An Introduction to Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking

The current work immodestly calls for a planetary thinking—a thinking that Kostas Axelos already announced in view of the domination of planetary technology and the threshold of a new epoch to come during the 1960s. The rationale behind this call is simple: we do not yet think planetarily and must learn to think planetarily, even though this may well take a considerable amount of time to come. The planetary is viewed as such, but it remains the unthought.1 To think planetarily doesn’t necessarily mean proclaiming or defining the sovereignty of outer space, or delving into terraforming and geoengineering, even though such topics might be anticipated in a book dedicated to planetary thinking. To think planetarily, first of all, means thinking beyond the configuration of modern nation-states, which have not been able to move away from vicious economic and military competition; second, it means formulating a language of coexistence that will allow diverse people and species to live on the same planet; and third, it means developing a new framework that will enable us to go beyond the question of territory, respond to the current ecological crisis, and reverse the accelerated entropic process of the Anthropocene. The task of planetary thinking resonates with the idea of perpetual peace as proposed by Abbé de Saint-Pierre and then later by Kant, Fichte, and others. One must note that when these authors were writing, modern nation-states were still young in Europe, and thus the nation-state could be considered the most appropriate political form. Industrial capitalism was still in its infancy, and the damage of planetarization was not yet foreseeable.2 Organic nature, captured by two key concepts, community and reciprocity, stands as the model for perpetual peace because different parts constitute the whole, and every part will be conditioned by each other and the whole. Therefore, Kant enthusiastically claims that perpetual peace will be “guaranteed by an equilibrium of forces and a most vigorous rivalry” between the states.3 This is why, instead of looking at the world from the lens of the nation-state and nature, we demand a new framework for the planetary. Considering there have been many excellent studies on the planetary from philosophers,4 historians, designers, and Marxist scholars,5 we propose to take a different path to carry out this inquiry.

Following my previous works, this treatise will attempt to bring technology to the forefront of political thought. For planetary thinking to be possible, we cannot avoid and ignore the long tradition of political philosophy, but we must likewise read the history of political thought through a new lens: the question of technology. We might again, immodestly, call this attempt a search for a Tractatus Politico-Technologicus. A Tractatus Politico-Technologicus means that our inquiry no longer sees politics and technology as separate spheres; instead, we have a rather urgent task before us: bringing technology to the centrality of political philosophy, or, in other words, to ground a political philosophy in technology. This underlines our intention of reading political thought and its history. However, this task is both trivial and enormous. It is trivial because one could hardly fail to recognize that today technology is the main battlefield where different nation-states enter into conflict. Indeed, military offenses have now been transformed into information warfare. It is an enormous philosophical task because to achieve it successfully, one must laboriously retrieve the concept and the role of technology from Plato to contemporary political philosophers, as was the task of deconstruction, especially Jacques Derrida’s and Bernard Stiegler’s work. Deconstruction shows that philosophy, since the beginning, repressed (verdrängt)—in the Freudian sense—the question of technology. Therefore, it is necessary to make visible the centrality of technology in philosophy as the unthought that is, nonetheless, indispensable to thinking. Therefore, from the point of view of deconstruction, a political philosophy that ignores technology is defective and has to be rethought anew through the lens of technology. A Tractatus Politico-Technologicus would be necessary for political philosophy if we follow the school of deconstruction.

The transport of a large statue, reproduced from G. Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization: Egypt and Chaldaea, 1897. License: Public Domain.

However, what does it mean to say that technology is central to political thought? Do we mean that technology is a necessary tool of governance or that politics must respond to any technological development that brings new dynamics to communities? Or do we need an ethics of technology for every apparatus or application—for example, to make Amazon Alexa’s way of addressing children more ethical? This way of posing the question still takes technology and politics as two spheres: one sphere acts or reacts to another. A Tractatus Politico-Technologicus suggests that the political and the technical are not two separate spheres. Nomos is, first of all, a technical activity before being jurisprudential. Moreover, one could conceive the political as a technological phenomenon—a phenomenon in the sense that political forms such as the polis, empire, the modern state, and the Großraum are particular manifestations of technological progress and its imagination while, at the same time, technology is contained and constrained by these different political forms. These forms are manifestations of what Lewis Mumford called megamachines. The first megamachine emerged from the end of the fourth millennium, which we see in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and Peru, where various components—political, economic, military, bureaucratic, and royal—assembled into a gigantic machine according to the division of labor.6 Mumford provided us with a grand history of the megamachine, passing by absolute monarchy, which, in his view, aligns with the megamachine sustained by a mechanistic epistemology. With the idea of a Tractatus Politico-Technologicus in mind, we start our journey.

