The University and the Technosphere. The End of the Humanities and the Possibilities of Reversal?

Abstract

The article discusses the relationship between universities as the idea of realizing scientific and technical possibilities of “progress” and “development” of man at the end of metaphysics and that which arises from understanding the technosphere as the rule of “artificial intelligence” and “artificial life” through the analysis of four basic concepts of cybernetics: information-feedback-controls-communications. By critically analyzing relevant approaches to this problem within the poststructuralist circle of thought from Jean-François Lyotard to Jacques Derrida, the author shows that preserving the “essence” of what we call the humanities as a thought-saying “on” the existential openness of man can only be done by its reduction to biogenetic processes. When life, in its last possibility of spiritualization, becomes an autopoietic system that loses the features of uniqueness and uncertainty in the technologization of Being and instead becomes singularity and calculability, the knowledge of the “cybernetic difference between man and the world” requires a radical transformation. But not the transformation of science and its historical and epochal place of world history as is the idea of the university from Humboldt to the so-called Bologna reforms. The last transformation with which the Western metaphysics as an onto-theo-cosmo-anthropology loses its own “essence” concerns the realization of the possibility of what Friedrich Nietzsche intended for the idea of man - to be a bridge between an “animal” and “superman.” The article intends to reconsider the consequences of the new paradigm of technological structure of “artificial life” for the future of the idea of the university and possibly new “missions” of the humanities in that context.