Read Online Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science by Dorion Sagan - Free Book Online

or further differentiate. Glossing Martin Heidegger in a footnote, Jacques Derrida describes how, in the nonvulgar or “Greek” conception of time, times past, present, and future converge and diverge; they are at once touching and infinitely distant. Perhaps the founding example of such posthuman nonlinearity is Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of the last man and the
Übermensch
(the “Overman”) in
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
The last man, the overcoming of man, and the superman are, clearly, not just literal (as in Adolf Hitler’s interpretation) but allegorical. On the one hand, Nietzsche, thinking of Charles Darwin, complains how these English are no philosophers. On the other hand, Zarathustra—his prophet up in the mountains who talks to the animals and informs humanity that God is dead (but the news has taken a long time to reach us)—espouses the theory of eternal recurrence as his most important doctrine. At the very least, the idea that everything that can happen will happen, and not once but an infinite number of times, does not go along with simple, linear, evolutionary scenarios.
    So we have then a double meaning, a double entendre, of the future: one linear, one nonlinear. The post-man’s first ring announces the future of man; the second is uncannily silent, more a buzz or a beep. This is the human future that never arrives because it is already always here.
    There are problems with both ringings. But in the end I think the nonlinear, atemporal or polymorphically temporal posthuman version is the more resonant. Ironically, the playful and metaphorical view of the human future is not only broader but more literally true than what Heidegger calls the received or “vulgar” view of orderly, progressive, linear time.
    But before I veer off into unreconstructed mysticism, let me say that the fragmentary, the fallen, and the derivative do not belong only to the present age—as Derrida argues, against Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in
Of Grammatology.
Language itself, the splintering of things into signs, into alphanumeric representations, calls into question our idealized image of the past: the golden age, our happy childhood, or, cosmologically, the unity of the singularity at the big bang. This seems to be the same absent sense of wholeness, of the halcyon, that we project into the future: heaven, merging with light, a dissolution into the ecstasy of the sexual or the neural that relieves our constitutive sense of loss. Sigmund Freud’s student Otto Rank located this loss in the original trauma of birth, 1 the loss of the womb—the experience of which might, if we could remember it, be compared with floating in space or lying on a raft on opiates in a sunlit pool. To be alive is to be deprived of this Edenic yesteryear for which we long, and this utopian future for which we strive. Jacques Lacan suggests that both are based on the illusion of the uncoordinated, wobbly toddler looking in the mirror, or at its mother, and hallucinating its own unity. Locating the mirror stage in the register of the Imaginary, Lacan marks it as the gateway into language, into the splintering of signification. The idea of wholeness in the past as well as in the future is thus a narcissistic illusion.
    One familiar way to illustrate this doubleness, this insistent and split entity arriving at our threshold with the news that never quite comes but is already always here, is to look at radical science fiction scenarios for the far future and to see how they stack up against the present. A visitor from humanity’s future is projected back in time, landing, for example, in lower Manhattan, in the middle of rush hour. “Ah, what peace!” he sighs. The witty geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said the universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we
can
suppose. Truth, or what Lacan calls the Real, is stranger than fiction, including science fiction. (Granted, not all agree. The fiction guru and Cornell professor Paul West