We live in an era in which what we still call “rationality” has been reduced to systemic thinking. I do not mean an isolated theory or a particular discipline, but an intellectual climate that runs through cybernetics, systems theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and a large part of contemporary philosophical thought—often pleased, if not outright entranced, by these totalizing proposals. This climate rests on a basic conviction: that life, mind, and society can be fully understood as self-regulating processes, adaptive networks, and circuits of interaction whose ultimate purpose is not radical transformation but the continuity of the system itself. It is a way of thinking that trusts that everything can be explained within the horizon of immanence, where no true exteriority exists and where all alterity is reduced to information flow.
This form of technical rationality is not accidental. It arises in late modernity as a way of securing its own survival and fostering its self-expansion through devices of control, technologies of stabilization, and increasingly sophisticated models of management. In this context, academic philosophy seems to have become—often unwittingly—an instrument dedicated to sustaining the illusion of stability. From there emerges what I call the “bunker philosophy”: a philosophy produced from protected locations, from spaces where the continuity of the world still appears conceivable, where conflict is treated as a corrigible accident, and where life is thought according to the logic of equilibrium. This bunker philosophy looks at the world through a notion of functional and institutional security and therefore conceives it as a system capable of self-regulation both linguistically and operationally.
And yet, outside that bunker lives most of humanity: millions of people inhabiting territories devastated by endless wars, regions ravaged by extractivism, collapsing ecosystems, and bodies subjected to structural poverty or permanent exclusion. For these exposed lives, the world does not appear as a system that naturally tends toward continuity—nor as an order worth perpetuating—but as a constant fracture, a world whose continuity must be interrupted: that “brake on history” Benjamin spoke of. Their experience is not one of equilibrium but of those who inhabit the open exposure of the elements. And from that exposure, the bunker philosophy reveals its radical insufficiency immediately.
What I aim to show here is that contemporary systemic thinking, in all its variants, cannot think transcendence, cannot think rupture, and cannot think politics in the strong sense. Not because it lacks sophistication, but because it is built to avoid rupture, to neutralize antagonism, and to absorb any alterity into its own field of operations. The cognitive sciences, in particular, have served as a laboratory for this rationality. Mind has been translated into internal loops, feedback mechanisms, flows of information that adjust themselves to maintain the stability of the organism within a changing environment. Classical cognitivism achieved this through the computational metaphor; connectionism, through distributed patterns; predictive theories, through hierarchical inference. In all these cases, the subject is locked into a circuit that recognizes no real outside.
Enactivism emerged as a reaction to this horizon. It proposed an embodied, situated mind in interaction with the world. But in its gesture of rejection, it preserved—almost intact—the very structure it sought to overcome. Autopoiesis reintroduces Cartesian closure in corporized form; structural coupling reinstates co-determination in direct continuity with German idealism; participation substitutes representation, but at the cost of denying those substantive exteriorities that delimit its own emergent totality. Although differences exist among its proponents, the core remains unchanged: meaning always emerges inside the system, immunized against whatever might destabilize its premises. Alterity does not appear as an irruption capable of provoking the collapse of the structure but as a variation demanding dialectical subsumption or, in some cases, straightforward appropriation. Experience becomes not an encounter with what exceeds us but an internal process of coordination oriented, ultimately, toward the system’s self-affirmation.
Artificial intelligence operates within this same framework, though with even greater radicality. Its generative models learn solely from data that confirm their own statistical horizon: the world becomes a pattern, novelty becomes recombination, and substantive alterity—anything that cannot be linguistically subsumed—is reduced to noise. In short, AI does not understand poetry because it does not die, does not experience the absolute loss of a loved one, and does not anticipate the tearing of the future. In this sense, AI merely carries to the extreme what systemic philosophy formulates conceptually: there is no surprise that cannot be translated into data, no event that cannot be recomposed as an internal variation of the system. Complexity theory, for its part, extends this logic to the social realm, where conflict is conceived as a fluctuation to be rebalanced and where politics is reduced to mere management, incapable of housing the irruption of that which demands a new world.
