Unworlding - in Dialogue with Eliade and Heidegger

As if on cue, shortly after I published my last article, Elon Musk himself demonstrated my point in a near-cartoonish manner. Advertising billboards in space. You couldn’t make it up if you tried. It sounds like the absurd scheme of a ghoulish tycoon in a sci-fi spoof, but no - this is our real world now. These are truly the exploits of a puny bug of a man. I’m reminded of a choice Nietzsche quote:

“The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.”

(As if you'd be able to see that many stars)

The guy’s name alone ought to be enough to sink him in the public eye, but no - indeed, this odious snake-oil “visionary” has amassed a sycophantic cult of reddit-dwelling neo-nerds. It is fitting indeed that today’s most rampant technophiles are adult children, inseparable from their mounds of toys, hoarding pop culture and gadgets like a sweaty dragon in his mum’s dungeon’s basement.

Last time’s topic was on the irreconcilability of traditional modes of life with technology and by extension how the encroachment of technology can eradicate the sense of place that may exist in a given area. This is as true for the sky as it is for land - what was once the great untouchable heaven, the very core of the supernatural, is now just more ad space. It’s almost poetic in its total annihilation of what poetry there is left in the world. The notion of the world as brimming with poetry is central to the work of the later Heidegger, who drew greatly on the works of German Romantic Poet Friedrich Hölderlin. This topic deserves its own post altogether, but for now, I’ll let my favourite Heidegger scholar, Richard Capobianco, make my point for me. As we are dealing with Heidegger, I’m afraid dense terminology is unavoidable. Heidegger’s term Ereignis, which means something like “coming into view”, relates to the way in which things present themselves to us in the world. An authentic encounter with Being is made impossible by the intrusions of technologisation into precisely this process of “revealing” that Heidegger describes. It’s not just me making the explicit link to tech - Heidegger was himself deeply concerned with the question of technology - so concerned, in fact, that he wrote an essay named The Question Concerning Technology concerning the question; such was his level of concern with technology. Jokes aside, here’s Capobianco on Ereignis:

“For Heidegger, though, what we encounter, what “there is” (es gibt), has the character of an “Ereignis,” a “happening” or “event” within lived experience (here he employs his signature term Ereignis for one of the first times). In other words, things “happen” to us and address us; they are “events” of showing that we appropriate in language. As he put it, “es weltet” – that is, the surrounding world “worlds”; things “world” “everywhere and always.” I suggest that with this expression “es weltet,” Heidegger was tapping into the meaning of the old verb form welten, “to world,” which, even more evidently in English, once conveyed “to furnish and fill up” and also “to come into existence.” In other words, “things” emerge and abound about us in their eventfulness. The key point is that in his reflections here, we detect that Heidegger, very early on, was animated and guided by an exceptionally vivid sense of how things are manifest to us in an “eventful” way, how they address us and even “speak” to us, as it were … what truly interested and moved Heidegger was not so much that things are made-present by us (Husserl) as that things present themselves to us.”

I would have to make this point far more subtly had Mr. Musk not given me such a perfect, near-parody illustration of it. The sky is not exactly able to “present itself” to us if its blotted out with literal fucking advertising. Could there be a more perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with our modern thinking? The sky itself has become standing reserve. The world “spoke” to us in ages past. Our world has gone quiet. When things exist and occur in their “Ereignis”, their eventfulness, as a part of the process of “worlding”, the cosmos appears to us as a living thing, and things “reveal” themselves to us. We partake in a greater process that brims with meaning and significance. 

Having intentionally eschewed the use of his insights in the last article, I am now bursting to discuss Mircea Eliade, often considered an “historian of religion”; I think this a reductive assessment of his works, and prefer to call him a philosopher. Eliade’s masterpiece, The Sacred and the Profane, is centred around the notion that traditional, that is religious man, delineates time and space into that which is sacred and that which is profane. The world is therefore structured around qualitative distinctions, places are experienced as sacred or profane in kind, and the world is imbued with meaning, based on the observance of these distinctions. As we witnessed last time, the approach of modern man to space is quite the opposite. In our rationalised, clockwork model of the universe, all space is fundamentally interchangeable - there is no inherent difference between a church and a shopping centre, only that one “lot” happens to house a stone building with a steeple and the other several acres of identicate metal oblongs. The world, and the cosmos at large has been desacralised. There is, fundamentally, no difference between advertising in orbit, and what we’ve already done; for instance, encasing the earth in a concrete net of roads. The technological retiarius ensnares the two in the same way, and throttles their discrete modes of being. It is not the organisation of the world that is at fault here, but rather that the world is organised according to no higher principle whatsoever, only along the arbitrary lines of the all-consuming machine. This is the kind of world that offers you American style suburbs in an Arabian desert. We can intuit that these places were conceived and constructed in absolute isolation from the ecological context they were placed in, by men entirely insulated from the living world. What possible meaning can be derived from such atrocities of arbitrariness?

