Part VII: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part VII: Tensions in the Triad - Hegel, Whitehead, Ruyer

Part I: The Pope Interrupts the Talking Machine

Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part II: Philosophy as Emergency Response &
Part III: Resisting Cognitive Enclosure

Parts II & III: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part IV: Hegel’s Loom and the Difference Reason Makes

Part IV: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part V: Whitehead’s Function of Reason and Humanity’s Cosmic Calling

Part V: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part VI: Ruyer’s Origin of Information

Part VI: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

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Part VII: Tensions in the Triad

Hegel, Whitehead, and Ruyer have stood together thus far as defenders of the human mind—and of the wider living soil of which that mind is the flowering—against those who would mechanize it. But that does not mean they are all of one mind. Pausing to assess the tensions between them before concluding may be instructive.

The first strain is between Ruyer and Hegel. In Neofinalism, just before approvingly citing Whitehead’s generalization of “organism” beyond biology to physics and chemistry (quoted earlier), Ruyer criticizes Hegel’s “dialectical distinction…between the ‘in-itself’ and the ‘for-itself,’ the in-itself supposedly primitive relative to the for-itself,” a “primitive, blind, and deaf Ground” to which consciousness alone would lend sense.^[1] Ruyer goes on to reject the emergentist prejudice of his twentieth century milieu, which he claims is fed by the influence of Hegel, for whom “life emerges dialectically from matter and the spirit from life”; Ruyer then dismisses emergence as a word that “signifies nothing” but a “laicized, diluted, or inverted creationism.”^[2] But Hegel is never quite as simple as either his admirers or detractors would prefer, and his own doctrine of Subjective Spirit complicates Ruyer’s caricatures.

Ruyer’s rendering of Hegel’s an sich and für sich sounds far more like Sartre’s en-soi and pour-soi: an absurd plenitude of being subsequently riven and signified by a nihilating consciousness. Hegel’s logic begins with bare being, not the in-itself, which develops later. His anthropology begins with our animality—not with clear self-consciousness but with the soul still sunk in sensuous corporeality and dreamy feeling, in the dull stirring of natural life.^[3] Spirit is already there initself if not yet for itself in that it breathes, senses, suffers, slumbers, and only just begins to rub the sleep from its eyes. But this slumbering soul is not the blind and deaf Ground dismissed by Ruyer; it is a restless activity awakening to itself from within. The in-itself and for-itself are not, for Hegel, two modes of existence that get externally welded together, as if the latter emerges atop the former. Hegel is very far from a temporal emergentist; disastrously so, according to Charles Taylor, an otherwise sympathetic reader.^[4] In his Philosophy of Nature he claims it is “a completely empty thought to represent species as developing successively, one after the other, in time.”^[5] This would hold as well for the thought of life and mind emerging in sequential time from matter. Ruyer would seem to mistake Hegel’s dialectical derivation and self-explication for a claim about temporal production of a genuinely unprecedented ontological level.

That Ruyer does not treat Hegel’s thinking fairly here may relate to his embeddedness in the same French interpretive atmosphere that shaped Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.^[6] The charge of emergentism misses its mark, sounding more like an amalgam of French materialism and existentialism than anything Hegel proposes. Yet it is precisely here that Hegel’s real limitations become apparent. Cleared of the charge of emergentism, he is guilty of denying evolution: a thinker who cannot grant nature a genuine history will have trouble thinking genesis, novelty, and creative advance.

Despite Ruyer’s polemic with Hegel, they remain aligned against the mechanization of mind. For Hegel, mechanism is only the most abstract and external determination of the object, whose mutually indifferent parts have not yet attained the self-relating unity of the Concept that is won only through sublation into chemism, teleology, and finally life. While Ruyer is not a dialectical thinker, his distinction between crowds and true forms, and his account of machines as all liaison and no survol, ends up converging with Hegel. Ruyer’s account of approaches that attempt to reduce life and mind to complexes of mechanical linkage is akin to Hegel’s account of those who remain arrested at the level of the Understanding—able to fix, separate, calculate, and recombine predicates whose meanings are received ready-made without ever rising to the self-moving organicity of Reason, wherein living wholeness differentiates and comprehends itself. Further, Hegel’s account of the soul as pure activity inseparable from its living embodiment converges with Ruyer’s account of the activity of self-survey: for both, organisms are their own unifying subjects rather than assemblages surveyed from without. Subjective Spirit is not layered on top of nature, as if it left nature behind, but nature’s innermost being appearing to and beginning to comprehend its own universality. But their approaches remain distinctive, since Hegel orders mechanism, chemism, life, and spirit as increasingly adequate determinations of the Concept, whereas Ruyer denies that mechanism was ever ontologically primitive, since even its ultimate constituents are already domains of self-possession. Ruyer does not describe the cosmos as a single self-developing subject, but begins from a plurality of individual lines of activity, each with its domain of absolute survey. His theology later seeks the transindividual unity of these lineages in God, but this unity is not generated dialectically through their negation and mediation.

