The infamous 1929 Davos debate between Cassirer and Heidegger, which as history tells it Heidegger won, not only marked the historical rift and parting of ways between what is now known as analytic and continental philosophy, but it also apportioned their given objects of inquiry. While the former claimed science and its relation to “the positive,” the later found itself, mostly due to the dominance of Heidegger’s influence on French philosophy (the only German philosopher left in Europe), rejecting the ontic nature of the “positive” and embracing the “rational.” If the Vienna Circle’s “verifiability principle” allied naturally to the physical sciences, then phenomenology, existentialism, and other post-isms (post-structuralism and post-modernism) remained rooted in a method that viewed thought alone as enough, despite its constant attempts to break from metaphysics through an engagement with philosophy’s kindred spirits: literature, history and the political. Indeed, continental philosophy saw itself as all the more political, all the more emancipatory, the further it drifted away from the offenses of the positive sciences.

This portrait of the two traditions has been rendered with broad brushstrokes. Both traditions found common ground in their engagement with language, and whether the ontic-ontological distinction or the positive-rational best distinguishes the two is debatable. Notwithstanding, twentieth-century continental philosophy, often without much critical reflection, followed Heidegger’s dictum that “science does not think,” and as such itself did not think through science. But neither did analytic philosophy of science. In distinction to the now widespread professionalised analytic philosophy of science that almost exclusively questions science’s methods, foundations, and implications, what is needed is a new philosophical attitude and engagement with science that instead of obsessing with the genitive “of,” contends with the preposition “with.” That is, what must be formulated is not strictly speaking a philosophy of science or of technology, but a philosophical stance or method that dares to think with science and technology. To develop this attitude and new philosophical method that I term Critical Epistemology, two historical allies emerge from out of the vestiges of continental philosophy: neo-Kantianism and French Epistemology.

The Cassirer-Heidegger debate not only originated the Analytic-Continental divide, but it also signalled the demise of the then established field of neo-Kantianism. In Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, one of the last texts of this once monolithic school, Cassirer argues that the philosophy of the enlightenment, that great era where both science and philosophy blossomed, was fundamentally marked by its “esprit systématique”. This systematic spirit, culminating in Kant’s great work The Critique of Pure Reason, paved its way by rallying and conjoining both the “positive” and the “rational,” and it did so in the form of the transcendental. As Cohen and Natorp, the founders of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, argue, to question the conditions of the possibility of experience is to do nothing more than to question the conditions of possibility of the natural sciences. Indeed, one might want to define neo-Kantianism as broadly following Kant’s 1786 The Metaphysical Foundation of the Natural Science, which, as per the title, outlines the philosophical foundation of phoronomy (now kinematics), dynamics, mechanics, and phenomenology. If neo-Kantian thought is to be considered an ally in the development of a new philosophical method that philosophises with science (Kant’s emphasise of the active nature of philosophising should not be ignored), it should be considered as such not only in terms of its engagement with the science of its day, but also due to the primacy of its transcendental critical method. That is to say, a method that did not just aim to polish or classify science’s concepts but that asks what its conditions of possibility are; what its metaphysical blind spots consist of.

While epistemology, as it is broadly understood in the English-speaking world, refers to the philosophy of knowledge, in the French academy (in which Epistemology is still institutionally separated from Philosophy), the same term “épistémologie” has several meanings. It refers either to the philosophy of science itself (as influenced by English analytic philosophy, for example, the work of Gilles-Gaston Granger), or to the specific French tradition, often referred to as historical French epistemology. At the end the eighteenth century, almost concurrently to neo-Kantianism, figures such as Pierre Duhem and Emile Meyerson combined the philosophy of science, the history of science and the theory of knowledge into a philosophical method that examined the historical development of “the structure” of science, which is to say, as Duhem writes in The Theory of Physics, its Object, its Structure, “those operations through which [physics] is constituted.”[1] Despite French epistemology’s direct influence on its arguably more renowned later protagonists, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Michel Serres (all of whom likewise developed their own philosophical methods both in relation to and sometimes against it), its place in the continental cannon has been somewhat disregarded. Those who followed Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger’s ontology or Bergson’s intuitionism in the post-war period nonetheless still take all the limelight.

If we are to approach the positive sciences once again with a critical eye, we must not, as a result, abandon the cultural as the political. If epistemes are those epochal regimes of truth that structure the knowledge of the world, then they are sustained as metastable (structurally stable) by the relation between the accepted nature of this truth in discourse and the social reproduction of the structures sustaining it as embodied in actually living social or material relations. Thus, furthering the historical epistemological method (and other than just determining how certain epistemes have altered the “order of things” and how they function as “analogical exemplars”), critical epistemology argues that it is necessary to determine the changes or alterations in political economy that co-constitute an episteme. How does political economy maintain or “socially reproduce” such a structure as hegemonic?

