Theological Origins of the Digital

Abstract

In his paper ‘Thinking Technicity’, Richard Beardsworth suggests that ‘one of the major concerns of philosophical and cultural analysis has been the need to reflect upon the reduction of time and space brought about by contemporary processes of technicization, particularly digitalization’. In this context, he describes what he calls Continental Philosophy’s ‘mourning’ of metaphysics.¹ Beardsworth traces the beginnings of the oppositional logic of metaphysics to Plato’s ‘aporia of memory’ described in the Meno, which concerns the question of virtue and whether it can be taught. Meno responds to Socrates’ demonstration of the difficulty of defining the concept of virtue by asking how it is possible to look for something when you have no idea what it is. Socrates suggests that according to such logic, you cannot look for knowledge of anything, since you either already know what you are looking for, in which case you do not need to look for it, or you do not know what it is you are looking for, in which case how could you be looking for it in the first place. In the dialogue, Socrates has come to a solution to the problem of knowledge by way of a demonstration involving a slave boy. Socrates draws geometric figures on the ground and through questioning leads the boy, who has no prior knowledge of geometry, to work out the length of the side of a square of a certain area by reference to a previous example.