11 Syntheism as a radicalisation of atheism – and its dialectical dissolution

Syntheism is the third wave – or if one so wishes the second coming – in a series of culturally radical epochs that starts with the Renaissance as the first wave from the 14th century onwards, followed by Romanticism as the second wave from the end of the 18th century onwards. The Renaissance is confronted by the Enlightenment, after which one can view Romanticism as partly a defence of the Renaissance. Romanticism is then confronted by Modernism, after which syntheism, according to the same argument, comes to the defence of Romanticism. Syntheism is thus in some respects a rebirth of both the Renaissance and Romanticism. What unites these three culturally radical epochs is their common quest for a basic framework vis-à-vis existence. They put more faith in intuitive reason than in logical rationality, and they prioritise the will to mobilism over a striving for totalism.

This historical kinship with the Renaissance and Romanticism should not however be misconstrued as syntheism preferring opacity and musings over logic and precision – quite the opposite. To begin with, syntheism is of course a scientistic pragmatism. It even regards the scientific exercise per se as a holy act (one of the Syntheist Movement’s first known manoeuvres was to declare the research facility CERN in Switzerland sacred ground). Or to express the matter syntheologically: To do science is to play hide-and-seek with God. However, all verbal and literary statements and standpoints throughout history must be treated sceptically based on a fallibilism where every statement, no matter how convincingly it is considered to be proven at any particular point in time, remains always open for revision in the future. This is also the essence of science and the only attitude that is productive: a constant re-evaluation and modification of accepted explanatory models. What was true yesterday may be an obvious delusion today, which becomes clear when new facts are on the table. Fallibilism is the pragmatist conviction that even innumerable verifications of a certain standpoint are no guarantee that a future falsification is impossible. As a consequence of this, it is not a given that previously accepted knowledge takes precedence over culture when the two seem to collide. One must namely keep in mind that culture lies deeper in Man than knowledge. We express this by saying that culture embraces knowledge, while knowledge is completely dependent on culture.

The foundation for this transrationalism – the conviction that rationality only functions within those areas where it is possible, and that critical thinking must be fully conscious of and discount this limitation in its world view – is laid with the Renaissance and Romanticism to then be consummated with syntheism. This means that syntheism’s connection to its previous sister epochs is cultural rather than epistemological. In addition, there is a strongly pragmatist connection: We humans are our actions just as much as we are our thoughts. To be a syntheist is to act based on one’s richest knowledge of the state of existence, but it is above all to always dare to act, and then draw valuable conclusions from this truth as an act. Or to personify syntheist activism: its heart does not get its nourishment from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s rationalist idealism, but from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Romantic pragmatism. We act with an open, contingent and indeterministic future as the backdrop; a backdrop that we can know a lot about, but never everything, before we act. And in this situation, we honestly have no more reliable resource to use than intuitive reason, the ideal of the Renaissance and Romanticism.

The problem with both the Enlightenment and Modernism is their common overconfidence in their own scientific and artistic potential. The near-autistic conventionality in both their logical and their aesthetic premises – always this love of mathematics, minimalism and formalism – lead to both an overconfidence in their own rationality and, sooner or later (which as we know applies to all kinds of Platonism), to a totalitarianism and an overconfidence in (seemingly logical) authorities. With a belief in there being only one eternal truth about our complex existence, and that this truth is attainable for the rationally reasoning person, it is horribly likely for someone to feel called upon to invoke this truth and appoint himself its guardian and interpreter. Dictators consequently tend to have a predilection for invoking the Enlightenment and/or Modernism in particular as the raison d’être for their own positions of power. While sound pragmatic scepticism, that is, empiricism, comes from Romanticism’s reaction against the Enlightenment, from David Hume via Hegel to Nietzsche – it is hardly the Enlightenment’s own product. And if there was a need for intelligent Romanticism in order to parry inflated Enlightenment in the 19th century, there remains the same need at the transition from statist Modernism to globalist syntheism in our time.

When nation states construct heavy barriers along their borders and waste enormous sums of money on gigantic, impregnable and corrupt intelligence bureaucracies – with the stated or implicit aim that the free and open Internet must be brought to nothing – this is done with the rationalist arguments and concomitant demands for silence and obedience of the Enlightenment and Modernism. But it is once again a logic grounded in a blind paranoia and not in any scientific approach (the logic is occasionally dazzling, it is just that the foundation poor). The similarity with the axiomatic self-glorification of the Enlightenment and Modernism is striking. The only decent reply is syntheism’s requirement of a global opening of borders and free communication without either state or corporatist control and supervision: the libertarian truth as an act par excellence. Not because this response is a logically rational reaction, but because it is in fact an intuitively Romantic action; it is the only possible way out of suffocating alienation to the living religion. The dialectical transition from paralysing atheism to revitalising syntheism of course runs in parallel with this phase shift. Atheism’s hopeless dilemma is that it is the child of the Enlightenment and Modernism and, just like its parents, unaware of its own built-in, paralysing limitations. Syntheism is a radical response that also resolves this dilemma.

There are people who admit that they believe, and there are people that insist that they do not believe in anything at all, but that they definitely know and base all their decision-making on this knowing about which they are sure beyond all doubt. The problem for those that claim to know is that they seldom or never doubt their own existence, in spite of neuroscience teaching us that the ego is an illusion, generated by the brain in order to economise with precious resources and make sense of existence from a composed and artificial but functionally integrated perspective. What takes place within those who know with such certainty is evidently not at all as certain as the knowing itself would have us believe. And without the one, the other of course falls down. This position is called epistemological naivism. The truth is that all people, whether they admit it or not, by necessity are believers. Stubbornly maintaining the fictitious ego is in no way intellectually more honest than, for example, maintaining the existence of a god or a Santa Claus, but something that is taken out of thin air to exactly the same degree, regardless of how much (in this case unreasonable) intuition the believer invokes.