§1. On the Planetary Condition

Technology has brought about a new human condition that exceeds Hannah Arendt’s observation from 1958, when the launch of Sputnik struck the political theorist with a new form of alienation of man from Earth. On the first page of The Human Condition, Arendt wrote that the launch of Sputnik was “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom.”7 We should also remind ourselves of the shock that Heidegger received when he saw the image of the Earth taken from the moon in 1966, which confirmed his analysis in the lecture “The Age of the World Picture” (1938) and led to his lament of a technological catastrophe in the interview “Only a God Can Save Us” (1966).8 The Earth being grasped as an image of the globe symbolizes the zeitgeist of the second half of the twentieth century. One could consider it a spatial revolution in various senses; first, it constitutes the first time that the Earth was observed from outer space, not the other way around, and before human beings even observed it. This observation of observation, so to speak, reverses how outer space was perceived in everyday experience: the Earth is no longer the ground upon which we stand and look into the sky since now it exists in the form of an artifact available for manipulation. It resonates with what Marshall McLuhan said about Sputnik during an interview in the 1970s: “Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. … Nature ended, and Ecology was born. ‘Ecological’ thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art.”9 Nature disappears since it is no longer enchanted and mysterious but only part of a much larger artifact. This artifact is not static. Instead, it is understood as a dynamic system. Ecology, a term coined by the biologist and zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) to describe “the entire science of the relationships of the organism to its surrounding external world,” hence acquired a technological and political meaning.10

Technician working on Sputnik 1, 1957. Photo: Sovfoto.

Space is no longer a geometrical representation; instead, space, thus conceived, is now a dynamic system in which different forces and factors reciprocally act on each other. James Lovelock was one of the first to have studied the dynamic between the geosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. His early Gaia theory (before the collaboration with Lynn Margulis) tells us that the Earth is a cybernetic system capable of homeostatic functions.11 One of the most provocative caricatures of the Earth as a machine comes from Richard Buckminster Fuller’s description of it as a spaceship. Earth is a spaceship, and we, the Earth’s inhabitants, are only its passengers. This image of the spaceship was illuminated in the novella The Wandering Earth written by the science-fiction writer Liu Cixin, which was made into a film in 2019, the sequel of which, in 2022, was infiltrated with a “patriotic cosmopolitanism.”12 The passengers must anticipate the wreckage one day in the future. For a few decades now, we have already heard the alarm of climate change and ecological crisis, and this alarm is getting louder and more frequent. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change constantly warned us about the necessity of immediate action: it’s “now or never!”13 In response, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk have been exploring the possibility of emigrating to Mars or escaping to another galaxy—although in the name of humanity and its dream of “being among the stars”; of course, this would be only for the ultrarich who could afford it. Besides Plan B, that is, to escape to the other planets, Plan A is to steer the spacecraft to a safer place. If the Earth is a spaceship, this also means that one can modify its structure, improve its speed, and energize it. Terraforming is a manifestation of the power of modern technologies capable of engineering the planet’s atmosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. Similar voices are also heard, for example, in the “Ecomodernist Manifesto” signed by people such as Stewart Brand and his colleagues from the Breakthrough Institute, who claim that more advanced technologies can repair the damage caused by technology on Earth. As such, the key to the survival of planet Earth is the further advancement of technology. The same wish can be seen at work for the transhumanists who see the possibility of endless enhancement of the human body and intelligence in technology. Eco-modernism, transhumanism, and Prometheanism join hand in hand in this technological epoch, where anthropocentrism has surged to a historical height. Both Plan A and B are an objectification of the Earth as artifact, as something subject to engineering and design. These forms of planetarization are a consequence of modernity, yet they are not the planetary thinking that we are aspiring to.

