The New Theology. Lecture №6 Phenomenology of Freedom. Society as Unfreedom.

Lecture №6 Phenomenology of freedom. Society as Unfreedom. Geydar Dzhemal.

The previous lecture gave a certain panorama of society as a global negative force that opposes human. Human, according to our vision, our perspective, occupies a central position in the nature of things, but this position is usurped by society. We talked about the fact that society, as soon as it receives minimal emancipation from the natural environment due to certain factors — fire, tools, etc., brought by a cultural hero, as soon as society gets the opportunity to resist natural entropy, it immediately begins to conceive of itself as total everything at the expense of the individual person. In other words, it goes towards eventually becoming total everything, taking the place of human himself, taking the place of God, ultimately taking the place of nature, uniting these three hypostases in itself and assuming for itself a central place in the nature of things. Central place in the universe. Society comprehends itself through its elite, through its clerical caste, which directs and organizes it, comprehends itself initially as a collective representation of the Great Being, connecting heaven and earth, and elevates low chthonic energies upwards, and lowers subtle energies downwards. Society is its collective tracing paper, microcosm, multiple planar image of the “Great Human”. But at a certain stage, society emancipates itself from this idea and begins to consider itself as a total self-sufficient value in itself. Many thinkers of the 20th century experienced those aspects that we are talking about as a challenge and as a burden, without generalizing and globalizing them in representing society as a total evil. They concentrated on various aspects of society, which seemed to them a mechanistic alienation, a freezing of some of the essential forces of human. Sartre and Heidegger can be named among such thinkers in the 20th century. They paid attention (each in their own way) to the particular aspects of society as some kind of total evil. Heidegger focused on such an aspect as the technogenicity of civilization. Technique was considered by him as a form of alienation, as a tool for the evolution of human in his awareness of himself and history, and the world, and evolution from the essential to the inessential. According to Heidegger, a human is constantly sliding from the essential, which he perceived before, to the peripheral, to the husk, to the non-essential, in pursuit of more and more non-essential. And technogenicity is the doom that organizes this transition from the essential to the non-essential. But technogenicity and technical civilization are just one of the dimensions, one of the aspects of society and, in our opinion, far from being the most important. As we pointed out at the very beginning, society becomes evil and claims to take the place of human as an individual existence, to take a central place in the world, to replace him, to identify with himself. This happens long before the emergence of the technogenic factor — from the moment when, at the very first stage, society takes the first step towards emancipation from direct dependence on the natural environment. From this first step begins its transformation into a factor of unfreedom.

Here we have pointed to the very first key formulation: society as a fundamental lack of freedom. At the previous, fifth, lecture, we talked about the fact that society is the embodiment of Doom, as if the second contour of Doom, with which a human already included in society deals. He actually ceases to be a hero, because a human who is included in society, a human who is its integral part, its element, is no longer a hero. As we remember, the scale of the ancient tragedy was that the individual, the heroic individual, the heroic personality — Hercules, Achilles — opposes pure Being, pure organized Cosmos as Doom in its original meaning, he rebels against the first contour of Doom. What is the first circuit of Doom? This is entropy, the principle that was expressed by Descartes: the effect is always less than the cause. This waning, this cooling of reality — not just in the physical sense that “the manifested Universe and the stars are cooling down” — this is the cooling of reality as such. And this means that the hero, who opposes this cooling of reality, the striving of Something for Nothing, experiences, in Heidegger’s language, “Being-towards-death”, that is, he stands as a certain person in Being, which is directed towards the end, but he challenges this end. This challenge is hopeless, because the particular cannot overcome the universal. The universal will suffocate him. And realizing this, he nevertheless goes to the heroic challenge of a doomed defeat. But this consciousness of doom in the case of refusal to surrender is what constitutes the pathos of the tragedy and the position of the hero. However, the bottom line is that society in the time of Achilles, in the time of Troy, although it had already emancipated to some extent from the Cosmos and had already taken the first step towards a certain independence from the environment, was still far from the society that we know today. The difference between that society and the society we know is expressed in the word “archaic”. Society was archaic when it did not prevent the individual from being a lonely hero, opposing the light of the stars and the challenge of entropy. And it becomes post-archaic when it replaces the horizon of the starry sky for a human, when it itself becomes a second Cosmos for him.

