Homo kybernetes vs. Homo respondens: Is There Still Any Intersubjectivity?

Bernhard Waldenfels and the Other as a Problem of Ontology

Abstract

In the article, the author attempts to analytically show how, in contemporary philosophical debate, we encounter the problem of the relationship between human consciousness and the technosphere, which synthesizes the scientific construction of a new interobjectivity with the concepts of the body and the Other. Therefore, new figures, rather than traditional ontological-anthropological concepts such as homo kybernetes (Paić) and homo respondens (Waldenfels), necessarily find themselves in a kind of bipolarity in their determinations and actions in the real world. If, for Waldenfels,” intentionality is transformed into responsiveness”, then the path of phenomenology in the new conditions of action of globally networked societies must be designated as a “post-phenomenological path”. It is already evident from this that the answer to the stranger issue does not only hide the communicative potential of human existence in a historical-epochal sense. Considering a new ontological status of communication with the Other is simultaneously a necessity: abandoning the concept of intersubjectivity in favor of networked relations in the constitution of the body and the Other as existential structures of freedom.

Keywords: homo kybernetes, homo respondens, technosphere, intersubjectivity, Other, stranger

Introduction

After Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas introduced into contemporary philosophy the “spirit of reversal” of all metaphysical categories, abandoning its original starting points in the problematization of the relationship between Being, beings, and the essence of Human, phenomenology was left without a signifier ─ Husserl’s program of returning to the natural attitude. The question of consciousness and self-consciousness, which was so crucial to the entire philosophy of the modern age, was redirected to the conditions for the possibility of thinking about that which is not only a part of human existence but also the primary meeting point of thought and the matrix of Western metaphysics. Heidegger rightly called it the onto-theological framework of history. The reason is that thinking begins with the question of Being and the first cause or origin as the source of all beings (arché). In constructing the artificial mind and life, suppose phenomenology lacks the object of its focus, such as the forms of human consciousness. In that case, the only remaining area of its “resurrection” can be discerned in the analysis of the body and the Other. By analogy, since the concept of the subjectivity of mind marked the metaphysics of the modern age, the return to the body in the post-metaphysical thought of the 20th century should not be understood as a return to materialism and physicalism, much less to some dark psychologism. In contemporary philosophy, the body represents an enigma, as consciousness does, but on entirely different foundations from those established by the metaphysics of mind. However, Husserl’s critique of the Cartesian legacy in contemporary thought genuinely developed the concept of the Other. It did not radically break through the framework of subjectivity and self-consciousness; it did not wholly leave the environment of egology and anthropology.

The first approach is found mainly in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. In contrast, the second approach is shown to be derived from Lévinas’ most important book, Totalité et Infini (Lévinas: Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorite). There are multiple overlaps. For French thinkers, the body and the Other simultaneously mark the path into the labyrinth of feelings and the ethical call for freedom and justice in the community. In the contemporary situation, however, the new approaches can be concisely defined as the phenomenological analysis of the body, with Hermann Schmitz as its primary representative, and the phenomenological analysis of the Other, with Waldenfels as its primary representative. (Schmitz: System der Philosophie III.) 2. Der Gefühlsraum)

 In the lecture “Homo respondensʺ he showed the reach of different definitions of Human throughout the history of metaphysics (homo sapiens, homo erectus, homo faber, homo ludens, etc.). All these definitions start from what has always had the feature or transcendental condition of human existence in history, or has been historically attributed to him, such as something that determines the structure of action, such as work, for example, or play. Responsiveness or the possibility and necessity of answering questions that are posed to him as challenges or as mysterious events that must be solved, as if they give the Human some transcendental “essence” which is reduced to what in cybernetic theory belongs to the concept of substitution of everything from the traditional ontology of causality. How do we reach communication if not by mediating the source or cause of the emergence of intersubjectivity in dialogue and discourse with the body of the Other, whether it is physical, directly given, or only indicated using the image of a contingent and singular body? The reflections on this problem in Bernhard Waldenfels’ thinking are highly stimulating because they introduce into consideration, post-phenomenologically, a new way in which the Other, so to speak, is inter-subjectified through the experience of our changed view and narration not about him as the Other, but about what enables the coexistence of the Self and the Other in a community that is constantly changing and losing the characteristics of ontological permanence.

