“The history of the world unfolds according to a machination of a secret logic
that is beyond our short-term imaginations.
But, at the same time, there are waves and closeness, and something inexhaustible in remembrance…”
Heidegger
The End of Private, the Phase-out of Memory, and the Problem of Being Human in the Cyberbeing Era
We are prompted to a task that is still clearly beyond us, almost completely out of our reach. The task of thinking Being outside the framework of cultural determinations, or rather through the ontological reviewing of all our cultural determinations as preparation for Being’s self-unconcealment. An ontological thinking is the opposite of a metaphysical or a scientific thinking. Our task is thinking the Being of beings as it lets itself be thought in the experience of history, i.e., of innerworldliness. Yet human beings exist as history since history is their shared organ (Mamasdashvili). Therefore, letting the Being of beings reveal in the experience of history is a kind of thinking that requires Dasein’s authentic way of being, i.e., being open to death, meaning, and transcendence in the fate of freedom and the patience in thinking as humble surrendering to aletheuein. Nothing stranger and more foreign to cyberculture, than this.
This chapter seeks to confront the reader with some of the most significant developments taking place in our world-epoch today, essentially linked with the phenomenon of cyberbeing and the derivative bio-digital ecosystems: 1) the problem of thinking man’s essence, cyberbeing, and the trans- post-human outside metaphysical categories, 2) the fact of human enframing in cyberbeing, 3) the end of “private”—in the sense of “inward” and “uniquely intimate”— and the advent of the new cyber-publicness, 4) the meaning of the dissolution of the triad of memory, remembrance, and self-internalization in cyberbeing, and 5) the stubborn, fundamentally unthought presence of the human in trans- and post-humanity.
The problem of thinking man’s essence, cyberbeing, and the trans- post-human outside metaphysical categories
An ontological thinking is required, which is the opposite to the metaphysical and scientific-technological thinking. Most of the thought in the 20th and 21st centuries so far has essentially been a radicalization of the same traditional metaphysical principles of Greek Parmenidean-Platonic idealism. Foucault’s deconstructive poststructuralism, Haraway’s speculations about human, animality, and machines blending, David Dubrovsky’s neurocritical cyber-evolutionism, and Ray Kurzweil’s prophecies about the future Cyber-superman, etc., remain still, as a dialectical opposite, as tethered to the same metaphysical matrix as the criticized paradigm. Both the “super-human” and the “post-human” are understood within the categories of self-representation and conceptual self-understanding. They still offer worldviews and master-narratives without apprehending the origin of these self-representations, enframed in the horizon of Vorstellen or the conceptualizing and imagining thought.
Most of trans- and posthumanist thinking perpetuates the essence of the human (in any version whatsoever) as self-representation, social product, and will-to-know as a form of will-to-power. Ihab Hassan states that posthumanism does not mean “the literal end of man but the end of a particular image of us” (Hassan 1977, 845). From a self-image to another. From a “self-theory” to another. Still caught in its metaphysical categories, Western thought fails to think man’s essence and the essence of cyberbeing out of the horizon of representation and will-to-know that produces expectation and time. This reinforces the perception that the physis of cyberbeing as the essence of cybernetics and cyberculture has not been thought properly, and therefore we are still as ignorant today of the ontological and anthropological meaning of what is happening in front of our eyes—i.e., the enframing of the human in cyberbeing and its consequent displacement within the new techno-cybernetic media-sphere—as we were decades ago.
