The Philosophy of Artificiality explores the nature, meaning, and implications of that which is man-made or synthetically constructed, as opposed to what is considered natural or organic. It raises deep ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical questions about the human relationship with reality, technology, creativity, and authenticity.
Core Questions
What is "artificial"?
At its core, artificiality refers to things made or altered by human design rather than arising spontaneously in nature. But philosophically, this distinction can be blurry. Are artificial things less real or authentic?
How do we value the artificial?
Some traditions view artificial constructs as lesser than natural ones (e.g. artificial beauty vs. natural beauty), while others celebrate human ingenuity and artificial enhancement (e.g. transhumanism).
Is artificiality opposed to authenticity?
Existentialist and phenomenological traditions often associate authenticity with being true to one’s nature, while artificiality may be seen as performative or contrived. Yet, some argue artificiality is intrinsic to human culture.
Does artificiality distort or reveal reality?
In postmodern philosophy, simulations and hyperreality (e.g. Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation) suggest that artificial constructions can overtake or replace the real, raising questions about what’s “true” or “genuine.”
Related Philosophical Themes
Techné vs. Physis: The ancient Greek distinction between art/craft (techné) and nature (physis) is central. Artificiality is linked to techné—the human capacity to shape the world through skill and artifice.
Artificial Intelligence & Ethics: As we create entities capable of learning and decision-making, questions about consciousness, moral responsibility, and personhood arise. What ethical status does a synthetic mind have?
Artificial Environments: Architecture, virtual reality, and synthetic biology all raise ontological questions—what kind of reality do they create, and how do they shape human experience?
Aesthetics of Artificiality: In art and design, artificiality can be embraced (e.g. surrealism, modernism), or critiqued for creating inauthentic experiences. This challenges traditional aesthetic values.
Human Identity: Are humans themselves artificial beings in some sense—culturally, psychologically, or technologically constructed? From social roles to prosthetics, artificiality becomes a way of defining identity.
Philosophers and Thinkers
Martin Heidegger: His critique of technology as enframing offers a caution against reducing the world to resources.
Jean Baudrillard: Explored the dominance of simulations and the loss of the "real."
Bruno Latour: Argued against strict separations between nature and society in science and technology studies.
Donna Haraway: In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she embraces hybridity and artificiality as liberatory.
Plato: In The Republic, he warned that artifice (e.g. shadows on the cave wall) can deceive us into mistaking imitation for truth.
Conclusion
The philosophy of artificiality challenges us to reconsider the boundaries between natural and constructed, real and simulated, authentic and artificial. It is a vital area of thought in an age where synthetic realities—digital, cultural, and biological—are increasingly dominant.
Universities cannot withstand the assault on objective truth.
By: Mark Goldblatt
Published: Feb 7, 2023
Several years ago, in the pre-pandemic world of in-person meetings, a newly hired colleague at Fashion Institute of Technology proposed an LGBT-themed sociology course before the School of Liberal Arts. This is a necessary step in getting the course approved by the college-wide curriculum committee. It’s a time for constructive feedback and occasional tweaking before the final committee vote.
It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but doesn’t exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?
After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”
Her words hung in the air as I glanced around the room. Not a single faculty member, not even those in math or sciences, seemed fazed by her categorical statement. Since I was a tenured professor, I was reluctant to debate an untenured colleague during a school meeting. So, I let the matter drop. The course was approved without revision by the School of Liberal Arts, and went on to gain approval by the curriculum committee. And that is how my college got into the business of winning converts.
That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.
When Jacques Derrida, the renowned “father of deconstruction,” was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, 20 of the world’s preeminent philosophers—including W.V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus—signed a letter of protest, in which they argued:
M. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some marks of writings in that discipline. … In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor. … M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists. … Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.