Retrospectively we could identify the process of planetarization with that of technological globalization—in the sense that modern Western technology becomes a global phenomenon and the common aim of human development. That is to say, science and technology have detached themselves from the scientific community of the West and become the foundation of global communities consisting of researchers from everywhere. This resonates with Heidegger’s 1964 article “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in which he famously indicates two meanings of the end of philosophy. First, it means “the triumph of the manipulable arrangement [steuerbare Einrichtung] of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world”—in other words, society will be grasped as a cybernetic model because the term steuerbare Einrichtung refers explicitly to cybernetics. Second, the “beginning of the world-civilization will be based on Western European thinking.”14 Heidegger did not mean that Western European thinking is superior than other forms of thinking and that, as such, it will become the base of world civilization. What he means is that Western European thinking finds its completion in cybernetics, and that cybernetics, the synonym of modern technology for him, will be a planetary phenomenon. Therefore, it is because of and through cybernetics that the progress of the world civilization is now based on Western European thinking. This verdict of Heidegger’s became even more evident after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a thermodynamic ideology started ruling the globe. By thermodynamic ideology we mean an epistemology that originated from physics and then penetrated the economic and political sphere, becoming its operating principle.15 A thermodynamic ideology is closely associated with the free market, open society, economic freedom, and so forth. It also indicates a new form of individualism whose freedom is defined by the market. An open system is often described in neoliberal principles and a closed system as authoritarian communist regimes. The East lost any resistance in the face of the demand for an open society and a free market. Today the East has returned with fierce technological competition and, most significantly, an ideological war.

Yet, we must ask, what could non-Western thought’s role in the planetarization process be? The contest between the West and East brought about reactionary and nationalist politics in the past century and will continue to grow. However, what remains to be asked is if non-Western thought could contribute something more and even negate such an ideological manipulation. Searching for a ready-made theory of the planetary in various philosophical traditions would end in vain since no one in history has already anticipated our current situation. Thinking is epochal in that it belongs to a particular epoch, and even when a system of thought is passed to us, it can only gain its relevance through radical reinterpretation. Therefore, it is not my aim to claim that Western thinking failed and Eastern thinking will triumph, because such opposition is merely ideological and against thinking itself. While postcolonialism has been trying to pin down the relation between planetarization and colonization—that is to say, the relation between colonization and capitalism that exploited the planet to its extreme in the form of farming, mining, hunting, and fishing, etc.—it has almost always been silent on the issue of technology and the possibility of non-Western thought’s contribution to a planetary thinking of technology and politics given the coming global catastrophes. On the other hand, Marxism tends to reduce all causes to capitalism, for capitalism is the synonym for the economic activities that exhaust the planet and create consecutive ecological mutations associated with climate change and the Anthropocene. However, today’s crisis is economic, technological, and political. Therefore, postcolonialism and Marxism should also be reevaluated in the development of a planetary thinking. Before directly addressing planetary thinking, let us look into the phenomenon of planetarization to understand its essence.

Planetarization as a modern project is, first of all, the synchronization of time. First, through the convergence of transportation and communication technology, it can create a synchronicity between different geographical territories and machines;16 second, through the advancement of science and technology, it constitutes a global time axis, a common mode of existence of humanity. Nomos, as Carl Schmitt claims in The Nomos of the Earth, is “the measure by which the ground and soil of the earth [Grund und Boden der Erde] in a particular order is divided and situated; it is also the form of political, social, and religious order determined by this process.”17 In Schmitt’s thought, we see that the history of the nomos of the earth is fundamentally a history of the revolution of space—that is, the constant conquest of space, or what he calls the elements (land, sea, and air), via technological means. Ultimately, we see that the conquest of the elementary form of space finally arrives at a qualitative change: the suppression of space and its conversion to time. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the global financial industry and logistics functioned according to a synchronicity that ensured the circulation of money and goods. This does not mean that space is without importance; on the contrary, borders still function regularly, but territories are made into smooth planes via global logistics, the standardization of commodities, and the artificialization of food (such as animal farming and greenhouse agriculture), which allow these products to be detachable from any fixed locality. During the pandemic, the smooth plane was suspended, and suddenly, the experience of time was no longer the same as it was. Regarding global logistics, one now expects a longer wait time for mail and goods to arrive. In the summer of 2021, I sent a postcard from Berlin to Japan, which took more than two months to arrive. This is longer than it took for Mori Ōgai to send mail from Berlin to Tokyo more than a century ago. The interruption of global logistics reveals the true meaning of globalization: an increase in synchronicity that constantly compresses space to the shortest distance. This synchronicity is fragile because it depends on machinery, which relies on the energy market and is also vulnerable to state power’s intervention into the spatial order.