Sorting the available theories of the origin of information, Ruyer lists together the mechanistic and geometric approach seeking to derive information from fortuitous collisions of entities in space, Hegel’s dialectical account, and the Platonic doctrine of forms as the theories of “metaphysical fullness” that “sacrifice novelty to rationality” by “[resorting] to the notion of potentiality.”^[7] Ruyer cites Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic: “the Concept remains at home with itself in the course of its process, and…the process does not posit anything new as regards content, but only brings forth an alteration of form.”^[8] Ruyer affirms a reformed Platonism, holding that true forms “are regulated by means of axiological feedback passing through a trans-spatial world,” and grants that his own account of epigenesis may be “a preformation in which the form exists in advance, not in space, but in a trans-spatial world.”^[9] While Ruyer had faulted Hegel for inspiring the emergentists in Neofinalism, here he acknowledges Hegel’s preformationist leanings, and himself inches closer to Hegel’s account of the relation between the logic of the Idea and its self-externalization in nature.

Neither Hegel nor Ruyer is a crudely deterministic preformationist. Hegel’s account is of a retrospective wholeness, the owl of Minerva taking wing only at dusk, comprehending the world after it has grown old while leaving the future explicitly unthought—even if his systematic method assures that no future could ever truly surprise the Concept. Ruyer, by contrast, tries to distinguish thematic guidance from the execution of a finished plan. Trans-spatial forms conserve types already achieved, but they are not a complete reservoir from which every future form descends. Species “invent themselves in time,” though their invention remains guided or “predestined” by axiological possibilities.^[10] The agent may invent new values, yet discovers them in a God with whom its own agency is continuous.^[11] Ruyer’s novelty is therefore neither the mere unfolding of antecedent content nor an eruption without norm, but invention under the lure of an Ideal that no finite realization exhausts.

The second strain concerns Ruyer and Whitehead. In his insistence on genuine novelty, Whitehead has affinities with the theorists of pure experience and creative evolution listed by Ruyer—including William James, C. S. Peirce, and Henri Bergson—who, Ruyer claims, purchase novelty only by abandoning Reason.^[12] As a thinker of Creativity, Whitehead parts company at least with Hegel, for whom the determinative unity of the self-positing Concept is always already secured, a metaphysical fullness in which the form exists in advance like a germ “[bearing] in itself the whole nature of the tree.”^[13] For Whitehead, the universe is “an incompletion in process of production,”^[14] all actualities—even God—adventuring together toward higher harmonies in a perpetually unfinished cosmogenesis. Like Ruyer, Whitehead does not abandon Reason in favor of chance but seeks some reconciliation between Reason and what exceeds it.

Ruyer’s critique of Whitehead’s theology also needs to be addressed. Ruyer finds it unacceptable that Whitehead distinguishes his ultimate category, Creativity, from God, who then gets listed among “some derivative notions” as Creativity’s “primordial, non-temporal accident.”^[15] So long as Whitehead’s theology figures God as nothing more than “the ‘Ideal’ of the world acting as a lure,” it remains “an incomplete solution.”^[16] Ruyer’s remedy is to identify God with “the two poles of all finalist activities,” at once “supreme Agent as well as supreme Ideal.”^[17] For Whitehead, the primordial conceptual pole is said to be “deficient in actuality”—“not before all creation, but with all creation”—yearning for fullness of finite actualization that only becomes “really actual” in the consequent physical pole.^[18] The consequent pole is never finished, remaining always in open-ended concrescence, prehending, cherishing, and reweaving the world’s achievements of value without ever closing into a completed totality. Ruyer’s Agent is akin to the Creativity that he prefers to give back to God. Where Ruyer insists that “Creativity cannot be distinct from a God who is at once and indissociably Agent and Ideal,”^[19] Whitehead keeps Creativity, the ultimate activity, distinct from God, its primordial creature. In Whitehead’s cosmology, “agency belongs exclusively to actual occasions”: while the deficiently actual primordial nature expresses agency by way of its ordering valuation of infinite possibility, it can act in the world only as a lure influencing the decisions of finite occasions.^[20]

One could mistake Whitehead’s lures to be wholly the work of the primordial nature, as if the realm of pure possibility lay logically “before” the world. But Whitehead is explicit that the lure develops: its “primary element” is each occasion’s prehension of the primordial nature’s “initial aim,” and yet “by integration with physical feelings a subsequent phase of propositional feelings supervenes.”^[21] A proposition is a hybrid of the possible and the actual, requiring actual occasions as its logical subjects, so that “every proposition must be somewhere,” housed among the occasions whose actual worlds contain those subjects.^[22] The primordial nature is pure conceptual valuation with as yet no other subjects to prehend, so it can harbor no propositions. Propositions arise only where conceptual pattern is woven onto physical feeling. The concrete, situation specific lure that reaches a given occasion is therefore co-constituted by the consequent nature, which “passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent occasions.”^[23] The consequent lure is “the love of God for the world,” who becomes thereby “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”^[24]Whitehead’s luring Ideal is thus not a detached form suspended before creation but woven with the world.

