For a Philosophy of Hydrogen
Angelo Consoli interviews philosoper Freddy Paul Grunert
Angelo Consoli – Freddy Paul Grunert
Hydrogen, photo Tony McCullers (trakatan)
In Potsdam, former imperial city, former Nazi capital, former cold war hot spot, you can smell the past and the future intermingled in the air. In the port district of SPEICHERSTADT (literally the city of warehouses), in the context of an ambitious redevelopment project to transform a group of Renaissance-era barns into a modern multi-functional centre, an energy system based on the energy of the next thousand years, hydrogen, has been designeAC. The project is Potsdam SELPH2 (Slow Expanded Life Potsdam Hydrogen).
FREDDY PAUL GRUNET is consultant for Speicherstaddt Potsdam, he devised the Selph2 project (Slow Expanded LIfe – Hydrogen Districts, and “conceptor” of the repositioning of Potsdam as the Capital of Brandenburg, leader in the Governance of renewable energy in Germany and the capital of tolerance, concious living, eco-harmony and co-existance of all nations.
AC. SELPH2 is the first practical example of an energy project based on hydrogen and biomass. But how did a philosopher like yourself get into the energy field?
FPG. Because SELPH2 SPEICHERSTADT Potsdam is not a technical project, but a project inspired by a certain energy philosophy, based on a theory of what we do and not what energy itself is, like Jeremy Rifkin’s vision of green hydrogen. The biomass produced in abundance in the lakes and wooded areas around Potsdam will make SPEICHERSTADT self-sufficient from an energy point of view, a model which could then be extended to the rest of Potsdam and the Brandenburg region. This project has a solid philosophical basis, around which technical choices have then been developeAC. We started out from the dream of a hydrogen economy based on a new decentralised energy regime which would be safe, environmentally friendly and lastly democratic (Jeremy Rifkin’s vision), and we gradually set about turning this into reality.
The limited nature of the energy resources available to man is leading to the commercialisation of the present, with consumption taken to extremes
AC. Can you give us an example of this?
FPG. The human race is currently bound up in what I call an “obsession with the present”, because technological progress has led to the creation of a spatial/temporal envelope which has become a stifling limit for western civilisation, while at the same time representing its most dazzling export. This is all a far cry from the Kairos of Vedic liturgy, that perfect moment between instant and aion, and is the tragic downside of its theological might, which promised respite, light and a pharmacon for unhappiness, eternal life after death. Technological progress has become an instrument for the globalisation of nihilism and the confirmation of the brutal marriage between democracy and capitalism, acting as a smokescreen for excessive control and a justification for closing off access to our living space: a way to westernise the world.
Our horizons are limited to the present, plus the generation immediately before us and that which follows us. Hydrogen technology frees us from this temporal envelope because it enables us to think in terms of many more generations.
The infinite nature of hydrogen corresponds to the cosmic desire of man to reach the sun, contemplating it from an endless series of celestial Jerusalems, Hydrogencities and dream cities.
AC. This is a dream which goes back a long way. In 1781, the father of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier, discovered that “the water that burns” (as Henry Cavendish had called it a few years earlier) had energy potential that could be harnessed…
FPG. Yes, but Lavoisier was executed in 1794, and his hydrogen dream remained just that, hurriedly filed away with the advent of Adam Smith/capitalism. This heralded the beginning of a century destined to last 200 years, and to finish as it started, bogged down in the irresolvable contradiction between its ability to generate wealth and its inability to distribute it, against an industrial/cybernetic backdrop where the soul is subjected to technical scrutiny and the implosion of the ego generates post-modern and neocon trauma. In turn this was destined to be eclipsed by the conception of the European dream, a new social architecture based on the political deployment of energy, aimed at creating free individuals and original actions to assure a dream of civilisation where everyone is guaranteed the right to be both identical and alienated.
AC. Can we provide a clearer definition of what you call “the obsession of the present”?
FPG. The limited nature of the energy resources available to man is leading to the commercialisation of the present, with consumption taken to extremes. It is a void where human beings chained to a vision of conformity have granted themselves the right to lay waste to the natural world, aided by the dematerialisation of space and time in an endless process of metamorphosis which condemns them to excessive progress and constant growth, with the ever-present threat of the abyss. Detached from the responsibility of our initial contract with nature and our duty to preserve it, man has lost the ability to ration Locke’s pharmakon, and what was once a remedy has now become a poison, with war against war, religion against religion, politics against politics, cohabitation against cohabitation, faith against faith.
