Cogito Ergo WHAT? Or, It's a Geodesic, Stupid

As many of you know, American Philistine exists in part to assist in the translation of orthodox Presbyterianism from the antiquated idiom of Victorianism into the dialect of the "post-everything" person (a dialect which we call "poster parlance"). However, as I told a dear friend during a recent cigar-smoke-and-rum inundated evening, it is sometimes difficult to imagine what shape a faithfully translated Presbyterianism would take. It seems to me that one helpful move in creating this new incarnation would be to exit the Cartesian-Newtonian universe that we lamentably seem to still inhabit.

I've been reading Heidegger's Being and Time recently, and his discussion of Descartes started me thinking about orthodoxy's penchant for operating within a Newtonian universe, with all the Cartesian baggage that that universe entails. The only problem being this: several years back, there was this dude named Einstein, and he kind of interrupted the whole Newtonian gig, much as we all preferred the Newtonian thing. And then, around the same time, some dog named Heidegger came out with this anti-metaphysical phenomenological ontology that kind of turned into existentialism when Sartre and Camus got a hold of it. So, what happened is kind of like this: people don't really live in a causal, dualized universe anymore. They live in a relativized, existentialized universe.

Derrida, for example, has made bank with the idea of "curved space," the lines of which are known as "geodesics." He fruitfully uses Einsteinian physics as metaphorical bolstering for his infinite play. Meanwhile, we're still talking about moths and flames. To make matters worse, we still rely on the Platonic tripartite breakdown of the soul, which is hopelessly antiquated now that "the ghost in the machine" model of humanity has been discontinued. Like it or not, we are in a quantum universe, with all the counter-intuitiveness that's entailed by that. And the human inhabitants of that quantum universe are deeply imbued with a sense of "the horizon of their ownmost possiblities," to use Marty's catchy phrase. So, as a step toward the translation of orthodoxy, I suggest that we locate the correct universe and life form first.