What challenges me to question the possibility of any further phenomenological and post-phenomenological analysis of the Other stems from the impossibility of its ontological determination in modernity, already determined by the rule of the technosphere. Questions are no longer answered only by us as humans but also by them as posthuman bodies of artificial intelligence. As Bernhard Waldenfels clearly shows, responsiveness cannot be what is reduced in one way or another to the environment of humans and non-humans in the sense of living ꟷ Human and animal. (Waldenfels: “Homo respondens”, 6-16.) Hence, it is foreign or alien, that uncanny Other as Stranger, no longer in the sense of that powerful title of Albert Camus’s novel, or that actor in Plato’s Sophist who questioned the universality of the ethical-political horizon of the recognition of the Other in Athenian democracy. Can homo respondens still be an appropriate name for the issue of the body and the Other “here” and “now”?

          It seems that it should be introduced the concept of homo kybernetes into consideration, which transcends the limits of the human body and speech as the limits of the existence unconditional Other who, for Emanuel Lévinas, was beyond metaphysics as ontology because it is neither Being nor being, but a reversal in the essence of Human, starting from the possibility that the Human emerges from the rule of the non-human. (Paić: “Messianic Triumph of Ethics? Emmanuel Lévinas and the aporia and the thinking of the Other”, 53-92.)

 However, phenomenology denotes an orientation in contemporary philosophy that Heidegger abandoned early on, for the simple reason that he destroyed, in the period of Sein und Zeit, the three ways in which the Human is founded in modern thought: anthropology, psychology, and biology. The reduction of the Human as a “subject” to that which is essential and substantial to him comes from the reducibility to that which is unconscious or to that which is vital in animalism. However, psychology, or Freud’s psychoanalysis, and biology are only two ways of approaching humans through what is “foreign and alien”. They can be understood as modifications of Aristotle’s attitude toward animal rationale. Therefore, we must start from the position of thinking as noesis and reach some object of cognition as a noema. That is why intentionality could be its first and last dogma. But what if such thinking of subject and object, even in the case of intersubjectivity and interobjectivity, cannot be longer authoritative or plausible because instead of subject and object, we have thought as a conceptual hologram in the form of technosphere, that thinks of itself in a different way and beyond the limits of the body as a hitherto unimaginable openness in the direction of the construction of the Other beyond the power of homo respondens?

The issues of bodies and the Other are now set from a new “hermeneutics situation”, which arises in our human-all-too-human opinion, almost Unheimlich. Why? Because it is work, the disembodiment of human bodies in the concept of posthuman bodies, and because others, more​​ so, cannot be strangers or unknown objects X. Instead, we are faced with homo kybernetes with whom we “communicate” by language. It’s no wonder he answers our questions and certainly will​ us soon set questions to assign unwanted problems becoming the one who from perspectives of the “Great Third” goes beyond all previous concepts and pictures that metaphysical-post-metaphysical thinking could create as idea, energy, spirit, work, play, unconscious, will to power, enframing and events, (Gestell and Ereignis). We have no problem with the determination bodies and Others, which already have self-determination and self-producing opinions. We have a problem with the technosphere as artificial intelligence is advanced. The ethical consequences of the “existence” homo kybernetes are the real Unheimlich. (Paić: The Superfluity of the Human: Reflections on the Posthuman Condition)

1. Responsiveness and decentering the subject

Responsiveness and the phenomenology of the foreign presuppose the decentering of the subject of contemporary philosophy and the social and human sciences. Now, I want to add something else, and I hope this also means the unique possibility of dialogue and discourse between two concepts of Human that are already on the verge of further existence. These are homo faber and homo ludens. We are no longer on the horizon of the rule of the so-called working animals, nor the opposite animals that take place in the experiment of the world game. Neither the modal category of necessity nor, on the contrary, chance or freedom is decisive for the action of homo kybernetes. The only thing that moves him and “drives” him to answer human questions and soon asks questions of humans themselves represents the contingency of this technological entropy as a platform for a programmed vision of the coming world in which it is no longer a problem to think of the Other as a stranger or alien in a placeless order without value. Without body and otherness, phenomenology loses ground. In this way, aliens become, like Object X, just a question about the possibility of encountering what belongs to otherness in general and primarily to the non-human way of existence of species and beings outside the Earth. Indeed, this has become a turning point in the history of metaphysics, which separates us from the entire tradition and its stable foundations and habits of thought.         

