Blinding the Eyes of the sun god: A Forray into Epistemic Counter-tactics

by Hermes

Epistemologies of the sun

The sun is the archetypal symbol of knowledge in the history of pre-modern societies. It is the bringer of light. Metaphors of solar light for describing the pursuit of knowledge are omnipresent in mythic, mystical and spiritual language. It is no coincidence that supposedly elevated states of being and the acquisition of divine knowledge are either direct references to light (“enlightenment” and “illumination”) or an indirect reference to sunrise through words rooted in wakefulness: the effect of the early morning sun’s rays on the human pituitary gland.

But ancient symbolism of the sun also included an alchemical-like “as above, so below” connection to the modality of vision. The “sun as eye” is a common mythological occurrence. In Egyptian mythology, the male sun god Ra also had a female-counterpart symbol in the Eye of Ra. The god Thoth, the god of knowledge-transfer and communication (and the precursor of the Greek god Hermes and Roman god Mercury), is often depicted in artifacts as holding the eye of Horus. On the other side, theories of vision in ancient Greco-Roman and up until early Islamic thought feature a complimentary opposite “eye as sun” symbolism. They did not just assume that the eye is a mere instrument of stimulation, passively receiving inputs of varying light frequencies, but instead viewed vision as an active process of extromission, i.e. of radiation coming from the eyes in the form of visual beams directed towards objects of the world. In such a way, the eye and the sun shared a hidden association; they are instruments of illumination.

This peculiar triangulation between the sun, knowledge and vision formed the basis of pre-modern knowledge-acquisition theory; an unholy trinity which culminated in the Pythagorean-inspired ancient Greek philosophy of Platonism. The Pythagoreans were the first to assign a divine significance to visual quantities such as numbers and geometrical objects and see them as sources of light. They claimed that through knowledge of number and ration, pure illumination is achievable as the highest state of being. We find the greatest glorification of this illuminist lineage in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The dialectical interplay of darkness and shadows as the objects of pure falsehood and the sun’s light as Truth (ἀλήθεια) and Goodness (ἀγαθό) adds a new element to the trinity, a normative element where the tri-partite expression of illumination embodies the ultimate good. It is through this lineage of Western Greek thought that illumination became humanity’s prime ethical imperative.

Although the mythological view of the sun has been replaced by a mechanical-materialist narrative, the subtle association of knowledge (which the sun initially represented) with light, illumination and vision has still remained vital in Western thinking and Western doing. As Marshall McLuhan’s deep genealogy of our interaction with representational media shows, vision has monopolized Western thought, culture and technology, replacing the commonplace, embodied and multi-modal acoustic understanding of the world with an increasingly decoupled and abstracted visual mode. What happened in the broader Greco-Phoenician region was the invention of visual space, a continuous and void infinite plane of pure visual representations, decoupled from all other senses, exemplified by Euclid’s abstract geometry and Plato’s ideal forms.

In a sense, the megalithic technological achievements in modern scientific instrumentation, from telescopes to big data suggestion engines, can be seen as intensifying the monopolizing dominance of pure vision, by extending, disembodying and mechanizing vision on an ever grander scale. Even if we have nominally escaped the totemic worldviews of the sun god, we have been hard at work actually building one on top of Earth’s crust, with its optic fiber ganglia deep below the ground and its satellite-meshwork retina reflecting the reverted optic image of our intimate lives.

The increasing loss of privacy and freedom from the watchful eyes of state and corporate surveillance are but parts of a bigger legacy of solar epistemologies whose accelerationist intensification has been catalyzed through the societal influence of the modern Western philosophical canon. We are unwillingly thrust into an epistemic tradition of illumination where knowledge-acquisition is the ultimate goal and visual media such as text and propositional language form the horizons of what is possible to know. Science has inherited this deep suspicion towards all knowledge that is not public and propositional, while at the same time acting on a deep ethical duty for unconditional epistemic illumination. It developed a perverted obsession for god-like omniscience. The project to accelerate the sun god’s development is well underway.

Lunar Knowledge

What if epistemology was not based on knowledge-acquisition? What if instead of mere revelation, concealment was also part of the epistemological metalanguage? In his book Platform for Change, Stafford Beer makes the claim that our thinking blocks us from effecting change because statements that might seem contradictory (technical term: undecidable) in a certain context of language, might not be so if we adopt an even broader context through which our words and notions derive new relational meaning. The statement that epistemology can rest on a different basis than knowledge-acquisition might seem preposterous, but only in the context of solar epistemology — in which building a theoretical framework that can talk about knowledge-concealment or unknowability is inconceivable.

To escape this trajectory before solar epistemologies nurture the sun god to full development, we need to broaden our thought, transcend our previous language and attain a metalanguage where knowledge-acquisition and knowledge-concealment are entangled in a dialectical dance. In this Heraclitian flux of eternal tension, knowledge is more than a system of verifiable beliefs about the world, but a valuable resource, which can be generated, owned, used, regenerated, captured and of course, destroyed. In order to do this we need to inject a lunar epistemology as a cure to our epistemic addiction towards illumination and achieve a balancing act that weakens the scorching heat of its deadly rays.

