Man’s Yearning for Eternity. Contrary to Hegel, who according to Camus, affirms that insofar as death is the common ground of man and animal, it is by accepting and even inviting death that the former differentiates himself from the latter, I maintain that it is precisely in the rejection of death … in favour of the prospect of eternal life … that man is distinguished from the beasts, since his consciousness is capable of a degree of subjectivity, in self-awareness, that transcends nature to such an extent that mere physical survival is not enough and neither, therefore, is physical death acceptable. Hegel’s philosophy of course led to State absolutism and to alternative kinds of State worship on the part of both the Right and the Left. There is little or no place for transcendence in such a philosophy, and therefore death is accepted as the legitimate province of man. But this is hardly compatible with man’s yearning for eternity through that enhanced self-awareness which is his unique distinction over the creatures of nature, including those, be it not forgotten, who are less than fully or maturely human in their clinging, subhumanly, to natural and cosmic precedents, usually in consequence of environmental conditioning especially predisposing them to sex or astrology, or something of the heathenistic kind. Now such a yearning has been granted institutional support through the Church and, most especially, in societies that one would traditionally describe as church hegemonic rather than either state hegemonic or, god forbid, state absolutist, where man, under woman, is less masculine than antimasculine and the corollary of a feminine (not antifeminine) counterpart which is capable of aspiring, according to gender, towards both divine and antidiabolic resolutions. Doubtless the overhauling of traditional church-hegemonic norms by their revolutionary successors in times to come will enable this yearning, founded on a uniquely human capacity for enhanced self-knowledge, to be granted substance of a kind that no church hitherto has been able to provide, since it must take the form of a cyborgistic support and sustain, whether individually or collectively, depending on the circumstances, for what is most essential in human life, namely the brain and/or brain stem and spinal cord of the self conceived in terms of that which accords, physiologically, with ego and soul as the principal aspects of psyche. Doubtless this supersession, by degrees, of the natural body, of the physiological not-self, by a kind of artificial one will take much time and effort, and be fraught with all manner of problems and even set-backs. But we shall not achieve longevity of a character one would associate with eternity without the replacement, gradually and methodically, of that which, issuing from nature, holds our self ransom to mortality and, inevitably, to mortal death. As creatures born of women, who are more inherently of nature, we die. As creatures engineered, in increasing degrees, by science and technology, we shall be capable of transcending death and thus of living potentially for ever, give and take a replacement here and there of an artificial limb and/or organ or a new infusion of blood plasma or a change of oxygen provision as and when circumstances demand. But I do not believe – and have never said – that such an investment in a synthetically artificial successor, no matter how piecemeal, to what nature has created for and imposed upon us should be developed for its own sake, independent of other considerations. On the contrary, it must be a means whereby the self, physiologically reducible to the brain stem and spinal cord and psychologically reducible to the ego and soul, can attain to the maxim of its self-realization without fear of death and without dependence, somatically, on nature, including human nature. For me, cyborgization, however broached, is simply the means that will enable the self to attain to its true end in eternal life on a basis that, in keeping with the global requirements of contemporary civilization, will be no less synthetically artificial than everything we would now recognize as properly contemporary and thus already effectively as much beyond man as mankind was beyond nature and nature, for that matter, beyond the cosmos. We already live, believe it or not, in the age of the cyborg, as of the mechanization of life through technological innovation and development, but we have not yet gravitated, under messianic guidance, to that stage of cyborgization which will be no robotic parallel with or alternative to man but the means whereby he can transmute into godliness and, for females, antidevilishness, in the event of accepting a divine destiny for himself via paradoxical elections for religious sovereignty in a variety of countries predisposed, at this point in time, to that possibility because of their religious traditions and readiness to accept or, in the contemporary case, re-accept, on suitably revolutionary terms, a renewal of church-hegemonic criteria in the interests of enhanced self-awareness and, ultimately, of eternal life. I have made no bones, in the past, about contending that such a life requires, in the West at any rate, a Roman Catholic predisposition, and I see no reason to revise my contention now. Unless there is a predisposition, no matter how undermined by contemporary state-hegemonic impositions deriving from Protestant secularity, to church-hegemonic criteria there can be no overhauling, democratically and paradoxically, of those criteria in the future and therefore no development of the institutional framework that would make salvation to eternal life and, for females, counter-damnation to anti-infinite death possible on the basis of an ultimate metaphysics and antimetachemistry capable of developing truth and beauty, joy and love, to speak in general terms, to their logical conclusions in a framework that was both church-hegemonic and state-subordinate. For only such a society can guarantee, contrary to Hegelian state death, that the ‘horse’, so to speak, of free psyche is put before the ‘cart’, as it were, of bound soma, and that cyborgization develops in response to, not independently of, the extents to which a religiously sovereign supra-humanity, whether divine or antidiabolic, wishes to develop a synthetically-enhanced sense of self-awareness with the aid of substances that, for humanity, could only prove unsustainable over a protracted period of time but, for their saved and/or counter-damned successors, would prove not merely sustainable but critical to the achievement of eternal life on successively more essential levels of self-realization, be that realization egoistic and visionary or, ultimately, psychoistic and unitary, requiring only the correlative enhancement of cyborgization for its long-term viability to be chemically and psychologically assured.