Yuka Hui's project to transform technology through art and hybrid thinking

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

We modern people are like alcoholics

In the sense that we won't stop until

We will face the end, such as the inevitable

the extinction of our species or the devastation of the Earth. <..>

From ancient rock paintings to

modern images generated by AI,

dissemination and self-expression of art

it depends on the technique as on

his medium. At the same time, art

it is able to return the technique to a wider

reality...

(Hui Yuk "Art and Space Technology")

Hui Yuk is a Hong Kong philosopher of technology, a rising intellectual star, well acquainted with both European and Chinese philosophy. Three of his books have already been published in Russia, which immediately attracted attention: "Recursivity and Contingency", "The Question of Technology in China", "Art and Cosmotechnics" ^{[12; 13; 14]}. I am not exaggerating when talking about the transformation project. Following M. Heidegger, Hui believes that our civilization, including China, after ancient culture and with the advent of modernity, severed its connection with being (fell into "oblivion of being"), surrendered to the seduction and charms of technology in the face of second-order cybernetics, which steadily leads to its demise, however, salvation is possible in the right way thinking and a new semantic cultural project, including the transformation of technology.

As you know, Heidegger interpreted technical development as "bringing out the hidden into disclosure" ^[11]. Hui is slightly ironic about this, saying that "uncovered can still take place in modern technology, but in the form of disasters such as Chernobyl, Fukushima, the coronavirus pandemic, etc., which expose the limit of progressive optimism. If we do not want to resort to apocalyptic revelation as the only possibility of non-concealment, we will have to radically transform technology along with its understanding, use and invention. Having completed this task, we must first of all get an answer to the following question: how can the question of Being be included in the technique?" ^{[14, p. 120]}

"If,– Hui writes, "China wants to avoid the complete destruction of its civilization in the Anthropocene, its only hope is to invent a new form of thinking and invention…This requires cosmotechnical thinking and the development of a form of thought that will ensure the further development of Qi without separation from Tao and cosmological consciousness" ^{[14, p. 178]}.

I will further explain these terms (Tao, cosmotechnics, etc.), but for now I will draw attention to the fact that Hui sees the solution to the problems of our civilization in rethinking and recreating ancient Chinese ideas and ways of thinking that can be taken as a model of the right path and salvation. "Today," he explains, "it is extremely important to ask how modernity can be overcome from a non–European perspective. One of these possibilities can be found in understanding the diversity of aesthetic and technical experience in order to reformulate the post-postmodern program" ^{[14, p. 52]}.

However, Hui immediately says that following Hadegger and Chinese philosophy should be understood not as a literal reproduction of an already established historical tradition, but as reinterpretation and co-creation. "To think means to offer a new reading with transformative power. It will allow us to reflect on the current situation and go beyond it to present new fundamental discoveries…This is an attempt to demonstrate a new interpretation of Chinese philosophy and its possibilities <…>

I am not trying," Hui adds, "to say that Heidegger is a thinker of cosmotechnics: at least, I started the "Question of technology in China" with a statement to the contrary. At the very least, I could say that the philosophy of the late Heidegger echoes my approach, and therefore, perhaps, I can think together with Heidegger in the same direction in order to fully reveal my own concept" ^{[14, p. 150]}

Hui agrees with Heidegger not only in predicting the fate of our civilization, but also in the certainty of the "end of philosophy", which is replaced by a global cybernetic paradigm that contributes to the transformation of the world not only into a post, but also an autopoetic, to a certain extent alien to man, system. A person should be ready for this, in particular, by preserving the possibilities of such a development of technology that works both for the needs of society and for the revival of life, and the path to realizing this opportunity passes through transformed art. Since, Hui explains, the end of philosophy is due to "the prospect of achieving a technological singularity based on cybernetic thinking, it becomes necessary to discover a new form of the historical process... our task is to preserve the openness of technology beyond its utilitarian and anthropological significance" ^{[14, pp. 40-41]}.