But human experience cannot be absorbed so easily. Transcendence—one of the many names for the irruption of what we do not produce—always appears as that which the system cannot contain. It is not a religious concept in a narrow sense; it is the very structure that makes ethics, politics, and what we still call hope possible. When Christianity speaks of conversion, it is not about calibrating one’s life but about being reborn into another world. When Mahāyāna Buddhism speaks of awakening, it is not aiming at perfecting one’s coupling with the environment but at the collapse of the illusion of self and, with it, the disintegration of the walls that—under the name of our security—imprison us. When Fanon speaks of anticolonial revolution, he is not describing a system adjustment to incorporate the colonized but the destruction of the colonial world and the creation of a new subject. When Benjamin speaks of messianic interruption, he does not mean a historical variation but the paralysis of homogeneous, empty time. And when Dussel speaks of exteriority, he is not referring to a functional periphery defined by its role within the totality, but to the place from which the victim emerges as a living interpellation against the order that oppresses her and from which a new world can be born.
In all these traditions, the fundamental experience is defined not by continuity but by rupture. And in that rupture lies the possibility of a new world. Transcendence, in its deepest sense, names precisely the capacity to respond to a demand that does not originate within the system: it is the possibility of saying “no, thank you” to an order that claims to be absolute, on the basis of the irruption of a good we do not control, a justice we do not produce, a call that does not arise from within the self. This irruption demands transformation, conversion, rebirth. It demands leaving behind the order that constitutes us. It is the gesture systemic thinking cannot think, because its ontology rests on continuity and, for that very reason, remains devoid of all living poetry.
Today, more than ever, this incapacity of systemic thinking is evident. Ecological collapse, expanding wars, the global regime of inequality, generalized precarity, and spiritual erosion are not mere system malfunctions, adjustment problems, or coordination failures: they are the very evidence that the system is exhausted. And when a system is exhausted, no rationality oriented toward preserving its continuity can understand what is occurring. Politics, in these contexts, does not consist in managing the present but in crossing the threshold that separates a world that is dying from one that has not yet come into being. This is why an ethics of participation becomes simply absurd: no one can participate in a world that is falling apart. Participation is possible in stability; conversion is only possible in exposure.
To think from exposure means, then, assuming the standpoint of those who live outside the bunker. It means seeing the world not as a system but as a wound; recognizing that conflict is not a fluctuation but a real fracture; admitting that justice cannot be deduced from continuity but demands a leap. And it means understanding that philosophy cannot remain confined to describing the texture of experience but must open a space for what erupts, for what overflows, for what calls for a different world. Systemic thought—in its cognitive, technological, ethical, or political variants—expresses the rationality of those who can still inhabit stability. It is bunker philosophy: careful, delicate, self-protective. But the real world, the torn world we already inhabit, cannot be thought from there. It needs something else: a philosophy capable of listening to exteriority, of welcoming rupture, and of sustaining a hope that does not arise from adjustment but from transcendence.
References
Benjamin, W. (2018). Iluminaciones (J. Aguirre y R. Blatt, Trads.). Taurus.
Cincunegui, J. M. (2019). Miseria planificada: Derechos humanos y neoliberalismo. Dado Ediciones.
Cincunegui, J. M. (2024). Mente y política: Dialéctica y realismo desde la perspectiva de la liberación. Dado Ediciones.
Cincunegui, J. M. (2025). La vida en la historia: Más allá de la biología, la fenomenología y las ciencias cognitivas [Investigación inédita, Universitat Pompeu Fabra]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/pendiente
Di Paolo, E., Cuffari, E., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic bodies: The continuity of life and language. MIT Press.
Dussel, E. (1998). Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y la exclusión. Trotta.
Fanon, F. (2015). Los condenados de la tierra. Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Garfield, J. L. (2015). Engaging Buddhism: Why it matters to philosophy. Oxford University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
Milbank, J. (1990). Theology and social theory: Beyond secular reason. Blackwell.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. J. (1973). De máquinas y seres vivos: Autopoiesis, la organización de lo vivo. Editorial Universitaria.
Shantideva. (1997). A guide to the Bodhisattva way of life (A. B. Wallace & V. A. Wallace, Trads.). Snow Lion Publications.
Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Harvard University Press.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Harvard University Press.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life. Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind.The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Varela, F. J. (2025). Principles of biological autonomy: Annotated edition (E. Di Paolo & E. Thompson, Eds.). MIT Press.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991/2016). The embodied Mind. Cognitive science and human Experience. MIT Press.