دانلود کتاب ماتریالیسم ارگانیک و فلسفه فناوری: درباره‌ی رابطه‌ی گمانه‌شناختی میان اندیشه و ماده

This is a metaphysical project with an aspiration to stay grounded. To speculate about the nature of reality is to create limitations to our thinking. Essentially, the aim is to challenge such limitations, but this sets the project to do something nearly impossible, to overthrow metaphysics (Hui 2021, p. 5). Since thinking itself must be schematised to make sense of reality, metaphysics cannot be overcome. There will always be some set of principles guiding our thought. Henri Bergson argues that metaphysics is a result of our evolution, that the human intellect has evolved to help our bodies get adapted to their environment, to think matter. To survive, we had to figure out how to use solid materials and manipulate them into tools, and how to control the external causation coming from harsh environments. Our minds developed some ideas about the nature of reality, and we feel comfortable when operating in the ‘logic of solids’ (Bergson 2005, p. xix). This tendency has been concretised in science: while to some extent it always remains speculative, the end of experimentation is when the theory is successfully put in practice (Bergson 2005, p. 358). Intellectual habits make it difficult to think matter outside of its logical forms and external, mechanical causality, not least because these habits are useful for positivist sciences. The mechanistic view of the nature of reality has established itself in a descriptive metaphysics, such as mechanistic materialism. Philosophising is against the natural tendency of the mind to seek control over matter and achieve practical utility. Bergson notes that the intellectual habits embodied in mechanistic materialism amount to a ‘theory of knowledge’ but not a ‘theory of life’ (Bergson 2005, p. xxi). In a Socratic manner, he claims that ‘the duty of philosophy’ lies precisely in our obligation to examine life, but he adds that this examination should dare to see the world outside of ‘practical utility,’ outside of intellectual habits and pre-existing forms (Bergson 2005, p. 215). Yuk Hui, whose works have been inspirational to this book, similarly claims that ‘thinking must dare to think in view of difficulties and limits it has to confront’ (2021, p. 5). The first aim of this project is to critique mechanistic materialism from the perspective of organic materialism: to speculate on nature as life instead of generating knowledge of how to manipulate it; to challenge the intellectual habits that limit thought to practical utility. Bergson points out that viewing matter in mechanistic terms is a natural intellectual habit. However, the Western tradition of mechanistic materialism (corresponding with descriptive metaphysics) and positivist scientific methods have established themselves as the right way to discover truth about the universe using supernaturalism. Iain Hacking argues that the belief that there must be ‘one full and complete account of nature’ that scientists will eventually discover at the endpoint of the progress of science, together with the ultimate truth about the universe, is deeply rooted in ‘Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cosmologies’ (Hacking 2012, pp. xxxiv–xxxv). The natural tendencies of mind to think of matter and the external world in mechanistic terms are explainable from an evolutionary perspective. The idea that there can be an exhaustive explanation of the nature of reality comes out of a belief in the supranatural qualities of human reason. The human intellect has a tendency to treat its environment as an external factor and insist that the mind has distinctive qualities. The problem lies in this unnecessary opposition between thought and matter, and between knowledge and life. I will employ organic materialism (corresponding with speculative metaphysics) to critique mechanistic materialism for the limitations of thinking it imposes, and the reductive tendencies of atemporal truths or positivist methods. Grounding metaphysics must aim to think of thought and knowledge as limited to life, and to its material and temporal constraints. This is also why this project is an