For Hui, saving life on Earth involves not only transformed art, but also transformed technology, and "techno-diversity" and new thinking, primarily "popularizing" (multiple), culturally and regionally conditioned, diverse in its disciplinary capabilities. Hui writes that "questioning the Unknown, or Being, for Heidegger is an attempt to rediscover the question of technique and locality. The question of technology in this sense implies that art can also reveal the potential of technology, providing a representation of techno-diversity. The question of locality implies the following: if we preliminarily agree with Nisida that the philosophy of the West is based on being, and the philosophy of the East is based on nothing, then the rediscovery of the question of the unknown with the help of technology confirms the irremediable difference in the multiplicity of ways of thinking (aesthetic, technical, moral, philosophical, etc.) in different cultures and in various territories" ^{[14, p. 81]}

The last sentence shows not only the similarity of Hui's and Heidegger's approaches, but also the difference. Hui, in my opinion, thinks culturologically – the West and the East represent different cultures, if not civilizations – and hence, following Heidegger, who said that "language is the house of being", not just an analysis of language (terms and concepts), but a study of it from the point of view of a culture characteristic of a given language. For example, when Francois Julien said in a polemic that "the Chinese have invented a form of thinking (pensée) to avoid tragedy," Hui corrected, pointing specifically to the difference in cultures: "Oriental art is familiar with violence, grief, and the blows of both natural and man-made disasters. Japanese theater is full of ferocity and ceremonial death. But the depiction of personal suffering and heroism, which we call a tragic drama, is a distinctive feature of the Western tradition. <...> the non-heroic tragic work of Chinese literature really indicates a fundamentally different relationship between man and the cosmos than that of the Greeks. ...Why didn't other civilizations know anything about the tragedy? And why did the tragic epoch exhaust itself so quickly in Greece itself, and its place was taken by a philosophical type of thinking that eliminated the contradictions on which tragedy built its dramatic universe by rationalizing the former contradictions?" ^{[14, pp. 21, 22-23]}.

Or another example, the analysis of ideas about beauty and aesthetics. "For comparison," Hui writes, "we can highlight the analysis of the Chinese philosopher Li Zehou (1930-2021), in which he developed a different form of aesthetic thinking and a different way of resolving contradictions. The Chinese character mei, 㗄, which is now often translated as “beauty” or “beautiful”, consists of two graphemes: “sheep” (Yang, 㗀) and “big” (yes, ཝ), and literally means “a sheep is beautiful as long as it is great" (Yang da ze mei, 㗀ཝ�㗄). It can be assumed that this has something to do with ancient rituals and ceremonies… Li Zehou suggests that Chinese art comes from non-Dionysian culture and places special emphasis on the concepts of “li” – a category of Chinese philosophy (especially Confucian), which has an ontological and ethical content. In the cosmological context, li is a key factor in the ordering and unity of the world, and in the ethical context it is the norm of social structure and behavior (criticized by Taoists for “artificiality”). In this sense, li is inseparable from music (yue), thanks to the possibility of which to influence nature and society, it became possible to achieve social harmony in the image of musical harmony... Yue includes music, dance and is combined with li for educational purposes" ^{[14, pp. 44-45]}.

And there are many such subtle analyses of language in Hui's book. But the cultural approach played no less important role in formulating the basic pattern of thinking, which, from Hui's point of view, will save art and technology. Such a model for the author of the book "Art and Cosmotechnics" is the reconstructed and reinterpreted ancient Chinese way of representing art, technology and other similar phenomena within the framework of relational logic and reliance on Tao. Briefly, the essence of this way of thinking is as follows. Tao in relation to art and technology is understood, on the one hand, as the right way of life, on the other – the ultimate foundation in the spirit of phenomenology (i.e., the Tao is realized, but not ontologically), on the third hand, as the source and form of creation in art and technology. On the basis of the Tao, in turn, art and technology are understood as the right form of life and effective creativity.