Thinking is called to let the physis of things arise and expose itself midst our pre-interpreted and pre-charted cultural landscapes. In the heart of our information, digital, cyber-technological world one essential thing is conspicuously missing: i.e., the uncompromised, para-moral, honest, and selflessly patient thinking of the Being of beings, of aletheuien. It is a gigantic task that we must carry out together. The lestrygonians in this journey—and the sirens—are the metaphysical-scientific will to know, the cyber-technological will to control and redesign the Being of beings, and the biopolitical will to hold sway upon freedom (i.e., upon openness as transcendence) through surveillance and punishment, i.e., via onto-reification and consequently de-ontologizing. In cyberculture, human existence as being-in-the-world open to Transcendence through death is turned into a being at hand, before the eyes, which must be available for calculating thinking and practical utilization ad libitum and in the abstract hic et nunc of what is artificially brought into presence. In other words, human existence in cyberculture is being turned into a closed, de-centered, artificially rounded-up presence. This artificially acquired presence of human beings in cyberculture is the essence of the new public. The mystery of the concealed is over. If, for Parmenides, only Being is, which means that everything becomes defined by presence, in cyberbeing as the essence of cyberculture, being is enframed as information, i.e., an onto-indifferent meaning-making process. This shows cyberbeing as a mere continuity of the old metaphysics with its distinctions between physis and logos; between essence and perception; and between aesthesis, gnosis, and episteme, as it already appears in Plato—metaphysical turn that Heidegger calls an “embarrassment.” The problem is that, just like Plato’s “hypercelestial topos” implied the fragmentation between being and logos and therefore the concealment of the real physis of things, so in the new publicness, the presence of cyberbeing’s essence brings about precisely the concealment of human existence as freedom, authenticity, and resoluteness. In other words, the new publicness takes—in seeming paradox—, human existence and freedom out of the public sphere, but not in order to preserve them in the hidden of the private but, quite the opposite, to dispose of them by just letting them fall into the deepest oblivion. In cyberbeing, the most humane of the human, i.e., being authentic in being, being truthful in language, and being resolute in praxis, is fundamentally displaced, not for morally intentional reasons, but just because being virtual (i.e., ontically anisomorphic), shallow (i.e., informational, entertaining, and game-oriented), and public belong in cyberbeing’s physis.
The fact of human enframing in cyberbeing
This is a fact: the humanness of the human is becoming enframed in the all-controlling, self-replicating, de-centered, shallowly interactive, and onto-emptying matrix of cyberbeing. In the new public, the presence of cyberbeing’s essence is precisely the concealment of human existence as authenticity and resoluteness. Therefore, the essence of human presence in cyberbeing as the new public is the absence of human existence in the clearing of aletheuein, and so it can be seen as an ontology of absence. In the new public regime, as determined by cyberbeing, the essence of communication is interactivity. This means that human beings are prevented from experiencing their own existence as authenticity (self-attestation and singular responsibility) and, instead of resoluteness as individuals, they rely on others’ publicness when it comes to experiencing and understanding their own being and their call for meaning. As decentered “minus-subjects,” human beings as bio-digital interfaces see their own experiences only as mediated by others and, therefore, they produce relations of interdependence lacking the kind of authentic communication whose essence is being communion in freedom.
I approach this cyberization process of the human via a phenomenological perspective to describe cyberbeing’s phenomenology applying a theological standpoint to understand the essence of the human, the implications of its cyber-alienation, and the meaning of cyberbeing. The essence of human presence as cyberbeing is the absence of human essence as existence. From onto-reality to bio-digital interfaces and ecosystems; from open-to-Transcendence to enframed-in-fictional-transcendences; from responsible individuality to minus-subjectivity; from Being to cyberbeing; from ontological freedom to readiness-to-hand; from existential mystery to thing before-the-eyes; and from openness to artificially enclosed and rounded object of data-processing and organizational technocracy. “Absence” here means concealment, oblivion, and onto-indifference. Cyberbeing, in this sense, is the most alienated form of Western metaphysics and positive will to know and power. Cyberbeing is the essence of Western metaphysics and culture in full disclosure. Yet there is more in the essence of Western culture than just abstract metaphysics and will to know and power. So the problem of cyberculture and the human essence as absence in cyberbeing takes us to one of the fundamental questions: what is still the essence of Western culture announced in cyberbeing?
In a 1968 letter addressed to Hanna Arendt, M. Heidegger poses the question: “Is there still an ‘alternative’ to the uncanny ‘public sphere’?” Question that, as he himself clarifies, should be understood in the sense of “is there still a measure for essential things?” The task of thinking today is still to understand cyberculture and cyberbeing as its essence as a destining of revealing, i.e., a fate of Western metaphysics and its cultural by-products. But a real understanding of cyberbeing presupposes the “recovering of what is essential” in humanity and also in technology as a way of being human. Particularly, when what is being pushed out, displaced from the public agora, is precisely the humanity (the humanness) of the human. Or, at least, when the humanness of the human is becoming enframed into the controlling, self-replicating, de-centered, interactive, and onto-emptying matrix of cyberbeing.
