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A response to Billy on Bob’s thought experiment, part 1 April 23, 2007

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Part one of some low-tech observations about existentialism in the post-human age. Follow the link for the script if you can’t bear watching my lips flap about completely disconnected to the words that are coming from them.

Hey Billy, I really appreciate your thoughts here and elsewhere, and thought I might contribute a few ideas. I’ve chosen this particular strand of conversation because I’m enchanted by MetaBob’s thorough success here in living up to his name.

I’m also spending my final semester writing a paper on Heideggerian metaphysics in World of Warcraft, and have had my interests in the existentialists recent reignited. I wanted to respond to your invocation of Nietzsche and add my own two bits about Heidegger in the context not just of MetaBob’s reflections on thought experiments but on the broader attempts by the atheist community here on YouTube to articulate what comes next.

Alright. I’m going to start with your eloquent summary here of existentialism as a means of using rationality to understand our thrownness and then using that understanding to bend the world towards our will without destroying all of our emotions in the process.

Under Nietzsche’s rubric, everything revolves around asserting this will upon the world, so much so that despite or maybe because of his best efforts Nietzsche is forced into madness through his own dependence on the tradition that he spent his life trying to undermine. This tradition, in a word, is metaphysics.

Heidegger questions Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the end of Western philosophy quite brilliantly, calling it an inextricable entanglement in metaphysics. However, I’m going to go in to this through his question concerning technology, partly because it is very fitting for this context, and partly because in his questioning he reveals technology to be, essentially, metaphysics. “Modern technology,” which for him meant the bomb and railroads and hydro dams, was the manifestation of this essence of technology or metaphysics in history. In the essay he calls this essence enframing, deriving it both from German (which I will make no pretense of being able to pronounce) and from the Greek, techne.

This idea of techne or enframing has been called the will to technology, and Heidegger first reveals it as the systematizing force that drives the human subject to enframe the world, to turn it from subject past object and into the “obectlessness of the standing-reserve.” This standing reserve is the stockpiling of thing into mere potential, like the hydro dam that turns the river into nothing more than energy waiting to be transformed and distributed into a thousand different homes.
In your video, Billy, you made a comment about Nietzsche’s destructive fixation on the will, and I think that Heidegger’s reflection of the other side of enframing provides a well thought out answer to these kinds of excesses. Heidegger sees for enframing a possibility that sounds nobler than reducing everything to the bruteness of the will to power.. This other possibility is that enframing is grounded in poiesis, for as Heidegger’s favourite poet, Holderlin says, “poetically man dwells upon the earth.” Grounded in this way, Heidegger claims that it is the nature of enframing to bring what is concealed into unconcealment, or into truth, and thereby “lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence.”

Unfortunately, the end of the essay is a failed coup de gras where he does attempt to ground techne in poiesis, by claiming that the Greeks did the same thing and gave to both craftsmanship and poetry but a single name. I would speculate that just as Nietzsche could not escape metaphysics, so Heidegger could not escape history, and was caught looking the wrong way when he believed that the Nazi party could “bring a concentration on the Germans’ Western historical essence.”
Which brings me back to your comment on existentialism. You mentioned “the concept of having been thrown into existence, of recognizing consciously that there is a past and a future but not being able to deal with that in any thing other than the abstract and hypothetical.”

Now then, I do think that there is enough ammunition in the writings of Nietzsche alone, let alone the grand-daddy of existentialism, Kierkegaard, to challenge this claim. I think that both of those guys, at the very least, invoke all sorts of realities that are anything but abstract and hypothetical. Kierkegaard’s whole mantra about either/or choices rather than hegelian systems, and Nietzsche’s beckoning to art and music (both, at various times also rejected by him) as a source of meaning, a noble lie – these are anything but abstract and hypothetical. And Heidegger, when faced with a decision, justified his choice not with abstract hypotheticals but in appealing to what was for him a very real phenomenon: the German people. The very nature of existence is that it is concrete and conclusive, and so our way of dealing with history must at least appear to be so as well.
However, I would like to refocus away from from the historical question of existentialism to the much more interesting question that was brought to the surface with MetaBob’s “wandering in the foothills of existentialism.” I think that we are all intellectual nomads, excluded from both existentialism and other creeds because of the radical postness of our age: post-religion, post-colonial, post-rational, post-human.

We have learned from the existentialists that we are indeed beings in time, selves that have been thrown into a finite consciousness. However, the unflagging commitment that Heidegger and Sartre and Nietzsche have all made to history and the irreducible human being has eroded, been reduced, and we have seen one belief system after another fall with it. God was already dead by the time Nietzsche got here, and rationalism was quick to take His place. It took until the middle of last century to realize that the quest to rebuild the tower of babel was going to fail again. First it was reason that would do it, then it was history, then we blew each other up and killed 6 million Jews. Derrida and Foucault and Polanyi and Marx 2.0 and Adorno and Collingwood and more came along and showed us over and over how it all fell to shit, like endless reruns of the two towers on CNN. But it’s even worse than this: like that day that was mediated to all of us through footage that looked less real than a video game, we have seen through everything. Not only do we have only rubble left to build with, but even the rubble is wearing thin, as wispy as a whim and as phantasmagoric as the reflection in the cracked sunglasses of the posthuman.

On the other side of history, all we can ask ourselves is this: how can anyone propose a solution after 6 thousand years of broken fantasies?

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