Crypto-epistemology

Natural philosophers in the 16th century used cryptic metaphors to speak about the process of illuminating nature. By pronouncing that “Nature loves to hide,” they tried to investigate the signs left behind, the semiotics of physics. Mathematics was seen as the real message of the book of nature and the only source of purely universal validation, reviving the illuminist project. Algebraic expressions and proof-based mathematics have been instrumental to illuminist acceleration but at the same time, mathematics functions as a means of concealment because it is analytic a priori: it doesn’t provide new knowledge, just new configurations and new ways of encoding knowledge. In this way, mathematical proofs have always been truly anonymous tools of validation; It doesn’t matter who you are, what language you speak, what culture you’re from, what you know or who else you know: a simple Euclidean proof can be validated by anyone with the basic capacity to reason, independently and anywhere. Proof-based mathematics have been the most interoperable and substrate-independent proto-software. But to parse a proof is a perceptual activity requiring an embodied interaction between the subject and the artifact, the solver and the inscriptions of paper, with the sequential and continuous property of vision being exercised in its fullness. Mechanizing the process of proofs also requires vision, but a disembodied vision, an implicit vision, a vision stripped from a body, stripped from an eye and even stripped from natural light. Mechanical computation has managed to abstract away the saccades of the dancing iris on paper, as it passes from the one side of the page to other, and from one line to the next, and turned these movements into pure logical sequence. All computation is disembodied vision. In this way, the artificial sun god is given the ability to see far and wide.

If natural science in its entirety is approached through a cryptographic lens, it could be seen as a branch of cryptanalysis — cryptography’s contrarian sister — trying to break “nature’s code” and gain unauthorized access to its secrets. If unauthorized access sounds like too much of an anthropomorphism, then rest assured that the whole premise of modern enlightenment science and its high-industrialist consequences is all based on an even more malicious anthropomorphism; Francis Bacon’s analogy of nature as a woman, to be raped without consent, stripped of dignity, used and exploited for the purposes of men. It is through this metaphor that science as the dominion over nature has been institutionalized and in accordance with the beastly qualities of the lusty manly gaze, the sun god and its now unleashed vision has become incestuously horny for mother nature. The creative act of techne and of artifaction, of building a more preferable environment for one to live through niche construction, has been turned into the perverted lust for technology.

Solar epistemologies assume that the world is transparent — it’s there and we can know it if we just find the right means of illumination. But this also presupposes a dualistic split between the world and the minds of knowers who are simply trying to uncover something that is hidden in plain sight. Crypto-epistemology argues that there is no such uncovering unless there has already been a cover-up, and who or what does this cover-up becomes a crucial question. Instead of a split between mind and world, minds are always in a relation with the world where they enact their knowledge; acting, building and of course, hiding. In our dealing with the world, we don’t merely illuminate but we also enter into the reverse process, we endarken.

Celestial Dialectics

It is this historical context that we have to keep in mind to understand micro-culture war raging in the digital niche of public blockchains between Solarpunk and Lunarpunk. Solarpunk is the hopeful vision of a high-tech society of ecological restoration, green technology and an attitude of openness and positive-sum games. It is the happy ending of modernism, a post-Baconian future where humans have managed to achieve agency over the world and their surroundings, but, in symbiosis with nature. It is the pinnacle of technoscience, secularism and the maximization of utility, but with a human heart.

Solarpunk provides the cultural and infrastructural means to create and sustain humane commons, but not to secure and defend them. Creating bigger and more inclusive commons leaves bigger vectors of capture. Lunarpunk is the contrarian attitude which claims that this tragedy of the commons will be the biggest tragedy — and as a matter of fact, we have already started to see it taking place. Like the sun, the broken dream of web 3.0 and its unconditional openness has been radiating away energy, captured by the regulatory Dyson Sphere of central bank finance and ubiquitous surveillance, and excluding the flow of energy to parcels of human autonomy. Meanwhile, the moon has been absorbing solar radiation and reflecting it back to those who need it. Flows of lunar light shine safely under the encrypted darkness of the black sky.

The divide of heavenly bodies is not essential. As Paul J. Dylan-Ennis has made clear, they both aim at regeneration and the real enemy is the mechanizing capture devices of the artificial-vision industrial complex. Solarpunk practice, with its focus on sovereignty of local communities and the decentralization of energy, value and knowledge infrastructure, in a way escapes the oppressive tendencies of the sun god by playing its own game. A better way to approach this gap is by seizing the historical opportunity to engage in dialectics and reflect the Solarpunk light back onto itself and its epistemological legacy.

Epistemic Countertactics

The Solar trinity reminds us of the steps we need to take to build agoric penumbras around new sovereign worlds. By inverting the Light-Knowledge-Vision triangle on its head and entertaining the complementary opposites that arise, we can explore new vectors of counter-tactics to the prevailing epistemic order.