Why does responsiveness go beyond the boundaries of intentionality? The answer is already apparent in the orientation of consciousness towards the object as a “one-way street”, as in the causal flow of information. This communication model is based on the logic of means-ends and cause-and-effect. However, Waldenfels takes a decentered subject and plural rationality in the dialogue between “ownness” and “alienity”. In this way, the circle of mutual relations and understanding is expanded, but no longer of the external object in its materiality, content of the message, or awareness “about” the object. Responsiveness denotes a multifaceted model of communication. (Huth: Responsive Phänomenologie Ein Gang durch Philosophie von Bernhard Waldenfels)

 In that way, even the phenomenon of attention is present in the event of the change according to “subject” and “object”. It does not sound pretentious to say that Waldenfels starts from what we can find in quantum physics, cybernetics, and contemporary philosophy in object phenomenology. In this case, the indeterminacy of the stranger and his irreducibility to intentional acts of the intersubjective space-time of action enable a reversal in the essence of phenomenology. It is now redirected to avoid closing the circle from one direction of seeing and listening, but to open asymmetrically into new possibilities of dialogue and discourse about the foreign as such. The demand for multilateral communication significantly changes the position of the “own” versus the “alien”. For Waldenfels, it seems evident that this necessarily critically overcomes the limitations of the approach to the Other by expanding the horizons of the meanings of “appropriation” and “integration” into the given “world” of egology with dark origins. We can see that this does not only mean a deficiency in the West’s logo-phonocentrism. It is also a demand to think about what was impossible simply because object X (from Human to machine) was considered excluded. The foreigner, therefore, in existential discomfort of otherness and exclusion, necessarily appears as an excess for metaphysical thinking. (Waldenfels: Ortsverscheibungen, Zeitverscheibungen: Modi leibhafter Erfahrung)

 There remains something of a completely different “obscured origin” from what Waldenfels, in his lecture “Homo respondens,” particularly emphasized. In a certain sense, this appears to be the central theme and motif of the metaphysical turn at the end of modernity. The concept of feeling and sensitivity in all relevant philosophical speculations provokes reflection on the body and corporeality as conditions for the possibility of aesthetics and ethics. What was neglected, pushed aside for modern philosophy, suddenly takes on exceptional significance. In the works of Deleuze, Lévinas, Nancy, and Waldenfels, we witness the return of feeling in the reflection on a new set of bodies that neurocognitive sciences are discussing today. How else can we explain what post-phenomenology is talking about when, instead of the intentionality of consciousness in acts of perception, experience, and memory, it advocates responsiveness on the border between communicative rationality and the demand for recognition of the otherness in one’s identity? In his article “Das Fremde im Eigenen: Der Ursprung der Gefühle,” (Waldenfels: “Das Fremde im Eigenen: Der Ursprung der Gefühle”)

Waldenfels reminds us, in the introductory sections, that Husserl also believed the concept of feeling was reduced to the “psychic inner world.” This means that it was “appropriated” by psychology and anthropology and thus lost in the thematization of the positive sciences of the modern era. However, if the feeling is understood in Kant’s sense, it is about the relationship between natural and moral laws. In both cases, feeling is manifested by some external means. Therefore, it appears as a function of something else. Can we even have a “feeling” for understanding the foreign as our own in another’s skin without degrading it to “sentimentalism,” to the “merely bodily,” which is inappropriate for reflection and resides outside the horizon that has been established with the transcendental subject of the modern age?

When Waldenfels claims that Husserl liberated feelings from their subjective shackles, giving them an intentionally directed meaning, this is insufficient for a phenomenology of the foreign. Why? Because consciousness always denotes consciousness of something (an object in this or that sense). Since Waldenfel transforms the fundamental concepts of Husserl’s phenomenology through the discovery of Merleau-Ponty, responsiveness becomes a complex, multifaceted communicative relationship rather than a mere response to a command from either the outside or the inside. The body is mediated through dialogue and discourse as a complex relational phenomenon rather than a fixed state. The relationship always becomes an event of affective-rational performance in the space and time of the lifeworld. It requires concepts from the cybernetic communication theory: interactivity, risk, uncertainty, contingency, and emergence. (Paić: “The Body and the Technosphere. Beyond Phenomenology and Its Conceptual Matrix”. In: Andrej Božič (ed.), Thinking Togetherness: Phenomenology and Sociality, 475-510.)

