This lecture was initially delivered before the Fordham University Philosophers Society, November 15, 2024.
In a 1966 interview conducted by the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Martin Heidegger for the first time addressed his term as Rector of the University of Freiburg during the years of 1933-34 under the newly appointed Nazi government, with the condition that the interview not be printed during his lifetime. The interview accordingly appeared a few days after his passing in 1976, and while his justifications for his actions during his rectorship are, in the main, evasive and unsatisfying, merely adding fuel to a debate about how to think about the work of an undoubtedly brilliant and influential philosopher who was, at the same time, a Nazi functionary, the conversation also surfaced the late Heidegger’s ideas about the future of philosophy, such as it could be said to have a future in the late 1960s:
Heidegger: …The role of philosophy in the past has been taken over today by the sciences. For a satisfactory clarification of the "efficacy" of [philosophical] thinking we would have to analyze in greater depth what in this case "efficacy" and "having an effect" can mean. Here we would need fundamental distinctions between "occasion," "stimulus," "challenge," "assistance," "hindrance" and "cooperation," once we have sufficiently analyzed the "principle of ground ['sufficient reason']." Philosophy [today] dissolves into individual sciences: psychology, logic, political science.
SPIEGEL: And what now takes the place of philosophy?
Heidegger: Cybernetics.
What, in 1966, would Heidegger have understood “cybernetics” to entail? In contemporary parlance the prefix “cyber” has come to denote things generally involving the interface between human beings and advanced forms of technology, though even this terminology has become a relic of the early days of the internet, as in words like “cyberspace” which today feels like a rather dated name for the online world, or in the seemingly-ironically-named “cybertruck.”
For him the term would undoubtedly refer back to the work undertaken from 1946 to 1953 at a series of conferences held in New York City and sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation. Though the Macy Foundation was and is primarily concerned with advancing the medical sciences, the set of conferences that would come to be associated with the birth of cybernetics, known at the time by the unwieldy title of “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and social systems,” brought together academics and practitioners from a wide array of fields. This included physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, and sociologists, and the stated goal of the series of conferences was extraordinarily ambitious, aiming to develop a new language that would enable cross-disciplinary communication between the disparate fields of science then emerging. This need arose out of a sense the organizers held that deepening specialization in the hard and social scientific fields was leading to the development of hyper-specific jargon that was making interdisciplinary communication increasingly difficult. Among the most notable contributors to these conferences were John Von Neumann, one of the pioneers of game theory and among the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon, whose pioneering work on the mathematical foundations of communication provided the basis for the digital revolution in computing, and the chairman of the conferences Warren S. McCulloch, an important neuropsychologist whose leadership ensured the enormous diversity of perspectives present at these meetings. But the two thinkers who have been most important to my own work on applying the concepts of cybernetics to the field of literary study are the mathematician-philosopher Norbert Wiener and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.
Wiener, a mathematical child prodigy born to a Jewish family in the St. Louis area in 1894, first applied the term cybernetics to this field of study, deriving the name from the Greek word kybernḗtēs which means “steersman” and which is also the root of the English word “governor.” A dedicated pacifist, Wiener set aside his reservations about contributing to military endeavors at the outbreak of World War II; not unlike Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists who worked on the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, the Nazi’s genocidal militancy caused Wiener to volunteer his services to the Allied military effort, working on, among other projects, the problem of anti-aircraft artillery. Wiener realized in the course of this work that if an artillery gun could be programmed to “remember” all the results of its past attempts at shooting an airplane, its future attempts could be refined to maximize its efficiency in this endeavor. This notion, of a self-correcting mechanical mechanism, proved to be the germ of an idea that would become the basis for cybernetics.
For Wiener, cybernetics is specifically the study of the ways in which messages can feed back into a system and, by their presence within that system’s memory, affect future iterations of that system’s operation; thus, while cybernetics is frequently deployed to describe the workings of specifically mechanical processes, it is a way of looking at the world that also has applications to natural processes, including, especially, human activity. As he puts it in his 1952 volume on the subject, The Human Use of Human Beings:
It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
As this quote makes evident, the scope Wiener saw for cybernetics was enormous; along with the other contributors to the Macy Conferences, Wiener was able to identify the concept of anti-entropic feedback as being the crucial aspect of any communicating relationship, be it between man and man, man and machine, or machine and machine, as he says. In the example of the anti-aircraft weapon listed above, Wiener defines feedback in the following way:
This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors—that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.