Society fights entropy instead of a hero, because the purpose of society is to resist diminution and to be a kind of constant raising the stakes all the time and increasing the scale of its separation from the operation of physical laws. As it does so, it turns into the second circuit of Doom, which goes in the opposite direction: the oncoming arrow spins in the opposite direction. But society destroys in exactly the same way as it destroys the cosmos, as entropy destroys, as cooling destroys, and to no lesser extent, and precisely through its pronounced “reverse”. Increasing its potential for independence, it represents a kind of totality, a kind of second cosmos, born instead of the first. This is an anthropogenic cosmos, which destroys human in the same way, usurps his central place in the same way. We said that we would later develop the theme more precisely, in what way identity is a direct matter and a direct responsibility of the public consciousness. The interpretation of identity, the will to identity is a direct function, a direct vector of what is called social consciousness. But first, we must still say something about the basic specifics of this social consciousness, because society is a horizontal reflection, a horizontal plane dimension of what is a kind of fundamental constant inherent in what we called the absolute object in the first lectures. This constant is continuity as a fundamental feature of the objective and the objective. Continuity is the fundamental characteristic of external Being, opposed to perception, opposed to sight, opposed to evidence.

This continuity is in fact a generally intuitive and directly graspable characteristic of substance, which Descartes described as extension. But long before him, Thales of Miletus intuited this continuity, saying that “everything is water.” Pointing to the nature of water as a homogeneous, flexible, filling everything, passing into all wells, into all cracks essence, Thales had in mind the property of the object, which some other thinkers characterized as “the absence of emptiness in the external.” For example, there is the Democritanian idea that “being consists of atoms surrounded by emptiness.” And there is a much more common idea that emptiness is an illusion, that emptiness does not exist, that everything is occupied by continuous real existence in various forms, which can sometimes be confused with emptiness, but even in the stellar vacuum there is actually an ether that fills it , that is, there is no discontinuity in the manifested world. Strange as it may seem, this idea of a continuity that triumphs and that takes precedence is expressed even in such a traditionalist metaphysician as Guénon. He, of course, provides her with a completely different argumentation (not in the same way as Thales and Democritus — “on the fingers”). Guénon says that in the manifested world there can be no emptiness, because it is transcendent, it does not belong to the phenomenology of phenomena. One way or another, he explains that where it seems to us that there is a void (that is, all elements are absent: fire, air, water, earth), there nevertheless exists ether as the quintessence of all four elements. All this is some form of description of that intuition of continuity which constitutes the opposing cogito ergo sum extension. And if a mental point, a mental substance, a certain solitary witness of Descartes, is the criterion of subjective existence, then the extension that opposes it is a hostile force, a hostile element. It is hostile precisely because it is continuous. It stretches from here and there — but even where it stretches, in the infinite far away, it remains the same as here. It is the Itself equal to itself. What is the fundamental question of philosophy, according to Marx? This is the problem of confrontation between spirit and matter: what comes first? In the context of continuity, it is solved very simply: in fact, spirit and matter are the virtual poles of this continuity.

It is a continuity equal to itself. It has a virtual pole or projection in the form of matter or a rough inert inert cold perspective, or, one might say, chaos, a formless outer night. Another virtual pole that opposes this is the spirit: this is order, it is subtle, thin. But this is also a virtual pole. Continuity has a dynamic bifurcation into chaos and order, darkness and light, which, however, are essentially one and the same. They can transform into each other. We can gradually rise from the night to the light — and these will be transitions and shades of light. It doesn’t matter here: whether the darkness is rarefied or the light drives out the darkness, whether the light thickens and becomes brighter — all the same it is one substance in its dialectical dynamics, a monistic substance. Where there is a spirit, order, manifestation of the subtle, we see certain social forces, a project, there we see a super-elite. Where there is matter, where there is inertia, where there is formlessness, there is an atomic destitute clay humanity. For society is nothing but a horizontal projection of continuity. But as a horizontal projection, there is not just continuity in general — it is continuity. What is a society that has replaced human, nature and God? It is a society that exists in the past, present and future. Moreover, this is a society that confidently asserts itself in the past, present and future as the Uncontested It. Here we must return to the topic we touched upon in the previous lecture. We talked about the fact that within society there is a core of a clerical caste, a super-elite, whose goal and tasks are, first of all, to preserve continuity, to ensure an indestructible, uncontested, unvaried future. If you remember, we described a situation in which a society is like an ark, or rather, it turns from a cup into an ark. At first it is static and collects tribute for its existence from its participants, from subordinate layers, transfers it to some other plane, paying for its existence, resisting entropy. Society constantly pays tribute to this entropy with the energy of its members, with a certain essential force, with certain vital juices of its members. But then, at the level that society has, archaic at the beginning, this energy becomes insufficient — some kind of modernization is needed. It becomes necessary for it to increase the human potential in order to collect much more energy from all participants, because each step forward in time costs more and more — and, finally, this is a society of a regularly sailing boat: first it is a standing vase, then it is a sailing boat, a motorboat, then it’s a scooter that rushes at breakneck speed — and you need to pay more and more for each step taken, for each meter of advance!

