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In 1804 Schelling diagnosed our impending “annihilation of nature” due to our conceptual detachment from and consequent economic exploitation of our natural world. His critique of Modernity’s Cartesian Idealisms, effected through his inversion of the Kantian categories, results in a philosophical project whose relevance to our ongoing climate crisis is difficult to overstate.

Bruce Matthews
Bard College/BHSEC, professor of philosophy, research in German Idealism and Romanticism, with a focus on life and thought of F.W.J. Schelling, whose recent work revolves around Schelling’s critique of modernity with its anticipation of, as he wrote in 1804, ‘the annihilation of nature,’ and its relevance to the Anthropocene.

“Schelling in the Anthropocene: A New Mythology of Nature,” (Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2015), “Schelling: A Brief Biographical Sketch of the Odysseus of German Idealism,” in The Palgrave Handbook to German Idealism (2014), and “The New Mythology: Between Romanticism and Humanism,” in The Relevance of Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Books include the forthcoming intellectual biography, Schelling: Heretic of Modernity (2018), Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (SUNY 2011).

Presented by the Philosophy Department at The New School for Social Research

Sjoerd van Tuinen and Jürgen Schaflechner will present their film “Toxic Reigns of Resentment” featuring Wendy Brown, Grayson Hunt, Rahel Jaeggi, Alexander Nehamas, Robert Pfaller, Gyan Prakash, Peter Sloterdijk, and Sjoerd van Tuinen. NSSR philosopher Jay Bernstein will respond after the screening.

After the fall of the Soviet empire and the triumph of global capitalism, modernity appeared to keep its dual promise of liberty and equality. The spreading of human rights and democratic forms of government were intrinsically linked to free flows of global capital and free markets. Supported by technological developments and an ever-increasing digitalization of daily life, the future contained the promise of abundance and recognition for all.

Only a few decades later, however, we witness an oppositional trend: A revival of nationalism paired with xenophobia, an increasing tribalization of politics, a public sphere oscillating between cruelty and sentimentality, and a Left caught up in wounded attachments. Social media, once the promise to give voice to the disempowered, link cognitive capitalism with a culture of trolling and hyper moralization. Algorithms programmed to monetarize outrage feed isolated information bubbles and produce what many call the era of post-truth politics.

How did we enter this toxic climate? Are these developments a response to the ubiquity of neoliberal market structures eroding the basic solidarities in our society? Has the spread of social media limited our ability to soberly deal with conflicting life worlds? And have both the left and the right given in to a form of politics where moralization and cynical mockery outdo collective visions of the future?

In this paper, I explore the role that metaphor plays in the development of new scientific models. My goal is to illustrate metaphor’s fecundity in this regard, the way in which it extends our understanding in surprisingly diverse ways. As Mary Hesse put this point, “it is precisely in its extension that the fruitfulness of the model may lie” (1980, 114).

The particular focus of my paper is on the history of what John Haugeland called mind design: the use of mechanical models to reverse-engineer how minds work (1997, 1). My history focuses on two such models: the clockwork model and the computer model. In each case, I show how a metaphorical understanding of the model led to conceptual innovation in two distinct ways. First, it provided an interpretive frame that guided new research by offering an abstract, hypothesized structure to be later filled in by empirical research (Camp 2020). Second, it provided a concrete exemplar to contrast with human minds (Daston 1994). For instance, while on the one hand Descartes invoked the clockwork model to explain how color vision works (Adams 2015), he also invoked it as a vivid illustration of how human reasoning does not work (Riskin 2016).

It is this second source of conceptual innovation that is the real core of the paper; it reveals what I call the dialectic of mind design. This dialectic is especially evident in our tendency to redefine what it is to be human in response to new technological developments. For instance, it is evident when we take something that was previously assumed to be paradigmatic of mental acuity, such as the ability to play chess, and redefine it as something merely mechanical (Ensmenger 2012). But it is equally well evident when we take something that was previously taken to be mechanical—such as color vision—and redefine it as paradigmatically mental (Chalmers 1997; cf. Adams and Browning 2020). The concept of mindedness is, in this sense, a constantly moving goalpost that is perennially being redefined in response to new technological developments.