Intelligence and Spirit

Résumé : The history of philosophy conceived as the elaboration of a program for artificial general intelligence; intelligence understood as the impersonal and collective evolution of a thought that constructs itself according to a view from nowhere and nowhen. In Intelligence and Spirit Reza Negarestani formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things, a real movement capable of overcoming any state of affairs that, from the perspective of the present, may appear to be the complete totality of its history. Building on Hegel’s account of geist as a multi-agent conception of mind and Kant’s transcendental psychology as a functional analysis of the conditions of possibility of having mind, Negarestani provides a critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism. This remarkable fusion of continental philosophy in the form of a renewal of the speculative ambitions of German Idealism, and analytic philosophy in the form of extended thought-experiments and a philosophy of artificial languages, opens up new perspectives on the meaning of human intelligence, and explores the real potential of posthuman intelligence and what it means for us to live in its prehistory.