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After the Last Judgment: Hegel as
Philosopher of Artificial Life
Wolfgang Schirmacher, New York
INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
IN THE SPHERE OF POSTMODERNITY
World history is the Last Judgment, and
there is “no appealing”1 its decision, as
Ernst Bloch determined. But what is the
decision of the Last Judgment today?
Marxists of all people, Hegel’s aptest pupils,
in prayer wheel fashion have laid claim to
historical development as the court of last
instance, and the collapse of Communism
has now proved itself to be all the more
definitive. “Real Existing Socialism,
considered by many despite all the
immanent criticism and at least in principle
as a serviceable alternative paradigm, has
proven itself as non-viable,” as the writer
Peter Schneider has summarized this
judgment.2 Does this mean that Capitalism
has won? Does Western consumer society
represent the attainment of the aim of
history, and the culmination of the process
of human self-realization? Such false
conclusions must be avoided at all costs, for
the judgment passed is anything but
unambiguous. The Final Judgment seems to
resemble more the Oracle of Delphi; its
obscure pronouncements are full of
ambiguities and ironic surprises. Without its
counterpart of Communism, Capitalism has
lost all its sparkle, and while Western goods
and media may dominate the markets, a
North-South conflict is brewing that literally
takes no prisoners. If the first postmodern
revolution changed world history without
shedding blood, through the simulation of
popular sovereignty in an interactive media
piece, the southern European tourist
destination of Yugoslavia transformed itself
behind our backs into a premodern paradise
for sadists and cutthroats. What judgment
will history pass upon powerful industrial
states that stood by and watched the
genocide in Rwanda, and then contented
themselves with digging mass graves?
Hegel’s Last Judgment aimed to “resurrect
new life”3 from death and not to perpetuate
“misery and destruction”.4 For in Hegel’s
conception, it is only as uncomprehended
history that world history is a “slaughtering
block...to which the happiness of nations,
the wisdom of the state, and the virtues of
individuals have been led.”5 Rather, the
“thinker of becoming” (as Bloch calls him)
wagered on the conscious unity of theory
and practice:
“The aim of world history is... that the spirit
attain knowledge of that which is true, and
make this knowledge concrete, materialize it
into an existing world, realize itself as
objective.”6 Have the high hopes set by a
philosophical world history not long since
been dashed, at the latest in the gas
chambers of Auschwitz? What knowledge is
realized in the smoldering ecological disaster
and in the outrageous injustices perpetrated
against the third world? What must be the
nature of a universal spirit that can hope to
prevail in the sphere of postmodernity?
Today, a philosophy of history must begin
with the admission that Hegel cannot be
restored, and that “history” as he
understood it is indeed “at its end.” But this
implies neither that Hegel’s dialectical
philosophy is in every respect obsolete, nor
that history has exhausted itself as an
object of philosophical inquiry. Quite the
contrary! Freed from Hegel’s selfinterpretation and from the determinations
of his work’s reception history, Bloch’s
prophetic words come true: “Hegel denied
the future; no future will deny Hegel.”7 What
remains exemplary is Hegel’s attitude as a
thinker, his world-saturated circumspection,
and his methodical procedure, which
discovered history as “the most concrete of
objects that encompasses within itself all the
different aspects of existence.”8 In functional
gesture and in dialectical strategy, Hegel can
help us extract meaning from a history that
de-constructs itself. This should not be
construed as a proposal to separate
undialectically the form and content of
Hegel’s philosophy, but rather a new reading
of Hegel as a philosopher who stands at the
height of postmodern criticism and at the
same time makes possible something
currently sought the world over: a look
“beyond postmodernity.”
I. The Process of History and the Last
Judgment in Hegel
1. After the Last Judgment: the Meaning of
the “End of History”
In the works of Schopenhauer, Hegel’s
powerfully influential antipode, “The Last
Judgment” is a key metaphor. For
Schopenhauer, the world itself is a Last
Judgment,9 and the hour of our death is the
hour the judgment is pronounced.10 In this
view, becoming and history are mere
illusions, a capricious masquerade that acts
out the ever-constant will to life. If one
remembers that almost every age has
considered itself an age of upheaval, and if
one does not repress the images of presentday barbarity, then Schopenhauer’s
pessimistic view of the Last Judgment seems
much closer to the mark than does Hegel’s
optimistic one. History has reached its end
because there has never been a history, but
only ever the “eternal return” of the same, as
Nietzsche maintained.11 Without a doubt,
Hegel did much to ensure that his
philosophy of history can be read as an
ideology of progress, but such an
interpretation is by no means conclusive.