AC. But if the human race is so far removed from taking responsibility for its energy needs, what hope can there be that new forms of energy will restore the rapport with the city and nature that will enable the hydrogen dream to be put into practice?
FPG. This extreme lack of responsibility, which in the end goes against man’s rights and interests, leads to the oblivion of the present, while having infinite energy resources will focus human attention on higher ground, distracting it from its attachment to material goods and training it on values, be they human, cultural or philosophical. In this vision no single element of life can be separated from the rest, and everything links up once more, sometimes in a paradoxical, contradictory way, forging a network of rites, desires, travel, cohabitation, affection, tradition, awareness, abandon and fleeting moments: the stuff of human nature. The dream city thus comes into being as an aggregation of metropolitan agoras created thanks to hydrogen, and representing an entity which distributes energy and decentralises wealth. This will also lead to a dramatic improvement in human language and comprehension.
Our dreams are trapped in the hypnosis of reason, segregated from the multitude and the dream-city, where the hyphen linking dream and city becomes an insurmountable barrier, an alienating limit
AC. How can decentralised energy production influence language?
FPG. The current energy regime and the economic system which has arisen from it have led to the creation of a one-dimensional man, whose awareness revolves around the central role of the brain, leading to the atrophy of other systems of perception. Blind people, for example, develop more acute hearing. It has been proven that violinists’ tactile contact with their instruments develops a different part of the brain, and consequently a new form of sensitivity. We are not open to these “peripheral brains”. We distance ourselves from the multifaceted nature of the universe, lumping together all the different forms of perception and letting them cancel each other out instead of multiplying. Our dreams are trapped in the hypnosis of reason, segregated from the multitude and the dream-city, where the hyphen linking dream and city becomes an insurmountable barrier, an alienating limit.
AC. Can you explain the concept of peripheral brains in more detail?
FPG. It is the same attitude that determines our behaviour in the biosphere that hosts us; we see it purely as a resource to be exploited and not as an integrated system to preserve. Hydrogen lets us begin to see it in this way. The need to change point of view, from central to marginal, goes back a long way. When Plato visited Syracuse, full of hope for what he saw as the cradle of democracy, he was disappointed because he discovered that Dionysus was just a “centralising” tyrant. He returned to Athens and decided to “decentralise” the “campus” to the margins of the city, to capture the energy of marginality, in contrast to the tyrannical centrality of the Polis. But nowadays universities have been swallowed up by the Polis once more, losing the innovative spirit of the peripheral pulse. The peripheral nature of the European Union, on the other hand, keeps the energy of its cultural pulse alive, compared to the centralised tyrannies of world Polis-powers (and the peripheral nature of Potsdam’s Speicherstadt with respect to the Polis of Berlin maintains a similar vital pulse).
These are the new campuses: separate, peripheral areas, seed beds where new ideas find ideal conditions for growth, the thresholds to cross in order to develop a new awareness of distant lands which differ from our familiar surroundings, giving rise to a form of cohabitation between the new asymmetries of the world (China, the Americas, Africa) which is heterotopian rather than utopian, like the synapses of the biosphere.
AC. Heterotopia, utopia, synapses of the biosphere: I’m not sure I’m following you. Can you explain better?
FPG. Hydrogen, as a vector (namely as a means to an end, because energy is and must remain a means and not an end, as it is today, with wars being waged over oil…) enables us to revolutionise the concepts of centrality and marginality which have led to so many disasters in the past (nationalism, racism, and extremist ideas of all kinds; I am in the centre, you are marginal) in a new concept which is heterotopian, where all the various envelopes, from micron to macros, are equal. This kind of awareness can be seen in the approach of the Euro politicians who signed the Green Hydrogen Manifesto, the States that signed the Kyoto Protocol, the world water contract and energy contract. And all those good-willed people with the courage to act, working in non-governmental organisations and civil society associations, showing that they do not fear complexity.
AC. Can we therefore say that the emergence of a new awareness of the biosphere we live in is a consequence of this new bolder approach to complexity?