The same thing of course applies to the network, informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea, which does not either exist in any physical sense. The concept does not acquire weight as a consequence of any tangibly physical existence, but as the node that connects the dominant memes of the moment together into a cohesive world view, where this cohesive world view then in turn subsequently accords the node its weight. Naturally this relationalism.html">social relationalism is analogous with how phenomena in relationalist physics acquire weight from the network in question and not the other way around. Without a fictive but nonetheless highly functional node such as God, the ego or the network, the world view does not hang together. And if the world view does not hang together, nothing in existence acquires any meaning or context. Thus we must first of all believe and act in accordance with this faith of ours in order to then be able to know, in exactly the same way that within physics we must first of all weave together a network in order to then be able to give its nodes substance. Relations generate the substance and not the other way around. And even the most fanatical atheists are thus true believers. They just think that they are not.

By reason of this, the existentially necessary metaphysics seems rather to be disengaged from the physics that is every bit as inevitable. Without thereby succumbing to any kind of dualism, even in a monist world we are reduced to this duality, but it is our human senses and their phenomenological information processing that compels this, not some external, ontological property of existence. This means that there is a transrational wisdom in this metaphysical madness. To put it plainly, it is actually impossible to think ourselves past the ego experience. A world without subjects is a logical impossibility, since however illusory or artificial the ego is in the equation of life, the ego remains the basis for the entire existential experience. It is simply necessary for Man to be a pathological creature, to so to speak consciously fool himself, in order to be able to achieve the existential experience at all. And when we finally do choose to accept the ego that we have just revealed to be an illusory trick, we also get access to all the dazzling metaphysics. We believe consciously against our better judgement, and this we do wisely.

It quite simply does not matter that we know that Atheos is just the name of the void. We still perceive a substance behind the name Atheos, it is quite simply how we are programmed to perceive our environment, and moreover this substance is extraordinarily productive and functional for our senses. Towards the end of the 18th century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German classicist, argues that it is part of the nature of the subject to maintain an obscurity for itself. The subject must experience itself as incredibly small when it is brought face to face with the immensity of existence. And it is precisely this terrifying insignificance in the face of the immensity of existence that generates precisely the psychotic compensatory reaction within the young subject which is subsequently its engine throughout life, its constitutional lie, as Slavoj Zizek expresses the matter. So if anyone manages to capture the syntheist credo of the subject’s relation to the surrounding world, it is Goethe. Atheos lives, thrives and produces subjectivity in this obscurity.

This means that the ensuing intellectualisation of the preceding emotional experience of necessity must be constructed from an illusion. In fact, there must always be something there inside the actual experience; something that is, in the experience, that which de facto experiences that it experiences it. And, according to an intuitive reasoning that follows closely on the heels of Descartes, this something is the ego. Thus, it is quite reasonable to ask ourselves why people today are afraid of, uncomfortable with, or become quite frankly embarrassed by talking about the idea of God, when they should be every bit as afraid of, or uncomfortable with, or embarrassed by talking about the ego and its existence. Consequently, syntheism also entails a successful resuscitation attempt on the newly pronounced dead ego; it lives on, redefined, and proves useful on the same terms as apply to the idea of God.

Syntheism takes the logic connected to the subject’s pathological origin to its utmost limit. For if it is a pathological necessity for us to consider ourselves as subjects in order to be able to understand ourselves as agents, we must also admit our pathological need to establish phenomenal objects in existence in relation to this subjectivity – our respective subjects as fellow humans are of course each other’s objects to start with – and the optimal object has of course historically speaking always been God. There is thus nothing wrong with or even particularly remarkable about talking about God as an actual phenomenon; not as long as we regard God as a borrowed illusion in the existential equation in the same way and with the same importance as we talk about the ego. God is neither more nor less than the name of the empty backdrop against which the equally empty ego constructs its more or less functional fantasy world filled with fabricated meaning. This is ultimately the way in which we create meaning: we invent it, we create fictions around which we weave meaningful stories, which then form the basis for all human values. There is thus no deeper human activity than play. Even the best science is based on a playful attitude to the mysteries of existence rather than some kind of strict logic. Here we return to transrationalism: Logic follows strictly on from play, not the other way around.

When we say that the network is informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea, this means in fact that we are theologising God’s most recent reincarnation in the form of the network. We are saying that the Internet is God. And when a sufficient number of people adhere to this view it becomes a fact: a truth. It was in precisely this way that the 18th century Enlightenment philosophers turned the individual into God. Neither more nor less. Syntheism quite simply addresses itself to conscious believers who have understood the conditions of the existential theatre and who want to live affirming and complete lives within this credible and intellectually honest framework. We may then, in the best democratic spirit, leave those of our fellow humans who do not understand or do not want to understand the beauty in this project to their superstition, free in peace and quiet to spend their time consuming entertainment and empty enjoyment from the broad and varied offering that is directed precisely at the consumtarian masses. Syntheism is not, nor can it ever be, a religion that forces anyone to do anything. And quite honestly this is connected to the fact that this sort of thought control is almost impossible to administrate in the informationalist plurarchy.

Regardless of whether we introduce divinities or not in syntheist metaphysics, the actual process is finally about taking advantage of metaphysics’ unique opportunity to imagine existence to its utmost limit. To convert metaphysics into theology, to think about God, is thus not a matter of some kind of shallow fantasising about an Old Testament father figure who sits above the clouds and observes his children playing on the face of the Earth with tender or irascible eyes. Instead, theologising metaphysics is thinking one’s way forth to the outermost horizon of the time in which one is living and based on the knowledge and spiritual experiences that one has access to. And then not merely in a physical sense, with God as the concept for the beginning, middle and end of the Universe – in that case we might just as well settle for classical pantheism and not need to develop its completion syntheism – but even more so with God as the name of the surface on which to project the meaning and purpose of everything. In that sense, the concept of God is fundamentally not just the Universe (Pantheos), but also the utopia (Syntheos), the imagined backdrop located in the future – a backdrop that nourishes all of humanity’s dreams and aspirations.