And the organization of collecting these juices, squeezing these juices out of the human environment and transferring their energy to the Cosmos is carried out by the elite, which associates itself with the whole society, with that archetype of the “Great Human”, which redirects energies from below upwards, simultaneously gaining the right to the future. And from the point of view of the elite, the future as a category is not something that does not exist. From the point of view of the elite, the future is the absence of options, the absence of alternatives, it is absolutely guaranteed security and protection, which is connected with the fact that the past and the present are connected precisely in it, in the elite. From the position of transferring the continuity that reigns in the objective world to the continuity that is given in society, the past has the character of the spirit, that is, it is a kind of ideal spirit. The present is matter, which is fertilized by this ideal spirit and subjugated. The future is also a spirit, but a spirit that must materialize. And it is the elite who owns the keys to this triangle, it is the archetypal model of the ideal spirit, which is connected with the past, is embodied in the present and should give invariance and absolute predictability of the future. And here, pay attention, how the problem between the archaic concepts of such an involuting society, a society that descends from the Golden Age, is removed. Here, the contradiction between the traditionalist vision is removed, according to which “everything was good before, and then it gets worse, worse, worse”, and the concept of a “progressive” society, that is, the modernist concept of progress (and according to it, society used to be semi-wild, weak, then due to development it gains strength, becomes more self-sufficient and etc.).

In this context, there is absolutely no such contradiction. These are invariants of the same thing. In fact, at some point, the cult of ancestors becomes a guarantee of the cult of descendants. The cult of ancestors and the cult of descendants merge into a single whole. And the elite, which is a bridge between the past and the future, guarantees This Total not only in the object world, but also in the world of accomplishment, in the world of action, in the world of historical development. In fact, the ideal projection of the elite worldview is the absence of history as a platform for the emergence and playing of alternatives. It is very interesting to note here that in the public consciousness, which is controlled and shaped by the elite, it is precisely the alternative and the lack of it that are associated with the problem of freedom. Recall that society is a fundamental lack of freedom, which consists precisely in the fact that in the global social fact the will to liquidate, remove, abolish alternativeness is given. Alternativeness is always associated with an individual position, with personal Being, personal consciousness, with personal “thrown into the world”, because it is in this individual “thrown in” that there is a phenomenon of confrontation, opposition, and ultimately there is a phenomenon of rupture in a homogeneous tissue. For this individual “thrownness” is a certain point, a certain grain of sand, which tears the homogeneous fabric. It is natural that at this level there arises the most severe opposition between this point as a self-sufficient and individual factor and society.

What is freedom really? Until now, we have been talking about society and to a large extent reproduced the theme of the last lecture that society is such an “amber” in which a human is captured like a fly, moreover, in which a human is exterminated. What is freedom? In the 20th century, perhaps the most interesting Western thinker who spoke about freedom, wrote and explored freedom, was Sartre. For him, freedom was a deeply operational, fundamental argument. And he understood it in the most theological way, which will perhaps surprise historians of philosophy, who know that Sartre was formally an atheist. Sartre believed that freedom begins with the phenomenon of human consciousness, which is Being-in-itself. In this Being-in-itself, the object ends, in which absolute non-existence as existence is revealed. This terminology is extremely close to our understanding of theological terminology, theological vision. In Sartre’s view, the objective world, phenomenological reality was limited to this Being-all, this freedom opposing Being and object, which was simultaneously consciousness, and at the same time this consciousness as freedom was nothing but a a precondition for action. Why a precondition for action? Because in this consciousness, which opposed the object, there was that uncertainty in which the possibility of an alternative action arose, leading to the emergence of an alternative future, to the denial and rejection of the present. According to Sartre, consciousness as freedom is nothing but the opposition to the present. More specifically and more precisely: opposition to the given. Sartre’s idea of freedom is a direct fact of existential confrontation.

