Man, God, and Machine

“Logic is to be conceived […] as the realm [Reich] of pure thought.  This realm is truth  as it is without veil and absolutely.  It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.” – Hegel, Science of Logic

Hegel, the most imposing prophet of modern reason, shows us that at the end of modernity’s “History” the human/personal subject and its abstract impersonal ideals are reconciled in the rise of a Reign incarnating universal enlightenment.  In the final Realm, History-as-Logic is confirmed as none other than the real exposition of God. 

Modern History is supposed to end—it does so in accordance with its own constitutional “logic”—in what Marx called, “The Realm of Freedom,” where Man—the category itself—becomes or incarnates God; not, to be sure, as a mere individual subject, but as the Realm itself: the consummate Man is the regime itself, the enlightened State, in which God’s essence, as the essence of “pure thought,” manifests itself entirely. 

Unlike past regimes, the new or last regime fulfills our deepest yearnings as human beings; in it, our ideals are finally realized.  At the End of History, it is no longer a mere personal subject who views or believes to view the world, but the world itself as objective Realm of Freedom that proves to be the true seat of all subjectivity.  In, or rather as the regime, Man is God looking back to see human subjects as the pre-history of God.  It is not enough to say that throughout History God forgets he is a man, insofar as the “rise” of God owes more to an Eternal Logic than to mere human subjects; nor is it enough to call men to see God as their own “ideal” Image, as atheistic “free thinkers” might have it. Man himself is God in the making, even as men may forget their destiny, if only by projecting it into an ideal, transcendent, a-historical God. 

The atheist objects that men transported in words have long exposed Man as a God, projecting their own will into a divine person (accordingly today we study religion to show how inventive people are).  What is meant by “God,” here?  Is God a mask that men are supposed to have used to “justify” and yet, by the same token, also repress, if only unwittingly, a Nietzschean-like Will to Power?  Does that mask stand inside or outside of a mechanical universe?  Is the God in question a ghost in the Machine, or does he really stand outside of any Machine?  Is it mechanically or is it rather providentially that God has served to mask human frailty, not to speak of his inequities?  Is there a God beyond the one men have long used to conceal their own finitude?

Hegel’s “synthesis” calls for a mechanical providence that defies any and all atheistic objections, even as Hegel’s new god is hardly compatible with the old as upheld traditionally.

Throughout Hegel’s History (our History, beyond the classical distinction between Sacred and Profane), has God—the Man of the Future—forgotten he is Man, or has Man forgotten he is God?  Does Man forget his own divinity in God?  Does God forget his own divinity (the divinity of the future) in Man?  Must Man forget God to Become God?  With Hegel, to be sure, there is no forgetting, but a “sublation” (Aufhebung): Man and God negate each other in or according to a historical logic (an Eternal Logic unfolding historically, or as History) necessarily and constantly presupposing its end, namely the Realm in which Man and God coincide.

If in the final Realm the supposed mechanisms of evolution have coalesced into freedom itself (freedom as consummate product/repository of a cosmic interplay of compulsions), then it would be a mistake to assume that modern man invented a Machine, or a technological world, as place where Man rediscovers his own divinity.  The rise of the final Realm in which (mechanical) compulsion comes of age as absolute freedom makes use of human subjects; it is not produced by them.  In the End of History, human subjectivity has converted into an “objective” reality in accordance with History’s own “logical” essence.  It is not enough, however, to state that Man becomes God in a Machine, for the Machine in which Man is God is supposed to be a “living” machine, or a life in which the supposed mechanisms of evolution, have become fully self-conscious.  Self-consciousness is not the predicate of mere human subjects, but a reality emerging through the historical unfolding of a Logic.  Bare or raw History, History without “mythical” veils, will then be Logic itself as the “dialectical” (mutual-negations-based) coming of age of a Machine that is God himself—a Machine in which all human subjectivity represents the self-expressive realization of cosmic compulsion.  In the final Realm, in other words, human subjects survive as “points of view” or mouthpieces of a divine Machine.  No longer are the mechanisms of evolution at odds with human subjectivity, since in the final Machine all mechanisms consolidate to have human subjectivity bespeak them.  Yet again, for this terminal stage of History to be reached, human subjectivity must purged of all opposition to the final Machine.  The human subject must be entirely purged of its “mythical” bonds to any divinity beyond the final Machine.  The human must cease being a poetic image of a divine origin, so that he may become a digital image of a divine end superior to or more perfect that any mere origin.  The poetic image must undergo a process of “digital eugenics” whereby the image is recast to mirror the final Machine.

Man’s “Platonic” nature objects by raising the doubt that the final Machine is the place where Man forgets the True God.  Does Man’s leap into the final Machine—into the realm of Technocracy—signal a betrayal of the absolute signifier of Man as poetic image?  Is Man’s forgetfulness of the True God that he mirrors by nature a reflection of the True God’s own forgetfulness in Man?

