Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude
A bold work of philosophical speculation, this book mounts an investigation into the possibility that human beings may technologically overcome the transcendental limits of possible experience and envisages what this transition would look like. Through readings of Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Croce, Jung, and Derrida, Michael Haworth explores the effect of this transformation on human creativity and our relationships with others.
Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude is a highly original and profound scholarly inquiry into the impact of technology on our understanding of art and of communication more generally. Michael Haworth is one of the most talented researchers working in the humanities today.
Alexander García Düttmann, Universität der Künste, Berlin
A daring, original work of philosophical speculation, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude mounts a sustained investigation into the possibility that human beings may technologically overcome the transcendental limits of possible experience and envisages what such a transition would look like. Focusing on emergent neurotechnologies, which establish a direct channel of communication between brain and machine, Michael Haworth argues that such technologies intervene at the border between interiority and exteriority, offering the promise of immediacy and the possibility of the mind directly affecting the outside world or even other minds.
Through detailed, targeted readings of Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Croce, Jung, and Derrida, Haworth explores the effect of this transformation on human creativity and our relationships with others. He pursues these questions across four distinct but interrelated spheres: the act of artistic creation and the potential for a technologically enabled coincidence of idea and object; the possibility of humanity achieving the infinite creativity that Kant attributed only to God; the relationship between the psyche and the external world in Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology; and the viability and impact of techno-telepathic communication.
Addressing readers interested in contemporary continental philosophy and philosophy of technology, media and communications, and science and technology studies, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude critically envisions a plausible posthuman future.
Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude is a highly original and profound scholarly inquiry into the impact of technology on our understanding of art and of communication more generally. Michael Haworth is one of the most talented researchers working in the humanities today.
Alexander García Düttmann, Universität der Künste, Berlin
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Idea Becomes a Machine that Makes the Art
2. Intellectual Intuition and Finite Creativity
3. Unus Mundus
4. Techno-Telepathy and the Otherness of the Other
Notes
Index
