PHILOSOPHER ANATOLII AKHUTIN: on the «Intellectual Frankenstein», the Death of the Subject, and the End of Postmodernism

Anatoly Akhutin / YouTube

SHORT PROFILE

Name: Anatolii Akhutin

Date of Birth: September 11, 1940

Profession: Philosopher, specialist in the history of science, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and cultural studies

Will God’s project called «human» turn out to be a failure? How have the pursuit of knowledge and power transformed world culture? Can a human being become just one component of the machine they invented? Might artificial intelligence possess traits of the Cartesian subject? How did postmodern Europe discover the significance of cultural differences?

You will find answers to these and many other questions in an exclusive interview with philosopher Anatoly Akhutin for our magazine. In the previous interview, we discussed a kind of war between «two cultures» — one that affirms human dignity and another, a nihilistic «culture» that denies it. But what happens if we translate this confrontation into the language of science and technology? After all, many see them as a kind of antithesis to culture…

Anatoly Akhutin: I suggest we start from a broad understanding of the concept of «culture», one that includes science as its integral part. In this sense, we can also speak of another concept — a «cultural epoch». For example, we may view European history as a sequence of well-known cultural epochs — Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Modern Era. A cultural epoch is something whole, a unity. Within such a whole, the opposition of science and culture appears absurd.

Take the Modern Era, for instance — the «turning point» of European culture, whose decisive event was the scientific revolution, the birth of modern science as such. From the very beginning, science was not merely «science» but a civilizing «science-technology». At its philosophical foundation, we can discern three components: Cartesian doubt and the grounding of scientific methodology, but also the will to technical power, which, according to Francis Bacon, scientific knowledge provides.

What we call technical progress is precisely the process of the ever-increasing growth of human power: we fly into space, defeat once incurable diseases, modify the genetics of animals and plants, and even attempt to create artificial intelligence capable of competing with our own. The result of this metaphysical revolution was yet another decisive event: the division of the world into the «natural» (existing outside and independent of humans) and the human, subjective, humanitarian sphere.

Development — progress — followed primarily the Baconian scenario. Science as a form of doubt inspires us far less than the growth of power. And yet, the link between scientific knowledge and technical power that arose in the Modern Era transformed all of European culture, giving it a universal character. Of course, this universality is, first and foremost, technological. The Internet, AI, smartphones, and computers — all of these reach end users in the most remote corners of the world, bypassing cultural barriers and political divisions. Even the names themselves are symbolic: «inter-net», the «World Wide Web».

Also, starting from the Modern Era, we received the division between the natural sciences and the humanities, something neither Antiquity nor the Middle Ages had known. Everything that belongs to culture, to our subjectivity — museums, conservatories, literature, cinema — all this we now call culture in the narrow sense of the word. This is precisely what a modern person usually has in mind when they pronounce the word «culture». But do we truly understand what this phenomenon is?

In earlier times, within a single space — for example, a church liturgy — all of these were present in an undivided unity: architecture, chant, music, painting, poetry, and philosophy — in the form of theology. What has changed? If a person from the Middle Ages suddenly found themselves in a modern concert hall, they would likely think the audience had gone mad: they are not praying, not participating in a mystery, but merely sitting and listening to music that stirs their sentimentality. The same goes for museums and art galleries.

In our society, this «culture», the sphere of the sublime and the beautiful, has become a kind of secular religion. In this sphere, a person separates themselves from the scientific-technical, political, and ethical world. In the «temple» of culture, one finds an abstract realm filled with the twists and turns of one’s own psychology, tastes, biographies, travel notes, idle reflections, auteur films, concert halls, exhibitions, book festivals… To someone who sees culture in this way, it seems as though «science-technology», politics, and ethical catastrophes remain outside the walls. It is difficult for them to notice that these walls are entirely permeable.

Today, global media report almost daily on new achievements in artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, as early as Descartes, we find the treatise Man, which speaks of the «man-machine». Simply because scientific, objective, outside, and independent of human knowledge of anything, including the human being, can know it only by representing it as a machine.

