Ryan Haecker
@RyanHaecker

“When, in his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview “Only a God can Save Us”, Heidegger was asked what was destined to replace philosophy, he replied: “cybernetics”. He had, in an earlier lecture, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, wrote: “no prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now establishing themselves will soon be determined and steered by the new fundamental science which is called cybernetics.” This determination of science by cybernetics commenced as soon as metaphysics had been transformed by mathematical logic into a technical science of ‘logistics’ or calculation, and this logistical control of mechanical force became autonomous in digital computers. When, in this way, cybernetics supersedes metaphysics, the originary questioning of the meaning of being as true in relation to the categories can be suppressed under the objectified concept of techne. And when the trace condition of techne in technics is upheld as both the essential condition for the transcendental deduction of the categories and yet unanalysable beyond itself, thinking becomes increasingly paralyzed by a metaphysical empiricism that more and more refuses the task of philosophy. Yet the fire of philosophical speculation glows ever brighter the more tightly it is suppressed.”