This also brings up one of Wiener’s primary insights in his development of cybernetics, which was to apply the laws of thermodynamics to systems of information; just as in thermodynamics systems and processes tend towards entropy, the same can be seen in information and messaging, where, over time, the tendency is for organized information to move from an ordered to a disordered state. One of the only means of disrupting the natural, entropic flow of all things to disorder is by means of feedback. Informational feedback is, as he says, a “temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.” It is this capacity to temporarily resist entropy that unites living beings and complex machines in Wiener’s schema; he sees humans, animals, and machines as existing on a spectrum of organization, rather than as being in three fundamentally different categories. It is this aspect of Wiener’s thought that lies behind Haraway’s cyborg, the being whose existence elides the established boundaries between these three categories.
The chief capacity of an entity that is necessary for utilizing the information it receives through feedback is memory. Without the ability to refer back to memories of past actions in order to inform the undertaking of future actions, anti-entropic action is impossible. While human memories are of course immensely complex, Wiener saw memory operating on all levels of an anti-entropic entity:
The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made. Modern methods of tagging the elements participating in metabolism have shown a much higher turnover than was long thought possible, not only of the body as a whole, but of each and every component part of it. The biological individuality of an organism seems to lie in a certain continuity of process, and in the memory by the organism of the effects of its past development. This appears to hold also of its mental development. In terms of the computing machine, the individuality of a mind lies in the retention of its earlier tapings and memories, and in its continued development along lines already laid out.
This understanding therefore sees processes directly related to memory as being the essential aspect of any given anti-entropic entity, more so than the “matter of which it is made.” This also makes it clear why, if one’s sense of an anti-entropic entity is centered around process and not material, any being, be they human, animal, or machine, can just as easily fit these criteria. In this respect, Wiener anticipates the concerns of later, posthumanist thinkers like Haraway and the literary scholar Cary Wolfe, whose work focuses on conceiving of the world from a perspective beyond that of humanity, looking to see humans as only one interdependent element in a larger system. Furthermore, Wiener’s ideas can also be seen as anticipating the work of Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, philosophers who in the twenty-first century have looked to take philosophy beyond what they deem to be its post-Kantian, correlationist obsession with the interdependence of the world on humanity and humanity on the world, a perspective first introduced in Meillassoux’s After Finitiude. It is thus also possible to find cybernetic ideas in the background of the emergent field of speculative philosophy.
Additionally, in developing cybernetics, Wiener was acutely sensitive to the growing tendency towards insularity among the various fields of human learning, particularly in the sciences, which I addressed briefly above; in his view, the areas of overlap, where the boundaries between fields are most difficult to discern, are also the areas that offer “the richest opportunity” for meaningful intervention:
If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, ten physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologist ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in terms that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand.
This breakdown in messaging between different branches of study, brought about by the specialization of scientific fields, disrupts the ability of the sciences as such to arrest the progress of entropy because an excessive specialization creates barriers to communication between the different specialized schools. Cybernetics, with its focus on messaging, represents Wiener’s attempt at creating a field wherein these different disciplines of science might attempt to resist this drive towards hyper-specialization and forge new channels for interdisciplinary communication; in this respect, cybernetics was intended as a kind of universal science. To this end, Wiener helped to initiate the aforementioned series of conferences, sponsored by the Macy Foundation, bringing together thinkers from the hard and social sciences in order to facilitate dialogue and apply the ideas of cybernetics across a diverse range of fields with the aim of contributing to the furtherance of order as a means of resisting the generalized drive of all things towards entropy and disorder.