If the True God is the one forgetting himself in Man (where Man is the self-forgetfulness of God), he may be at once the One who recollects himself through Man; the One who sees his own image in and as Man.  While the recollection is incomplete in Man and obscured or undone in the Machine, it is complete in the cradle of memory, the source of our life of recollection, of our yearning for substantive unity, for “the thing itself,” the thing as permanent form.

Whereas God can use the image in which he forgets himself to recollect himself poetically, the machine in which Man forgets his divine roots fails to serve as reminder of those roots.  Far from serving as vehicle for a return to God, the Machine serves as stage for the mechanical-reproduction of idols, or of shadows of a distorted humanity, a humanity cut off from the True God.  In the products of the Machine, Man is confirmed as essentially godless.

The Bible is Platonic in the respect that it confirms that the “historical” logic of the Machine is one through which Man forgets God, much as Adam forgets God in Eve conceived as godless body, while Eve forgets God in Adam mistaken for a godless body.  Failing to see his divinity in Eve, Adam mistakes his partner for a godless body; Eve forgetting the presence of Adam in her, sees Adam as a machine.  The Machine is conceived as place of obscurantism.  Yet modern rationalism leads us to conceive the Machine as becoming God through Man.  Platonism objects that Man is rather the place where the Machine is mistaken for God, salvation being sought “in the machine.” 

In sum, if God recollects himself through Man, in Man God can forget himself entirely in the Machine: Man’s own divinity is lost in the Machine.  The Machine as place for the radical or hell-like loss of God—there where answers obscure their spring, their underlying questions, their life.  The Machine as Death: place where Eternal Life is lost.  Yet is Death not integral to Life?  Not to Eternal Life, or to Life Beyond Death.  Alternatively, we could say that Death is the Abyss of Eternal Life: what is beyond Death-as-Loss.  Positive Death.  Thereby we could speak of Death-in-Life as distorted echo, a shadow of Death-as-Life.  Plato’s Cave myth stands as reminder.

Now, the Bible invites us to consider that, if God forgets himself in his own Image (if Man is the place where God forgets himself), he gathers at once the Image into a Story—poetic background of bodies—pointing back to God.  Beyond modernity’s mechanical History, God’s Sacred Story weaves corrupt images into a sign/reminder of divine agency, of the agency of a God who thereby sees himself directly in Man.  The Story reminds us that the Image is not originally corrupt, but that in it God is really, “eucharistically” present.  God enters into his Image, thereby becoming personal.  The person as Incarnation of the impersonal.

Personality is a problem for Man as Man, a problem irreducible to any “historical” answer.  God as person presupposes an impersonal God.  Does the personal God forget he is an impersonal God, in Man?  Is Man the being in whom God forgets his own impersonality?  What happens in this case?  Man seeks behind the person but finds only a Machine (presupposed as final-end of “natural” mechanisms).  The Machine—biblically speaking, the Toy—as Man’s own impersonal God.  Man can behold only God’s face or persona; he can fathom only a personal God beyond whom he sees only or the Machine.  Yet the impersonality of God transpires through the divine person.  What God is for Man or personally is a Mirror in which Man discovers himself as the true person of an impersonal God.  God’s formal revelation awakens Man to the True God—beyond personality.

Man would then rely on the personal God to partake fully in the impersonal God; not in the Machine that kills personality, but in the Mind that supports and guides personally back to itself.  The impersonal fulfilling the personal; the hidden completing the manifest; the unsaid at the heart of the said—as its original motor.  Not unconscious, mechanical forces, though.  These are devoid of personality, whereas divine impersonality stands as storehouse of all personality pointing back to it.

Personality is the face of impersonality: that in which the impersonal sees itself; the person as medium for the act of intellective vision.  In the person, the impersonal acts, or returns to itself.  Destruction is merely the disappearance of the personal into its Ground.  All that clings to the person will be destroyed; all that rises into the impersonal shall be restored.  Yet again, the impersonal is not, here, a Machine.  The Machine offers a false salvation.  The leap from the personal to the mechanical is a leap away from salvation, for the Machine is the place in which the personal is destroyed, uprooted from the original impersonal God, the substantive one, as opposed to his mere conceptual skeleton.  The Machine will then be the place in which Freedom is traded for Compulsion. 

Today the Machine tells us that Man needs God to forget he is a Machine, a godless body.  The truth that is supposed to set us free entails the “Death of God”:  the “Old God” is useful, but not real.  He is the illusion allowing the un-enlightened or feeble-minded to avoid facing truth, above all the truth about Man.  True freedom would then entail reconciliation with absolute compulsion: Nietzsche’s amor fati.  Therein, destruction reigns unhampered by superstitions or religious prejudices.  The logic of the Machine triumphing in the wake of God’s Death demands unconditional embrace of strife; Man’s unconditional surrender before the godless.  The harmony or constancy (Vishnu) between creation (Brahma) and destruction (Shiva) is lost in the Machine’s logic of compulsion (demonic Mara).

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