Interestingly, in this way intention as the will to alternative is something much more superior, something much more valuable than objectively given. That is, an action that proceeds from opposition to this action, leading to an alternative, is obviously higher than the status quo, obviously higher than the present: a revolutionary project, which is born from freedom, from the will to an alternative, infinitely surpasses the passive external Being, which is given and presented thrown into the human world. Thus, Sartre reaches the theological level of understanding the religious background of the revolution. Although he called it religious, he has moments in which he very sharply approaches precisely theological awareness of his position. Thus, in one place Sartre writes that the absence of God is infinitely more divine than God. The absence of God is not a closure, on the contrary, it is an opening of the infinite, where behind atheistic argument there is a transition to a certain breakthrough into metadualism and into a new reformatting, into a new reinterpretation of the theological divine taste, which rejects the simple, direct Platonic ontologism. But the last conclusions and the last words of Sartre were not uttered. Nevertheless, this gave him a certain pathos and a certain social political determination to act as a defender and as a protector of the carriers of the very action that he justified, made it super value: in particular, he acted as a defender of the RAF, the Red Brigades, as a defender of all those young people who used violence to change the social status quo. His position was unique even then, and seems completely unthinkable today, but nevertheless it is a very deep, consistent and natural position, the position of a human who came very close to the discovery of political theology. By the way, it is no coincidence that his friend was Ali Shariati, a Shia and an ideologist of the Islamic revolution in Iran along with Khomeini, an “alternative” ideologist. Sartre borrowed a lot in his style, in his intuition, in his paradoxical thinking and in his pathos of counterontological freedom, fundamental freedom associated with the phenomenon of human consciousness. Society as unfreedom is also a systematized consciousness — the consciousness of unfreedom. This is the consciousness of unfreedom as “wisdom”, while in the individual consciousness there is a challenge, there is a will for an alternative, there is an experience of the status quo of the present as a burden, there is a consciousness that you can take an action that will lead to the generation of a completely different world, another space, another value interpretation.

By the way, in this Sartrean definition we see that he comes very close to the Koranic interpretation of freedom, because in fact the theological projection of what is given in Revelation is things that are very deeply connected with the defense of freedom, moreover, with the defense of freedom, going against the fundamental instincts of the collective, society, the masses, the human factor in general. Many people believe that Islam and religions in general are connected with the doctrine of predestination, fate, “what is written” — Gesmet, doom, kadar, etc. Not only people who are outside of religious discourse, but very many of those Those who consider themselves believers and are inside this discourse, understand the religious teaching about the phenomenological world, about the passage of time in such a deterministic way. Hard determinism.

They believe that the alternativeness of the world of phenomena challenges the freedom of the Creator, that is, if the world of phenomena is alternative, if instead of one there can be something else, instead of one event, perhaps some other can be considered, then in this way we belittle the Creator, who as if it becomes powerless and unnecessary against the background of this multivariance and polyphony of the created world. It’s really just bad theology and bad thinking. A typical mistake of people who did not bother to delve into what they were told in sacred texts. The fact is that qadar, which is usually understood as the predestination and rigid determinism of phenomena, in fact, does not speak of anything else but the power of the Absolute Subject over any thing, that is, its independence and its multivariance in the ability to define and redefine both any thing and its combinations. Kadar is the potentiality of the Subject, who can interpret a dead object as a “Rorschach stain” in an endless polyphonic way, in many ways, he does not depend on the internal logic of this thing. That’s what qadar means. This is not a causal series, this is the freedom, as it were, to reassign any thing in its phenomenological presentation. Therefore, qadar leaves a huge field for freedom, which is concretely expressed in the doctrine of intention. From the point of view of monotheism, the inner world of a person manifests itself in a focused, crystallized way in intention. Suppose a person cannot change the course of things: for example, he is locked in a pressure chamber or locked in a galvanized thing in the form of a terrible punishment cell with powerful locks, his hands are bare, he cannot get out, he cannot escape — this is a predetermined situation. But at least he may have the intention of getting out of there. This intention to exit is absolutely not crossed out and is not canceled by the situation in which a human is physically located, by some kind of fatal stiffness. It is surprising that we find the doctrine of intention, that is, the will to act, motivated by freedom, in Sartre. We find that Sartre in one of the places of his discourse comes close to the Koranic doctrine, which fundamentally, at the sacral level, links consciousness and freedom.