With this in mind, I’d like to pivot to a consideration of some of the ideas of Gregory Bateson, the British born anthropologist whose work itself straddles a broad array of fields, from on-site work with remote indigenous tribes to theorizing on the origins of schizophrenia. For Bateson, the emergence of cybernetics had the value of recentering our understanding of the concept of “mind;” drawing on work by the psychiatrist and early pioneer of ideas of artificial intelligence, W. Ross Ashby, (as Ashby would put it in his book, Design for a Brain, “The free-living organism and its environment, taken together, form an absolute system.”) Bateson came to see that a “mind” was not something that should be seen as being contained within the confines of a single biological or computational organism such as a “brain” or “processor.” This, in Bateson’s estimation, is a too-narrow sense of “mind,” one that confines an individual entirely to the realm of its specific body without considering the ways it participates in larger systems. As he writes, “…when you separate mind from the structure in which it is immanent, such as human relationship, the human society, or the ecosystem, you thereby embark, I believe, on fundamental error, which in the end will surely hurt you.” This view of mind as something that must always be considered in light of its material and social contexts complicates the old Cartesian dualism between mind and body by insisting not only on the mind’s radical enmeshment within the body, but further on the mind, body, and environments (both natural and social) as being equally enmeshed, to the point where speaking of any in isolation is to veer into dangerous ground that may, in Bateson’s terminology, “hurt you.”
In an essay on the relationship of cybernetics to the treatment of alcoholism collected in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson postulates on the relationship of “mind,” “self,” and “environment”:
…we may say that "mind" is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system—man plus environment.
In principle, if we desire to explain or understand the mental aspect of any biological event, we must take into account the system—that is, the network of closed circuits, within which that biological event is determined. But when we seek to explain the behavior of a man or any other organism, this "system" will usually not have the same limits as the "self"—as this term is commonly (and variously) understood.
Bateson focuses specifically on how this concept of “mind” necessitates a new idea of “self” that extends beyond the limited biological system of a specific individual and, as I suggested above, takes into account that individual’s enmeshment within the broader systems of both culture and environment. This discovery was actually in a way a return to earlier, pantheistic systems of belief, wherein the entire natural world along with its animal and human inhabitants were believed to be aspects of or emanations from an invisible spirit or “anima.”
Thus, the practices and beliefs of indigenous societies provide a clue to the broader conception of mind he would adopt. Bateson points to our early ancestors as offering an alternative perspective on the relationship of self and mind to an environmental system:
Anthropologically, it would seem from what we know of the early material, that man in society took clues from the natural world around him and applied those clues in a sort of metaphoric way to the society in which he lived. That is, he identified with or empathized with the natural world around him and took that empathy as a guide for his own social organization and his own theories of his own psychology. This was what is called "totemism."
This “early material” refers to anthropological research carried out amongst indigenous tribes and relates to their pantheistic religious explanations (what Bateson here calls “totemism”) for the phenomena of the natural and human worlds. These “early” peoples developed their worldviews through a kind of poetic process, applying the “clues” they had gleaned from the natural world to their understanding in a “metaphoric way” to the societies in which they lived. This process of identification between the individual, his community, and the natural world in which that individual lived is an “empathetic” endeavor, one that sees these three groupings (individual, community, natural world) as being intertwined on an essential level. While Bateson admits that, scientifically speaking, “totemism” is “in a way…all nonsense,” he argues that it nevertheless marks an important anticipation of a cybernetic outlook, because “…it made more sense than most of what we do today, because the natural world around us really has this general systemic structure and therefore is an appropriate source of metaphor to enable man to understand himself in his social organization.” Mind must be reconceived within this interdependence of individual, community, and environment, locating mind in the interplay of these three elements and not localized entirely within the brain of a perceiving organism. As with the aspects of Wiener’s philosophy highlighted above, Bateson’s broadened conception of mind, what he would come to call an “ecology of mind,” points the way towards developments of posthumanist thought I’ve enumerated above.
Writing in the three decades following the initial Macy Conferences, Bateson’s work , collected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, thus did much to demonstrate the broad applicability of cybernetics to regions of thought beyond those initially articulated by Wiener and the other conference participants. For Bateson, the chief value in cybernetics is its capacity to lend human beings perspective on both the nature of their world and on themselves; cybernetics is revolutionary because of its recognition of its own recursive quality, its tendency to initiate chains of feedback, both positive and negative, that augment our understanding of what categories like “language” and “attitude” actually consist in:
I included cybernetics as the second historic event of importance in my lifetime because I have at least a dim hope that we can bring ourselves to use this new understanding with some honesty. If we understand a little bit of what we’re doing, maybe it will help us to find our way out of the maze of hallucinations that we’ve created around ourselves.
Cybernetics is, at any rate, a contribution to change—not simply a change in attitude, but even a change in the understanding of what an attitude is.