From this point of view, in works of art and technology, the prepared perception sees both phenomenal manifestations (form, rhythm, composition, etc.) and, as it were, invisible, unknown entities obliged to Tao (for example, as in the paintings "Shan Shui", which Hui took as a model of "cosmo-art"). "Shan Shui painting," he writes, "is an artistic and philosophical interpretation of the correlation of the human world and the cosmos" ^{[14, p. 55]}.

Chinese landscape – Shan Shui "mountains and waters" ^[4].

This is somewhat reminiscent of Goethe's aesthetics and the thinking of Pavel Florensky. As you know, Goethe insisted on the formula "To see things as they are." He wrote that traditional theory suffers from "the excessive haste of an impatient mind, which would willingly like to get rid of phenomena and therefore puts images, concepts, and often just words in their place."…The highest thing would be to understand that everything factual is already a theory: the blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of chromatics. There is no need to look for anything behind the phenomena. They make up the teaching themselves" ^{[15, p. 376]}. "My thinking is not separated from objects, the elements of the objects of contemplation enter into it and are imbued with it in the most internal way, so that my contemplation itself is thinking, and thinking is contemplation" (quoted in ^{[16, p. 31]}.

Following Goethe, Pavel Florensky in the mid-1910s formulated his own approach, called "symbolism": behind phenomena and things one must see the life of the "noumenon", the phenomenon does not exist without the noumenon, and the latter without the phenomenon; in this sense, the phenomenon must be understood as a symbol of the noumenon. "All my life," writes Pavel Florensky, "I have been thinking, in essence, about one thing: about the relation of the phenomenon to the noumenon, about the discovery of the noumenon in phenomena, about its identification, about its embodiment" ^{[10, p. 153]}. But Florensky interpreted the relation of the phenomenon to the noumenon semiotically (as "symbolic"), while Goethe and the Taoists understand the relation of the phenomenon and its invisible foundation phenomenologically.

"According to Taoist thinking," Hui explains, "if there is a contradiction somewhere, it does not mean that its two sides need to be reconciled, since contradiction is a manifestation of the Tao. Tao is not being and nothing, but rather a way of understanding the relationship between being and nothing as an oppositional continuity and unity. What is revealed to the eye in Shan Shui painting is not sublime, but rather a return to the earth through the dissolution of the subject, which echoes Schopenhauer's description of the subject losing himself in the object: “[we] forget our individuality, our will and remain only as a pure subject, a clear mirror of the object”" ^{[14, pp. 73-74]}.

The cultural interpretation is also manifested in Hui's interpretation of technology as cosmotechnics. Unlike the European understanding of technology as independent of culture (although the author reconstructs the technique differently), Hui thinks of technology as regionally and culturally conditioned, and as a result, Hui's technique is popularizing. In "The Question of Technology in China," he writes, "I developed the concept of cosmotechnics to show that there is no one universal and homogeneous technique, and therefore we rather need to rediscover the various types of cosmotechnics and describe them from a historical and philosophical point of view. I have given a preliminary definition of cosmotechnics as the fusion of moral order and cosmic order through technical activity…I call this cosmotechnics because I am convinced that “space” does not mean space outside the Earth's atmosphere, but, on the contrary, locality. Each culture has its own cosmology, which is a product of its own geography and the imagination of the people belonging to it... The main observation is that these cosmologies contain ways of knowing and being, so they cannot simply be rejected because they do not correspond to modern scientific theories. Of course, some superstitious and illusory elements must be abandoned, but cosmologies are much richer than such outdated beliefs. Instead of viewing them as something that has gone into the past, or replaced by something else, we can approach them in a different way: by forcing thinking to individualize in the face of such incompatibilities. This is what we can call the task of thinking today" ^{[14, pp. 68-69]}.