When Waldenfels claims that interculturality passes into transculturality while the difference between the self and the foreign leads to communicative indifference, we encounter the same from Plato to Gadamer. Therefore, it seems necessary to unground this “monological dialogue”, which cannot be done based on hermeneutics. The reason lies in the fact that understanding the Other as a foreigner cannot cross the threshold of the so-called “authentic way of understanding”.

Namely, it can eventually listen to the Other. But it cannot be seen that his “property” is the one that calls into question our self-confident and self-sufficient logo-phonocentrism, responding to the demand of the foreign means freeing up space for a different kind of “responsiveness” than the one that stands at the foundations of Western metaphysics. Waldenfels must look for a place where dialogue and discourse of responsiveness, in an intercultural/transcultural sense, are not only possible but also necessary, to the extent that they require a change in the direction of thought. Instead of language and understanding, instead of listening to the desires of the Other, it is necessary to discern how the “irreducible asymmetry” can be opened in full scale between “one’s alienation” and “the other’s ownness.” In other words, it seems necessary to reexamine how to get from the phenomenology of the Other’s corporeality to a primary feeling that leads to re-approachement in communication, rather than to “appropriation” and “domestication.”

2. Is there anything else “foreign”? Inhuman as a challenge

In his article “Das Fremde Denken”, Waldenfels introduced the distinction between radical and relative thinking about the foreign. The latter refers to our knowledge, which is always limited, and an example comes from a foreign language. Radical thinking about the foreign/Alien goes to the very roots of things. Therefore, the foreign is divided into the own(Eigene) and the common(Gemeinsame). (Waldenfels: “Strangers Thinking”. Historical Research / Studies and Contemporary History, 361-362)

Interestingly, the latter has been derived from the political universalism of Western democracies. The constitutional document, as the fundamental law on which the modern state is based, simultaneously presupposes a logic of exclusion, because foreigners who are not citizens of the nation-state, for various reasons, are not recognized as legitimate political subjects in their foreignness. Therefore, to develop a “philosophy of the foreign”, Waldenfels must bring phenomenology to the end of the possibilities of Husserl’s fundamental concept: intentionality. It is known that the distinction between noesis and noema (thought and its object) forms the essence of the phenomenological way of approaching things. From the so-called natural attitude, using eidetic and phenomenological reduction (epoché), thinking observes the nature of being without quasi-mediation. However, in the case of the concept that Waldenfels develops in the footsteps of Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas, it is evident that both thought and its object can no longer be derived from anthropology and egology. We have seen that Waldenfels strictly denies those traces of phenomenology that remain obscured. In the face of the “irreducible asymmetry” of the stranger as such in the space-time of communication between people in a globally networked society, Husserl’s intersubjectivity can no longer be an acceptable solution.

Why? It is known that Husserl tries to understand intentionality as an act of directing consciousness (noesis) to an object (noema). In this respect, every intentional act carries with it a noetic content. Thought or noesis represents reality, meaning it gives sense to things. Noema is defined as the “sense” (Sinn) of an object. To avoid the attack of Kant’s transcendentalism of the subject, Husserl develops the content of the act of thought as directed towards (1) the intentional object of the act, (2) the intentional matter, and (3) the intentional nature of the act. Ultimately, the noetic-noematic structure of consciousness in the intentional acts of perception, imagination, and memory is the same. By rejecting Berkeley’s solipsism and Kant’s transcendental idealism, Husserl did not become a cognitive realist. Objects, therefore, in the real world, have their meaning only when they are intellectually witnessed as objects recognized by our perception, imagination, and memory. (Husserl: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie)

However, none of this applies to the stranger’s figure. The reason is that the way he appears becomes indeterminate and a riddle for consciousness in the sense of “subject” and “I.” To think of the foreign in its otherness, Waldenfels draws on the results of French poststructuralism within a modified Habermasian project of the theory of communicative action. Decentered subjects and plural rationality create the prerequisites for producing a new space for thinking of the Other as foreign. In his “Letter on Humanism” from 1946, Heidegger already said at one point that thought denotes a practical act by thinking. Unlike the concept of intentionality of consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology, the emphasis here is on thought events by which Being is opened in its historical-epoch truth (aletheia), which cannot be reduced merely to the accuracy of judgment in the logical sense of the correspondence between thinking and its object. Is it, therefore, a question of thinking about Being itself, which feels without transforming Being into a thing or object, or is it a question of thinking that unites praxis and poiesis? When Heidegger tries to show this difference, conditionally speaking, between philosophical thought and scientific thought, he takes the word “multidimensionality”. (Heidegger: “Brief über den Humanismus”)”. In: Wegmarken. 313.)