The stance I have taken in choosing what is important in history—saying that the important things are the moments at which attitude is determined, the moments at which the bias of the thermostat is changed—this stance is derived directly from cybernetics…
...Cybernetics has integrity within itself, to help us to not be seduced by it into more lunacy, but we cannot trust it to keep us from sin.
The recursive quality of Bateson’s own description of the impact of cybernetics, how cybernetics has itself shaped his ability to judge the importance of cybernetics, is the kind of enfolded, ouroboric structure that is the hallmark of this modality of thinking. Also characteristic is his somewhat mysterious final line about our not being able to “trust it to keep us from sin,” for along with Wiener, Bateson was very aware that cybernetics was in no sense a panacea for errors in thought and was not without its own potential pitfalls. But the possibility of recursive correction, of using bad results as positive feedback that might inform potential future, good results, at least has the potential for leading us away from “more lunacy.”
This conception of the recursive, that is, of successive future actions being continuously modified by the results of previous actions, was the most important idea developed through the work undertaken at the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, in Bateson’s estimation. He even argued that it resolved (at least for him) the Aristotelian problem of “purpose” in an interview he undertook with Stewart Brand and his former wife and research partner Margaret Mead towards the end of his life:
It [the cybernetic notion of the self-corrective mechanism] was a solution to the problem of purpose. From Aristotle on, the final cause has always been the mystery. This came out then. We didn’t realize then…that the whole of logic would have to be reconstructed for recursiveness.
The “final cause” Bateson mentions here refers to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where the idea is also translated as a “cause as end,” and it applies to the final reason an action or movement is undertaken:
The end of something is what that thing is for. For example, the end of taking a constitutional is to be healthy. ‘Why’, we might ask, ‘is this chap walking about the place?’ ‘It is in order’, replies the expert, ‘to be healthy’, and in so saying he reckons to have put his finger on a cause of the behaviour.
Bateson is suggesting that in light of the cybernetic insight regarding recursiveness the “final cause” of Aristotle must be understood differently; once one realizes that “the whole of logic” must be “reconstructed for recursiveness” one recognizes that even the “final cause” of an action cannot be seen as an end in itself, but must be understood in the role it might play in shaping future actions. In cybernetic terms, as long as the process of feedback and activity is continuing, there is no reason to speak of a “final” end, for every action undertaken offers the possibility for the continuing of this recursive process of augmentation, at least until the final triumph of entropy, when the body or mechanism breaks down for the final time, and death and disorder stand victorious.
I think this comment by Bateson gets us back to where we started, which is to say, with Heidegger’s comments about cybernetics as the successor to or evolution of philosophy; if in 1966 Heidegger could pronounce cybernetics as the inheritor of philosophy, today the picture is somewhat less clear. The dream of cybernetics as a unifying, universal science has for the most part faded, with the various participants in the Macy Conferences having retreated back to their own specialized areas, founding new schools of study based on cybernetics principles, leading to an era of crisis for the discipline, particularly after the death of Norbert Wiener in 1964. As the historian of the movement Ronald Kline puts it: “In that period of crisis [the 1960s and 1970s], American cyberneticians lamented the discrediting of their field as a unifying discipline and its fragmentation into separate fields, attempted to revive its fortunes by establishing new professional societies for it, and reinvented cybernetics as a science of social systems and as a relativistic epistemology.” But despite this era of fragmentation, by the late 1960s cybernetic ideas had already begun to permeate the broader culture, informing science fiction novels such as those written by authors like Frank Herbert and Philip K. Dick, as well as the notion of the “singularity” pursued by techno-utopians like Ray Kurzweil. My own work on cybernetics is primarily concerned with exploring antecedents for cybernetic ideas in the works of writers of the Romantic period, in particular in the poems and criticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By 1967, the year after Heidegger’s proclamation, cybernetics had also made a noteworthy appearance in the radical poetry of the hippie movement, in a poem by Richard Brautigan that later provided the title for one of the films of the intellectual historical documentarian Adam Curtis, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” So even as the initial aims of cybernetics fell prey to entropy and dissolution, its ideas continued to feed back into and be reinvigorated by the broader cultural ecosystem. I will conclude with Brautigan’s poem, a work that articulates the potential of a cybernetically integrated world, potential that still lies waiting, should we have the wherewithal to pursue it:
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
more of this please!
Check out Kant and Kantians on purposiveness [DE: Zweckmäßigkeit] and (the limits of) teleological judgment in the 3rd Critique.