As seen last time, our machinations are able to utterly transform the sense of a place, but this is done with the sheerly arbitrary motive of “line go up”; some fetishistic attachment to the  extension of the system. This is the vice of men like Musk (who himself is ultimately of little consequence, but makes a good punching bag), for which the world must suffer. We so flippantly obliterate worlds because we fundamentally lack a notion of the world as sacred. If the entire planet is desacralised then there can be no sacred space as opposed to profane space. All the world becomes one monotonous and profane zone, adrift at a random point in an empty cosmos. Our delineations of space are made according to material assessments and quantitative summaries of a place, and when reality is structured in this way, the various uses and features of space become utterly meaningless. I once again cite the example of the road; the road may carve a valley in half, and permanently transform the lived reality of that valley. The ancients too transformed areas in drastic ways, and altered the experience of the world, but their actions were done in the understanding of space as something non-homogeneous, knowing and intending their creations to reflect the religious meaning that they intuited in the world. The road, however, obliterates and transforms according to… well, nothing. At best it does so according to some notion of efficiency, but its treatment of space is ultimately entirely arbitrary. The valley becomes something else, but according to absolutely no qualitative notion or vision, what results is purely a disruption, without meaning. What allows us to do this so flippantly is our pre existing notion of the world as desacralised. When we actively “profane” the world, we are merely treating it as we are already convinced that it is. Contorting it to fit the model in our head. What difference does our destruction make if all places are fundamentally the same? We are left entirely unmoved, or even repulsed by the most technically impressive architectural feats of all time, when ancient man felt the real presence of the gods in a simple grove of trees. This is because the herculean means employed to erect our skyscrapers and to beam messages from satellites are all done according to a principle of absolutely nothing. Nothing but a gluttonous black hole, growing through the consumption of endless matter.

Ancient religion is something that arises organically, and stratifies the world into sacred and profane space in a way which reflects the “world” of its adherents (this is where Heidegger and Eliade align). In delineating that which is “sacred”, homo religiosus organises reality concentrically around his specific place in the universe, or his “holy land”. In the Mappa Mundi, mediæval man places Jerusalem at the very centre of the world; the sacred pillar around which all other space is measured. As such, the world is imbued with meaning based around its relation to this centre. Eliade notes how the ethnonym of numerous groups of people stems etymologically from their word for “the people”. It is this tendency which colours his conception of religion; religion “founds the world” around a specific place. Eliade notes that:

“Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent with his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralysed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion.”

The world which has no distinction between sacred and profane space is a chaotic world of absolute subjectivity. If the sun is just “a ball of gas and plasma seven squidgillion kilomofarts away”, then its meaning is entirely up to whoever perceives it, and likewise if the sky is just an empty canvas to project Uber Eats logos onto, then what objective truth can we possibly hope to discern from it? Reality is structured in a given way. The sky is above you, the earth below and you need to eat to live. These absolutes, these limitations are what gives meaning to life. When space is viewed as quantitatively equivalent, the room for sacred truths evaporates. There’s a kind of paradox to all this, that when man “organises” the world in straight lines, and seems to make things so tidy, things become more chaotic than ever before. All space today is treated as equivalent, and what once gave structure and meaning to life has been abolished. We are left observing this planet as a disembodied subject, to whom the world reveals nothing. Heidegger’s world has been unworlded; when encountering a thing or a place, we do not experience the “event” of disclosure (Ereignis), because we know, or think we know, the object in its entirety. Welten, as discussed by Capobianco earlier, is crucially a verb. This concept of experience holds that authentic being in the world is an activity, a process. Our more modern view of things would describe the world as a set of rigid nouns - Greek and Latin derived nouns, the sterile stuff of catalogues and research papers; not earthy, autochthonous Germanic words like world itself, much less as an organic, living process of being (another Germanic word - note the difference in quality between it and its Latinate counterpart, existence (once again - fodder for another post)).

Our obsessive “ordering” of the world, and attempt to shine a light through every surface to reveal its “true” nature has left us blind to the living reality of worlding. I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s allegorical novel The Pilgrim’s Regress (a play on John Bunyan’s the Pilgrim’s Progress). In the novel, the protagonist, John, is captured by a giant named the Spirit of the Age. The spirit’s gaze turns everything transparent, and when he looks at John, his entrails and insides are revealed to everyone, including himself, and he is convinced that this base material is “all he is”; his true nature. Our ideology would have us believe that this is so - that we are nothing but a collection of profane guts and biomass, and that the world is itself just minerals and vegetation, but John realises the falsity of the giant. His jailor says:

“Our relations with the cow are not delicate–as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.”