Long before our time, Descartes posed the question: how can we distinguish a human-robot from a living human being? In other words, this very problem was generated by the logic of the Modern Era at its very beginning. Today, when we converse «on equal terms» with artificial intelligence, the question remains just as relevant. Let me remind you that the Cartesian concept assumed that the subject of self-consciousness and thought — a «non-extended» (incorporeal) thing — is separated from the body — the «extended» thing. Yet the same consciousness («soul»), taken as the object of scientific knowledge, must be represented as an object, as a machine.

Here lies the paradox: AI substitutes the human being with thought and consciousness, and this substitution is carried out by the very subject being substituted. This means that only where the Cartesian subject of consciousness — long before any AI — had driven the work of its own thought and mind to mechanical automatism, can it be successfully replaced by a machine. And that is precisely what has happened throughout the entire history of technology. If AI writes poems indistinguishable from those of poets, this shows that poets had already made their art sufficiently algorithmic.

One might recall Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). The inventor was forced to destroy his creation, fearing the terrible consequences of its power. So-called AI often inspires the same fear in its creators. The human inventor, in one way or another, deeply integrates into the world of the technology they themselves have built.

Will Charlie Chaplin’s prophetic film Modern Times prove to be true, where the human, having created technology, becomes integrated into it as just one of its parts? Are we entering the world of posthumanism, of cyber-humans and techno-hominids, with decisions made by no one knows whom (or what)? In short, who is the kybernētēs (steersman, helmsman — Gr..) in our thoroughly cybernetic world?

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When people speak of the «death of the subject», it is assumed that the boundary between subject and object no longer exists, since a human is not a unique individual and the sole possible bearer of a personal type of consciousness. But in reality, we are dealing with the same subject, only in a different capacity. When we are told «God is dead» or «the subject is dead», one should ask: «Which God exactly, which subject exactly?»

For example, when I read a book by Thomas Mann, I am not interested in who Thomas Mann is; I am interested in the life of Leverkühn or Joseph, the life of the text itself. In that sense, the subject Thomas Mann, who created this book (that is, the hero of the «Lives of Remarkable People» series), has long been dead for me, while his text continues to live without him.

The analogy, I hope, is clear: can AI continue to exist after the death of its creator? The technical power acquired by man through methodical cognition and the translation of the forces of nature into the forces of technology is still power belonging only to his Baconian and Cartesian Subject. In AI, he—the subject—comes up against himself as object.

In any case, we continue to live within this science-technical paradigm, and it is not finished. The problem of AI is already not only a philosophical problem but a problem of choice for each person. You can act as artificial intelligence, your spiritual adviser, a political leader, or a charismatic film star tells you to… In any case, remember that it was you who decided to obey them, and you will be the one responsible for the consequences of your action.

Compared with the era of the Middle Ages, nothing has really changed. You came into a temple, prayed, and entered into contact with higher powers — but this in no way removed your personal responsibility or guilt. The only difference is that in the modern world, instead of one God, we have received a whole host of «gods», and all of them give advice, dictate, compel, persuade… They offer countless excuses for a person to fall into the illusion of free choice and to renounce their own dignity — but, unlike in totalitarian practices, to do so voluntarily.

You renounce your dignity when you delegate your sovereign decision to advertising, marketing, a charismatic leader, or artificial intelligence, to information trends and popular bloggers on social media. In this way, these two concepts — dignity and responsibility — turn out to be interconnected. In «turning times», these foundations of our humanity are put to the test. And we must not allow our dignity and responsibility to be broken.

Huxley: Which of the cultural epochs is personally closest to you in terms of worldview?

А. А.: Modernity. Because it is the era in which all the preceding epochs are present in one way or another. I am engaged in philosophy, and in philosophy, for me, there is no past. This means that in my thought, the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz… all live equally. Philosophy is all of them together, not some «exclusive» contemporary philosophical practice.

You know, I belonged to Vladimir Bibler’s «school of dialogue», where he developed the philosophy of dialogue and the idea of philosophy as a dialogue of cultures, of logical cultures — that is, one might say, a dialogue of epochal minds. For him, philosophy by definition exists only where, in some way, all philosophies are present.

