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A response to Billy on Bob’s thought experiment, part 2 April 23, 2007

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Part two of my response to some YouTubers on the subject of existentialism and religion. The webcam is ancient but I am making a few faltering steps towards a new way of thinking about religion. Click below for the transcript.

Hello again, Billy, MetaBob, and any others who might be interested in a little bit more YouTube philosophizing. In part one I talked about Heidegger’s concept of enframing, which he describes as our ability to reveal what was concealed through setting upon the unconcealed. In other words, this is the rational impulse that seeks to expose the mystery, to create order out of disorder, to build coherent worldviews that give us meaning. However, there are two ways that our enframing manifests itself. The first is when it challenges forth the world, exerting so much power over it that the world becomes mere stock, a standing reserve waiting to be distributed according to human whim. Heidegger saw this in the modern technology of his day which revealed rivers as hydro dams and the earth as a coal mine. The second type of enframing is grounded in poiesis, a certain type of poetic dwelling upon the earth that Heidegger examines more thoroughly in other essays. If enframing is grounded within this poetic dwelling, Heidegger sees a second, higher possibility for it that transcends the challenging revealing. Instead of turning everything into standing reserve, enframing allows man to “keep watch over the unconcealment—and with it, from the first, the concealment—of all coming to presence on this earth.”

Now, Heidegger’s words don’t really make sense without first approaching his sense of truth as an ongoing revealing, but I have this theory that the zeitgeist of our age has kind of grasped this at a really fundamental level, so I will only touch on it briefly here. To do this, however, I am going to dive into one of MetaBob’s increasingly infamous omnibuses, part 2 of his response to BlueAdept. He quotes Alan Watts on faith, and says “faith is a state of openness or trust. to have faith is to trust yourself to the water. when you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief…”

So, we have these two forms of enframing, the challenging forth revealing and this more poetic revealing that is “used for the safekeeping of the coming to presence of truth.” Heidegger’s mysterious language here, as well as Watts’ ethereal approach to faith, is trying to get at something in equal parts beautiful and maddening because of the delicate manner in which it must be approached.

The collapse of evangelical Christianity into the challenging forth revealing has been mocked extensively by the YouTube atheists. Their derision is directed at the way Christians enframe the world so that it is regulated and ordered, by a fear of divine punishment or a sense of guilt or an obligatory gratitude to this same deity who has saved the world from said punishment. This gives way to the storing up of moral acts and proper behaviours and even more insidiously, certain “righteous” modes of thinking, which are then projected onto others in a feeble attempt to assert their will. Unfortunately, not all attempts are feeble, and this storing up is itself regulated and controlled by whichever power-hungry group happens to come along. Ultimately, the Christian herself is turned into standing reserve, stored up and distributed and switched about according to the whims of the system into which she was born again.

That is the old, old story. It has been around since Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard has his own version directed against the “rampant disease” of Hegelianism. Dawkins has had his own particularly vitrolioc brand on the market for sometime now, defered rape fantasy and all. The new story, which has been told so many times that it is already the old story, is that atheism is the same thing. Consider the following pearl buried 17 minutes into the omnibus: “My big bone to pick with the atheist community is I really do feel that the vast majority of the atheists who make themselves known on youtube are still trying to drag themselves free of some kind of fundamentalist christian tradition. that they are still at war with a kind of identity, and if they really got free of it their personalities would change radically. In a sense I think they’re trying to hold on to their old christian personalities at the same time as they rebel against the nonsense.” Pardon the length, I admire Bob’s delivery just as much as Blue Adept, but getting a pullquote from the guy can be hell.

Anyway, you see the problem. Atheism is currently (and, I think, inherently) committed to the same principles that made Christianity implode. But that is old news, and can be discovered in any dis carded primer on postmodernism.

What I would like to do, and what I think, to be honest, Billy and others have already begun to do with the rise of the pastafarian movement, blessed be his noodly appendage, is to find ways of building systems of meaning while recognizing the inherent instability of such structures. Thus, pastafarians gleefully undermine themselves in a moment by, say, donning a pirate costume to fight global warming.

The FSM shares in a noble heritage of parody religions such as Discordianism, which are so ridiculous that they might actually work. Consider the fact that Bobby Henderson was talking recently about buying a yacht or at least a small trading vessel for the Pastafarian Church. Let’s say he did, or that he achieved his even bigger dream of getting an actual pirate ship. Currently, pirate ships go for about $2 million, and fund-raising of that size would require a charitable organization to keep all the money. Thus the Church is institutionalized. But the Church has already become something more than just a parody: Bryan Killian got suspended for wearing an eyepatch. Of course, of course, this is just part of the joke. What better way to prove the absurd point than to stick to your scimitars and get sent home from school? Of course, wouldn’t it be even funnier if someone got thrown in jail for preaching the Flying Spaghetti Monster? What if CapnAwesome got dragged away by security guards at some Christian campus for his prosletyzing? Funny, as long as he doesn’t get hurt?

You see my point: when does an anti-religion become a religion? I think that the answer is when it starts to take itself too seriously. But the catch is that we admire Henderson and Killian for being so serious about something so stupid. And Billy, you taking the time and effort to don pirate clothes in support of his noodliness completely changes the tone of that whole video you did. Satirists have known for a long, long time that they can get away with murder if they’re funny. But the space created by the FSM allows for more than just satire: it creates a whole new world in which creativity can take place, as seen, for example, in the 11 responses to the recent challenge to depict the battle between the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Back to Heidegger and I’m done. I believe that in the case of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, blessed be his noodles, we have a good example of enframing (or techne, metaphysics) situated within poiesis, within a playfulness that allows the joke to be appreciated by granting the existence to a totally ridiculous phenomenon. My concern, however, is that the FSM is still finally an anti-religion, not a post-religion, and suffers from the same dependence on what it critiques that MetaBob described in the youtube atheists. So, too, do the thoughts of Heidegger and Nietzsche, as Christianity did before them. So, too, has the whole western philosophical project crumbled, and with it any claims that reason is the final arbiter of the real.

To ground our ability to develop systems within a playful poesis, this Heidegger sees as the highest dignity of our nature. So use reason to shape and bend your world, by all means, but do so within a context that preserves the hiddenness of things. Remember that it’s a cosmic joke, and die laughing. Or, as Zizek would say, “assume the mistake and follow it through to the end.”

Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on these and other things. Keep making great videos, and I hope I manage to catch up to your “modern webcam technology” sometime soon.

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