Nikola Tesla: Between Capital, the Machine, and the Ideal

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) is among the most mythologized figures of the modern age: alternately the martyred prophet of "free energy" and the patron saint of techno-utopian fantasy. Marking the close of the three-year research project Nikola Tesla: Philosophy of Energy, Technology and Religion and its Relevance Today (ARIS J7-60133), this event sets out to recover the historical Tesla and the coherent body of thought beneath the legend, treating him not as an isolated wizard but as a thinker embedded in his age — the world of electrification and finance capitalism, of robber barons and patent wars, of imperial rivalry, world war, and the period's intense debates over science, religion and the destiny of humankind.

Over three evenings, three keynote lectures by invited Tesla scholars will trace this thought across its full range: his physics and inventions, his entanglement with capital, his philosophy of energy, his religious and monist sources, and his theory of war and the machine. The invited speakers — international Tesla scholars and specialists (to be confirmed) — together bring the philosophical, archival, and scientific-technical dimensions of Tesla's legacy into one conversation.

What gives the occasion its urgency is how directly Tesla's preoccupations still speak to our own: the promise and politics of decentralized and renewable energy, the ethics of autonomous weapons, the automation of human life, and the question of who owns and controls transformative technology. The aim is a critical reading of Tesla's thought, one that tests his vision against present-day knowledge without either idolising it or ignoring its shortcomings, so that what finally emerges is not a prophet to be worshipped but a demanding interlocutor for the twenty-first century.

Gorazd Andrejč in Tibor Hrs Pandur
 

In cooperation with The Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the Science and Research Centre Koper (ZRS Koper), as part of the project Nikola Tesla: Philosophy of Energy, Technology, and Religion and Its Relevance Today (J7-60133), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS).