Conquering the Tertium Datur: Sloterdijk in defense of a “cybernetic anthropology” (between Heidegger, Günther and Latour)

Abstract

 Martin Heidegger developed an analysis of metaphysics and technology that questioned its ontological presupositions. However, Peter Sloterdijk, author of a revision of the Heideggerian clearing (Lichtung), under the title of Domestication of being: clarifying the clearing, argues that Heidegger suffers from the same illness he criticizes: an abeyance relative to classical ontology, which, after Plato and Aristotle, separated Being and Nothingness, grounded the logical bivalence, excluding any third possibility, and allowing for the metaphysical dualisms. Following the anthropologist Bruno Latour, who has showed that “Modernity” is a belief in the split between the poles of form and matter, of subject and object, of nature and culture, Sloterdijk also assigns to Heidegger the dependence on classical ontology on the level of the split between ontological and ontic. In this respect, what does Sloterdijk suggest? An alternative to classical ontology in the cybernetics of Wiener and Günther, in order to reattach the links broken by Heidegger between ontology and anthropology. This work aims to articulate Sloterdijk’s critique, Latour’s enquiry and Günther’s ontological-logical revision, in order to open field for an understanding on the Sloterdijkian project of thinking anthropology from cybernetical hypotheses.

Recebido: 20/07/2017
Aceito: 24/10/2019