Consciousness and the End of History

The idea of the end of the world has engaged, if not fascinated, quite some minds. Quite along this line, even quite some philisophers have been quite fond of the idea of the end of history. I've never taken seriously the former picture--I just shrug if off. I couldnot but take the latter seriously, not because I'm worried about the im/possibility of such a state of affairs, but because quite some influential philosophers have contributed to the building of this imaginary state, leading several non-philosophers to a kind of perpetual fear.

Considering this, I thought some people among us who are familiar with these hypotheses may want to read the passage I am reproducing below. This exerpt is from Stuart Sim's Derrida and the End of History (New York: Totem Books. 1999, pp 25-30).

Lyotard and the End of History Lyotard’s take on the end of history is worth commenting on, given that it is a vision, and a singularly bleak one at that, of both the end of history and the end of the world. The Inhuman pictures a world where the forces of technoscience (that is, advanced capitalism) are concerned above all to prolong life past the end of our universe. It will not, however, be life as we currently know it; rather, what is being sought is the ability to make thought possible without the presence of a body. Bodies, under the dispensation of the death of the sun, are to be regarded as a liability. Lyotard proceeds to sketch out a nightmare vision in which computers take over from the human, given that they are less vulnerable and more efficient than human beings – and also, even more crucially from the point of view of techno-scientists, more susceptible to control: ‘among the events which the programme attempts to neutralize as much as it can one must, alas, also count the unforseeable effects engendered by the contingency and freedom proper to the human project.’29The human body becomes outmoded hardware in such a schema, where it is the software, thought, that is the prized element instead. This is thought, however, divorced from the body where it standardly takes place, and thought under the strict control of a programme concerned with efficiency to the apparent exclusion of all other considerations.

What Lyotard pictures is the dark side to Baudrillard’s alienation-free, post-historical state. There is certainly no history here. As Lyotard acidly remarks: ‘Is a computer in any way here and now? Can anything happenwith it? Can anything happen toit?’30Neither is there any alienation, merely an endless ‘present’ with computer programs hyper-efficiently, and bodilessly, going about their allotted tasks minus ‘the contingency and freedom proper to the human project’. The end of history, as engineered by the forces of techno-science, looks like a highly undesirable state; an ‘inhuman’ state, in fact, which Lyotard regards it as our duty to oppose with whatever means come to hand – even though he is somewhat less than sanguine about our ultimate chances of success in the prospective struggle. The techno-scientific project would appear to be the grand narrative to end all grand narratives, with dissent ceasing to be a factor in the absence of the human.

Consciousness and the End of History Lyotard’s vision of science is a particularly negative one, but some commentators can extract a more positive message from the development of our scientific knowledge that might resolve the problem Lyotard is grappling with. Human consciousness is, after all, partof the universe, rather than a mereobserverof it, and in that guise, it has been argued, it may be able to develop to the extent of altering the future physics of that universe – perhaps even to prevent what at the moment appears to be the inescapable death of our sun and home planet. The scientist Paul Davies, for example, has speculated along precisely those lines about the interaction of consciousness and matter:

. . . there is still a sense in which human mind and society may represent only an intermediate stage on the ladder of organizational progress in the cosmos. To borrow a phrase from Louise Young, the universe is as yet ‘unfinished’. We find ourselves living at an epoch only a few billion years after the creation. From what can be deduced about astronomical processes, the universe could remain fit for habitation for trillions of years, possibly for ever.

An unfinished universe still holds out possibilities, and is not necessarily to be regarded as a programme running inexorably and unchangeably through to its predetermined end. Higher levels of organisation (of consciousness, for example) may develop, with the ability to defer that end – without having to cede the field to the computer programs of the techno-scientific establishment. Perhaps the game does not have to be given up by humanity quite yet. Davies gives us a much more optimistic vision of the future, therefore, in which the end of history need never happen. Yet it does have the drawback, and a very considerable one at that, of being entirely speculative. The vision we are offered goes so far beyond current knowledge and understanding of physical processes, and our place in them, as to seem more like science fiction than science; and that is highly unlikely to quell the disquiet felt about the end of the world and history, as well as the role of advanced capitalistic technoscience in those processes, by anyone in the Lyotard camp. From where we are now standing, the prognosis looks less than favourable.