15–20).

10 Cf. Hegel’s argument that the truth of gravitational force as category of the understanding is the indifference of the moments of its general lawful constitution of reality (Phenomenology of Spirit A III, 90 [92]).

11 Serres (The Natural Contract 89–92) distinguishes reason (the necessity of truth and innovation) from judgment (the necessity of arbitration and tradition) in a way that is analogous to our distinction between good sense and common sense. At stake is the (Leibnizian) conversion of reason to a new “equation of optimization, symmetry, and justice”:

Starting with the Enlightenment, reason has presided at the court of judgment […] Now we are witnessing judgment catching up with reason […] Through a new call to globality, we need to invent a reason that is both rational and steady, one that thinks truthfully while judging prudently. (92–94)

12 In fact, both Descola and Viveiros de Castro are inspired by Leibnizian perspectivism, the former via Émile Durkheim and the latter, like Deleuze, through Tarde (Pelletier).