Becoming , Hegel’s “password” (Bloch), is not
synonymous with natural evolution or social
progress; rather, becoming describes first
and foremost that fundamental “movement
before all interpretation” (Aristotle) that
neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche would
deny. How one interprets this movement,
what meaning one gleans from the universal
dynamic, serves to clarify the real and
differentiate the philosophers one from the
other. Hegel as “teacher of living
movement”12 did nothing other than
understand this becoming — and this is his
great achievement — not from without, but
as a “going into oneself” in the manner of
the “knowing and self-imparting becoming”13
itself. To be sure, the “individual”14 of world
history is the “spirit” whose “progress in the
consciousness of freedom”15 retraces Hegel’s
philosophy of history, — not the human
species, and certainly not the individual
person.
But an anthropomorphic interpretation is by
all means possible, seeing how Hegel’s
analogy of the development from child to
adult, as a “sequence of steps” in the
“progression” of the becoming-consciousness
[des Bewußtwerdens] in the spirit, can be
readily applied to man as well. How much
more anthropological is Feuerbach in the
christological Hegel! The student carried to
its end what in the work of the teacher was
still lacking a concept.16 “World history
equals last judgment” is a reversible
equation17, for what was condemned or
acquitted is our history. Justice is dispensed
there and judgment passed. As fact,
however, history remains mute; only when it
is narrative are we able to glean meaning
from it. The historical process “must be
clarified and won” (Bloch) and this happens
not through determinations of content nor
ideological codification. Today, such a
“grand narrative” (in Lyotard’s sense18) can
only tell of the “end of history” and of the
Last Judgment that has befallen Western
metaphysics. To the extent that Hegel
remained rooted in eternal time ["Überzeit
in der Zeit"]19 that satisfied our
“metaphysical need” (Schopenhauer) and
allayed the creaturely fear of death, his
history is completed. But the end of one
history is the beginning of other histories;
the Last Judgment has not adjourned. The
verdict of Schopenhauer’s Last Judgment
was decided at the outset, according to the
motto “give him a fair trial and then hang
him!”, but Hegel’s dialectical court is open to
changes and thus always capable of
surprising us with its verdicts.
2. After Humanism: Rehabilitation of the
Anthropomorphic
In the sphere of postmodernity, all isms are
just so much presumptuous claptrap,
including (and above all) humanism. Thus,
we should not let Feuerbach persuade us to
countermand Hegel’s disassociation from the
delusion that man is the center of all things.
There is no center anywhere! Neither God,
nor nature, nor society are capable of
establishing the unity that allows all
differences to become relative. A humanism
on a natural or on a historical basis must
needs degenerate into an ideology of power
and will want to decree what can only fulfill
itself when left to its own devices. For Hegel,
Nature is oriented “relatively to the spirit,”
and the work of this “spirit” is, according to
Hegel’s determination, “this: that it brings
itself forth, makes itself into that which it
is.”20 Today, this self-production is known as
autopoiesis, which refers particularly to
human activity. As the self-generating being
(Homo generator)21, man avoids being
master or slave of the other nature, and
assumes responsibility for the world he
generates. The aim of the Hegelian spirit, to
become transparent to itself and at the same
time to be world, without having to dominate
something foreign to it, corresponds in
gesture and strategy to a post-humanistic
existence.