Thus we can ask: what is the meaning of cyberbeing as the essence of Western metaphysics? And also, how is meaning present as the most radical presence in cyberbeing? What is pathos in cyberbeing? Since pathos and pasxein—the passion that moves while making that which is moved internally motionless—mean “to bind,” what is that binding in the environ of cyberculture? Yet the question about what can be this humanness of the human logically takes us to a different question: to recover what, from where? A provisional answer can be to recover the human essence as a theandricenclave from the grip of cybertechnology, abstract moral determinations (opposing to them the return to life), and scientific-technological conditioning (acquiring liberation from scientific and technological Gestell); all by-products of Western metaphysical will to knowledge and its onto-modeling vocation.
Human essence, which is being as existence, has been already taken up and enframed into the “public,” i.e., reified and necessarily alienated, under the fashion of metaphysical moralism. This process extends now under the form of cybertechnology in the ontological filum of cyberbeing. From industrial to post-industrial recensions, technology enframes human essence in a special way as it makes up for an independent ontology in which Dasein’s Being appears in the most alienated and estranged form as cybernetic networking and bio-digital interface. Yet the understanding acquired in thinking appears not as an object to be reached through the mechanical process of cause-effect and propositions-conclusions thinking. This understanding is the understanding of Dasein’s history itself, which is the history of its interpretation of and behavior (sich verhalten and Verständnis) toward the meaning of Being as its ultimate destination. Thus, understanding the events of history requires primarily the humble letting Being disclose things’ essence in existential time (καιρὸς – kairos) free from the determinations of calculating-conceptualizing thought.
Patience as the “non-willing will” and attentive gaze are structural moments of essential thinking. Of course, “being thrown onto a future” is also “being projected toward” an answer that demands doubting and questioning. Yet the answer is never a rational achievement but a dispensation that opens up a way of being that dwells in the clearing of Meaning. Human effort bears fruit only when it comes around in support of the ontic disclosedness and attains, through the aesthetic apprehension, the image of what lets itself be known as aletheia. Of course, image is not to be understood here either as empirical presentation (aesthesis), mental representation (gnosis) or rational conceptualization (episteme), but as ontological opening in dwelling (εἰκόνησις eikonesis) and epistemological intentionality in understanding (ἀπεικόνησις apeikonesis). So, eikonesis is rather a dynamis, it is dwelling in the open between the enclosure of the world and the abyss of Transcendence. Apeikonesis is the thinking of this dynamis. In this ontological-epistemological acquisition, Dasein’s propriation and authentic befreeing also take place.
Human essence’s alienation in technology is a destiny, a fate. In this sense, it cannot be understood primarily either as a moral-social event or as an intellectual, free self-determination of the human as subject and regulator of its own history. Fate is always behind us, past, because it always comes first. The experience of fate as “the events of the future” results from our existential openness as “thrown into…” Yet, essentially, fate is precisely what is already there, regardless in the mode of dynamis or entelechia, i.e., possibility or fact. So, while concealing it, techno-estrangement as cyber-destination also reveals Dasein’s ownmost way of being thrown to Transcendence in the cross-ontoscape of Being and Meaning. However, self-attestation as authenticity, ontological understanding, and resoluteness in freedom, constitute also Dasein’s fundamental possibilities. Befreeing as letting the human essence flourish as unconcealment in history becomes impossible as long as, caught in the interactive logic of cyberbeing, human being never recovers itself from the technological mediation and experiences instead an abstract expansion without moment of self-returning into the an sichof Dasein. This expansion stretches through a rift-structure determined by a shallowness matrix that keeps Dasein exterior to itself and incapable of understanding its own being as dwelling in Meaning in the openness granted by Logos. Heraclitus saw this as he said: διὸ δεῖ ἕπεσθαι τῷ ξυνῷ. τοῦ λόγοῦ δ´ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδὶαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν (Fragment 2).
[Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Homo Theologicus in the Digital Age, Casa Vacía, 2025]
