Our adventure is actually a great heresy.

But there are a few [people] left who are able to experience a [kind of] thinking which is not calculating.

Abstract

The essay contrasts Warren McCulloch's experimental epistemology, whose nervous calculus made it possible in principle to lay out a circuit diagram for every thinkable thought—a key moment in the epistemological experiment of cybernetics that brought thinking and switching together in the first place—with Heidegger's rethinking of the question what thinking means, a rethinking that dominated the relaunch of Heidegger’s philosophical thinking after 1945 and focused on the question of technology. This contrast shows Heidegger to have been engaged in a vast philosophical archaeology of the formalization, calculization, and mathematization of thinking. Yet it is only in the light of cybernetics and information theory that this undertaking can become a diagnostic tool for him: it allows him to contrast calculating thinking, culminating in the cybernetic end of philosophy, with the necessity of another beginning of thinking and the—still merely dawning—possibility of a new task for thinking. For Heidegger, cybernetics marks the apex of Western metaphysics, it is emblematic of the Gestell. Information theoretical formalization and the construction of mainframe computers perfect and actualize a certain logocentric conception of language (already launched by Aristotle) in signals that are now electronically switchable. To counter it, Heidegger seeks to mobilize what has remained unthought in, by, and about thinking, which he considers to be nothing more but also nothing less than the unthought of cybernetics.

Keywords: experimental epistemology; the cybernetic end of philosophy; philosophical archaeology of formalization; thinking and calculating; Martin Heidegger; Warren McCulloch