Bound up with this is a rehabilitation of the
anthropomorphic after the “death of God”
(Nietzsche). This must be clearly
differentiated from an anthropomorphism
that is nothing but a naive
anthropocentrism, that transfers human
behavior to nature or the gods.22 Like Hegel’s
spirit, man is “this: that it brings itself forth,
makes itself into that which it is,” and for
this work he indeed requires, as does the
spirit, the entire cosmos. The result, which
is in essence “something brought forth”23
constitutes our Lebenswelt [life-world] and
influences the stories we tell ourselves about
it. Philosophical apprehending, Hegel’s “idea
of reason,” is one of these stories of the man
responsible for himself (Homo generator),
and by all means a very beautiful fable:
that the real world is as it should be, that
the rational will as the concrete good is the
most powerful thing indeed; absolute power
that unfolds itself24
Such a fable is by no means merely an
idealistic fairy tale or a postmodern bedtime
story for children. Hegel’s concept of world
history avoids anthropocentrism just as it
does biocentrism. That reason should prevail
in the world, admittedly not in a straightline manner nor under all circumstances,
throws down no challenge to the other
nature, but is simply an anthropomorphic
prerequisite to a life of fulfillment. What can
remain open are the questions of what this
rationality looks like and whether its
instrument is one of identity or difference —
just as long as it is human. In all cultures,
our fables and stories tell of justice, the
locus of mediation between the “concrete
good” and the “rational will.” The human has
the right to be solely human, and no one
should misconstrue this as “human, all-toohuman.” This anthropomorphic justice is
not simply given, but rather, as Hegel’s
dialectical philosophy of history reminds
each and every present-day, is generated by
us, in struggle and in renunciation.
3. After Postmodernity: Dialectics of Artificial
Life
As Last Judgment, the murderous 20th
century has in an immediate way
acquainted us with the true, even if this
world-historical process largely has yet to be
apprehended. Technical civilization as
efficient machine of destruction and
universal system of exploitation targets man
and nature without distinction.
Metaphysics, this millennia-old occidental
mode of life, has by means of modern
technology become planetary, and through
the synthesis of technology and
anthropocentrism it has attained its final
perfection as well as brought about its own
demise. Postmodernity means the cultural
diagnosis that sees traditional orientations
as devalued, without itself being able to offer
a new world view. The joyful-serious play of
differences, however, cannot be expected to
engender another epoch; attempts to codify
a transitional phase and proclaim the
philosophy of difference tend to make a
somewhat desperate impression.
Postmodern thinking is cleanup work; with
deep erudition it sweeps up the shards of
metaphysics or uses them to make ironic
works of art — more or less to pass the time
— anything goes. We are waiting “without
expectation” (Heidegger) for something
“beyond postmodernity,” for the true concept
of a Lebenswelt (life-world) that strikes us
every day as increasingly uncanny. “What
comes after postmodernity?” was a question
put to the leading postmodern philosopher
Lyotard. His astounding reply, at the same
time a challenge to the postmodern
variations of spurious rationality, has to this
day not been take seriously philosophically.
“After postmodernity comes modernity” was
Lyotard’s explanation.25 So, after
postmodernity comes Hegel’s “Novum,”
Nietzsche’s “Übermensch,” Adorno’s
“completely other” [ganz Anderes],
Heidegger’s enownment [Ereignis]! At issue
here is not a return to metaphysics and its
hypostasizations: neither history nor nature
are being restored here. The modernity after
postmodernity is the Other modernity,
whereby “Other” is capitalized, in Levinas’s
sense.26
This other modernity beyond postmodernity
reveals itself as “artificial life,” and leaves
behind a once-raging debate about who will
determine and control this artificial life. In
information technology and media as well as
in biotechnology and the biological sciences,
one can observe how long-since obsolete
paradigms abuse their power to define when
faced with new phenomena. Whether ethics
and public acceptance attain a key position
in this regard and mobilize criticism or
whether a linear optimism of progress
prevails, remains of secondary importance,
for both positions bear the stamp of
anthropocentrism and are deeply
undialectical. Those blinded by humanism
and fixated on the eradication of
contradictions utterly fail to see that
“artificial life” entails a fertile Hegelian
contradiction. To acknowledge this
contradiction in its immanent necessity and
to urge it along as an open-ended
theoretical-practical process, is the
challenge faced by a philosophy of history in
the Other modernity. Artificial life is
anthropomorphic, but we do not produce it
from nothing, nor is it a matter of some
powerful other that stands opposed to us as
a higher phase of evolution. The robot Dante
II has much more in common with the poet
Dante than conventional wisdom would have
us believe! Virtual worlds, aesthetic spaces,
and random, everyday discourses are all
equally accessible to an ethics of fulfillment,
in the performance of which human beings
generate themselves (Homo generator).