Penumbral Dynamics

Ironically enough, the technologies that have enabled hiding are the ones that have also enabled radical openness. The reason is that a neutral layer of secrecy enables freer modes of expression. Openness is not contrarian to concealment. Like all life, from its most basic forms in prokaryotic bacterial organisms, boundaries are semi-permeable. Without openness there is no thermodynamic flow, no energy enters the system. Without closure there is no identity in time and no internal reassembly. Full openness or full closure both lead to death. Organisms thrive by means of internal regulation according to their own internally generated norms. External regulation or no regulation also leads to death. Epistemic horizons and sovereign society will not survive if they don’t embrace this balance.

This is evident by the recurrent problems faced by public goods, open-source software and open science. Nurturing and maintaining a public good is incredibly difficult but not impossible. The Tragedy of the Commons is not really a tragedy; it’s more like a comedy, a humorous goof of cultural entrenchment in simplistic mental models. When a Cryptic Epistemology is adopted, the problem seems more daunting because it is also less deterministic and linear. You can sustain publicly available infrastructure by creating the right kind of enclosures and hiding the right kind of knowledge from open acquisition and thus capture from a force of avarition. Even the early experimentalists of the Royal Society like the chemist Robert Boyle, who passionately advocated for public verification and the demystification of knowledge (in contrast to the alchemists), still hid their patents, discoveries or controversial knowledge in cyphers. We tend to think of cryptography as a 20th century invention but the truth is that experimentalists were ahead of the game, writing encyclopedias of cryptography and casually using cyphers in their texts.

Lunar epistemology, is not a denial of the value of illumination, but rather it’ a denial of merely its partiality and selectiveness, because it is always part of a social game of adversarial-power relations. It also reminds us that we have an imperative to reflect the light back to the powerful, creating a shield of blinding light, which protects the powerless and corners the big players in the spotlight of accountability. This sentiment is encapsulated in the infamous cypherpunk proverb:

Transparency for the powerful, privacy for the weak.

This is what the early cypherpunks called sousveilance, a pattern reminiscent of a reverted pyramid and a view that has been overshadowed by the late cypherpunk obsession with an individualist framing of privacy as mere self-defense. It’s time to stop speaking simplistically about openness or regulation, or about transparency and privacy, whether to demonize or elevate them. Penumbras are composed by the gracious contortion of light and darkness.

Endarkenment

The Pandora’s box has already been opened. There have already been some important lunar victories in the 21st century. Without the cypherpunk tools of mass encryption, the digital world would have been a much more oppressive place than it already is. Legitimizing “the right to forget” has been a crucial praxis of endarkenment. Obscolesnece in an age of manic version state-saving is hard but should be a norm. Hitting permanent delete constrains one path and enables all the rest.

The value of record-keeping cannot be overstated but for how long are we going to be hoarders? How long until the historical archive of the future becomes a bottleneck? Knowledge of the past is a form of liberation, but it is also a force of slavery to fate. Theorists of cultural evolution have coined the term generative entrenchement to describe how the crystalization of certain states creates a certain trajectory by disabling all other possible options. Radical change needs an escape from entrenchement and thus an escape from the imprisoning effects of knowledge. Otherwise we are stuck in a constantly retrospective state of nolstagia while, in Mark Fisher’s terms, the future is canceled. History should be a scaffold; read the books and burn them. System versioning needs tombstoning. Big data needs destruction. If the natural act of recycling and keeping what is necessary that is so crucial to the functioning of nature is mechanically removed from our epistemic action space by the artificial sun god, we have a moral imperative to be epistemic terrorists.

Post-Occular Plurimodality

The most subtle aspect of the framing of post-solar praxis (and the hardest to fully embody) is moving away from the totalizing dominance of disembodied vision as the primary way of approaching the world. The way we record knowledge, the way we share it, the way the underlying information infrastructures that support these action work, is visual. There are good theoretical conjectures we can make about why that is, like the fact that the visual modality is based on object persistence and linear-sequential causation, while other modalities are discontinuous, with qualities emerging and disappearing, like the pulsating rhythm of a kick drum’s sub-bass on the dance floor. Spoken words perish in the ether while written documentation encodes them externally in a persistent way.

Digital technology however has both enabled the recording of non-visual information and led to what McLuhan refers to as the re-emergence of “acoustic space,” a discontinuous space of constant barrage of information. But the underlying data infrastructure, even encoded in binary, is still deeply textual, preserving the properties of disembodied vision. The most radical move would be to re-engage and anchor ourselves back to the underlying properties of audition which would be to explore technological and cultural avenues different than our current obsession with persistence and precision. Maybe we could take inspiration from the oral traditions of the past, which managed to preserve their myths, legends and wisdom through long lineages of storytelling. Maybe we should re-emerge and embrace the antifragile nature of story and song, which people managed to preserve even under oppression and control, even when stripped of all possessions and laid bear in the face of torture. And if we deeply care about anonymity as a tool of social change rather than a mean for childish removal of responsibility, we should remind ourselves of the anonymous nature of oral tradition and their catastrophe-averse antifragility.