It must be said that in understanding technology as dependent on culture and ways of thinking, the author is on Hui's side, only he does not designate this aspect as "cosmo". In my works on the philosophy of technology, I show that in the Ancient world, technology was thought sacral and created empirically (by "trial and error"); since Modern times, technology has been understood rationally and created within the framework of engineering based on the laws of nature; since the second half of the XVIII century, technology has been formed in which technology determines activities focused on competition, division of labor, quality, economy and management; a little later, a century later, design begins to take shape, where technology is again understood and created in a new way; in the twentieth century, complex types of technical activities (for example, the atomic project, the Internet, AI) are formed, in which all previous forms converge and types of technical activities ^{[5; 6]}. Hui would say that all the listed types of equipment are examples of different types of European space technology, but in addition to them, other types of space technology exist and can be created.

However, Hui would immediately emphasize that at present all these types of space technology are being replaced by one type of space technology, firstly, which grew up within the framework of European space (culture, region), secondly, based on cybernetic thinking and delivery (Gestell), thirdly, turning the world into technical networks and planetary an organism in which the fate of a person is largely predetermined. Hui writes that modern technology is not separate autonomous machines, but "giant systems: banking systems, social networks, social credit systems, smart cities, etc… This new status of machines has the consequence, firstly, that the dualistic logic of the antithesis between organism and machine, subject and object, animal and environment has already been overcome by recursive operations: feedback, structural conjugation, etc. Secondly, the organic formation of machines is in the process of creating a new totality due to the increasing exponential strength of connections and algorithms." ^{[14, pp. 83-84]}.

"I,‒ Hui points out, "want to explore how discourse about the diversity of artistic experience can contribute to the development of thinking beyond Gestell. Modern cybernetic machines carry a new epistemology and a new form of organization, which increasingly determine social, political and economic structures. Machines are imperceptibly freed from mechanistic determinism and freely penetrate into all spheres of society. Like Jean-Francois Lyotard, since the late 1970s (especially in the "Postmodern State"), we must constantly ask ourselves what happens to our feelings when the sky is covered with drones, the earth is covered with unmanned vehicles, and exhibitions are curated by artificial intelligence and machine learning software"^{[14, p. 271]}.

What is the path, according to Hui, of the transformation of technology? Firstly, technology, following the example of art such as Shan Shui, will be based on the invisible and the Tao, and since the latter sets the right worldview and vision, the development of technology will acquire the right direction. "Painting, especially Shan Shui, is cosmotechnical in the sense that before painting, one must first understand the cosmos and its genesis. As Shitao said: "The essence of the landscape is realized, embodying the first principle of [li] Heaven [qian] and Earth [kun]" ^{[14, p. 242]}.

Secondly, as a necessary condition for the transformation of technology, a proper awareness of what is happening and what needs to be done is also required. Hui is trying to show that a technique based on the Tao worldview works for a person, because a Taoist master who creates technical products follows the rhythms and laws of Heaven, virtue, and the way of creating "a thousand things". In the Tao te Ching, there are the following lines: "All things in the world come from yu [being/being], and yu comes from wu [carrier/nothing]." Further, in Zhang 42, we find: "The path gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, and Three gives birth to the whole darkness of things" ^{[14, p. 206]}.

At this point, I can reproduce the intended question of a reader who has probably been perplexed about Hui's argument for a long time: what kind of evidence and discourse are these – Tao, the unknown, cosmos, nothing? It is another matter, he will say, when Hui turns to the concepts of autopoiesis, recurrence, contingency, reflection. Hui writes about these concepts, then falls into Chinese archaism, then, by the way, turns to the equally incomprehensible, although popular among French philosophers today, author Gilbert Simondon. "In my previous book, Recursivity and Contingency," Hui writes, "I tried to show that this organic thinking is characterized, firstly, by circular logic, which reflexively returns to itself in order to define itself, and secondly, by contingency, which opens up such circularity for deformation and transformation. It is precisely because of this reflexivity, which appears to us more clearly in the form of a circle, that necessity and contingency appear as two sides of the same coin <...> This means that aesthetic thinking and philosophical thinking form a recursive loop mediated by techno-science. The end of philosophy does not mean that it is necessary to invent a new universal thinking to replace the old one, because it is outdated, nor does it mean that such universal thinking has already been implemented in cybernetics and modern technologies, as Heidegger suggested" ^{[14, pp. 35, 92]}.