In short, what I call the analytic of critical epistemology asks the question: what are the metastable conditions of possibility of episteme in political economy? Alongside Kant’s and the neo-Kantians’ critical method, which decides “as to the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general, and determines its sources, its extent, and its limits all in accordance with principles,”[2] critical epistemology integrates critical theory’s own criticism of Kantian critique: that it “does not see reality as a product of society’s work.”[3] It asks how the epistemological reality qua the given reproduces itself through political economy. As per Friedrich Lange’s claim that “the lasting importance of the critical philosophy,” is that it is “capable of affording…aid to the changing requirements of various epochs of culture,”[4] the analytic of critical epistemology is dedicated to determining the sources, the extents, the limits, and politico-economic conditions of epochal episteme understood as world-defining or governing technoscientific metastable conceptual frameworks that ideologically structure how the universe is substantially said to be.

To resurrect the systematic spirit, we must nonetheless be more Kantian than the neo-Kantians and less historical than the French epistemologists. It is not enough to just outline the transcendental conditions of the facta of science in a piecemeal manner, nor is it enough to simply describe the politico-historical structures of the concepts and operations that science holds most dear. Philosophy cannot and must not remain only at the level of description. Philosophy must develop a two-sided systematic methodology that both analytically determines the conditions of possibility (critique) of world-governing conceptual techno-scientific structures (epistemes) and that synthetically aims to develop its own architectonic systems of thought that transductively philosophises with science.

It is due to the recent return to the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon that continental philosophy has, in part, awoken from its dogmatic slumber, and now, once again, it treats techno-science with the import it deserves. The significance of the development of a post-Simondonian method for the synthetic element of critical epistemology, which I term the transductive method, offers a technique of philosophising whose significance lies in the fact that it is precisely capable of philosophising with science not just of science. As a philosophical synthetic method, transduction can be understood as the transformation of a particular domain of knowledge by the introduction of an “informational germ” from another; the structural logic of a particular domain “outside” of philosophy forms the analogical basis for the development of philosophy itself. For example, Kant’s philosophical project could be described as the transductive integration of scientific notions, such as force, qua “informational germs” into philosophy. The physical analogy that Simondon uses to develop “transduction” is that of the formation of crystals out of a supersaturated solution. Because such a solution is both metastable (not in the state of lowest energy) and rich in “pre-individual” potential, when an “informational germ” is introduced into it, a crystal forms through transduction: each subsequent crystalline layer functions as the operational, informational, and energetic basis for the continuation of the growth of the crystal. In the same way that Kant’s transcendental philosophy can be understood both as the philosophical response to the question concerning the conditions of possibility of (the objects of) experience and the methodology that leads Kant to this response, transductive philosophy is both the philosophical response to the question concerning what the ontogenetic operations of individuation are and the philosophical methodology that arrives at this solution. In other words, as a synthetic philosophical method, transduction reveals how one might develop an architectonic philosophy of principles and ideas from out of the concepts and problems of science that might critically delimit its extension into metaphysics.

It is not an understatement to claim that the techno-sciences, hand in hand with finance capital, govern the current world. If Kant’s “epoch,” as per Lange, was defined by the tensions between “matter and force,” then our current epoch is defined by the tension and confusion between energy and information. Our current epoch or episteme is, thus, “thermoinformatic” in kind. The recourse to “thermoinformatic” as a novel portmanteau of “thermodynamics,” the science of energy and entropy, and “information theory,” the science of information manipulation, occurred for two fundamental reasons. The first is related to their concomitant overturning of the Newtonian classical mechanical paradigm with its concepts of force, momentum, and inertia and the second is due to their mutual influence in political economy. The episteme in which we live, and act should be considered thermoinformatic insofar as the very structure of global advanced capitalism is conditioned by the dual relation between energy and information extraction and energy and information manipulation. Capitalism effectuates, as many such as Bellamy Foster have pointed out, a metabolic rift between man and the earth; this rift is marked by the dual thermoinformatic relation between energy and information extraction and manipulation. However, for the most part, European philosophy has remained in the Newtonian classical mechanical paradigm; it has not yet sufficiently transduced energy, entropy, and information into a systematic philosophy.

We are, therefore, in dire need of an epistemological critique of the dominant thermoinformatic conceptual structure. It has become both philosophically and politically necessary to analytically outline the thermoinformatic episteme in which we think, act and work and to synthetically construct an architectonic system that can think its metaphysical limits through principles. It is time philosophy caught up with the episteme that governs us. Critical epistemology provides us with the philosophical and political means to do so.

Notes:

[1] Pierre Duhem, La Théorie physique son objet, sa structure, Paris : Vrin, 2007, 23. (My translation)

[2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith, London: Blackwell, 2003, 9.

[3] Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays, London: Continuum, 1975, 203

[4] Friedrich Lange, History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance, ‎London: Routledge, 2010, 155.