Consciousness, freedom and will are three fundamental points. Intellectual will as the assumption of what a human projects and what he aspires to. This expresses just the primary freedom, which we must define in the future. We said that in an archaic society the hero can actually still look at the stars and challenge the sky. And a society that has stepped from the archaic into a certain independence from the environment and becomes everything, replacing a human, environment, nature and God, no longer allows a hero to be a hero. At one time, we pictured society as a kind of wheel, as a kind of arc on which a cultural hero is crucified and sacrificed to emancipation. And every society is nothing but this crucifixion of the original archetypal hero. All people are individually immersed in the fact of the crucifixion of the hero, in the fact of his captivity. Society lives by exploiting the fire of Prometheus, which he stole from Olympus, but he himself is chained to a rock. This fire and Prometheus’ chained to the rock together as a single fact. Fire as emancipation from the cold and from the environment, and Prometheus’s chained as crucifixion and sacrifice of this hero in this act are one and the same. This is a fundamental social fact. Within it there is a certain clerical priestly core, which is the permanent Caiaphas, who always says: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” The doctrine of unfreedom is the fundamental “wisdom” of these people, or rather, of the priestly caste. Because this is the doctrine of non-alternativeness. Surprisingly, Sartre said that a human can lose his freedom when he ceases to be aware of his ability to change something, when he becomes a thing, more precisely, when he considers himself a thing, unable to act, unable to change anything. We all know the philistine saying that none of us can change anything: “One body is nobody”. This consciousness of oneself as a thing woven into the total deterministic flow of things, the conformist-possessive consciousness is the ultimate fall into the mine of unfreedom.

But it is surprising that the philistine fall to the bottom of this mine coincides with the highest “wisdom” of the Confucian, Taoist, any priestly clerical type. It is a consciousness of non-alternativeness, non-variability, which can also be interpreted as the equivalence of all options, as the invalidity of the alternative and the deliberate withdrawal of any alternative. This can be expressed in this position: what is the point of fighting against the system, when what will replace it will be no better than the current system? Therefore, from the very beginning, changing one system to another is pointless, stupid. This is the “wisdom”. “Wisdom” that rejects alternativism. “Wisdom” denying action, which is the essence of the highest social consciousness. At the same time, both the higher and the banal, because in the public consciousness there is practically no difference between the top and the bottom. These conditional poles there are converged and identified. But nevertheless, there is also a class of heroes in this space who, of course, are no longer opposed to the stars and not to the cosmic principle of entropy. They oppose society as such. Someone was defending Sartre. Sartre defended young people who opposed society and were bearers of military spirit, military virtue, but not in the form of a caste of kshatriyas, which modern society ate, plagued, chewed, but post-Kshatriyas warriors. This is a space of lonely heroes. The space of people who, by their type, accept their marginalization, their deprivation, “disinheritance”, their central position in society as an instrument of the struggle for freedom and for the return of their centrality. In the adventure novel by Raphael Sabatini “Knight of the Tavern”, the hero — an adventurer, a hired captain — after twelve years of slavery and rowing in the galleys of Algerian pirates returns home, to his homeland, and during the adventures he is locked in prison. The dungeon is taken by a lattice, which is cemented into a powerful stone, granite. And at some point, when at the hour of X he needs to be released, he blows up this grating and pulls it out with the same movement with which he rowed the slave galleys for twelve years. The slavery movement has become a liberation movement. This is an amazing dialectic. It is a dialectic that indicates that in some strange way human is provided with the providential tools to resist infinite continuity, infinite continuity, which seems to be the same challenge; as in the Nordic sagas, Thor is offered to drink a glass connected to the sea: no matter how much he drinks, the level does not go down. Or lift a stone that is the earth itself: no matter how hard Thor strains, he can’t lift it. These are the challenges before which the Olympians, heroes, and gods of the Nordic sagas are powerless. And there are providential tools that are given to people, but they refuse to challenge and really lift these “endless loads” and drink these “endless seas”. These are the lonely heroes. There is a strange narrative by Stephen King, a largely misunderstood author whom I consider to be one of the most profound and subtle writers of our time. He has a seven-volume epic, The Dark Tower. In this “Dark Tower” there is a story about an archer who is a lone hero. This is the last archer. The last of its kind — after the world has changed and shifted. He confronts the clerical element in the face of Martin, who is actually Mervyn’s servant, and in the first volume he pursues the servant of this Martin, also a sorcerer and wizard, half-human or super-human, or “man in black”. Obviously this is a clerical caste, this is a kind of strange elite, a magical elite, and it is in this narrative, in this perspective of Stephen King, that it is associated with the fall, with the decline, with the shift of the world, which it is constantly said that the world has moved, emptied, fallen into decay, transformed. But, oddly enough, what is responsible for this degradation is precisely what should embody traditional values and stability — namely, the priestly caste: sorcerers and wizards. And so a lone archer pursues this clerical caste, fights it to get on the axis of the worlds, on this Dark Tower, knock out the Beast from there and take control of it. This is an amazing narrative, which is largely a romantic, fantasy-epic paradigm of a sufficiently deep and sharp narrative, a sufficiently deep vision. Because the class of lone heroes is precisely the material from which the parties of professional revolutionaries are made, it is the material from which groups of people of direct action are formed, the action that is above the status quo, which ontologically surpasses the existence given around us. Where does freedom come from? We should bear in mind that if a human was not really free, then society would be hysterical, because it parasitizes a human, makes him unfree, devours his energy potential. We said that people, the lower classes, are being weaned of vital juices, which the elite transfers, transfers to a certain space, to another dimension, in order to pay for the survival of society at any given moment and the future of this society. The future must always be paid for. Where does this energy come from? After all, we are not talking about muscular energy, although muscular energy is also alienated, psychic energy is alienated. But they are only manifestations of a more fundamental, more essential energy. If it were only a matter of muscular or psychic or mental energy, they would not be renewed. Over-exploitation of an animal that does not have a special human resource leads to its rapid death. But human is reproduced and reproduced. And human walks, sleeps, rises in the morning, walks, shift till morning — the Dickensian conditions of the working class in England. If we read not Dickens, but Engels’ famous work On the Situation of the Working Class in England, I think this is comparable to the stories of Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn about the Gulag; and this is still a question: where was it easier to exist? Class existence is not when you know that the criminal regime has arrested you and thrown you into the Gulag, and you can ideologically resist there or think that you are innocent. But here people are doomed to class: they do not have an option at all that something else may be.