The perplexity is quite fair, indeed, the logic of Hui's argument can be called hybrid, perhaps even strange. It is at least twofold: on the one hand, Hui, analyzing Shan Shui painting and talking about Tao, etc. Chinese realities, appeals to our consciousness, vision, understanding, experience, on the other hand, explaining how he understands the development of art and technology, Hui tries to think rationally. At the same time, in turn, he understands development in two ways: autopoetically, according to H. von Foerster, U. Maturana and F. Varela, and in the logic of "individuation" according to Simondon.

Karen Sarkisov, the editor of the first book, writes that "Hui refers to two concepts borrowed from cybernetics – recursiveness and contingency. Recursivity, according to Hui... is a cyclical return of the same thing on new turns of development, it defines itself through non-mechanical repeatability. Recursiveness is inherent in organic systems, it is what distinguishes them from automata. Cyclic reproducibility gives the system the ability to assert itself. But this is not a lazy following of a preset program, but a movement involving openness to new things. The novelty in the life of the system is always a kind of contingent. Hui defines the latter as unforeseen, random fluctuations caused by the willingness of the system to adapt to changes. Recursiveness allows the system to anticipate contingencies, and thus adjust to new events in its life. This means that recursiveness and contingency are interrelated and are the defining characteristics of any technical systems" ^[9].

As we can see, it is a completely rational discourse, but how, one wonders, does it combine with ancient Chinese imagination and experience, for example, paintings in the spirit of Shan Shui or Tao, as well as with cultural thinking, which we discussed above? Here I want to clarify, in my opinion, Hui really thinks culturally, but he is aware of his thinking in the logic of autopoiesis and individuation of Simondon. However, the latter two approaches for the topics that Hui discusses can probably replace the cultural approach. In both cases, it is possible to think of the reproduction of the whole (cosmo–art, cosmotechnics), and of different types of the whole, as well as to discuss development, and dialectically - simultaneously as a pattern and a singularity (recursiveness and contingency). In my cultural studies, I define these wholes and development differently (culture or its areas are reproduced using signs and diagrams, and development is interpreted in the logic of formation, functioning, completion and change of cultures), nevertheless, Hui's logic is quite understandable to me.

By the way, I also understand the reference to ancient Chinese discourse, as a reliance not on rational thinking (philosophical or scientific), but on schemes. Characteristics (narratives) Tao or, for example, mei (beautiful) are typical "semiotic schemes", if we understand this material on the basis of the work "Introduction to Schemology: schemes in philosophy, culture, science, design" ^[7]. I define the scheme functionally: the problem situation that has developed in culture is resolved by inventing a scheme that sets a new reality and understanding of what is happening, allowing you to act in a new way. In the "Confession" St. Augustine tells how he solved for himself the problem of understanding the reality of God. At first, he thought that God was either a part of nature or an intellectual kind of being defined by Aristotelian categories. But such an interpretation led to contradictions and was at odds with the Holy Scriptures. As a result, after many years of work, Augustine built a scheme in which God was defined as the Spirit, the Way, the Truth and as Christ the mediator between man and the Creator of everything.

