Yuk Hui on a New Axial Age of Technology
Discussion
Nathan Gardels: Does all this suggest we are entering a new “axial age,” as the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers named that period 2,000 years ago when all the great religions and ethical systems — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets — emerged simultaneously in a de-synchronized and mostly unconnected world?
In history, the accomplishment of convergence yields a new divergence. As we’ve been discussing, the search for a new beginning after the triumph of modernity is now underway. The global conquest of the West and its philosophy has now reached its limits and is fragmenting. The dialectic is turning. The modern Tower of Babel is poised to crumble.
If we are in a “new condition of philosophizing,” what comes next?
Yuk Hui: We are at the beginning of what you call a “new axial age” as a result of this universalization and convergence. The question now is not “what will happen,” but “what can happen?” To philosophize, you need to start with the impossible before the possible.
To explore this, we need to return to the fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese cosmotechnics, which have been forgotten and assimilated to a universal mono-technology in the process of modernization. The consideration of Chinese cosmotechnics in the West has rarely gone beyond comparisons about the advancement of particular technologies in particular points in history.
I am opposed to the complete realization of a unified global system represented by transhumanists such as Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel. Rather than converging teleologically toward a quintessentially Western singularity, we need to envision alternative possibilities, bifurcations and fragmentations. The new beginning must have a multiplicity of starting points opened up by fragmentation."