This synchronicity also expresses itself in the synchronization of history; that is to say, it is only through technology that humanity could be said to follow a linearity that goes from Homo faber to Homo deus via Homo sapiens. The human is, first of all, a technical being, and therefore the evolution of the human has to be conceived as the continuation of technical activities. In anthropology of technology, André Leroi-Gourhan affirms the fundamental role of technics in the process of evolution. He rejects the commonsense saying that human beings descend from apes because, for him, this claim ignores the fact that the invention and use of tools conditions human evolution. Leroi-Gourhan and his contemporaries, such as Édouard Le Roy and Henri Bergson, accepted that there is a discontinuity between Homo faber and Homo sapiens.18 Like Georges Bataille, who in Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art (1955) associates the birth of art with Homo sapiens,19 Leroi-Gourhan considers that there is a break between the technical, which characterizes Homo faber, and the intellect, which characterizes Homo sapiens. The former is associated with the hand and the latter with the brain. However, this assumed rupture is problematic or even contradictory because, if the human is first of all Homo faber, then that which defines it—namely, technology—became nonessential for Homo sapiens.20 And if technology is nonessential, then we have difficulty in understanding the evolution of Homo sapiens. As Leroi-Gourhan defines it in Gesture and Speech and other works, technics could be understood as an anthropological universal, namely, the externalization of memory and the liberation of organs. The flints used in ancient times should be understood as the crystallization of body gestures, which was only possible after a long process of biological evolution when complex motor nervous systems were developed. Or, as per the example of Lascaux, these paintings are the externalization of the memory and imagination of Homo sapiens, which we inherit today and represent in various technical means. That is to say, the intellect is not separable from technics. On the contrary, the technical is at the same time its externalization and its support. Thus, the criticism that Bernard Stiegler levied against Leroi-Gourhan in his Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus concerned the emphasis that was put on the opposition between the technical and the intellect, arguing that it is merely a repetition of Bataille’s thesis and, as such, risks being self-contradictory.21 This rejection of the rupture between Homo sapiens and Homo faber in terms of the separation of the intellect from technics also refuses the infamous fall that Jean-Jacques Rousseau described in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755).

Thus, we can understand that anthropogenesis is grounded on technical activities and that the human is, thus, no longer the master who creates technology but rather the human who is made possible by technology; in other words, the human is a technological phenomenon. The anthropological understanding of technology unifies the history of the human species, and civilizations are synchronized to the same global axis of time by technological convergence—a world history is present to us at the same time as a history of the anthropogenetic excess, namely, technology, or more precisely Western technology. Thus, as was claimed earlier, the second meaning of synchronicity completes human history that moves from Homo faber to the highly evolved Homo sapiens and now toward a new possibility. This possibility is exploited by science fiction as the Homo deus, the realization of the human as God. It is also the end of Feuerbach’s famous critique of God as the projection of human desire because Homo deus is no longer a projection but the realization of such a projection. Science fiction reigns in this epoch of planetarization and takes philosophy to the Schwärmerei, where everyone could be called a philosopher of technology.

§2. Planetary Thinking as Political Epistemologies

The objectification of the planet in the twentieth century on all levels ranging from abstract representation to scientific exploration, including mining, earth system science, automated agriculture, hydroengineering, and geoengineering, as well as to the preparation for space war, has presented us in the twenty-first century with an urgent task to conceive a new political form, one that allows us to imagine a future for peace and coexistence between different peoples, between humans and nonhumans. Planetary thinking will have to firmly grasp the process of planetarization and develop a language of coexistence. Planetary thinking here has to be strictly distinguished from global thinking. Globalization started during the Age of Exploration toward the end of the fifteenth century, together with colonization; culminated after the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrating the thermodynamic ideology; and while debatable, is claimed to have ended with the Covid-19 pandemic. In this sense, globalization is planetarization. Planetary thinking should be oriented toward the future with a new conceptual framework. The obstacle is that today we still think primarily from the perspective of the nation-state and its economic and military interests. The planetary should not be confused with a new configuration of power between the states, such as a bipolar or multipolar configuration, because this does not change the nature of politics. For this would be the mere continuation of the politics of the nation-state; the difference would only be related to who has more power and more control over resources and the world market.

Healthcare workers conducting mass COVID-19 testing in Hong Kong, 2021. License: CC BY 2.0.