There remain deeper tensions in the relative weight each thinker gives to creative incompletion versus secured fullness. Ruyer worries that granting genuine novelty to the world-process surrenders rationality to chance, purchasing novelty only by abandoning Reason.^[25] Whitehead feels the force of the worry himself, conceding that his doctrine of unique creative processes “seems to have destroyed the very foundation of rationality.”^[26] But their shared wager is that this dilemma is ultimately false. Whitehead seeks to recover rationality not by retreating into a metaphysical fullness fixed in advance but by reconceiving speculative philosophy along experimental lines: not the deduction of the form of the Real from self-evident first principles, but the imaginative generalization of a matrix of categoreal proposals, drawn from various regions of experience and then tested—like the flight of an aeroplane that lands again for renewed observation—by their power to interpret every other region: scientific, aesthetic, religious, and so on.^[27] The categories are not axioms but proportional analogies, always revisable, answerable to the experience they are intended to illuminate.^[28] Ruyer approaches the same chastened ambition when he calls for “a more modest sort of metaphysics, which would be a cosmology of the knowable, beyond the [physically] observable.”^[29]

The third strain, the tension between Hegel and Whitehead, is captured in their divergent responses to the prime philosophical emotion of wonder. Hegel affirms wonder as the origin of philosophy. It arises, he says, because Reason trusts that, even when it encounters objects that initially appear irrational and alien, it will with effort of thought rediscover itself in them. We gaze up at the scattered stars, struck by how familiar their strange order is, how intimate their infinitude. But philosophy must rise above wonder, on Hegel’s reading: wonder is but the launch pad and not the destiny of Reason. For a mind whose aim is to recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth, “an out-and-out Other simply does not exist.”^[30] Whitehead demurs: “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophical thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”^[31] This is the sense in which Hegel remains a thinker of closure, of the dusk in which life, having ripened, can at last be comprehended in full. Whitehead, in contrast, is a thinker of dawn, for whom every comprehension is itself a new fact added to an evolving universe. Rationality, so conceived, is not the demonstration that the world could not have been otherwise but the disciplined attunement of thought to the generative grain of a world still in the process of making itself.

The case against the mechanization of mind does not rest on any one finished metaphysics. To defeat the claim that consciousness is mere machinery, we need not first have settled the quarrel between idealism and realism, nor have decided whether ontological openness is best grounded in Ruyer’s unity of Agent and Ideal or in Whitehead’s distinction between Creativity, God, and the many self-creating occasions. We need only to have provided a clear sense of the inadequacy of the mechanistic picture, which is what all three thinkers, from their divergent vantages, supply. Their very disagreement is instructive: it shows that the country beyond mechanism is wide enough to be contested, that more than one coherent metaphysics can honor what the machine image distorts.

As we have seen, speculative philosophy is stirred into motion whenever a mutation in our medium of thought furnishes a new analogy between mind and world. Its task is to attend to the analogies at the liminal thresholds where one technological milieu gives way to another, keeping metaphors living and proportional rather than letting them fossilize. Only then can we avoid mistaking the mind for whatever machine now models it.

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^[1] Ruyer, Neofinalism, 85.

^[2] Ruyer, Neofinalism, 231.

^[3] Hegel, Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, §§388ff (anthropology).

^[4] Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 354.

^[5] Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (Encyclopaedia, Part Two), §249.

^[6] On Ruyer’s real target as the specifically Sartrean distinction, see Edlebi’s Translator’s Introduction to Neofinalism, xiii.

^[7] Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, 131. Even the Cartesian geometrization of extended matter conceives of the latter as taking all possible positions in a pre-determined state space.

^[8] Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, 130. The Hegel passages are quoted by Ruyer from The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, and from the Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris; ellipses are in Ruyer’s text.

^[9] Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, 129-130.

^[10] Ruyer, Neofinalism, 221.

^[11] Ruyer, Neofinalism, 246.

^[12] Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, 131.

^[13] Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, 130; Ruyer quoting Hegel’s Philosophy of History.

^[14] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 214-215.

^[15] Ruyer, Neofinalism, 240ff; Whitehead, Process and Reality, 31, 7.

^[16] Ruyer, Neofinalism, 240.

^[17] Ruyer, Neofinalism, 241.

^[18] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 343–45, 349

^[19] Ruyer, Neofinalism, 241.

^[20] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 31.

^[21] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 185.

^[22] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 186, 259; on the proposition as a hybrid lure for feeling, 256–63.

^[23] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 345, 350–51.

^[24] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 351.

^[25] Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, 131.

^[26] Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1938), 133.

^[27] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 5.

^[28] For an account of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme as a matrix of proportional analogies, see James Bradley, “La cosmologie transcendantale de Whitehead: La transformation spéculative du concept de construction logique,” Archives de Philosophie 56, no. 1 (January–March 1993), Part IX. Translation available at: https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/whiteheads-transcendental-cosmology-by-james-bradley1-2.pdf

^[29] Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, 132.

^[30] Hegel, Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Sec. 377.

^[31] Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 168.