Humans cannot be understood within metaphysics except through essentialism. The position within Being and beings should be given to him spiritually and biologically, or vertically, by Aristotle’s famous definition of animal rationale. Furthermore, the relationship between the two, starting from the primacy of the Human, cannot be merely horizontally reduced to biologism, from which psychologism and anthropologism follow, as Heidegger sought to eliminate them within the framework of the systematic “destruction of traditional ontology” in Sein und Zeit. (Paić: “Metaphysics” and Cybernetics: About the Technosphere or from the thing of thought of the thing that thinks ʺ. In: Žarko Paić (ed.), The Technosphere as a New Aesthetic. 1-36.)

The reason should be seen in the fact that he believed this completely misses the “Human” or being-there (Dasein) in thought and thus reduces it to precisely what he wanted to overcome, namely, Aristotle’s definition of animal rationale. Biologism denotes the reduction of Human to naturalism or the biological factors; psychologism represents the reduction to the unconscious articulation of language, which reduces Human to a pre-and post-rational living being, while anthropologism is the reduction of Human to the subjectivity of the subject through which all other beings appear at a lower level of cosmic-biological evolution, thus making him the master of nature as a whole. Heidegger’s criticism of reducing the meaning of Being to life processes in their comprehensive vitality strikes at the triad of biology, psychology, and anthropology, because the Human thinks insufficiently and inauthentically through this conceptual-categorical “rationalization” of language. Any reduction of the Human to the non-human necessarily destroys his integrity and irreducibility as a being among beings.

We should claim that the human and non-human relationship cannot be resolved by a vulgar distinction between the biological and post-biological when it comes to the relationship between the Human and posthuman. It is not difficult to see that the problem with this relationship is that both are derived from the power differential in life that arises from the concept of nature (physis) as life (bios). In the metaphysical sense, humans are consistently elevated above the limits of biologically understood life, which is mere survival at the animal level. Therefore, it becomes self-evident that from this, every form of animalism will be considered a loss of human dignity that represents an ethical-aesthetic ideal of life. But life in its complex contingency has no meaning without understanding freedom. However, this does not mean that the biological structure of human existence is considered null and void for humanity. (Paić: “Metaphysics” and Cybernetics: About the Technosphere or from the thing of thought of the thing that thinks ʺ. In: Žarko Paić (ed.), The Technosphere as a New Aesthetic. 1-36.)

The most crucial philosopher of cybernetics, Gilbert Simondon, was right when he believed that the future of the relationship between humans and thinking machines does not mean the abolition of humanity in the dominance of superior technology, but an attempt to build coexistence as the only meaningful way of coherence of the analog and digital worlds. (Simondon: Une pensée de l’individuation et de la technique) It should be self-evident that we understand non-humans by starting from the Human. In Sein und Zeit, Heideggerattempted to show that the meaning of Being on the horizon of original temporality can only be explicated if the sense of being there (Dasein) is understood in its existential-ontological spheres of aspiration, concern, and openness towards the coming future. The difference between aliens and the foreign to humans cannot be thought of by itself, from the logic of the thing itself, par lui-même, but only in a turnaround way. The non-human means, therefore, is no longer just a pure negation of the possibility of humans to spiritually-biologically govern their existence, system, and environment of beings as such. It sounds just like uncanny (Unheimlich). Namely, suppose a Human cannot be the result of any biological-animal interventions and reduction of his being to that which is non-human in the sense of things and objects. In that case, his ontological-temporal openness has an entirely different character from the reduction to God in the sense of pure spirituality and incorporeality and from the decrease to technology in the sense of pure applicative objectivity arising from the subject-substance of modern sciences. God and technology are the ways of metaphysically understanding the meaning of Being as téchne and poiesis from Plato to the end of metaphysics in cybernetics. (Severino: The Essence of Nihilism. 208-209.)