Syntheism is radical and evolved atheism, a philosophical concept that captures the inexhaustible and unattainable in existence that philosophy and theology sooner or later must confront. Not least theology, since traditionally utopianism belongs in the world of theology rather than philosophy. More often than not it has been a matter of a longed-for reconstruction of a lost paradise. Syntheology thus takes theology back from its dull life among the traditional religions and gives it a renewed relevance historically. By leaving its traditional hermeneutic search for a meaning that is externally produced in advance, theology instead gains the central role as the intellectual engine for Man’s internal production of credible and functional utopias. For it can no longer pretend to be occupied with silent and inaccessible gods that do not exist. But theology can aid in building longed-for and credible gods centred in, for example, physics, psychoanalysis and utopianism. Syntheology forces theology to give up its historical fondness for transcendence to instead give structure to the new and growing religious immanence. Classical theology shifts over to syntheology, and when all is said and done, syntheology is a utopology. The question of whether any particular god exists or not syntheologically speaking is completely irrelevant. Such a question of course assumes that we are intimately acquainted with some kind of god who does not exist anyway nor has ever existed, and beforehand at that. The correctly posed syntheological question is instead which god might come to exist, and the answer to this question is always synonymous with the core of the vision that is driving the paradigm in question. The syntheological response runs as follows: Tell me your utopia, and I will tell you what god you are seeking and following.

Syntheism is about deriving and describing new and more relevant explanatory models for existence. This means that it regards the sciences as very much a theological exercise – while the syntheist religion serves as a collective term for the emotionally engaged, social practices that follow from this search. God is the name of the engine behind utopianism, which drives human creativity and adventurousness. This means that if, for some prejudiced reason, we are to deny ourselves the option of including the idea of God in our equations, it also means that we deprive ourselves of the option of producing utopias. We castrate utopianism for no reason whatsoever. Without utopias, no visions, and without visions, no hope. For what reason should we accept such a meagre atheist asceticism?

This question brings us to the dramatic difference between classical atheism and syntheism. We repeat time after time in our work the dialectical necessity – personally as well as socially and historically – of removing oneself from traditional religion via the atheist baptism of fire in order to only then be able to arrive at the syntheist position. Syntheism is thus not a reaction against atheism, but instead its logical conclusion, its historical and intellectual deepening (the philosophical concept of atheism.html">radical atheism as it is used by the philosopher Martin Hägglund among others is synonymous with syntheism). Syntheism is eternally grateful to atheism for a cultural act of cleansing that was as grandiose as it was necessary. But classical atheism has an obvious weakness, and it is not particularly surprising that it is from this very vulnerability that the syntheist impulse arises. Atheism is of course reactive in nature and a pure negation; it has no content in itself, and at the full extent of its creativity it can only represent one of the four basic concepts within syntheology, namely Atheos. But that is all there is.

Philosophically, classical atheism lacks a logical conclusion and fears instead its necessary extinction; the point where atheism becomes so strongly radical that, in the best spirit of fallibilism, it can finally leave the arena to give way to syntheism. And while the rumblings that herald the syntheist revolution grows stronger, a considerable proportion of atheism’s militant proponents hide away in an ill-considered, conceptually confused and blind contempt for religion; a kind of autoimmune defensive reaction against its own flagrant meaninglessness. The reason for this behaviour hides behind classical atheism’s Achilles heel: atheism in itself lacks an understanding of Man’s highly justified sense of wonder at existence. It does not see that Man only exists as a being in the midst of a world from which she gets her substance. It does not understand that the psychological tension in the relation between Man and the world is existentially fundamental. Thus, classical atheism has no qualifications for being anything other than a temporary springboard between two religious paradigms.

When classical atheism is placed alongside holistic syntheism, the latter suddenly stands out as a conservative, autistic perpetual loop that has got stuck and just repeats phrases that are increasingly pointless. While syntheism represents what Nietzsche calls and celebrates as the Dionysian drive, atheism gets stuck in its retrospective opposite, the Apollonian drive. This is not to say that the Apollonian drive is illegitimate: it is no more illegitimate than the left hemisphere (if we once again allow ourselves to borrow metaphorically the human cerebral hemispheres’ apparent peculiarities). But it cannot act unimpeded without a fatal imbalance arising. Atheos must be placed in relation to Entheos, Pantheos and above all Syntheos. The Apollonian drive that Atheos displays in isolation must be made subservient to the Dionysian drive in the other parts of the syntheological pyramid. In the same way that the eternalising left cerebral hemisphere, which divides up and freezes events in separate fragments, must interact with the mobilising right cerebral hemisphere and its holistic perspective in order for the human being’s self-image and world view to be complete.

In spite of the fact that all metaphysics begins, revolves around and ends with Man’s wonder at existence – or if you prefer: nature’s own wonder, embodied by and in Man, at itself – this constantly recurring complexity of emotions remains a mystery to many militant atheists. They stubbornly cling to their own, fragile, subjective experiences – many somewhat fetchingly refer to themselves as humanists, as if they themselves were able to serve God’s utopian purpose with their pious belief in reason – without understanding that all subjective experiences, even their own, merely consist of emotions. Which is not the worst thing in this world, but this fact must be acknowledged and analysed. The relevant response is of course to ask how emotions could have become a historical problem for such an emotional being as Man. They are after all as genuine and real as any other physical phenomena. And they are indisputably inevitable. So why not instead capitulate to these emotions, in order to later investigate what great exploits such an acceptance can inspire?