Adorno’s hope of being different without fear
expresses the mood of this new life-world
[Lebenswelt]. The dialectics of artificial life
overcomes the one-sidedness of art and of
life, and attains post-technological ethics
worlds in which humanity enowns as
though of its own accord. I will briefly
outline this radical turn using the example
of a culture of death in the Other modernity.
II. The Culture of Death in the Other
Modernity
1. Negativity and the Ethics of Fulfillment
In opposition to Hegel’s history of success,
Heidegger put forward a history of decline.
The sharpness of negativity, this Hegelian
development principle akin to death, turns
dull when the result of history is a world
ever more fulfilled. At the basis of every
negativity, according to Heidegger’s critique
of Hegel, lies a “daringness of thought”
[Wagnis des Denkens] whose shadow is
destruction.27 In this dialectical conflict, the
concept of fulfillment mediates, a concept
which encompasses construction and
destruction, and as de-construction never
redeems what was planned or intended.
Fulfillment shows itself only after the fact,
and brings about an order whose
characteristics are unpredictability,
lightness, and releasement [Gelassenheit].
An ethics of fulfillment needs no recognition,
neither from society nor from individuals.
Rather, it sets itself up — “before our eyes”
(Maurice Merleau-Ponty) — as a world in
which human rights are realized without
humanism. The meaning of history as
fulfilled life, life of fulfillment includes our
very right to productive negativity and a
culture of death.28
Death as nature, notes Hegel,29 is overcome
in history, for death as fact is “the greatest
banality among people,”30 as Nietzsche
remarked. Such great teachers of practical
wisdom as Epicurus and Spinoza have
emphasized that we don’t need to worry
about death, and Rorty, an American,
summed up today’s pragmatic relation to
death as follows: “I will die. There is nothing
more to say.”31 [get original quote] While
Schopenhauer characterized “the fear of
death as the greatest fear,” a fear “native to
every living thing,” he also qualified
immediately this inappropriate
ontologization of death: “Upon reflection it
seems ridiculous to worry so about the brief
span of time allotted to us in life”32 Our
traditional understanding of death no longer
fulfills itself and in the post-technological
world it has become obsolete. The
experiential background of the prevailing
metaphysics of death has fallen away, as far
as concerns the First World, and thus
culturally as concerns the entire world.
Death today is a simulation: a “media
theatre of cruelty” (Jean Beaudrillard) about
the death of the barbarians, or the
superpower’s virtual war game, in which
only the Third-World opponents die — and
only offscreen at that. It is beyond all doubt:
dying begins at birth! But the First World
retorts: Life lasts until the last dying breath!
Death no longer dwells “in the midst of life,”
and a “headlong rush to death” (Heidegger)
reveals no meaning: our statistical life
expectancy has conquered the threatening
power of death: for whom is death not
welcome after the age of 90? (To be sure,
what we still have to fear is a death without
self-determination and dignity.)
In a culture of death,such as it needs an
artificial life, even one’s own death is selfengendered, a deed for which I am
responsible. In Schopenhauer’s grim
interpretation, nature asks the will to life in
the hour of death: “Have you finally had
enough?”33 On the other hand, the question
posed in a culture of death would be “Have
you lived?” She who has lived fulfills herself
in death as well and is allowed to die; all the
others merely croak. It is seldom and never
as a rule — as it was in the metaphysical
epoch — that one dies before one’s time in
the First World, and it is this experience of a
fully-lived life span (something still hardly
ever taken into consideration by philosophy)
forms the basis of a culture of death that
owes its existence not to fear, but to
generosity.
2. Sacrifice, Extravagance, Generosity
Sacrificing oneself for others, for the
community, for an idea, must not be
idealized as a culture of heroic death, since
it often merely confirms in secret a negative
judgment of life. Death is conquered, as
Schopenhauer would have it, when one
discovers the worthlessness of life.34 Hegel,
on the other hand, points out that every
sacrifice is accompanied by pleasure and as
“cult” it establishes a “ongoing poetry of
life.”35 Immortality and eternal life would be
unbearably boring, so that the aim of an
ethics of fulfillment can never be to
overcome death. Bataille outlined an
“aesthetics of death”36 and coupled it with
an economy of extravagance, thus
conforming to key traits of a culture of
death. Just as reckless lovers risk the leap
into an enownment [Ereignis] beyond being
and time, so does a “freeing-from-oneself-tothe-Other” become an ethical habit in the
Other modernity which is artificial life.