It is also the objectivation of the planet that urges us to take it as a subject and think planetarily. This is also why Bruno Latour suggests formulating his planetary agenda on two premises. The first premise claims that all humans confront the same ecological mutations. Because these mutations are planetary, and we are this planet’s habitants, we must think planetarily. This premise might remind us of Kant’s premise of the Weltbürgertum from his “Perpetual Peace,” where Kant states that the surface of the Earth is communally possessed by everyone (das Recht des gemeinschaftlichen Besitzes der Oberfläche der Erde) and that it follows that the right of visiting a foreign country should be recognized as a natural law because borders are only artificial.22 Therefore, the planet as a common object everyone shares is imperative to imagine, constituting a collectivity beyond artificial boundaries. The second premise of Latour’s project states that since Europeans have never been modern, Europeans and non-Europeans should, therefore, find a way to collaborate to overcome the impasse of modernity.23 It is an impasse because the system of knowledge that originates from European modernity has spread its wings through new transportation and communication technologies, pervading the world and at times seeming irreversible—this was a subject closely examined in The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016). The title of Latour’s exhibition at the Taipei Biennale 2020, “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet,” concisely summarizes his effort to think planetarily. Latour hence calls for a new diplomacy; in response, we will endeavor to address it as an epistemological diplomacy. Therefore, we will have to understand planetary thinking historically, that is to say, to reconstruct planetary thinking to expose its limits and conceive of other possible political forms. Planetary thinking means more than just developing thinking capable of dealing with larger scales and sizes. There is no doubt that scale is an important element, but at the same time, when the scale is too large, one ignores the question of locality, which is equally essential to a planetary thinking. Hence, our objective here is not to propose a grand politics of dividing and transforming the planet Earth. Instead, we seek to revisit the fundamental question of technology and its implications for the twenty-first century.

Kojin Karatani, in his book The Structure of World History, suggests that the current political form, which he formulates in terms of the trinity of capital-nation-state, must be surpassed or sublated since it has already attained its limit. Even though the work critiques Marx and the Marxians, who reduce economy to its modes of production, the inspiration is Kantian since he is attracted to Kant’s notion of the “world republic” as the political form that might transcend the nation-state. His main target is, thus, Hegel. Because Hegel, instead of Marx, is the philosopher who truly grasped the unity of capital-nation-state. Marxians still consider the nation and the state as superstructures separated from the economic base. Instead of the mode of production, Karatani analyzes world history from the perspective of modes of exchange. World history is conceived in terms of three dominant modes of exchange: the exchange of gifts, state-enforced distribution, and the world market, each corresponding to three dominant modes of power: the gift, the state, and money. Karatani thus proposed to conceive a mode D that would sublate the nation-state; Mode D is the return of Mode A (the gift economy) in a higher form.

Karatani sees very clearly that to carry out the task of overcoming the nation-state, it is necessary to develop a thorough critique of Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right.24 However, instead of further pursuing Karatani’s analysis of the history of the economy, I wish to start with the notion of unity in what Karatani calls the “unity of capital-nation-state.” Karatani, through his reading of Kant, compares the capitalist economy with the sensibility, the state with the understanding, and the nation with the imagination. If, in Kant, it is the imagination that synthesizes the sensibility and the understanding, then likewise, the nation synthesizes capital and the state. Therefore, Karatani claims, “The capitalist economy (sensibility) and state (understanding) are held together by the nation (imagination). Together they form Borromean rings, where the whole collapses if any of the three rings is removed.”25 We contend that this unity cannot be grasped topologically by Borromean rings—this also differentiates our reading of Kant and Hegel from Karatani’s. Karatani also recognizes that Hegel’s dialectics is key to understanding the unity, as he writes, “This Borromean knot cannot be grasped through a one-dimensional approach: this was why Hegel adopted the dialectical explanation.”26 However, this grasp remains too underdeveloped.