"I looked back," Augustine writes, "at the created world and saw that it owes its existence to You and is contained in You, but in a different way, not as if in space; You, the Almighty, hold in Your hand, in Your truth, for everything that exists is true because it exists <…> I was looking for a way where I would gain the strength necessary to enjoy You, and I did not find it until I grasped "the Mediator between God and people, the Man Christ Jesus," Who is "God above all, blessed forever <...> I did not know then that God is a Spirit that has no members extending in length and breadth, and no magnitude: every magnitude is in part smaller than itself, the whole, and if it is infinite, then in some part of its limited by a certain space, it is less than infinity and is not everywhere whole, like a Spirit, like a God. And what is there in us that makes us like God, and why is it correctly said about us in the Scriptures: "in the image of God," it was completely unknown to me." ^{[1, pp. 94, 95, 35]} (emphasis ours. – V.R.). The above narrative is, from my point of view, the scheme constructed by Augustine.

I think it can be shown that in approximately the same way, Chinese thinkers solved in ancient times the problems of understanding the right life, the Sky as a guide and source of such life, and at the same time the habitat of the sun, sacred forces, seasons, beauty, warmth, energy, life-giving man and society. They built a scheme of the Tao in which all these meanings could be thought and imagined, but not seen. They could be seen indirectly, Hui argues, for example, in works of technology or paintings by Shan Shui. There is one more point worth noting. In the Tao scheme, the way of cognition and understanding of man, characteristic of the East, were also implemented. G. Oldenberg discusses these relations based on the material of ancient India.

"The fact is," he writes, "that the Indian mind does not perceive a separate phenomenon in its separate existence, enclosed within the boundaries of its outlines and living its own peculiar life. In the Hindu, one phenomenon merges with another; the lines fade into something indefinite. Thus, thought now grasps one area of essences and perceives every single phenomenon from this area as identical with the same central potency or as dependent on this potency, animated by it, born from it, then flies over all the barriers of individual phenomena and says: this is the essence of everything" ^{[2, pp. 34, 35]}.

I would have reasoned differently. The Oriental individual does not establish identities and differences like the ancient one, removing contradictions, "he seeks analogies, similarities and similarities between phenomena, which he considers fundamentally different, individual. It is clear that this procedure is no less effective than the one used by a European: any group of objects can be organized both in relation to identity and difference (i.e., reduction to bases), and in relation to similarity, analogy, similarity. Perhaps this way of thinking corresponded to the Eastern sociality of that time, which allowed the Hindus and Chinese to minimize conflicts between numerous ancient communities. And in Europe, military conflicts, on the contrary, were cultivated. At the same time, the longest chain of analogies, encompassing and permeating everything that can be thought of, is in India God– Brahma (but strangely enough, Atman, a separate individual), a single being that has no positive definitions, only "not this, not that", and in China – Tao. ^{[8, pp. 122-123]} A separate individual in such a chain of analogies represented the second pole (base), if the first was Brahma or Tao.

In ancient culture, Plato introduced the idea of schemes. He also showed that "ideal objects", which include consistent knowledge (epistems), are created based on schemas. If the schemes define a reality that everyone can understand in their own way, then the definitions allow us to attribute certain fixed characteristics to the phenomenon under discussion (as a result, ideal objects are created). For example, in "Feast", the characters of the dialogue first tell stories about love, representing schemes ("androgynous", "bearing spiritual fruits", "beloved as a genius"), and then on their basis they define love (love is the search for one's half and the pursuit of unity, beauty, goodness and immortality ^{[7, pp. 26-29]}).

I show that the construction of initial ideal objects and concepts describing them ("principles" according to Aristotle) is always preceded by schemes (even if, like Aristotle, they try to eliminate them), and it is clear why. Schemes allow you to express a problematic situation (for example, in the case of a "Feast", the impossibility of an ancient personality to choose a lover on his own), outline its resolution (search for his half, etc.), form a new vision and understanding (of what later became known as "platonic love"), create conditions for new behavior (building definitions of platonic love or practicing it). The ideas of autopoiesis, recursivity, and contingency are no exception, they were also preceded by schemes. It is clear that the schemes of Tao or meyi are not similar to the listed schemes of second-order cybernetics, nevertheless, in both cases we are dealing with thinking on schemes, which in the second case turns into scientific. In this regard, Hui's hybrid thinking seems quite logical. Now, the question is, did Hui manage to outline an effective solution to the problems posed by him and Heidegger?