Levinas celebrated this extravagance that
merges into asymmetric generosity and
laughs at its own fear of death, as a praxis
“beyond being.” The attitude he introduced
paradigmatically as a “trembling and
wavering for justice’s sake” makes possible
the beginnings of a culture of death imbued
with generosity.
3. Beyond Fear: Artificial Death
“To live in such a way that one has one’s will
to death at the right time!” recommended
Nietzsche.37 Beyond the creaturely fear of
death the artificial death awaits us, which
the post-nihilistic Nietzsche announced as
“voluntary (rational) death,” but only after
he entrusted it to “a completely
incomprehensible- and immoral-sounding
morality of the future.” Yet the Other
Modernity, artificial life, has already drawn
near and with it, the culture of death
anticipated by Nietzsche, the main
characteristic of which is “a wise
arrangement and a genuine ability to die.”38
Nietzsche’s teacher Schopenhauer must be
read against the grain of his animosity
toward life, so that his profound conception
of death can come to fruition. In
Schopenhauer’s words, death contains “the
great reservoir of life”39 from which it feeds
“an eternal noon,”40 Hegel’s “ongoing poetry
of life,” for which life and death represent
aesthetically luxuriant reflections in the
mirror of the world.
America’s most courageous philosopher,
Avital Ronell, calls for “the embracing of
being-unto-death” and “ecstatic temporality”
[get the original words]41, for it is thus that
being-unto-death changes into the
enownment-of-death. In this enownment
[Ereignis], the self learns how it can live
confidently and free of anxiety, by means of
such practices as caution, circumspection,
empathy, and listening. In this culture of
ethics, a timely death is part of a mastered
existence, one characterized by persistence,
deliberation, releasement [Gelassenheit],
and generosity as life-attitudes. With the
Second Negation, the dialectician Hegel
opened the way to artificial death, a “course
and process,” which “sublates” [aufhebt]
nature and history in the consciously
anthropomorphic person. The christological
Hegel outlined precisely the culture of death
whose influence is evolving even today;
which, when regarded systematically, is a
culture of the Second Negation: “The death
of Christ is the death of this death itself, the
negation of the negation.”42
Conclusion: Hegel as the Philosopher of
Artificial Life
To read Hegel as a philosopher of artificial
life is not an attempt to do justice to his
work from an historical standpoint, but
rather to allow it to speak with regard to a
future history. Hegel encourages us to
dissolve the rigid opposition of
anthropocentrism and biocentrism in a
dialectic that leads to a new conception of
the anthropomorphic. Man generates his
world himself — as individual, as group, and
as species — but only within the realm of
his subjective and objective possibilities. As
Homo generator, the “non-fixed animal”
(Nietzsche) transcends all ontologies and
transforms them into an ethics of fulfilled
life. Hegel had attributed to Spirit what is
actually an anthropomorphic existential: the
self-production of a world through
comprehending and realization. This
Hegelian Spirit as the individual of world
history is in itself a fulfilled mediation and
from a strategic standpoint an antidote to
the relapse into unreconciled contradictions,
such as are represented by an optimistic
faith in progress on the one side and a
pessimistic criticism of history on the other.
Without an unrelenting dialecticism,
Artificial Life, the Other Modernity beyond
postmodernity, would run the constant risk
of succumbing to the monotony of the
technological “framework” [Gestell]
(Heidegger). In that case, the human world
would indeed function like a well-designed
cybernetic machine, but it could never fulfill
itself anthropomorphically. That man can
assert the right to resolve the contradictions
of his existence offensively, and is thus able
to realize a humanity without humanism, is
Hegel’s lesson for the critics of contemporary
society. A future history encompasses all
phenomena, transgresses with the Second
Negation every ontological fixation, and
cultivates above all death. Today, we can
say: this future has already begun, and
Hegel with his dialectic was one of its most
surprising envisioners.
Translated by Daniel Theisen
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