This unity has to be approached from the perspective of a political epistemology instead of a Borromean diagram. By political epistemology, I mean the epistemology transposed from science to politics, economy, and technology, which consequently constitutes a new paradigmatic shift in the modes of knowing, organization, and operation of society. Or in other words, there is such an epistemology behind every megamachine. We do not see only one megamachine and one epistemology, but rather the evolution of the megamachine alongside epistemologies that adequately justify its existence and specific forms of organization. The history of planetary thinking could then be studied through an examination of various political epistemologies. This book will depart from two major epistemologies, mechanism and organism. The organism, or its analytically and mathematically deduced model, organicism, presents an epistemology radically distinguished from the mechanism that fashioned the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The culmination of mechanism could be read in correlation with the emergence of political absolutism and regimentation, which Mumford endeavored to evidence in his reading of Descartes and Hobbes in the second volume of The Myth of the Machine. The shift from mechanism to organism characterizes a crucial epistemological rupture toward the end of the eighteenth century. Kant’s Critique of Judgment stands out as the major work that placed organism at the top of philosophy in Germany and constitutes one of the most profound treatises on organism understood as a proto-model of the philosophical system.27 We could even claim that Kant imposed the organic condition of philosophizing, which has continued until our time—notably, the last chapter of Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine is titled “The New Organum.” It is dedicated to the “organic world view” seen as the antidote to the “mechanical world view” that has dominated since the seventeenth century. This analysis of the history of organicism was one of the main tasks undertaken in Recursivity and Contingency (2019) and Art and Cosmotechnics (2021), and we will continue in the current work by extending it to political philosophy.

Importantly, a critique of the nation-state does not mean that the state is the opposite of planetary thinking. Instead, we have to recognize the state as a stage in the history of such thinking, that which has yet to be rendered explicit, and we will attempt to do so in the current work. This unfolding of a planetary thinking will start with a critique of Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, focusing on the concept of the organic form. What makes Hegel’s political philosophy significant is his justification of the modern state as the culmination of reason and the political form under which freedom and the ethical life are possible.28 Hegel’s justification (Berechtigung) is logically deduced from his dialectical method. Dialectics will arrive at an organic form, which is also its principle. Thus, the political form of the modern state is organic, in contrast to the state machine that was seriously criticized for its positive and mechanistic nature in his earlier writings, such as the “German Constitution.”29 The organism of the state in Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right points to an imaginary organic machine.30 That is to say, it is not yet an organism because an organism is already organized (or already concrete in the sense of Simondon), it is a fact; for the state, it is a goal31 because the state is a form of organization that assimilates the organism under the principle of reason and effectiveness.

The projection of an emerging epistemology into politics often encounters problems because it remains speculative and, therefore, always ahead of its time. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the young Marx challenged Hegel’s organic state, asking what the difference would be between the organism of the state and the organism of the animal. Marx criticized Hegel, arguing that he could not explain the specificity of the organic state, and as such, his theorization remained only formal and empty. This criticism is important, however, not because Marx was right (Marx nonetheless recognized Hegel’s theorization as a “great advance”) but because Marx did not manage to comprehend its central role in Hegel’s philosophy.32 The opposition between materialism and idealism, which the Marxians employed against Hegel, comes from an intended misreading of Hegel, and it fails to see that the genesis of the spirit already implies a becoming organic that cannot do without a history of externalization. That is why a nuanced reading of Hegel’s political philosophy is fundamental to a Tractatus Politico-Technologicus, and why earlier we called the Hegelian state an imaginary organic machine. The question that concerns us is what the limit might be of Hegel’s political epistemology as a planetary thinking, and what succeeded it in the twentieth century.

Two limits have pushed us to develop a planetary thinking further. First, Hegel only applied organicity to the interiority of the state, never pushing it toward its exteriority. To put it plainly, Hegel refuses what Kant did to conceive of an organicity of international relations and stops at a straightforward friend–enemy relation, which echoes that of Carl Schmitt. Second, the imaginary machine that Hegel conceptualized seems to have been realized by cybernetics, as Hegel scholar Gotthard Günther famously argues in his The Unconsciousness of Machines: A Metaphysics of Cybernetics.33 Günther’s conclusion comes from his dedicated studies on Hegel’s logic and his turn toward cybernetics after immigrating to the United States. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, had already announced that cybernetics overcomes the dichotomy between vitalism and mechanism because, through the notion of feedback, cybernetic machines are capable of assimilating the behavior of organisms. Retrospectively, we can also understand why Heidegger claims that cybernetics marks the completion or the end of philosophy. Today, when we look at the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we cannot ignore their origin in cybernetics, no matter how fast they have evolved in the past decades. This organic machine could be identified as belonging to various domains other than technology—for example, economy, ecology, and the earth sciences. Continuing this line of investigation, we might want to ask if the completion of philosophy in cybernetics also means the completion of Hegel’s philosophy of right? Or does this completion also transcend the first limit mentioned above that the cybernetic system can extend from the interiority of the nation-state toward the exteriority, forming a gigantic organic machine that marks the milestone of the World Spirit in the coming centuries in the name of the “omega point” (Teilhard de Chardin) or the singularity (Kurzweil)? These questions, as speculative as they are, are nonetheless important for us to reflect on a political form adequate to future planetary thinking.