FPG. It has to be said that fear of complexity is comprehensible and human. Who would not feel lost when faced with “chaotic creeping”, as the English fearfully refer to it: the uncontrollable growth of big ideas when you start thinking about them. When man manages to govern complexity, dematerialising concepts, making them more accessible, and therefore governable, the gateways to dreams open up. And all the political initiatives regarding green hydrogen help us gain a more common sense vision of what some took to be an impossible dream. In other words, making hydrogen more heterotopian and less utopian, as it was considered by those critics who had a vested interest or were simply afraid, and the doom-laden nuclear lobbyists and smirking dignitaries.
AC. Smirking dignitaries?
FPG. Yes, all those dignitaries who wear a permanent smirk – politicians who hide their vested interests behind empty smiles.
AC. So does the “heterotopian” nature of hydrogen, namely its otherness and diversity, as opposed to being utopian and therefore non-existent, represent the basis for creating the dream city that inspires the Potsdam project?
FPG. The initiatives I mentioned previously have helped to inject common sense into what many saw as an impossible dream, of a thousand “heliopolis” powered by the hydrogen released by the sun. This is where hydrogen stops being utopian and starts being heterotopian. It changes from being a non-existent element to being an element that exists elsewhere. In this sense we can say that the heterotopia of hydrogen is the basis for a new vision of the human race. But it is up to man to cross that thresholAC. And for those who decide to do so, the threshold of heterotopia will reveal new Polises, freed from the refuse of the past, enriched with the sustainability and renewability of a form of energy suited to both man and the environment, in a long term dissemination of the potential of memory, optimised and boosted by the efficacy of fuel cells and green hydrogen.
When man manages to govern complexity, dematerialising concepts, making them more accessible, and therefore governable, the gateways to dreams open up
AC. But there is still a great deal of resistance to the idea that hydrogen can found a new form of peaceful coexistence between men and between men and nature, resistance which feeds on extremism and scepticism.
FPG. That is why it was important to create this dream city in Potsdam, in the old SPEICHERSTADT. This initiative lets us uncover a new semantic field which lends credibility to the categorisation of green hydrogen beyond mere utopia, and enables private individuals and institutions to come face to face with a vital, grass-roots, maieutical initiative, a “hydrogen community” which fulfils its own energy requirements in a new paradigm, disseminating sources of energy all round the planet according to the cycles of the natural world and ecosystems. A revolution which is cultural as well as energy-relateAC.
Hydrogen enables us to emerge from an economic language based on materialistic, utilitarian parameters, which though being responsible for our modern well-being, are also the cause of all the suffering in the world, which far outweighs the latter.
AC. Doesn’t this new semantic field run the risk of remaining abstract, without producing effective practical results?
FPG. This risk has been avoided so far, thanks to the chain of interconnected initiatives sparked off by Rifkin’s book. In this way the dream of green hydrogen in cities gradually becomes part of the daily semantics of parliament, and the practice of the other European institutions (think of the European Commission’s technological platform for hydrogen). Hydrogen gives us a language where life in all its manifestations can be measured in terms of quality and not quantity, beyond any spatial/temporal dimension. Hydrogen has opened up new fields of semantics which allow us to measure the quality of life no longer in terms of GDP or with necessarily reductive, economic parameters. The Potsdam Speicherstadt project represents the first practical application of this new vision of the world, closing the circle, or ellipse, as we inhabit a solar system which is not circular, but based on an elliptical motion.
AC. But if a new philosophy based on the rational use of the planet’s resources comes into being, what repercussions will there be for those huge agglomerations that we traditionally call cities?
FPG. The rational, sustainable use of renewable sources of energy (just think of the potential which lies in using biomass from agriculture or from our endless agglomerations of humanity), combined with the vectorial multiplicity of hydrogen, will prevent the uncontrolled exploitation of common resources to the benefit of the few and the detriment of all. From the fields to the cities a new, fairer social fabric will be woven, where water, energy and the environment will represent new conjugations of the right to life and other fundamental human rights such as justice, self rule and solidarity. And in this process the planet will be freed not only of its carbon dioxide, but also of the few shady global potentates who currently hold it in check. The relations between means and end will be redefined in ways that we may not be entirely aware of yet, but which sit very well with the word PEACE.