When we have this in mind, we can see that the problem with understanding the non-human lies at the core of the concept of the posthuman condition, which can no longer be measured by the parameters by which humans are traditionally conceived and expressed metaphysically. What are these parameters? Undoubtedly, the autonomy of the human essence was, for modern speculative thought from Kant to Hegel, a pragmatic issue of the sustainability of anthropology. As subjects of cognition of the external world, humans were a substantial set of reflexive practices, and even for Blaise Pascal, human dignity consisted only of rational thinking. Rationality becomes a condition for the possibility of human existence in the technical world, which at the same time means that science and technology are the key parameters of human possibility of progress and development in the historical movement towards achieving object X. The paradox is that already with the entry into the scientific-technological age, humans have become an artificial construction, and not a natural act of revealing the secret of Being. In that sense, the posthumancondition cannot be merely the realization of the potential of Western metaphysics, completed in cybernetics. What does non-human mean in terms of how it differs from humans? It cannot be anything non-human in the sense of animalism and bestiality of a creature or a monstrous being as the embodiment of evil in a sublime state of chaos and entropy. On the contrary, the posthuman conditionmeans the becoming (Werden, devenir) of something that transcends any distinction between living and non-living, nature and culture, Being and beings. So, in posthumanism, instead of God in the metaphysical sense of the first substance understood, the creator of the world and humans in it, one speaks of the singularityas the Omega-point of connection of the onto-theo-cosmo-anthropological perspective in the form of the technosphere. (Paić: Art and the Technosphere – The Platforms of Strings)

3. The singularity of the “life world.”

From a philosophical point of view, we encounter a precise movement of the very thing of thought from the speculative-reflexive analysis of the progress and development of the primordial and its form as eidos and morphé to the last station in life, regardless of whether it is about stars, plants, animals, or man and his self-awareness. The second law of thermodynamics, which includes the concept of entropy, shows us precisely what Nietzsche metaphorically calls the statement that the desert grows: the order in its stability inevitably collapses and becomes, as Simondon claims, sustainable only in a state of metastable equilibrium. Simondon always thinks starting from (1) transduction, (2) trans-individuation, and (3) metastability in the transformation of the order of metaphysics. (Simondon: L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information)

          The fundamental concept by which the singularity in the cosmic-human perspective can be measured is the essential parameter of the posthuman condition. Of course, this is the concept with which cybernetics begins and ends, and with which the entire original structure of Western metaphysical thought collapses. It is the concept of information as the absolute measure of all measures in the era of the technosphere. Without information, there is no feedbackin the systems of life’s homeostasis; there is no possibility of external or internal control over the emergence of events, nor, finally, any interactive communication. Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics, said that the third key concept for the self-guidance and self-management of systems and the environment, after matter and energy, is information.

Thus, information entropy has become a categorical framework for the path to absolute singularity in which the cosmo-biological merges with the anthropo-technological. (Rieger: Kybernetische Anthropologie: Eine Geschichte der Virtualität) When we confront this with the main problem of Waldenfels’ phenomenology of the Other as a stranger, we should see the impossibility of understanding it within “responsiveness,” which is just another way of doing what Habermas tries to do with his theory of communicative action. Let us not forget that, for Habermas, the concept of communication is just a “modernized” way of explaining the complexity of the irreducible “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt). (Habermas: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns) It is known that he took this from Husserl’s writings. Be that as it may, the difference between one’s own and another’s world (Heimwelt vs. Fremdwelt) is notfixed and eternal for Waldenfels. The difference originates precisely from Husserl, is ontologically established, and does not refer only to ontic phenomena. There is much evidence for this claim. Waldenfels distinguishes between “one’s” and “foreign” language, which belong to the “innate” and “learned” categories. (Waldenfels: “Verschränkung von Heimwelt und Fremdwelt”, In: R. Mall and A.-D. Lohmar (ed.), Philosophische Grundlagen der Interkulturalität)

Responsiveness becomes impossible in life without what belongs to the essence of philosophy, which is the thinking of being, since Plato. It is a conversation in which the position of the Other is revealed in the impossibility of its reduction to a mere other or different “I”—finding the Other as my neighbor presupposes both his approach and my distancing from my own “innate” indifference to everything that does not belong to what Wittgenstein calls the limits of “my world”. Everything suddenly becomes a network of uncanny alienations. Just as anxiety represents the highest fear of immersion into the abyss of nothingness for the existence of a singular individual, so too does fear of a foreign world and its culture take on the features of homelessness. When encountering something that is not one’s own, humans experience a radical change in the world and in their lives.  (Waldenfels: “Strangers Thinking”, Contemporary History Research/Studies and Contemporary History. 361-362)