While the atheists stay with their positions and protest against all other illusions than their own, to which they are blind, while they ironically enough wonder why nobody wants to engage emotionally in their noble cause – except with a limited but intense envy directed at something one lacks and never believes oneself capable of achieving, namely a living faith – the affirmative post-atheist syntheists decide to engage and integrate emotional life directly into their world view. By moving through four concepts rather than just one; by leaving the categorical cold in Atheos and letting in the emotional warmth of Entheos in the appreciation of Pantheos, a formidable religious experience springs to life. It is this indisputably religious emotion, this strong mystical experience, that sets the syntheist agent in motion towards the utopia, towards the syntheological pyramid’s consummation, since the experience generates a desire to make the impossible possible. Here the desire to create Syntheos is awakened. Or to express the matter poetically: Syntheism is the light that lets itself be sensed at the end of atheism’s dark tunnel.

Sooner or later we are confronted by the enormity of existence. To start with, there are enormous distances between us and the things that surround us in everyday life on the one hand; and the smallest components of existence – the vibrating, geometrically multidimensional figures that bind together to form space, time, vacuum and matter – on the other hand. But there are also enormous distances between the small things that surround us and the gigantic multitudes of galaxies in cosmology, the enormous, vibrating voids between them, not to mention the infinite number of possible universes besides our own in a fully conceivable multiverse. The result is the syntheists’ fundamental appreciation of the immensity, intensity and productivity of existence, the theological conviction that the syntheist philosopher Robert Corrington – in his radical reading of the father of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy – calls ecstatic naturalism.

Between these extremes we find people in alternating states of confusion and wonder where everything, including ourselves, exists in ecstatic intensities. What classical atheism does not seem to understand is that it is precisely in this existential confusion and wonder that religion has its origin, not in any quasi-scientific, more or less lame logic. Religion comes out of mysticism’s handling of the immensity of existence, and that immensity has neither shrunk physically nor become any less fantastic as a result of the last century’s overwhelming scientific advances – from quantum physics to cosmology. Logically, we ought to be considerably more religious now than ever before. The miracle of reality is constantly becoming ever more fascinating. From our wonder at the immensity of existence (Pantheos) we continue to our wonder at our fellow human being’s difference in relation to ourselves (Entheos) and to reconnection between people as an empathic collective (Syntheos). For where the Universe meets us with indifference, we meet the potential for love in our fellow humans. It is when we build further from pantheism to syntheism that love comes into the picture. By definition love cannot expect love in return as a condition. Then it is not love, but merely internarcissistic manipulation (what follows from this manipulation is then the individualistic idea that the other is to be conquered and owned as a kind of colonised possession).

The romantic elevation of a single other human being to the only other, followed by a shutting out of the rest of the world as if it were hierarchically inferior to this only other is bizarre enough. That this deification is then mistaken for love is even more absurd. But if nothing else, the dark underbelly of this symbiosis-seeking manipulation is revealed by its ethical consequences. What characterises authentic ethics is namely that it is merely carried out, without a single iota of calculating ulterior motive, as an identity-reflecting truth as an act. Only then does the action become ethical: if not, the act can only be regarded as a cynical manipulation, a banal attempt to harness another person’s body and mind for short-sighted, egotistical purposes. Authentic love may indeed be an emotion, but the ethics that it must be based on are considerably more robust; it is a love that does not wait and see, that actually and most profoundly defies death. Syntheologically we express this by saying that love reveals itself in Entheos with its sights set on Syntheos, as a truth as an act originating in Atheos, carried out in Pantheos. But in order to understand how this complicated process works in practice, we must divide love into several dialectical steps.

In Ancient Greece, three different concepts of love are used: metaphysical love (agape), erotic love (eros) and friendship love (philia). The definitive test for love is attraction to the radically other, and this can only arise as agape. In this way, the three loves form not just a triangle but also an inclined plane, sloping from agape down towards the pair philia and eros. In the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza added a fourth concept of love: amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God, a love sprung from an intellectual conviction and recognition of the actual conditions of things, above all in relation to his monist universe where God and Nature are two names for one and the same thing, Deus sive Natura. Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis is first and foremost a radical act of will, which makes it truth as an act par excellence. For he maintains that the ethically desired attraction to the radically other does not start with the emotions we normally associate with love, but as a logically and cogently performed act of duty.

An authentic attraction must be about loving the radically other passionately without hopes of any love whatsoever in return. Otherwise it is not a case of authentic attraction, but merely a case of hypocritical and banal bartering which we call internarcissism. This explains why Spinoza argues that amor dei intellectualis must come first, before agape, philia and eros, quite simply so that authentic love can gain a foothold at all in the Greek inclined triangle. Syntheologically, Spinoza’s idea of the fundamental value of intellectual love has the consequence that neither the empty subject (Atheos) nor existence on the whole (Pantheos) leaves room for any emotional opinion of them; instead these are to be loved without reservation, since they can neither be added nor dropped. All of life’s other experiences are then based on Atheos and Pantheos, including everything else that is loved, hated or in any way at all related to emotionally. Amor dei intellectualis is this dutiful, logically cogent and fundamental attraction. An authentic agape, an authentic eros and an authentic philia with their strong emotions can only arise as a consequence of amor dei intellectualis first offering a necessary platform. Syntheologically, we express this as we must first submit to Atheos, in order to subsequently be able to abandon ourselves to Pantheos and Entheos on the way to the ethical objective, the authentic love of the radically other, where Syntheos arises.

Spinoza’s concept amor dei intellectualis is a predecessor to Nietzsche’s complementary term amor fati, which was coined 200 years later. It is enough to add duration to Spinoza’s love which is dependent on logical dutifulness to the Universe in order to get Nietzsche’s love which is dependent on logical dutifulness to fate. In both cases it is about the same attraction as a truth as an act, where the identity-reflecting decision precedes the emotion. Syntheologically of course we place the universe-fixated Spinoza with Pantheos and the time-fixated Nietzsche with Entheos. That Nietzsche adds the arrow of time to the ethical equation results in amor dei intellectualis and agape being merged as the basis for amor fati. His own world view is of course based on the Abrahamic God’s death, and since it also heralds the death of the individual, the Nietzschean übermensch ends up in a deadlock where everything in history up until now must be loved – both dutifully and without reservation – since no external salvation or other mental relief whatsoever exists. This means that an accepting attitude is not enough: Nietzsche unreasonably maintains that in fact a transcendent love is required for a possible reconciliation with fate. Since the love of fate is logically deduced, a necessity for the ethical substance rather than some kind of freely chosen emotion, only metaphysical love, agape, is suitable for this task. Fate arises and must be loved as truth as an act where the events are fixed in history. Therefore we place amor fati in the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.