They know that this hard cattle existence — it’s like an order of things. It is inside and outside, and inside no less than outside. It’s irreversible. If you imagine it, then here it is — hell, and yet human recovers, reproduces. Why? At the expense of what? No animal can withstand that. It’s due to the fact that there is a resource of freedom that is transfered, stolen, this is how it is squandered. What is this resource? Where does freedom come from? To understand this, we need to go back, we do not have enough Sartre definitions, although they are very good: “freedom is an absolute non-existence that has become existence”. Yes, but this is not enough: we did not understand what “absolute non-existence, which became existence” is. We think it’s a set of words. Let us approach the question more precisely, more visibly, and imagine materially: where is this freedom? What are the components? Let us remember that a human, who is like a body in clay, is just as much an object as any other object: like a blotter, like a chip, like a pencil, like a table, like a falling leaf — just one of the objects. And what we said about the five levels of opportunity applies to him as well. You remember these five echelons: the first level, the simplest, the concrete, the approximate, is the possibility of any particular thing to be as it is, in its concreteness at this time in this place; the second level is the possibility to be in its place for any other; the third is the possibility of not to be it; the fourth is the possibility not to be for anything in its place; and the fifth is the impossibility of any thing to be at all, simply the impossibility of anything to be. All these five levels are perfectly applicable to the human himself. Moreover, a human at the level of instinct understands that this applies to him. And his instinct is alienated, deduced, objectified and made so articulate in the public consciousness. Public consciousness tells each human that, first of all, you are a specific person in your specific place today, at specific date. Wonderful, have a good time. But the thing is, it could be anyone instead of you. That’s the second point. You may or may not be there. And further: all the people who can be instead of you, your relatives and any alternative to you that you can think of, also may not be.

Finally, it is impossible for anyone to be human. You will say: what kind of public consciousness is this — this is a paradox of some kind. How is it that this impossibility for anyone to be is suddenly proclaimed in the public consciousness at the highest fifth level? Really easy. Society is the impossibility of being to anyone. Society is the pure impossibility of anyone — a concrete creature — to be. And this is the limit and horizon of social consciousness, of social “wisdom”, which, perhaps, does not blossom and shines clearly enough at the philistine level in the clogged brains of ordinary people, but nevertheless it feeds the public consciousness, it warms it, it directs it, this fifth level of impossibility for anyone to be. It is this group systemic evaluation of human’s ability to be, to be as an alternative, not to be at all, etc., that constitutes human’s fundamental intellectual alienation. In the social consciousness, human does not have his own consciousness, he has this objectified consciousness.