Conclusion

Cyborgization means programming the world as a contingent case. It is possible to control systems and the environment only when the possibility of cybernetic thinking is realized in language as a pragmatic form of life. Such language is a visual conceptualization of the relationship between structures and functions. Since the image in the digital environment no longer represents anything, the operation of metaphysically established thinking in philosophy, art, and science has been terminated. The image cannot be the function of something external, nor does it arise from an otherworldly source such as God’s hidden presence, which it did during the reign of the referential framework of myth and religion. Instead, the image shows and expresses what happens in the emergence of life itself in the phenomenon. The connection of genes and information as the emergence of new life determines, for example, the essence of bio-art and trans-gene art. (Sorgner: Philosophy of Posthuman Art and Paić: ʺSynaesthetic Without Sensitivity?​ Body as a Technological Construction, in: Žarko Paić (ed) The Technosphere as a New Aesthetic. 191-219.)

When we have all this in mind, it should not be difficult to see that the essence of transhumanism, in the philosophical sense, necessarily falls within the framework of posthumanism, namely, the realization of the nature of the technosphere in the posthuman condition. If, for Nietzsche, the last man was a preparation for the arrival of Overman as the meaning of the Earth, then in the case of homo kybernetes we find ourselves in a position of thought that can no longer be philosophical, artistic, or a scientific investigation of the first reason and the last purpose of the human-too-human in the era of global-planetary development of the technosphere.Cyborgization becomes the previous instance of the production of technologically perfected and improved “beings” who have become hybrid structures and applications of the connection of genes and information in everyday life.

          For all the above reasons, we confront two post-metaphysical figures. In that case, concepts in the philosophical contemplation of “Human,” such as Waldenfels’s homo respondens, are situated within a posthuman condition in which the Human is no longer a subject or an object of thought, feeling, or action. Still, within the framework of contemporary technoscientific constructions of the very “artificial life,” with what the figure homo kybernetes presupposes, Husserl’s solution of intersubjectivity can no longer be a credible path on which everything that connects the body and the Other can be further developed. The reason seems self-evident. The logic of the technosphere’s functioning transcends all metaphysical concepts from ontology and anthropology, as well as ethical-political solutions to the problem of otherness, starting from its irreducibility and autonomy. Instead of intersubjectivity, which still has within itself a trace of the separation of the living and the non-living in the difference res cogitans and res extensa, it is necessary to go a step further and show that the autonomous objects of the new enactive consciousness of the technosphere are, as cyborgized entities, networked into a new interobjectivity that synthesises both”consciousness” and “body” beyond all possible intersubjectivities.

          Since, for Waldenfels,” intentionality has been transformed into responsiveness”, the path of phenomenology in the new conditions of functioning in globally networked societies must be designated as a “post-phenomenological path”. In one place, Waldenfels describes intentionality as a “shibboleth” of phenomenology. It is already evident that the answer to the question about the stranger not only hides the communicative potential of human existence in a historical-epochal sense. We have said that the answer presupposes not only listening to the mandate of Being and its mission, as Heidegger would have said in the 1930s, in the wake of his thought of events (Ereignis). (Heidegger: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)

          What kind of Waldenfels’ transformation of fundamental phenomenological concepts is reflected? Instead of “world”, the idea of “order” (Ordnung) now comes to the fore, and instead of “us”, the “stranger” enters. Everything becomes connected with new boundaries and demarcations, and what seems particularly significant is that the concept of the Other cannot be accepted as Lévinas takes it. He even claims that the ethics of the Other becomes the first philosophy or ontology. Waldenfels’s intention represents a different line of thought. (Friesen: “Waldenfels’ Responsive Phenomenology of the Alien: An Introduction”. Phenomenology & Practice. 68-77.)

To be a stranger means to be someone Other and outside any order of foundation of common Being. So, it has been the fate of the “same” from Plato’s time to the present. Nothing has changed significantly except that fate has become a contingency, and the “intruder” inhabits the everyday experience of encountering what is, admittedly, disturbing, but at an acceptable distance between fear and exoticism. Where, however, the stranger comes from and why his essence should be mysterious belong to the question of the coming community. This question is no longer a matter of Waldenfels’s phenomenology. With its demand for the responsiveness of the affective body in communication with the Other, phenomenology reaches the limit of its realizations.

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