The most intimate of relations remind us that everything essential in life starts with two and not one. One is nothing: the attraction always starts with two. And as the definitive truth event, attraction is in focus for mysticism. Zoroaster already understood and talked of this already with his concept asha in ancient Iran, followed by Heraclitus, who consummates the idea with his concept anchibasie in ancient Greece. Interestingly enough, both concepts are ambiguous: they can be translated as both to be present and to be close to being (not to be confused with late capitalism’s obsession with all kinds of pseudo-Buddhist mindfulness). Because two is the minimum in syntheist ontology – nothing can ever be just a one, other than the One, the Universe as a whole itself – a closer association with the object cannot either be a point of departure for the ontology. Instead this must be based on the actual relation between at least two, from the existential being in the division between them. Thereby asha and anchibasie, brilliantly, have not just ontological and epistemological but also ethical consequences. To live, understand and act correctly is to constantly remain as close to the states asha or anchibasie as possible.

This is abundantly clear to the protosyntheists Zoroaster, Heraclitus and their Chinese counterpart Lao Tzu as early as a few thousand years before their devoted successors Nietzsche and Heidegger complete their thinking. And as for Heidegger, he of course constructs his entire ethics of presence from anchibasie – this concept is the very key to his existentialist objective, Gelassenheit, or spiritual liberation. For syntheism asha and anchibasie are not just inspiring concepts from the infancy of philosophy but also the basis for its existentialism. The search for closeness to the truth and the will to presence in the truth’s inner division – caused by its constant oscillation and the impossibility of ever being eternalised outside the fantasy world of Man – means that the core of syntheistic mysticism already existed with Zoroaster and Heraclitus. Asha and anchibasie are not just the fundamentals of syntheist onto-epistemology – we cannot in any way make use of the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism without assuming them – but are also the ethical substance in syntheist mysticism.

We arrive at asha and anchibasie at the same moment that we let their meaning pass from being-external observing to being-internal participation. From this point of departure in syntheist mysticism, of necessity we land in fact in relationalist ethics. No other philosopher either before or after Heraclitus – with the possible exception of its predecessor and source of inspiration Zoroaster – has been so close to defining metaphysical truth with such precision. For it is precisely in its intense closeness to the truth event – rather than in some kind of absorption into the event – that the metaphysical truth is manifested, in its constantly failing yet necessary attempt to unite the at least two at the core of the ontology. We express this by saying that through all the thousands and thousands of truths we constantly produce, we find the primordial eternalisation as the defining truth as an act for our existential substance, as the primal act for us as creative truth machines.

The consequence of this is that, if we try to avoid asha or anchibasie as an onto-epistemological foundation, it becomes necessary to deny all forms of motion at all. This means that all motion without exception must be regarded as illusory. Parmenides is the Greek philosopher who draws this logically necessary conclusion, and with Parmenides the revolt against Heraclitus’ pioneering, counter-intuitive, but nevertheless logical insights is born. Parmenides’ ambition is fulfilled by the physicists Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein when they create a world view where all motion is illusory in a Platonist block universe, where the various forms of laws and determinism in a frozen space–time precede everything else. The problem is however that mathematics does not precede physics. Existence is not primarily mathematical (ideal) and secondarily physical (actual), as Plato claims. It is merely physical. We quite simply do not live in some form of Einsteinian block universe, however tidy this might look on the drawing board; we live de facto in a considerably more complicated Bohrian network universe.

Mathematics is actually just advanced, idealistic addition. If you take something and then add something else to this thing, all in all the whole obviously expands. It becomes something more. From this unavoidable fact, the first mathematicians draw the conclusion that 1 plus 1 might possibly be 2, and then go on to build the entire science of mathematics from this axiomatic assumption. The problem is however that this line of reasoning only works in theory, which means that it is only applicable to mathematics itself. And why is that? Because in nature the second 1 is never identical to the first 1. In nature there are never two absolutely identical objects to symmetrically add or exchange for each other. Nature is not only analogue but also fundamentally asymmetrical in all directions. There are never two of anything at all – phenomena in existence not only have fluid boundaries but are also completely unique, which has the consequence that all our generalisations, however epistemologically necessary they might be, can never be more exact than arbitrary approximations. Syntheologically we express this as Entheos being ontologically in the same class with Atheos and Pantheos – or to express the matter more poetically: two is the first sum for the fundamental difference within the One, and it is in the capacity of this scientific axiom that multiplicity is the foundation of ontology.

Thereafter we only have to reverse the addition to get subtraction, the temporarily negative addition – neither more nor less. In the next step, we build further with multiplication and division as shortcuts to increasingly complex additions and subtractions. And so on, and so forth. But we never leave eternalism within mathematics, which of course ultimately is applied eternalism par excellence. Mobilist existence outside mathematical construction does not take any notice of this however; it is not the least bit more mathematical than it is eternalist. All such things are merely illusory conceptions that are nourished by our inadequate albeit functional aids for navigating the turmoil of existence. It is important to note here that mathematics does not distinguish itself from physics as some kind of latter-day emergence – no such suddenly arisen mystical degree of complexity is needed – rather, this separation actually occurs right at the same moment that mathematics starts to come into use at all. The structured fantasy sets off in one direction, the chaotic reality in another. We live in a radically relationalist universe – not in a mathematical one. We must not follow the autistic Plato and mistake mathematics’ tempting simplifications and fancy symmetries for endlessly complex reality per se. Mathematics is merely our eternalised way of trying to understand a mobilist environment that constantly evades our descriptions of it, and at the end of the day this must also apply to mathematical formulas per se, which become tangible within Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. According to the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, one of Whitehead’s most prominent disciples, Cantor succeeds in creating a science of infinity. Syntheism can only agree and if nothing else say thank you for the inspiring metaphors.