§3. Search for a Planetary Politics beyond the Nation-State

Is the state still relevant today? There have been many rumors that the state is dead and that the sovereign has already been dissolved by global capitalism.34 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s trilogy could be considered the most systematic exposition on the lost cause of the nation-state and the guidebook for the new revolutionary subject, the multitude. According to the authors, as an empire, global capitalism has “taken sovereignty out of the way” because the sovereign has weakened its ability to decide on monetary and military matters.35 In other words, globalization has incorporated every outside into its inside.36 However, during a debate in 2016, Roberto Esposito challenged Negri that the opposite was, in fact, true because, in the past decade, due to the global financial crisis, it was in the end the national governments that saved the banks.37 To borrow Esposito’s words, “The nomos of the earth (to use Carl Schmitt’s formula), along with production and distribution, goes back to being a kind of sharing out in a new geopolitical order of the world.”38

Negri retorted that what Esposito’s thinking lacks is precisely political.39 Our task is not here to defend Esposito, the political immunologist, against Negri, the Marxist revolutionary. However, since the pandemic, it might be clear that the state was never withering away. Indeed, the trinity of nation-state-capital has become more exposed; fascism and nationalism have prevailed in many countries, including Italy, and all announcements of the end of sovereignty and capitalism are simply misdiagnoses that take the immediate as the ultimate truth. In hindsight, the discourse of the multitude gained momentum during the antiglobalization movements towards the end of the millennium. However, over the past decade, the antiglobalization movement has become relatively quiet. Instead, we observe seemingly perplexing anarchist gestures, exemplified by figures such as the conservative anarchist Audrey Tang (the minister of digital affairs of the Taiwan government), the utopian anarchist Elon Musk (as he claimed on X), and the ultimate anarchist Donald Trump (named by the New Statesman40).

Map of the Netherlands in the shape of a lion (Leo Belgicus),  Claes Janszoon Visscher II, Joannes van Doetecum I, 1650. License: Public Domain.

There are other more profound challenges to project onto political epistemology, which were outlined earlier: the reading of modern political thought through the lens of the opposition between mechanism and organism, as well as the framework of the nation-state. Carl Schmitt’s work should be carefully studied in this context. Carl Schmitt, a professor of constitutional and international law and a legal theorist of the Third Reich, stands out as one of the most profound thinkers of planetary thinking after Hegel. Schmitt is not Hegelian; instead, what we find in Schmitt’s writings concerning Hegel is a mix of admiration and discontent. Schmitt distinguished three types of legal thought specific to his time: decisionism, normativism, and “concrete order and form thinking [konkretes Ordnungs- und Gestaltungsdenken].” We can understand the normativism Schmitt speaks of as corresponding to the mechanism, or the positivism of Hans Kelsen (notably, Schmitt’s intellectual rival), and the “concrete order and form thinking” as corresponding to organism, which is exemplified in the political thought of Hegel since Hegel’s state is “the concrete order of orders, the institution of institutions.”41 Schmitt’s position, as we all know, is decisionism, which we will formulate as a political vitalism.

The political, according to Schmitt, is based neither on mechanism nor organism but rather on decisionism. In his Political Theology, Schmitt concisely defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.”42 This power to decide on the exception and the friend-enemy distinction gives soul to the nation-state. The word soul here is not merely to be understood in its literal sense. Indeed, we can find in Schmitt’s treatise on Hobbes a comparison of Hobbes’s mechanization of the state with Descartes’s mechanization of the human.43 Schmitt’s characterization of the sovereign as the power to declare the state of exception returns us not to an absolute power but rather to a legal framework that allows the sovereign to override all legalities, for the sovereign is the ultimate ground of legitimacy.