The claim that Queer Theory has “deconstructed objectivity” means only that a certain number of academic performance artists have doodled with a cluster of words related to the concept of objectivity in order to gain university employment, win friends, and influence a distressingly large number of gullible fans. But no epistemological breakthrough has come of their efforts: if it had, it would be self-refuting since it would consist of an objective truth about the impossibility of objectivity. (At a lecture I attended 40 years ago, a debonair British postmodernist stated that Derrida had shown us how it was possible to formulate a consistent argument with a contradiction in it. When I inquired how, in that case, we could recognize an inconsistent argument, the question was met with actual hisses from his acolytes. I’m still waiting for an answer.)
Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis. The statement “Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis” is itself objectively true. And Queer Theorists make objective truth claims all the time—as when they cite statistical evidence of harms visited upon the LGBT community or proving the reality of climate change. One of the silent faculty members at the meeting I mentioned, also near retirement, had devoted his entire distinguished career to combatting the effects of global warming. You’d think he’d be miffed at the suggestion that such effects were not objectively real. But no, he just sat in silence like everyone else.
Either he didn’t understand or didn’t take seriously the implications of what our new colleague was saying. The latter possibility seems the far likelier one. My sense, based on hundreds of informal conversations I’ve had with STEM faculty, is that people working in the hard sciences tend to roll their eyes at the alleged insights of postmodernism. They inhabit a world in which truth is still gauged by correspondence between belief and reality, and in which reality exists independently of our beliefs about it. Generally speaking, they don’t give a rat’s ass about discourse communities and meta-narratives. They want to know if the equations balance, if the instruments work, and if their hypotheses match empirical outcomes. In other words, they are interested in discovering if what they believe to be true is objectively true. They are certainly not interested in the ethnicity, sexuality, or gender identity of the people making truth claims.
Put all of that together, and you’ve got the makings of a schism. The humanities and social sciences are undergoing a mission reversion—they’re returning to a pre-Enlightenment view of the purpose of higher education. Prior to the Enlightenment, universities were sites of religious instruction that trained clergy. Harvard was founded in 1636, a mere six years after the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, to ensure that future generations of New England Puritans would be served by learned ministers. That goal is found among Harvard’s original “Rules and Precepts”:
Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome [i.e., at the base of the boat, to keep it steady in the water], as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.
That’s a version of what we’re seeing with the rise of the subjectivist movement in the humanities and social sciences. It is a new secular faith, a version of The Way. Instruction in radical progressive curricula is baptism by accreditation. It’s witness and testing. You gather for three hours a week to dwell in the spirit, commit yourself to individual rituals and collective causes, despair the fallen state of humanity, call out and cast out demons, immerse yourself in sacred texts and memorize venerable chants, then venture forth to spread the gospel. The end is performative, sacramental. Let me tell you the many ways you’re oppressed so that you may be a river to the masses.
Increasingly, that is the state of the humanities and social sciences at public universities in the US. Whatever you think of that development, it signals an existential crisis for higher education because instruction in the STEM fields at American universities remains traditional, objectively focused, and globally competitive. The reversion of the humanities and social sciences to religious preparation cannot coexist indefinitely with the Enlightenment mission of STEM instruction. Something has to give.
What, for example, becomes of science textbooks that report that only female mammals give birth? (Pity the poor seahorse, hitherto famous as the only species in which the male gives birth. But for how long?) You cannot be told in your morning sociology seminar that the pursuit of objectivity is an instrument of white supremacist culture, which must therefore be deconstructed, and then be told in your afternoon biology class that identical twins are objectively always the same sex.
It’s natural to expect the demand for severing ties to come from the professoriate on the STEM side, from a desire not to be sidetracked in their pursuit of objective truth. More likely, though, as evidenced by that liberal arts meeting at FIT, the demand will come from the humanities and social science side, caused by the unbearable adjacency of reality-based standards and scholarship to the postmodern insistence that the demand for objectivity is oppressive.