According to relationalism, as the Swedish philosopher of religion Matz Hammarström claims, an intra-acting interdependence between Man and his environment always prevails. Or to put the matter phenomenologically: there is no real boundary between Man’s near-world and his surrounding world. All phenomena that Man is confronted with already include himself ontologically. Then even epistemology, and ultimately also ethics, must submit to this fact. Knowledge of one’s surrounding world cannot be attained without the human being herself being an integral part of the object of this knowledge, the relationalist phenomenon, whose participation must be constantly discounted in every eternalised calculation. It is here that Plato and his mathematics depart radically from mobilist thinking. For Plato, the duality that mathematics offers is a fundamental given for ontology, but existence contains no such dualities outside the world of mathematics. Phenomena can be diachronic in relation to each other, but that in itself does not mean that they are dual, which mathematics beguiles us to believe. Two phenomena can arise concurrently or in the same area, but never both at the same time. And conversely: if two things occur either at different points in time or in different places, they are thereby automatically always different phenomena.

Heraclitus is the first person in history who seriously both realises and formulates this. His universe is vertical and sees context as primary. Parmenides responds with a universe that is horizontal and sees sequences as primary. It is not the degree of truth of these statements themselves that determines which of these branches dominates the philosophical arena, but how well they match and adapt to the prevailing power structures. It is thus nothing other than the usefulness of Parmenides’ world view to the feudalist and capitalist elites that gives it its dominant status, right up until Whitehead’s and Bohr’s relationalism arrives when, after all this time, Heraclitus is proven right – at least for the time being. The Enlightenment’s three celebrated civilisational mainstays – the individual, the atom and capital – and the primordial forms of Kant’s subject and object, have their roots with Parmenides. At the same time as the network-dynamical revolution pulls the rug out from under the feet of individualism and atomism as well as capitalism, and thereby from Parmenides’ entire legacy.

Syntheism embraces an ethics of survival as a counterweight to immortality’s moralism, which is characteristic of the dualist philosophies’ outlooks on life. The Platonist obsession with immortality and perfection attests to its hostility vis-à-vis existence and life, a phobia of change that at its deepest level is a death worship. From syntheism’s Nietzschean perspective, Plato and his dualist heirs therefore stand out as the prophets of the death wish. Syntheism instead celebrates the eternalisation of the decisive moment, the manifestation of the One in the irreducible multiplicity, as the infinite now. All values and valuations must then be based on the infinite now as the event horizon. Eternity in time and infinity in space are not extensions of some kind in Platonist space–time of some kind, but poetically titled compact concentrations of passionate presence, as Heideggerian-inspired nodes in Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism. Eternity in time and infinity in space can only meet in the infinite now, in temporality’s minimised freezing, rather than in some kind of maximised extension. We are thus not eternal creatures because we are immortal, but because we can think and experience eternity as a logical as well as an emotional representation of the infinite, focused to the current moment. Which in turn means that the syntheist transcendence is localised inside rather than outside the immanence.

Love and mysticism in the infinite now constitute the very nucleus of the ethics of survival. Here, an alternative to all forms of moralism based on the preconceived state of things appears. That valuations that are loosely founded in the state of things being able to motivate a kind of “the future should be more of the same as now” as an ethical beacon, is not something that has any logical robustness. That nature appears to act in a certain way in a certain given situation of course does not mean that Man must have nature’s mechanisms as an ethical beacon. While amor fati is a dutiful love to the closed past, the imperative does not include the open future; rather, it implies a contradictory encouragement to break with everything that has been, that is, to expand rather than minimise the spatio-temporal multiplicity, as the arch-Nietzschean Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. Thus to act ethically is at least as often about violating nature, participating in and driving the cultural and civilisational process, as it is about following it. Nature is not any kind of Abrahamic god and neither is truth an ethical guiding principle.

Even relationalist philosophers can fall into the trap of wanting to convert Nature’s behaviour into precisely such an ethical beacon. In his Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier depicts a kind of fascinating Freudian cosmology with the Universe as an entropic giant, dazzled and on his way towards his own extinction – what he calls an organon of extinction. Brassier’s point of departure is that culture has done everything it can to eschew the trauma of extinction. His ambition is instead to construct meaning based on the inevitable annihilation of existence. This Brassier does by attacking both the phenomenological and the hermeneutic branches of Continental philosophy, but also Deleuzian vitalism, which he argues tries to inject all sorts of meaning into existence, as a kind of failed and fundamentally ineffective invocation against the trauma of extinction. Brassier instead bases his ideas on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland and Thomas Metzinger when he makes his appeal for his radical ultranihilism. He points out that the Universe comes out of nothing (syntheism’s Atheos), and his idea of the organon of extinction as a philosophical point of departure – the fact that life can only be experienced against the backdrop of its own inevitable annihilation – according to Brassier is also the condition for thinking existing at all. Syntheologically, we express this by saying that he regards Pantheos and Entheos as merely subordinated aspects of the thoroughly dominating Atheos, where any form of Syntheos is nowhere to be seen at all.

Brassier’s dramatic achievements are that he attacks Kantian correlationism based on the assumption that thinking does not exist in relation to being, as Kant claims, but in relation to non-being. Only there does the possibility open up for a philosophical way forward, and it is relationalist. But even if his cosmology were to be physically correct – syntheist physicists such as Lee Smolin and Roger Penrose definitely do not agree with him – this does not entail that conscious people themselves need to behave as repetitive organons of some kind, replete with naked death drives (even if the elder Jacques Lacan toys with the same idea). Expressed in a Lacanian manner, Brassier thus constructs a kind of theology of the subconscious as an ethical guiding principle, but he attaches it to the same shaky place as 19th century socio-biologists did – when they lay the foundations for, among other things, 20th century Nazism – namely in the masochistic will to submit to, follow and amplify nature in exactly the same way that, on scientifically extremely shaky grounds, it is already assumed to be.