This definition partially resolves the ontological problem of sovereignty. But the most puzzling question remains: What exactly is sovereignty? We are still looking for a satisfactory answer in both positive and natural law traditions. Positive law returns us to a presupposed basic norm, while natural law has been ceaselessly challenged by historicism in the past centuries, arguing that its foundation is only historically valid.44 Schmitt’s vitalism may be intrinsically a liberalism, as Martin Heidegger remarked in his seminars on Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, where we read, “Carl Schmitt thinks liberally: 1. because politics is ‘also’ a sphere; 2. because he thinks in terms of the individual and his bearing.”45 This comment may sound ironic because Carl Schmitt ceaselessly criticized liberalism as the seed of the collapse of the sovereign, which he finds in Hobbes and modern liberal democracy.

This political vitalism pushes Schmitt to reflect on the future of sovereignty given the world wars and the new international order that emerged due to these new dynamics. Schmitt saw the limit of the nation-state and its decline in light of American imperialism (after the distortion of the Monroe Doctrine) and the collapse of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, which once defined the global order. In other words, when the Jus Publicum Europaeum reigned over the global spatial order, it was intrinsically Eurocentric; its obsolescence suggests a new global spatial order that ought to appear, which, however, insists on the independence of sovereigns.

Schmitt’s development of the nomos of the Earth attempts to provide a new political form after the nation-state and a history of planetary thinking. This history is equally a history of space conquests and spatial revolutions. Schmitt develops an elemental philosophy of geopolitics by neatly, and probably too neatly, plotting a trajectory from the nomos of the land to that of the sea and finally to the air. What is fundamental in Schmitt’s rationale, though he only implicitly acknowledged it, is the question of technology. Again, this is how we could read Schmitt’s political thought as a Tractatus Politico-Technologicus. In his “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” (1929), Schmitt already suggests that one shouldn’t understand technology as anything neutral in the twentieth century. Spatial revolutions would not be possible without technological advancement. The development of sea power would not be possible without the Industrial Revolution, without which there would not be an opposition between the Behemoth (Continental Europe) and the Leviathan (England). The same goes for air power, which was only possible with the invention of aircraft, making it possible to fly across several sovereignties within a couple of hours.

In “The New Nomos of the Earth” (1955), Schmitt proposed three scenarios to conceive future planetary politics.46 First, the configuration based on individual nation-states remains unchanged; second, the unification between the West and the East (in the East, he includes the Soviet Union and China). However, Schmitt does not see unification as necessarily desirable; thus the third scenario, the development into a new political form, which he calls the Großraum, or the big space. The Großraum is that which Schmitt wants to justify, as Hegel did with his political state. The Großraum—a term that, according to Schmitt, has its origin in the “technological-industrial-economical-organizational domain [Bereich]” during the turn of the century when energy and electricity supply unified the Kleinräume into a Großraum-wirtschaft.47 More precisely, it is an imagination enabled by the spatial revolution brought about by air succeeding land and sea. The geographers Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, in their book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, suggest that climate change will lead to the emergence of planetary sovereignty, which they call the climate Leviathan. The planetary sovereignty will decide on the state of emergency for the sake of the security of lives on Earth.48 Though referring to Schmitt, they do not seem to have grasped that Schmitt might be the exact person who would immediately reject such a planetary sovereignty because he is precisely skeptical of any political institutions speaking in the name of humanity. If there is an “advancement” of planetary thinking in Schmitt, it is not a planetary sovereignty but the Großraum.

The Großraum is that which aims to resist the universalism of American imperialism. Universalism here should mean universalization, the promotion and homogenization of a set of values and knowledge regarded as the exclusive truth. Could the political vitalism and the Großraum of Schmitt succeed Hegel’s organism and the nation-state, becoming the blueprint of future planetary politics? It is, nonetheless, necessary to bear in mind Schmitt’s involvement in National Socialism and his justification of the Third Reich. However, one should not discredit all of his thought, rejecting it outright, as many so-called intellectuals do today with Heidegger and others. Like Schmitt, Heidegger wanted to justify National Socialism as a philosophical project, and Alexander Dugin, the right-wing and traditionalist thinker, who picked up Schmitt’s Großraum, integrated it into his Eurasian project—which has subsequently been used to justify the “special military operation” in Ukraine. This does not mean that any discussion on Schmitt can only appear as a depreciation of his thought, which occupies the moral high ground. This is for sure politically correct, but it is philosophically insufficient. Instead, we should expose the limit of Schmitt’s theory and, through this exhaustion, shed new light on a planetary thinking that defends both democracy and freedom. Again, we want to ask what the limits of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and the Großraum might be in view of the new challenge of the ecological crisis and the intensified competition of digital technologies.