Is Being Digital or Analog? episode artwork

EPISODE · Sep 15, 2025 · 46 MIN

Is Being Digital or Analog?

from Failure Is Freedom · host https://www.martinessig.com

In philosophy being just is whatever there is, which is sometimes called the "Universe." But there is only one way for being to know itself, and that is to stand outside itself, so that it can get a good look at itself. If there is such a thing as being directly knowing itself without mediate, enlanguaged beings, such as ourselves, have mostly lost access to it, which is why Jacques Lacan thought of our entrance into the Symbolic as infants rather grimly as "Symbolic Castration." Being that has been alienated from itself by language will always experience a gap between the Symbolic and the Real. For Lacan this is a lack inherent to the Symbolic itself. It simply isn't capable of representing all of being to itself. But in a further bizarre twist currently being studied by Slavoi Zizek at least part of the failure of the Symbolic to know all is inherent to being itself. The relation of the Symbolic to being reflects being's own incompletion. This incompletion within being can't be completely represented because it hasn't been determined yet. This is the direct challenge to Einstein's Block Universe that was leveled against it by the Copenhagen Interpretation of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and by Henri Bergson in his famous Debate with the stubborn genius. We do not live in a finished Universe, part of what is, has not yet become.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.cohttps://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

In philosophy being just is whatever there is, which is sometimes called the "Universe." But there is only one way for being to know itself, and that is to stand outside itself, so that it can get a good look at itself. If there is such a thing as being directly knowing itself without mediate, enlanguaged beings, such as ourselves, have mostly lost access to it, which is why Jacques Lacan thought of our entrance into the Symbolic as infants rather grimly as "Symbolic Castration." Being that h...

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Is Being Digital or Analog?

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In philosophy being just is whatever there is, which is sometimes called the "Universe." But there is only one way for being to know itself, and that is to stand outside itself, so that it can get a good look at itself. If there is such a thing as...

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