The syntheist response to Brassier’s radical nihilism is of course that it gets stuck half way in syntheist dialectics, in a kind of permanent masochistic enjoyment under Atheos, without completing the pyramidal thought movement via Pantheos to the affirmative oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos, where the four corners of the syntheological pyramid are radically equal. Brassier’s role model Nietzsche of course never based his affirmative nihilism in his otherwise beautifully failed concept of the will to power. Nietzsche’s affirmativeness can instead only be achieved through a fully conscious existential act of truth, where the act produces the truth, which in turn produces the Übermensch. There is thus considerably more of Nietzsche’s postnihilist affirmativeness in his role model Badiou’s existentialism than Brassier seems to understand. It is also therefore that Brassier’s otherwise impressive nihilist reasoning – except that it is based on a probably incorrect although particularly interesting reading of modern cosmology – lands only half way in syntheist dialectics.

But if nature does not actively provide us as passive receivers with any valuations whatsoever, a possible future extinction of the Universe does not do so either, since the annihilation most definitely also is part of the nature that, according to Brassier, is silent. Syntheism is therefore based on an even more radical nihilism than that of Brassier, since its emptiness is even deeper and above all lacks Brassier’s wishful-thinking foothold along one of Atheos’ slippery verges. Within syntheology per se, the existential experience – regardless of whether it has the trauma of extinction as a backdrop or not – offers no possible values. The insight that reaches us when we take atheism to its utmost limit is instead that valuations really must be created strictly ex nihilo. This is atheism.html">radical atheism, the dialectical turning point where the fully reasoned nihilism, as a notorious extinguisher of all historical values and valuations, is converted into affirmative syntheism.

Instead of Brassier’s organon of extinction, syntheist ethics is based on Zoroaster’s classic axiom: Man’s ethical substance is his thoughts, his words and his actions, and in precisely that order. It is only on the basis of a radical identity creation that ethics finds its mark. And what is this ethical principle founded on if not self-love’s being or non-being? Only the creature who loves herself as she is, from a crassly logical and ethical acceptance of herself, rather than based on any kind of sentimental and unreliable emotional passion, can act in an ethically correct way. And then survival is the ethical beacon, based on the principle of maximisation of existential pleasure – most clearly manifested in the religious ecstatic state that syntheologists call the infinite now – rather than any kind of premature mimicking of an alleged future universal annihilation.

Nietzsche, the father of European nihilism, interestingly enough goes in the opposite direction compared to Brassier and instead argues for an ethics based on resistance to nature’s doings. He pits culture against nature and finds the heart of the übermensch in a kind of aesthetics of resistance – but not without first confronting Man with his deep animalistic nature – an ethical turnaround that is investigated and applied to perfection by his French successor Georges Bataille among others who, with his extensive atheological project in the 1950s in turn is one of Lacan’s and obviously also syntheism’s foremost sources of inspiration. According to Nietzsche and Bataille, it is precisely by opposing the natural – by surviving rather than conforming – that Man gets his own ethical substance. So if the Universe really is on the road to a final death and extinction, a Nietzschean response to this state of affairs might be to defend survival against extinction as a norm through every thought, every word, every act. Thereby Nietzsche with his wealth of tragic heroes is the ethicist of survival par excellence. He pits the principle of maximisation of existential pleasure against Brassier’s ambition to speed up and put into effect the death-wishing masochism of the subconscious.

Brassier’s philosophy is indeed firmly anchored in syntheology’s cornerstones Atheos, Entheos and Pantheos (what he misses is the affirmative launching to Syntheos). He is right in saying that this nihilist fundament must be understood as a great historical achievement, a kind of collective intellectual maturation, and not as a regrettable spiritual emergency. But since Brassier’s world is nothing but sublime physics – and he does not, in contrast to Alain Badiou for example, take into consideration Man’s ability to create the truth through an act – he also opens the way for the counter-question of whether his own nihilism means the end of history. And there Brassier has no unequivocal answer. His Freudian cosmology is not even verified within physics. It is sufficient – in the manner of Niels Bohr – to regard time as physics’ real constant, in an indeterministic rather than deterministic universe, in order for Brassier’s drawn-out apocalypse to collapse.

What syntheology adds to Brassier’s ultranihilism is that it draws lines from the base constructed around the three basic concepts, up towards the top of the syntheological pyramid. Thereby it adds Man’s emotions and creativity to the world view; and it ironically enough includes Brassier’s own highly libidinous philosophising per se, whose driving force Brassier can never explain based on his limited atheological model. It is about emotions and creativity that a seemingly depressed or malicious Brassier does not experience or attempts to ignore. Syntheos is Man’s highly conscious creation of God, her sense of wonder and confidence vis-à-vis the fundamental triangle of the syntheological pyramid, which she builds on with a logical faith. It is about Man’s vision of a new and different future, the utopia, in relation to her present existential situation, and is constructed on top of her established knowledge of the fundamental nature of existence.

Brassier does in fact understand the trauma of extinction, but he is evidently wrestling with the shock of affirmation which follows from the insight of one’s own mortality. Therefore Nihil Unbound gets stuck in the category protosyntheism. This otherwise so impressive philosophical work, this consummate atheology, remains at a standstill in one of the three bottom corners in the syntheological pyramid, unable to rise towards the top. Brassier claims, which is entirely reasonable, that Atheos is the Universe’s own formidable engine, but he has not started the engine himself nor allowed himself be carried away by the journey within the syntheological pyramid. And the explanation is, as is so often the case concerning philosophical fallacies, psychological. In his quest to stand outside the relationalist universe as a neutral observer, Brassier misses the point that such a psychological alienation for the philosopher is just as impossible as the corresponding physiological alienation for the physicist. Brassier’s inadequacy is that he lacks the oceanic feeling, which is the reward for a genuinely participatory philosophy. Consequently the spiritual work of syntheists strives to attain and then maintain this oceanity.