And therefore, all cultures, regardless of the «points» at which they originated, never cease to converse with one another. It is precisely this conversation that constitutes the essence of modern culture. Perhaps they are conversing even now, in some hidden beginnings beyond our sight. Even postmodernism can be viewed through the perspective — or lack of perspective — of such a dialogue.

It must be acknowledged that, one way or another, postmodernism as a cultural epoch has by now practically come to an end. There is one great work which, in my view, embodies all of its achievements at once: The European Dictionary of Philosophies: A Lexicon of Untranslatables, edited by Barbara Cassin. It is a remarkable postmodernist masterpiece. Words that might appear to designate the same concepts turn out, in fact, to be untranslatable.

In the Dictionary of Philosophies, they proliferate like a mycelium — in the manner of Gilles Deleuze’s rhizome: in English, French, Ukrainian, Russian, Azerbaijani, Sanskrit… To summarize briefly, this dictionary provided the final philosophical formula of postmodernism: we see that what took the place of the traditional European philosophical pursuit of unity was differences, which turned out to be no less — and perhaps even more — significant.

Europe appeared before us as a strikingly multicultural phenomenon. Alongside Christianity, Arab culture developed here. Epochs existed that cannot be reduced to one another, such as Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Modern Era, which we discussed earlier, is also a completely different epoch, one that stands in a special relation to the world and to the human being. It invented the very idea of progress, which was unknown to the preceding cultural epochs. That is, where earlier one saw continuity and indivisible unity, postmodernism revealed much more complex relations. And yet postmodernism has ended.

This happened precisely at the moment when we moved, roughly speaking, from «theory» into «practice» — into a «battlefield» situation, where it is extremely uncomfortable for a postmodernist to think. Here, different philosophical impulses come into play. Dignity and responsibility, engagement and action — these, alas, are not themes of postmodernism.

Moreover, these themes are now enormously amplified because humanity today does not live merely in different countries and cultures but on one shared, and not very large, territory of the Earth. Whether we like it or not, the fact is that technologically, energetically, financially, and informationally, we are already bound together. This demands an idea of some new wholeness, a new philosophicity oriented toward a rethinking of «first principles» and «foundations».

We are forced to return to them because nihilism, which pushes us into the abyss of «nothing», must be countered with «something». Why is the confrontation between «nothing» and «something» philosophically significant? Translated into the language of theology, the question becomes: can it really happen that the project of the human world created by God will turn out to be a failure? We know that once God erased almost all humanity from the face of the earth by sending the Flood. Only the inhabitants of Noah’s Ark survived. This has already happened once, and who can guarantee that something similar will not happen again tomorrow?

Not necessarily in some mystical or eschatological way. The elimination of humanity could begin with any random cosmic, tectonic, or climatic event. How are we to exist in an infinite universe, for which our disappearance would bear no consequences whatsoever? How are we to exist in a global world — not only in the scientific-technical sense, but also in the cultural one? For each culture is a distinct, existentially and rationally viable way for a human being to be human.

Huxley: Anatoly Valerianovich, give us some advice: how can one remain human in these difficult «turning times»?

А. А.: If only we knew what that really means. For everything exists within a human being. A person can be like the Russian executioners with their torture stun guns and plastic bags over the head, or like Ihor Kozlovskyi, unbroken by them. Here the simple commandment of doctors applies: do no harm. Neither to others, nor to yourself.

It is better to reflect on what I have been emphasizing all along — the notion of dignity. I am already 85 years old, and I know that to preserve dignity — that is, what was once called honor, which is rooted in your inalienable freedom, namely the responsible authorship of your own being — is truly very difficult in the human world. I can only say this: do not rely solely on yourself.

No one knows their true strength, and it does not take much to break you. But then I find a community for which human dignity is not an empty sound, a community born in an event justly called the «Revolution of Dignity», a community for which the struggle for dignity has existential force (that is, «to be or not to be»). It is a great fortune if you can join it, to be in solidarity with it, whatever the cost.

And finally, one must not shy away from responsibility, saying: «Nothing depends on me, it will somehow work itself out in the end». No, here everything depends on each of us. No supernatural powers are obliged to save us automatically. No natural forces of justice, humanism, or kindness exist in nature. But even if they do exist, they will do nothing apart from our own reason, will, and effort.

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