WHAT IS THE CYBORG?
1. Nietzsche insisted that man was something
that should be overcome, meaning superseded, and in his teachings, not least Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this was to be achieved by what he called
the Superman. But such a term was
derived, in no small measure, from the traditional Western notion of thinking
of the ne plus ultra of things in terms of the
supernatural, of supernature, when in point of fact
the supernatural is closer, in feminine strength, to what precedes
nature in its vegetative aspect, so that any identification of life with the
supernatural is bound to lead back towards strength and, hence, the barbarism
of Nature as we have defined it in terms of a watery predominance.
2. Certainly vegetative nature is still Nature,
but it is nevertheless what lies beyond
both the unnatural and supernatural, fiery and watery aspects of Nature as
something closer, in effect, to the subnatural,
meaning that which is deeper than the vegetative and more akin, in consequence,
to air than to earth, to the soul than to the ego, to metaphysics than to
physics, to God than to Man, to contentment than to form, to culture than to
civilization - in short, to being than to taking.
3. Nietzsche disbelieved in God, as also,
somewhat cynically, in Man, especially in his Christian manifestation, the
manifestation of civilized knowledge par excellence, and thus of that
which, hitherto, has been morally most advanced in Western civilization. But he wasn't able to see through and defeat
the Western convention of a supernatural ne plus
ultra, with its spiritual hyperbole, and so blandly conceived of the
Superman, the 'meaning of the earth', etc., who would replace Man as the
epitome of all that was noble and self-overcoming.
4. And the Superman was centred, as supernatural
things tend to be, not in truth but in strength, which is precisely the
barbarous attribute of Nature, and especially of the per se
manifestation of Nature which takes a supernatural, and therefore watery, turn
more congenial to feminine females than to masculine males, viz. to women than
to men.
5. It is as if, with the Superman, we consider
the going backwards from knowledge into strength as somehow constitutive of
progress, when, in point of fact, nothing could be more regressive from a male
standpoint than to end-up playing second fiddle, as it were, to the more
authentic strength of watery females in a fresh outbreak of barbarism, the
'fair sex' always fundamentally more barbarous and less civilized and/or more
philistine and less cultured than the male sex, for reasons already described.
6. Obviously, Nietzchean
paradoxes are the last thing we need if we are truly to progress and develop an
alternative not merely to Nature but to Man and his town and city-like town
mentality. For, in truth, the city that
is proper is no town-like patchwork of suburban and urban areas, a congeries of
villages and farms, but a more unequivocally urban context that lends itself to
an analogue with a sensible form of environmental absolutism, the absolutism in
which Truth, with a capital T, can develop and be upheld in the interests of a
cultural hegemony such as the West has never before experienced, given its
town-conditioned Christian predilection for civilized knowledge.
7. Before I discuss
such Truth, a word or two more about
8. Man, in short, is the precondition of God,
for God is that which is culturally absolutist in relation to Truth, and
ultimately God and the Cyborg are virtually synonymous,
antithetical, in every respect, to the beautiful Lie of the Cosmos, which is
the arena in which the Devil, duly hyped as God in terms of 'First Mover', has
His or, rather, Her throne, and never more so than in relation to the stellar
aspect thereof, which is arguably not only its primal but its predominating
aspect, in noumenal objectivity. Man climbs to God via the Cyborg,
for the Cyborg is, or should be, the outcome of the
earth, conceived in civilized terms, as that context of life wherein sensible
knowledge is enthroned.
9. But the Cyborg is not to be thought of in terms of robots or
robotic devices, as some people are only too keen to imagine! Rather is it to be thought of in terms of the
gradual stepping up of the interface between Man and technology to a point, or
series of points, where virtually everything that formerly served the self, the
brain stem and spinal cord, in conventional bodily terms has been superseded by
artificial and synthetic mechanisms which will enable Man to overcome the
mortality of the flesh, so to speak, and thus live if not for ever initially,
then certainly for a considerably longer period of time than would otherwise be
possible.
10. In short, Man's innate evolutionary drive
should have the effect of advancing him towards Eternity, towards a context
antithetical to the Cosmos, and more in terms of sensibility than of
sensuality, through recourse to technological stratagems and devices which
interface with him to such an extent that he ceases to be recognizably human
and becomes more-than-human, becomes godly in the Cyborg.
11. Now the Cyborg will
enable human life to survive beyond death or, rather, overcome the mortal
inevitability of death and live immortally for ever, live on a higher plane of
existence in which afterlife-type experiences and even certain in-life
experiences can be sustained artificially and synthetically for as long as
desirable, and partly to enable such Cyborg life to
avoid the fate of death and either the temporal 'eternity' in the grave of a
Christian-type afterlife for the self or, more prevalently as time goes by, the
afterlife-denying hell of cremation, as the remains of the deceased are handed
over to the raging furnace in the belief that there is no survival of death by
the self and no possibility or likelihood, in consequence, of its being
'alive', in self-consuming soulful illumination, to suffer the excruciating
agony of fiery encroachment and, ultimately, obliteration.