At which point John realises that the spirit and his cult of despair are all talking bollocks:

“You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.’

“And pray, what difference is there except by custom?”

“Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food?”

“So Nature is a person, then, with purposes and consciousness,” said the jailor with a sneer. “In fact, a Landlady (play on Mother Nature. In the book, God is named the Landlord). No doubt it comforts you to imagine you can believe that sort of thing”; and he turned to leave the prison with his nose in the air.

“I know nothing about that,” shouted John after him. “I am talking of what happens. Milk does feed calves and dung does not.”

John realises that there are fundamental qualitative differences between things, and that it is fallacious to reduce everything to equivalent materiality. The giant can pretend that through making things transparent he is “revealing their true properties”, but in fact, he and his followers are merely prescribing themselves a delusion. They, and the scientistic mindset along with them, are imposing an external model onto reality, and missing the lived “world”, as Heidegger saw it. Things cannot “reveal themselves to us”, for as long as we persist with a mindset that wishes to unclothe reality and collapse it to its dirt and fluids. John, away from his atheistic age, starts to experience the objective world that is founded on the given, on the reality that dung and milk are different things. Likewise, homo religiosus understands that there are “dung places” and “milk places”. Sacred ground is unlike profane ground, just as the earth is unlike the sky. Man can perceive from his objective conditions that there is a structure and an ordered meaning to the cosmos, it is only when he is cut off from his natural proximity to the conditions and limitations of existence that he starts to view the world in the fallen way that we do today.

Have you ever even seen the Milky Way? I haven’t. We are unable to live the authentic encounter of man with the heavens, because our lights have blotted out the stars. In our “enlightenment” (pun intended) we have become blind. That wild and untamed world of myriad and particular forms, the plethora of Being, of worlds that once existed, has subsided to a sterile, levelled plain, where everywhere can be anywhere, and no one knows, or has any way of knowing where they are. The sad irony of today is that we derive chaos out of “order”, where we once enjoyed order out of a kind of beautiful chaos.

Eliade offers fascinating insights into this as well. It’s commonplace at this point to speak of modernity as Kaliyuga, the dark age of vice and sin, and in general, eschatological accounts of radical decline are very popular ways to characterise our current world, among antimoderns. These are found also in primordial religions. There is a notion common to homo religiosus that the gods are the forces of order, in opposition against those of chaos, and that the end of the world is the triumph of chaos over order, bringing about total destruction. Of course, the golden age, Satyayuga comes after the purification of the world in absolute destruction. In the Hindu case, this is performed by Kalki, tenth avatar of Vishnu, and in the ancient Mesopotamian account, the god Marduk slew Tiamat the serpent, embodiment of chaos and the encircling waters of the world (note the similarities to Jǫrmungandr), who destroys the world at the end of time.

“On the last day of the year the universe was dissolved in the primordial waters. The marine monster Tiamat - symbol of darkness, of the formless, the non-manifested - revived and once again threatened. The world that had existed for a whole year really disappeared. Since Tiamat was again present, the cosmos was annulled; and Marduk was obliged to create it once again, after having once again conquered Tiamat.”

It is not incidental that the destruction of the world is envisioned as an embodiment of chaos, of water, that erodes and dissolves. As the sacred has fled our world we are left with a chaotic assembly of resources and goods and plots of land. In endeavouring to understand we have left ourselves more confused and lost than men have ever been. The world has been undone. 

Tiamat is the chaotic, the unmanifested, the formless. As we have fled further from an organic life, in touch with truth and nature, the formative pressures that once acted upon us have relented. We are now able to perform radically arbitrary actions, in a way unknown to our ancestors - what results is the formless, the unmanifested, the false and the untrue: Tiamat. But there is ultimate hope - in Marduk, in Kalki, in the forces of order. The fact is; an artificial lifestyle sustained on obscene levels of abundance is ecologically impossible. We are through the looking glass, in a momentary lapse of limitation, but those limitations are nature itself. Another blog post, or even a book, is needed to discuss this at length. For now, I will conclude by saying that when this age passes, when man (provided he survives…) is once again viscerally in contact with the realities of nature, when the world is once again free to “world”, then he will finally be able to perceive the light of heaven once again, and live in that sense of awe and wonder that was once inherent to life in this world.