Entrance into STEM fields requires rigorous standards of assessment, as does progression and graduation. Rigorous standards of assessment, however, don’t produce equity or (objectively!) diverse student populations. Asian students are currently overrepresented in STEM, black students underrepresented; male students are overrepresented, female students underrepresented. According to the tenets of progressive activism, demographic imbalances of that nature constitute de facto proof of racial and gender bias since in an unbiased system every demographic would be proportionally represented. How long will student activists, encouraged by humanities and social science faculty, tolerate this alleged injustice on their campuses?
The disintegration of academia is coming. Whichever side precipitates the break, it will be a necessary development. Higher education is a serious intellectual endeavor, and nothing is less intellectually serious in contemporary academia than the suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity has been discredited. Empirical observation, mathematical inquiry, inductive and deductive reasoning, and falsifiability are the sine qua nons of higher education. As courses of study in the humanities and social sciences depart from such things, they cease to be higher education in the Enlightenment sense.
[ Via: https://archive.is/vQvgg ]
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It's pivotal moments like this that inform what comes next. That realization something was really wrong here, with that hesitation, that second-guessing, that telling the truth might upset them, that it would just be easier to let this one slide, that instinct to just go along to get along, and the creeping recognition a group delusion was going on.
Who would have thought that the downfall of western academia could be powered by the worst, most pretentious and puerile French philosophy which can be encapulated as an academic formalization of the Equivocation Fallacy, and language games worthy of a 7 year old who just discovered a book of knock-knock jokes?
It was a mistake to think that nobody would take this seriously. It was a mistake to think that it wouldn't leak out of the bogus Fantasy Studies domains within Humanities which they'd invented and credentialed themselves in. And it was damn sure a mistake to give them a seat at the grown-ups table as far as knowledge claims and knowledge production.
To paraphrase Sam Harris, those who reject objective reality belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of knowledge.
Denying objective reality should be regarded as an announcement they do not live in it. This is a definition of delusional, not a definition of intellectual.
Camus and Sartre have been the twin founding fathers of existential philosophy. For Camus life is absurd, monotonous, chaotic and repetitive and for Sartre man is condemned to be free. I have revised both Camus and Sartre by proclaiming that life is a celebration of meaning. As beings we make choices which make us privileged.
I would like to explicate my philosophy of existentialism by using certain philosophical jargon.
Celebrationist Metaphysics
From a metaphysical point of view I am secularizing God and making him an earthly plane of consciousness. Here I would like to refute Camus myth of the Sisyphus. Sisyphus in Greek mythology was condemned by God to roll a boulder uphill to find that it rolled down and he is forced to repeat this monotonous task. From this Camus developed the view that life is absurd and meaningless. For me Sisyphus is a man who has the favor of God and he is productive, creative and life fulfilling. His existence is wholesome, productive precious and celebratory.
Celebrationist Aesthetics
Aesthetics the art of creation and appreciation is an experience of joy. I use the term Godesque as the celebration, creation and experience of art. In Godesque there are two Nietzsche’s element, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian elements are rhythm and beat and the Apollonian elements are harmony and melody. Melody and Harmony are happiness states of being and rhythm and beat are noetic states of fulfillment.
Celebrationist Ontology
Here I start with Sartre’s condemnation and Heidegger’s Dasien (being). Sartre famously said: we are condemned to be free due to the responsibility of the choices we make. I would like to refute Sartre by saying we are privileged with the choices we make. Heidegger’s Dasien (being) for me is the presence of experience that exist in ontological states as cognition, perception, catharsis, appropriation, possession and angst. The purpose of Ontological Dasein is the celebration of meaning in the ethos of life.
Celebrationist Teleology
Teleology (purpose) is a jargon and from it we look at the celebrative meaning of life. Life is the luxury of existence. The motto of life is live to celebrate. I refute Roseau who said man is born free but everywhere he in chains. I would like to say Roseau chains are redemption and freedom.
Celebrationist Axiology
Axiology in Philosophy refers to values. What are values to acquire in Philosophy? Celeberationism boasts of an ism from the Bible: love they neighbor as thy self. The self is a reciprocal experience of love, sharing, empathy, friendliness, camaraderie, and concern all Biblical principles espoused by Christ.