12. Societies based around the cathode-ray-tube
and other vacuous media owing more to a female hegemony than to a male one, may
be conditioned towards that belief, as indeed towards disbelief in the self
generally, but I believe it to be a false one; that, on the contrary, the self
continues to survive the mortality of the flesh until such time as it has
nervously consumed itself and fades into nothingness and that darkness which,
to judge from medieval eschatological paintings, some would interpret in terms
of hell, but which is really just the final cessation of afterlife experience
co-existent with ongoing decomposition, whether extensively or otherwise, of
the bodily remains.
13. They say that to inspire men towards God you
need to put the fear of the Devil into them, and it may be that what I have
said above and in previous texts, concerning crematoria, could be interpreted
in that way. Certainly I do not just
envisage the synthetic afterlife of the Cyborg as
being exclusively motivated by fear of the Devil, viz. the crematorial
philistinism and/or barbarism of secular modernity; for there would surely be
enough grounds for a more positive and self-serving attitude to develop in the
course of time or, rather, eternity.
14. But for the present, which has not yet
officially crossed the threshold between Man and Cyborg,
or the world in its civilized form and the otherworldly cultural contentment of
'Kingdom Come', mankind may need some such inducement and wake-up call to help
kick-start the engine of its evolutionary advance beyond humanism into a
society in which transcendentalism, in its sensible manifestation, is if not
the sole goal then certainly the focus of cultural and moral enlightenment, and
those who are properly of the city - in other words, the great majority of
people - witness a new dawn in which cities are not only encouraged to develop
along more unequivocally urban lines, with due structural and institutional
refinements, but can come into their religious own as the contexts most
according with a sensible environmental absolutism and therefore with the
possibility and, indeed, justification of cultural truth, of Truth with a
capital T, such that would deliver people from a lot more, eventually, than
just the hideously agonizing prospect of crematorial
annihilation.
15. But if Man is fated to rise, in knowledgeable
self-overcoming, towards the Cyborg, in
self-affirmation of Truth as the precondition of self-transcendence in Joy, of
God in Heaven, and to do so via the sort of paradoxical election which I have
customarily equated, in my writings, with Judgement, with the possibility of a
vote for religious sovereignty and the fobbing off of 'sins and/or crimes of
the world', meaning conventional political sovereignties and concomitants, onto
the Saviour and his closest followers in the event of a majority mandate for
the said sovereignty, then the ensuing context of 'Kingdom Come' would indeed
be a pluralistic one divisible between a triadic Beyond and its administrative
aside, as described in previous texts, and not a monistic or totalitarian absolutism
in which nothing but Godliness and Truth existed.
16. Not all men would be entitled to such cultural
truth, for there will also be contexts in the triadic Beyond of civilized
knowledge and generative strength, as well, with the administrative aside, as a
context, duly transmuted, of racial beauty, so that all the elements will be
acknowledged and done sensible justice to, after their various tier fashions,
together with the threefold subdivisions, two male and one female, of each
tier, as already described in previous texts.
17. Therefore even if not all progressive mankind,
all mankind that would want 'Kingdom Come', can or ever could be entitled to
godliness, for transcendental meditation on the top tier (top subsection) of
our triadic Beyond, still they would all be entitled, sooner or later, to cyborgization, so to speak, for advancement, at the various
tier or elemental levels, towards that goal of Man's overcoming in the Cyborg, and of a rise, in consequence, towards an
antithesis to the Cosmos such that will enable culture to flourish as never
before, but also, in lesser and 'bovaryized' manners
to how things would have been in the pre-Cyborg past,
civilization, barbarism, and philistinism, or knowledge, strength, and beauty
as well, albeit subordinated to and conditioned by that overriding Truth which
we have identified with genuine Godliness and the best of what 'Kingdom Come'
would have to offer.
18. Therefore pluralism even within the Cyborg phase of evolution, but a pluralism harmonized to
the lead of Truth, and therefore one which can advance, on a fourfold elemental
basis, towards the utmost stage of evolutionary sophistication in the
space-centre Omega Point(s) of a more closely-knit accommodation with the
godly, and hence Truth, than would otherwise be possible, while still
respecting, for structural purposes, the various tier entitlements of the
respective post-human components, not all of whom, as argued in previous texts,
would have had or still be having the same type of self, and therefore not one
of which could or ever should be forced into a uniformly transcendental
manifestation of life from a uniform structural base.
19. Each tier context of our projected triadic
Beyond will not only have a self peculiar to itself, to class and gender, but a
cyborg structure peculiar to itself moreover, since
the structure relevant to one type of eternity would be quite irrelevant, and
possibly harmful, to another, and a cyborg structural
absolutism is not and never could be the goal of evolution, whose cultural
contentment in the utmost manifestation of truth demands the support not only
of the relevant form of knowledge but, on the other side of the gender fence,
the relevant glory of strength and power of beauty as well.