First of all, I would draw attention to the fact that the interpretation of modern technology as a supply for solving these problems is clearly insufficient. It is hardly possible to radically reform the technique if it is reduced only to a Gesture. Unfortunately, Hui does not analyze other aspects of technology (engineering, technology, the technical environment, technosocial large projects, the Internet, AI), considered in works on the philosophy of technology ^{[5; 6]}. These types of technology allowed us to solve the basic needs that formed in modernity: energy, movement, goods and food, cars, a comfortable environment, etc. These needs themselves began to develop as a result of the implementation, starting from the XVI-XVII centuries, of a new semantic cultural project formulated by F.Bacon and his followers of the Enlightenment. The essence of it was as follows. Man will become powerful and happy, and will ensure the well-being of millions of citizens if he masters nature. To do this, it is necessary to develop natural sciences and engineering, and based on the latest industry. In turn, a necessary condition for the creation of these areas of activity is a new social organization (government and management, directed by technical specialists).

"The state," writes Vitaly Rachkov, "discovers a legitimate connection with science and technology, contributing in every possible way to scientific and technological progress... the state acts as an accelerator of the movement of science and technology, counting on the positive consequences of economic development and the multiplication of its own forces <...> Debates on the strategy for the development of certain means by the state are practically impossible, despite any democracy or glasnost, since actors are interested in their game. If a program has been adopted to invest in grandiose technological chains, for example, the construction of an atomic or chemical complex, then no reasonable arguments can resist the execution of such a program... We just have to ask: and who are the agents of this technocratic violence outside of political power, this unprecedented technological tyranny that arises and intensifies somehow gradually and imperceptibly, creeping? Of course, the administrative and executive authorities, which include the Government. Then there are technocrats who occupy key positions in the technostructure, generating technological propaganda that is readily and enthusiastically accepted by the general public. And of course, professors, intellectuals, scientists, and journalists. Strangely enough, representatives of the Church have been increasingly acting as agents of technological violence..." ^{[3, pp. 101-102, 288-292]}.

Well, yes, technological tyranny, environmental crisis, man-made disasters, but still modern technology has made it possible to provide a high standard of living for the "golden billion" and tolerable well-being for the rest of the billions of inhabitants of the Earth. These other billions cannot imagine their future without further development of modern technology, including engineering, technology and, I have to agree, Heidegger's postage. If we take technology in all its listed aspects, then we must admit that modern life with its ideals and ways of organization is inseparable from technology. How does Hui understand the transformation of modern technology, placed under the banner of Tao and autopoetic systems? Is it possible to answer this question by considering the technique only as a Gesture? I think not. Is it possible to develop modern technology in the logic of Chinese space technology, the foundation of which is unknown and developed in the Ancient World and the Middle Ages? I doubt it very much. Is it possible to convince the elite and leaders of modern states to abandon the ideals of modernity and modern technology, starting the search for other technical means less fraught with the end of life on Earth? Experience shows that this is not yet possible, elites and heads of state are deaf to such appeals and exhortations. What catastrophes must humanity experience in order, as Heidegger writes in The Question of Technology, for man to "open up to the essence of technology", "come to his senses", and "feel the breadth of his essential space" anew (that is, he remembered and understood his higher values in order to subordinate to them values that are less significant – comfort, power over nature, power over the world)? ^[11] I don't know. Trying to make sense of the environmental crisis and modern military conflicts, remembering Chernobyl, Fukushima, the coronavirus pandemic, you start to think that maybe we haven't reached the bottom yet. The question is whether we will have time to "come to our senses" and start doing something before this bottom appears.