COGITO AND CYBERSPACE: AGAINST DIGITAL HERESY

My nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being.

Comrades,

Although the text below was written almost a quarter of a century ago, I believe it still posits relevant ideas, particularly on the topic of identity and the digital space.

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The gap that separates Gnosticism from Christianity concerns the basic question of "who is responsible for the origin of death": "If you can accept a God who coexists with death camps, schizophrenia, and AIDS, yet remains all-powerful and somehow benign, then you have faith /.../. If you know yourself as having an affinity with the alien, or stranger God, cut off from this world, then you are a Gnostic."[1] These, then, are the minimal coordinates of Gnosticism: each human being has deep in himself a divine spark which unites him with the Supreme Good; in our daily existence, we are unaware of this spark, since we are kept ignorant by being caught in the inertia of the material reality. How does such a view relate to Christianity proper? Is it that Christ had to sacrifice himself in order to pay for the sins of his father who created such an imperfect world? Perhaps, this Gnostic Divinity, the evil Creator of our material world, is the clue to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, the "vanishing mediator" repressed by both of them: the Mosaic figure of the severe God of Commandments is a fake whose mighty apparition is here to conceal the fact that we are dealing with a confused idiot who botched up the job of creation; in a displaced way, Christianity then acknowledges this fact (Christ dies in order to redeem his father in the eyes of humanity).

     Along the same lines, Cathars, the Christian heresy par excellence, posited two opposed divinities: on the one hand, the infinitely good God who, however, is strangely impotent, unable to create anything; on the other hand, the Creator of our material universe who is none other than the Devil himself (identical to the God of the Old Testament) - the visible, tangible world in its entirety is a diabolical phenomenon, a manifestation of Evil. The Devil is able to create, but is a sterile creator; this sterility is confirmed by the fact that the Devil succeeded in producing a wretched universe in which, despite all his efforts, he never contrived anything lasting. Man is thus a split creature: as an entity of flesh and blood, he is a creation of the Devil. However, the Devil was not able to create spiritual Life, so he was supposed to have asked the good God for help; in his bounty, God agreed to assist Devil, this depressingly sterile creator, by breathing a soul into the body of lifeless clay. The Devil succeeded in perverting this spiritual flame by causing the Fall, i.e. by drawing the first couple into the carnal union which consummated their position as the creatures of matter.

     Why did the Church react in such a violent way to this Gnostic narrative? Not because of the Cathars' radical Otherness (the dualist belief in the Devil as the counter-agent to the good God; the condemnation of every procreation and fornication, i.e. the disgust at Life in its cycle of generation and corruption), but because these "strange" beliefs which seemed so shocking to the Catholic orthodoxy "were precisely those that had the appearance of stemming logically from orthodox contemporary doctrine. That was why they were considered so dangerous."[2] Was the Catharist dualism not simply a consequent development of the Catholic belief in the Devil? Was the Catharist rejection of fornication also not the consequence of the Catholic notion that concupiscence is inherently "dirty," and has merely to be tolerated within the confines of marriage, so that marriage is ultimately a compromise with human weakness? In short, what the Cathars offered was the inherent transgression of the official Catholic dogma, its disavowed logical conclusion. And, perhaps, this allows us to propose a more general definition of what heresy is: in order for an ideological edifice to occupy the hegemonic place and legitimize the existing power relations, it has to compromise its founding radical message - and the ultimate "heretics" are simply those who reject this compromise, sticking to the original message. (Recall the fate of Saint Franciscus: by insisting on the vow of poverty of the true Christians, by refusing integration into the existing social edifice, he came very close to being excommunicated - he was embraced by the Church only after the necessary "rearrangements" were made, which flattened this edge that posed a threat to the existing feudal relations.)

     Heidegger's notion of Geworfenheit, of "being-thrown" into a concrete historical situation, could be of some help here. Geworfenheit is to be opposed both to the standard humanism and to the Gnostic tradition. In the humanist vision, a human being belongs to this earth, he should be fully at home on its surface, able to realize his potentials through the active, productive exchange with it - as the young Marx put it, earth is man's "anorganic body." Any notion that we do not belong to this earth, that Earth is a fallen universe, a prison for our soul striving to liberate itself from the material inertia, is dismissed as the life-denying alienation. For the Gnostic tradition, on the other hand, the human Self is not created, it is a preexisting Soul thrown into a foreign inhospitable environment. The pain of our daily lives is not the result of our sin (of Adam's Fall), but of the fundamental glitch in the structure of the material universe itself which was created by defective demons; consequently, the path of salvation does not reside in overcoming our sins, but in overcoming our ignorance, in transcending the world of material appearances by way of achieving the true Knowledge. - What both these positions share is the notion that there is a home, a "natural" place for man: either this world of the "noosphere" from which we fell into this world and for which our souls long, or Earth itself. Heidegger points the way out of this predicament: what if we effectively are "thrown" into this world, never fully at home in it, always dislocated, "out of joint," in it, and what if this dislocation is our constitutive, primordial condition, the very horizon of our being? What if there is no previous "home" out of which we were thrown into this world, what if this very dislocation grounds man's ex-static opening to the world?

     As Heidegger emphasizes in Sein und Zeit, the fact that there is no Sein without Dasein does NOT mean that, if the Dasein were to disappeared, no things would remain. Entities would continue to be, but they would not be disclosed within a horizon of meaning - there would have been no world. This is why Heidegger speaks of Dasein and not of man or subject: subject is OUTSIDE world and then relates to it, generating the pseudo-problems of the correspondence of our representations to the external world, of the world's existence, etc.; man is an entity INSIDE the world. Dasein, in contrast to both of them, is the ex-static relating to the entities within a horizon of meaning, which is in advance "thrown" into the world, in the midst of disclosed entities. However, there still remains a "naive" question: if entities are there as Real prior to Lichtung, how do the two ultimately relate? Lichtung had somehow to "explode" from the closure of mere entities - did not Schelling struggle with this ultimate problem (and fail) in his Weltalter drafts, which aimed at deploying the emergence of logos out of the proto-cosmic Real of divine drives? Are we to take the risk of endorsing the philosophical potentials of the modern physics whose results seem to point towards a gap/opening discernible already in the pre-ontlogical nature itself? Furthermore, what if THIS is the danger of technology: that the world itself, its opening, will disappear, that we'll return to the prehuman mute being of entities without Lichtung?