Consciousness, in which a person becomes nothing more than the realization of a particular opportunity. Here is a human who is in a clay state. But the fact is that this clay human paradoxically brings a very sharp thing. Remember when we said that a young child experiencing the infinity of his perception suddenly faces the fragility of his body and his vulnerability and discovers that there is a terrible difference between the fact that he himself is fragile, and his perception is limitless? It is like an inextinguishable flame that burns on a disappearing and very unstable candle rod. Usually, this conflict does not lead anywhere. Yes, it leads to a mismatch of two points: perception is infinite — the body is fragile. And then a human begins to build a strategy that allows him to forget about his fragility and identify with the infinity of his perception. That is, somehow morally identify with only one side — with the infinity of perception, and the rest as it were to bring out of brackets. Either through the immortality of affairs, or through the immortality of the tribe, or through the eternity of the human factor, etc., different strategies are, and they are all generalized in the system of ontological trust, which we have already talked about. But there is an accident, a situation in which the fragility of the individual as a witness carrier comes into direct conflict with the infinite ability to witness — the crisis begins. It’s like getting “eyes on the back of the head”. He sees his finality. He doesn’t just see his finality; he sees something more. He discovers that his absence is his true essence. He discovers that his limb, his mortality, is his real self; he sees his face as the eyes of eternity that will remain, and that face will disappear. And the moment he sees this face, it becomes infinitely significant precisely from the point of view of his disappearance. The ephemerality, the finality, the annihilation of man in his individual concreteness suddenly rises to a phenomenon equal to the infinity of perception. Then suddenly he discovers that, it turns out, the infinity of perception is only the reverse side of the limb and the disappearance of what he perceives. In fact, he sees that it is one coin, it has two sides. The infinity of perception and the mortality of the perceiver are the same thing. He perceives nothing but death, as his absence for centuries. After all, what is this situation between the absence before and the absence after — the second of the flash, which is his uniqueness? It’s just a concentration of this nothingness, a concentration in a unique, individual way. His true self is illuminated by this absence, and it becomes a perceiving fire or crystal. And at this moment the principle of non-identity is born: when he discovers that he does not exist, and this “does not exist” there is, there is (Sartre: “absolute non-existence from this becomes existence”). His absence, his death — this is the true he, which is not identical with anything, is not exchanged for anything, cannot be replaced by any other alternatives. It is the impossible non-existence which is given, and which alone is opposed to everything, which alone is opposition, non-identity. It is that freedom which is infinite energy. This is the energy of non-identity. What’s identity? This is the “collapse” of potential. This is a convergence of potential to nothing. This is the absence of voltage between the cathode and the anode when they become the same and there is no electric current between them. Where’s the current? The current is where there is non-identity, where there is opposition between the cathode and the anode. This non-identity, which is comprehended in an exclusively epistemological existential way, suddenly turns out to be a source of limitless energy. The same energy that in the form of muscular, mental, intellectual, etc. can be collected and collected. It can be aimed at paying for the existence of this Leviathan in the form of an infinite society, robbing its members in favor of eternal continuity of generations, eternal uncontested domination of the elite. But this same freedom, this same non-identity, this same energy is the basis for an alternative action. Society is fed by the fact that the individuality of a person is understood simply as the individuality of a cup: a person does not give up his individuality — he simply does not understand, he does not have the consciousness that he gives up his own self. His freedom becomes purely virtual. By the way, we have not yet finished analyzing the phenomenology of freedom. The fact is that the phenomenon of non-identity, the phenomenon of discovery, that your absence is the point of non-coincidence with nothing, in which everything becomes what it is, and this point of non-coincidence highlights the true nature of everything that would simply not exist or would exist as a pile of meaningless spots without it. This black spot is an intelligent lantern of witness. But it is an inner point. Purely internal. Because if there is no such non-identity, there is no inner — there is only the outer. There is only, as Hegel said, Entäusserung — “externalization”, pure “externalization”.

There is nothing internal that would “externalize”. There is just äusser, there is only purely external. This point of opposition is the only internal one that is conceivable. It is Being-for-itself, Being-in-itself, Being-to-self — to use Sartre’s terminology. Sartre said that freedom is lost when a human begins to consider himself as a thing. If we take a step within the framework of our discourse and look at what it means to “consider ourselves as a thing”, it means that a human becomes transparent to the outside, a human loses his inner, a human is the “eight of Mobius”, where the outer and inner pass on the same plane into each other. It is nothing but the state of society of the spectacle, of the information society — a society in which human is simply the terminal of information networks, where he is open to the direct flow of coded sign information, of the coded world, not in the form of tactile impressions, but in the form of already dissected brain signs, which are the determinants of his inner space. We see examples of how a human ceases to be internal at the moment of a virtual action, when he is a participant in an interactive game. He plays an electronic game on a computer, where this game motivates his reaction, and the reaction motivates the creation of a new situation. It is like an imitation of an action, each time a certain solution of the situation, training in action. In fact, this is dialectically the very moment in which the external and internal of a person coincide, where he turns into a Mobius ribbon, where the iconic information flow completely fills his inner space.

