Page - 164 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

164 | Michael R. Heim www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 159–181 tic ecstasy may have seemed cogent for a fictional cyberspace of the 1990s, a contemporary spirituality of today’s internet and Vr requires greater clarity and critical fortitude. the requirements of actually dwelling in virtuality are dif- ferent from the requirements of merely imagining and occasionally building in virtuality. Fiction, especially science fiction, can foresee emerging trends, but its literature can hardly serve as a manual for living in the present. Bladerunner (Ridley Scott, US 1982) is a wonderful film, but its dank set should not be con- fused with the lovely Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles that served as the backdrop for the movie. BODy AMNesiA? GrOUNDiNG? the second essay to revisit is by elisabeth List and is entitled “floating identi- ties, terminal Bodies: the Virtualization of existence in Cyberspace”.15 this es- say proceeds from the twentieth-century epistemological framework of phe- nomenology (franz Brentano, Alfred schütz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, francisco Varela), so here the lens we see through is a direct experiential lens rather than a literary fictional one. We (the phenomenological subjects) are looking at the contents of our own experiences through the Cartesian ego cogito. the histori- cal Cartesian ego originally lacked bodily awareness as rené Descartes in the seventeenth century considered the “outer” world to be a grid map of mechan- ical forces that subsume the organic physical body. A number of twentieth-cen- tury phenomenologists developed an alternative view of the cogito (“i am now thinking”) that includes somatic self-awareness (“i feel in my limbs”) in their descriptive research.16 List pays close attention to sensory feedback in describ- ing cyberspace, and she notices a profound problem in so doing: By distinguishing between intentional states and intentional objects of various kinds Brentano takes what he calls “intentional inexistence” as the ontological state of such objects. “Intentional inexistence” now is just the term Brentano uses for what we today call “virtuality”, namely “not really existing in an ordinary sense” but exist- ing in the sense of being able to be thought of, as thinkable, as possible, in short, as virtually existing. this idea has far reaching consequences for our topic, because tak- en seriously it means that all objects we can conceive of are in fact of this kind, includ- ing our bodies and our selves. The thought experiments and science fiction scenarios are about converting all experiential space into informational space, in which sensual bodies are no longer of concern. The place held by an embodied subject would then 15 Wessely/Larcher 2000, 17–37. the German title of this essay is “Platon im Cyberspace: technologien der entkörperlichung und Visionen vom körperlosen selbst in der telematischen Kultur” (“Plato in Cyber- space: Disembodying technologies and Visions of the Bodiless self in information Culture”). 16 see Merleau-Ponty 1945, Gendlin 1978, hanna 2004, Levin 1991.