Thoughts on the manifesto of futurist science (1916)

The ultimate goal of science is mystery.

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In his book “Trattato di Filosofia Futurista” (“A Treatise on Futurist Philosophy”) my friend Riccardo Campa explains that, according to the Italian Futurists (my translation):

“The goal of science is not solving practical problems, but shedding light on the unknown. But here comes an unexpected twist… The futurists startle everyone with a statement on the edge of paradox: they affirm that knowledge is an intermediate goal, since the ultimate goal of science is… mystery!”

Riccardo sent me the original manifesto “La Scienza Futurista” (1916). I posted the full text here in a separate post.

An English translation of the manifesto doesn’t seem to exist. So I guess I should translate it myself, and I plan to do so if there’s really no translation. Here I’ll summarize the manifesto, translate some passages, and comment.

The Italian futurist movement, started by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, is often viewed as an anti-philosophical, anti-intellectual artistic movement, with political associations that many find unsavory. But Riccardo eloquently debunks these myths.

Italian futurism and fascism were not natural allies, but were essentially incompatible as emphasized by top representatives of both. That many futurists joined Benito Mussolini’s fascist party was due to realpolitik more than ideology.

Behind the anti-intellectual rhetoric of Italian futurism there’s a more or less consistent philosophical worldview to be found if one knows where to look.

The Italian futurists were artists with little patience for politics. They celebrated vital energy, novelty, and speed. Of course, they were enthusiastic fans of aviation and early ideas of spaceflight. Today, they would be enthusiastic fans of spaceflight.

While I don’t approve of some exuberant excesses of the Italian futurists, I think today’s sedate Western culture could use an injection of vitality, and I stand with Marinetti on the summit of the world to “fling our challenge to the stars.”

Many are persuaded that Italian futurism was somewhat similar or at least related to contemporary transhumanism, but Riccardo goes further (my translation):

“This author is persuaded that Italian Futurism was not only a precursor of transhumanism, but a fully achieved transhumanism ante-litteram.”

In fact, the writings of Italian futurists are full of transhumanist ideas such as humanity remaking itself by merging with technology, overcoming all limits, and ascending to the stars. In Riccardo’s words (my translation):

“Marinetti and the futurists set themselves objectives like, no less, ‘to challenge the stars’, ‘to ascend to the sky’, ‘to reconstruct the universe’, ‘to create the mechanical man with interchangeable parts’…”

Italian futurists were anti-clerical, but not anti-spiritual. On the contrary, many participated in theosophical salons and were open to paranormal phenomena, life after death, spiritualism and all that.

Mistero aereo, by Fillìa. Picture from Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll now translate some passages of “La Scienza Futurista” (1916) and comment. The manifesto begins with a strong condemnation of the science establishment that, “hypnotized by the stupid books of the countless university professors of Germany,” is “superficially precise, pettily accurate, idiotically sure of its own infallibility, without any brilliant explosion.” If the manifesto were written today, I guess the authors would use terms like “politically correct” and “culture wars,” and perhaps they would extend their dislike of Germany to other nations as well.

Here is what the Italian futurists propose as an alternative to the pedantic and politically correct science of their time:

“Instead, we exhort young people to consider scientific culture, as it is given in schools, as an indigestible food from which it is good to keep away; we affirm that the only kind of useful culture is that which an original spirit knows how to procure for himself, here and there, with a chaotic, intuitive, profoundly unruly study; we exalt the dynamic value of the notion taken directly from reality, against any form of bookish knowledge; we proclaim that, for a truly brilliant brain, culture is never too little.”

I have objections to the wording of the Italian futurist manifestos, but I tend to sympathize with their spirit. It was true in 1916, and it remains true in 2023, that the science establishment tends to be too protective of the old and too hostile to the new. I make an important difference between scientists and those I call “bureaucrats of science.” I could go on for hours, but I have elaborated elsewhere (just google my name plus “bureaucrats of science”).

Contrary to the Italian futurists, I don’t entirely condemn the science establishment, to which we owe a lot of good things. But please, establishment scientists, don’t reject new ideas before even considering them, and don’t use name calling and mobbing instead of scientific arguments.

La Scienza Futurista (1916)

The manifesto continues:

“The science of the past has always been pompously self-confident, idiotically blind to the colossal and nagging imminence of the mystery that is everywhere in our reality; the continuous enlargement of our life makes it necessary to create a futurist science that is boldly exploratory, hypersensitive, vibrant, influenced by very distant intuitions, fragmentary, contradictory, happy to discover today a truth that destroys yesterday's truth, all drenched in the unknown, all reaching out sensitively towards the emptiness in front of her.”

And here comes the startling futurist statement that the ultimate goal of science is mystery. The utility of science is not “to increase the known by decreasing the unknown.” On the contrary:

“Science cannot really have any other goal than this: to deepen the vision that men have of the world in which they live, to enrich it with new outlets towards the unknown: to scan the darkness with ever more numerous and more intense beams of light to give us an ever stronger sensation of its never ending vastness… The supreme goal of science would be, hypothetically, to make us understand nothing: to turn the face of humanity towards the total mystery.”

Here the Italian futurists fall into a contradiction: they adored machines like trains and airplanes, which were built by engineers based on scientific understanding of the parts of reality that we know.

Here again, I have objections to the wording of the manifesto but I tend to sympathize with its spirit. If I were writing these manifestos today I would make ample use of the magic word “AND” (it’s really a magic word). To me, the utility of science is to increase the known (which allows us to do more) AND the unknown (which allows us to dream more). And in fact science is, at the same time, understanding more things and suggesting that there are more things that we don’t understand yet.

For example:

“Science tends to get stuck in the study of the same areas of reality, insisting on the search for new properties of old substances and decrepit energies. Instead, we encourage brilliant minds to explore the new materials and new energies that are entering our knowledge. We draw the attention of all the audacious towards that less explored area of our reality which includes the phenomena of mediumism, psychism, dowsing, divination, telepathy… Undoubtedly we are about to grab from this side something that will enrich our lives with the unpredictable. The energies operating in this field are certainly endowed with a higher degree of intelligence than all the others.”

I elaborated on psi (mediumism, psychism, dowsing, divination, telepathy and all that) in my post “In support and praise of psi research” (2021):

I don’t intend to affirm that psi is real or defend any specific result of psi research. I just want to defend the right of scientists to do psi research, and the right of the public to be informed. I’m totally open to the possibility that humans could have no natural psi abilities (in which case, no big deal, we’ll just have to engineer technological equivalents). But the “scientific” arguments against psi that I have seen aren’t good enough to persuade me that this is the case.

So I follow and will continue to follow psi research, which at least is imaginative and interesting. This recent paper by Stuart Kauffman and Dean Radin should be taken seriously by all scientists. Kauffman is a giant, universally respected in academy but also open to highly imaginative ideas. Too big to cancel, he speaks up. See also this related interview with Kauffman by Tim Ventura.

The last passage quoted reminds me of this statement often attributed to Nikola Tesla:

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

I don’t know if Tesla really said this, but it definitely sounds like him. The idea of science studying non-physical phenomena seems odd, but I think what Tesla meant is phenomena beyond the framework of known physical science. He meant futurist science.