But this is the prototype of what should actually happen at the exit in a generation, when almost all socially responsible, intelligible participants in society turn into such interactive terminals through which information quantitative flows are passed, and the person as a source of alternative, as a source of uncertainty disappears. Because so far, even in our time, every person is still potentially a source of uncertainty. And uncertainty already assumes fluctuability, alternativeity. The alternative is a threat. Any alternative is an option that assumes historical dynamics, plot. In fact, it is a threat, a challenge from the point of view of the fact that for the elite the future is an alternative version of the spirit that has become material, which is a reflection of the purely ideal spirit, controlling the present. It is in this triangle that a precarious situation arises, an uncertainty that is carried by every individual who retains inner freedom, so between matter and the future spirit, or spirit of the future, lies this phase of the materialization of the spirit, which is nothing but an information society. Sartre made a very serious miscalculation in this regard towards the end of his philosophizing, when he did not draw theological conclusions from his discourse, but limited himself to saying that “freedom begins with choice, and choice begins with itself” — it has no prerequisites. He gave a very interesting image. Suppose there is a play. A human is an actor who found himself in the middle of a play: he knows neither the plot nor the comedy, nor the tragedy, nor his role, nor the nearest line — he knows nothing. He appeared as if he had parachuted down, as if waking up in the middle of some unknown play. And, according to Sartre, he concludes that he is told how to understand whether it is a comedy or a tragedy, whether he will now fight or drink tea. And all he has to choose supposedly himself: there are no norms — and this is freedom. In fact, this is a deplorable immanent end to a position that promised to “shine diamonds” of transcendence.

Moreover, even the word “transcendence” was mentioned by Sartre, but there is no breakthrough, because there is no transformation. If everyone makes a choice himself, then this is an atomic choice, which has no vector, no advantage, and, therefore, no value. Thus, freedom is diminished to the point of stochastic dice roll: few people will make any choice if the choice begins with themselves. These is the dice thrown out of the glass. Sartre killed the concept of freedom with which he began as consciousness in his last work, Critique of Dialectical Reason. But we, as political theologians, as social theologians, cannot go the way of dismantling the colossal capital that is concentrated in the human heart. We must convert it into a truly “atomic reaction”. That’s just one thing. The way to this lies in the very thinking that is the epiphenomenon of the central position of human. On the one hand — a society that carries in itself a public consciousness based on the application of five layers of opportunity to a human, and the “wisdom” of the uncontested, the human’s awareness of himself as a thing whose action is illusory or even impossible. On the other hand, the thinking that subordinates all five positions of this possibility to the subject. You remember the two triangles that come together in a square or a six-pointed star when a very complex, very special, but infinitely productive human relationship arises with a particular object, and with its alternatives, and with the non-existence of this object, which ultimately creates exactly that field, that mirror, where the central inner freedom of a person becomes the axis and manifests itself as the only main and self-sufficient fact. It is this technology of thinking that is Sartre’s answer to getting into an unfamiliar play. No, a person should, once in this play, firstly, determine its plot, secondly — his role in it, thirdly — its ending, fourthly — become its director or co-director.

Thus, he becomes a partner of the providential design, because Sartre, although he proves that there is no God, although he slides into the position of simple flat agnosticism, slides from his transcendental atheism to simple flat castrated agnosticism — but he also gives us the idea that a person was in a play, and someone wrote a play. There’s a plan. The fact is that everyone chooses how he understands his role in this play, but the play exists as a prerequisite. This contradicts what Sartre says, that there are no conditions. If he told us that there is a play then there is a play. Yes, this condition is preliminary. It’s completely virtual, but it has a rule. This rule is a total paradox, the domination of a virtually nonexistent speck of black Being-in-itself that lives in the heart of human, over an infinite continuum of clay that represents the inexhaustible inertia of an object from the outside. This overturning of tables is nothing more than the main leading principle on which we must build our understanding of the plot. And in this sense our theological will, our theological project, is directly opposed to the political disappearance and capitulation of Sartre. It is the will of the person thrown into the play to become a partner of the director and comprehend his plan. In order for this play not to fail again, it did not end with the stomping of the director’s feet, sending unsuccessful actors from the stage and appointing another day for the next rehearsal. Sooner or later you have to play hard.