The Gold of Time

Technology and Covid-19 converge

Oct 22, 2022

The ear heard this story that was told of the philosophy of the Russian thinker Lev Shestov.

Making the story brief the philosophy he held was for the Divinity all things are possible.. Physical restoration of the dead should God will it. Or Regine Schlegel (Olsen) who was engaged to the philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard from September 1840 to October 1841, would prevail and Kierkegaard would be happy. She did not want the engagement to end, fearing it would strengthen Kierkegaard's growing melancholy and depression although to envision Kierkegaard as a husband was foreign to her thoughts.[ In her conversations with Hanne Mourier in her later life, she stated that:

Kierkegaard’s motivation for the break was his conception of his religious task; he dared not bind himself to anyone on earth in order not to be obstructed from his calling. He had to sacrifice the very best thing he owned in order to work as God demanded of him: therefore he sacrificed love … for the sake of his writing.
Berdyaev who told the tale points out that the absolutely freely capricious God need not be concerned with the resurrection of flesh in a timeless place nor marrying a melancholy Danish philosopher to a girl. God is not fulfillment of human desires but something else entirely. So in a sense of pure faith in justice and mercy by God in creating paradise twice the hope is misplaced.
So then in our time technology has replaced God entirely. In the Singularity lies deathless life. All hope for moderns evidently is the transhuman. The integral accident (l'accident intégral) is a term devised by French philosopher Paul Virilio.
Technology cannot exist without the potential for accidents. For example, the invention of the locomotive also entailed the invention of derailment. Paul Virilio sees the accident as a negative growth of social positivism and scientific progress. The growth of technology, namely television, separates us directly from the events of real space and real time. We lose wisdom, lose sight of our immediate horizon and resort to the indirect horizon of our dissimulated environment. From this angle, the Accident can be mentally pictured as a sort of "fractal meteorite" whose impact is prepared in the propitious darkness, a landscape of events concealing future collisions. Even Aristotle claimed that "there is no science of the accident," but Virilio disagrees, pointing to the growing credibility of simulators designed to escape the accident -- an industry born from the unholy marriage of post-WW2 science and the military-industrial complex. A good example of Virilio's integral accident is Hurricane Katrina and the disastrous events that followed, which brought the eyes of the world upon a single nexus of time and place. From his article on Katrina, "Ah ouai, ce méchant vent, vent qui siffle, siffle. Tout le monde regarde, c'est sur toutes les chaînes, c'est l'émission dont le monde parle. Et c'est tellement, tellement mouillé la bas." Roughly translated, "Oh yeah, that nasty wind, wind that blows, blows. The whole world is watching, it's on every station, it's the program the world is talking about. And it's soggy, so soggy, down there."