War, the Technosphere, and the Question of Evil. Three Paradigms of War

Abstract

The problem of the thinking of the technosphere cannot be an ethical issue because it is no longer a question of a potential struggle or war for the terri- tory of a nation-state or even for supremacy over the global-planetary space. Instead, “war” has now become only cognitive and a matter of ruling over the human mind and body as a free territory of existential performance. Further- more, if the means and metaphors of warfare in the age of technique are the sword and shield, and, in the age of technology, the cannon and the bomb, then it is quite obvious that in the age of the technosphere, the instruments of the destruction of the Other, earth and man are nothing but gamma rays and hypersonic missiles. The essence of total war derives from the post-me- taphysical “attributes” of contemporary nihilism and thus connects all three paradigms of understanding war (the technical one, the technological one and the one I call the technosphere) as a combination of artificial intelligence and artificial intuition.