The utopia is the God called Syntheos, and the core of Syntheos is the existential experience of ego-dissolution and uniting with the One, the unit of existence. Here syntheism leaves classical philosophy and steps into the world of theology. For the step from an illusory existential dividuality to a considerably more credible existential oceanity requires that one leaves philosophy as a transcendental totalism in order to proceed to theology as immanent mobilism. Therefore Brassier’s role model François Laruelle describes the speculative totalism of Hegel as the pinnacle of the history of philosophy, since totalism – which Hegel first completes and then also turns around dialectically – at its core is the essence of the philosophical exercise. If this is the case, mobilist thinking must use theology as a weapon in order to change the course of philosophy away from its fixation on extinction. Since it evidently requires a theological dialectical reversal to reintroduce Man’s emotions as the decisive factor – or syntheologically expressed: Syntheos must be added to the metaphysical triangle Atheos–Entheos-Pantheos – mobilist thinking must claim that theology is deeper than philosophy. Thereby syntheology can begin to act as the necessary metamorphosis that saves philosophy from totalism’s wearisome and destructive death wish.

Mobilist thinking has always factored in the emotions of beings; totalist thinking is instead based on a picture of beings as frozen objects. It is only when we consider Man as a disengaged external observer of existence, Kant’s fantasy, or as a disengaged isolated near-world without an authentic relationship to the surrounding world, Hegel’s fantasy, that we can accept that totalism displays any intellectual honesty whatsoever. On the other hand, for example Heidegger’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s emotionally motivated and theological search for an engaged presence requires a correct overall picture of Man’s life-world, syntheology’s saving and concluding addition. Through the addition of Syntheos the syntheological pyramid is humanised. Only in this way can philosophy save its integrity from Laruelle’s anti-philosophical attacks and win a separate role from the otherwise all-embracing physics. Thanks to the constantly emotionally engaged human being’s actual presence, both in the world and in philosophy, syntheology’s last step is historically necessary. Oceanity is not just a wonderfully liberating feeling, a sweeping emotional experience, it is also the necessary antithesis of cynical isolationism, the necessary logical antithesis of individualism, the only way for thinking to dissolve and once and for all leave the philosophical prison of the dishonest Cartesian theatre.

Heidegger attempts to change transcendence from within. He argues that transcendence acquires a new, credible role if it can be understood as an internal human activity and not as an external separate domain that Man tries to achieve and conquer, that is, as a transcendental psychology rather than a Kantian phenomenology. Heidegger’s search can be compared with the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire). Without eternalism, perception would end up in a complete psychosis. While without mobilism we would end up in an equally complete neurosis, since everything would then be transformed into a single gigantic, incalculable mess without any distinction or limitation whatsoever. Eternalism is the expression of transcendence, mobilism is the expression of immanence, in a Heideggerian sense. And both are just as necessary, and moreover in a dialectical relationship to each other, in order for Man to be able to construct a functional world view to be de facto present in.

Eternalism distinguishes itself from totalism inasmuch as it does not adduce any kind of ontological status or pretend to be primary and external in relation to mobilist reality. Instead it is strictly phenomenological. The father of pragmatism Peirce emphasises mobilism’s primary ontological status precisely by calling it firstness; consequently he confers a status on eternalism denoted as secondness and in closing refers to the dialectic between them (that is, when phenomenology returns to mobilism after a digression via eternalism) as thirdness. Thus as secondness, eternalism has no Platonist ambitions at all. It instead apprehends itself as a brilliant, perceptive response to the massive semiotic flow from an immanent and contingent universe (Peirce is not very surprisingly also the father of semiotics). Eternalism is thereby very much in fact a transcendence as an activity, exactly what Heidegger would like to see, and as such it manages all of totalism’s hobbyhorses excellently without totalism being able to sneak in the back door and once again try to attack mobilist ontology.

The original dividuation arises through an organic contraction. We can call this condition primitive subjectivity, in contrast to the organism’s primitive objectification of its environment. From primitive subjectivity, the organisms later develop into the thinking and feeling human being of our time with his language and his consciousness. The ideas are dialectical in nature, the intensities are aesthetic in nature. The existential experience is best described as an oscillation between these two poles. The more eternalist the syntheist agent is, the more mobilist the phenomenon becomes, and vice versa. The subject is produced by the perception in order to give the semiotic flow its context and meaning. But if the subject were not there, if it were not produced, both we ourselves and existence would remain irreducible multiplicities piled on top of each other without context or meaning. But without any form of personification, no unit arises. Without personification, a chaos can never be understood as a cosmos. Whether one later, like the classical mystics, claims that God ought to remain nameless in order to maintain God’s illusory personification, or as the syntheists say that the illusoriness should be affirmed openly, so that personifications can be infinitely produced as long as they are creatively and explanatorily motivated – syntheology starts with four, deeply rooted in the history of metaphysics – is rather a matter of preference. However the syntheists are happy to let this issue be decided in a future comparison of the creative effect of these positions. Up until then, the transrationalist question to the believer is: What standpoint do you choose to identify with and follow as your truth as an act in particular?

For it is Man’s emotional engagement that is needed in philosophy and theology, not his internarcissistic and anthropocentric projections on his environment. But neither the void, Atheos, nor nature, Pantheos, offers us any safe haven. We do relate to and allow ourselves to be fascinated by the void and nature, but we do not on that account have to follow their contingent whims at all. We can only create our religious home together with other dedicated believers through an affirmative cultural expression rather than through an ingratiating imitation of nature. For life is not a long drawn-out destructive death; life is instead a passionate, creative dying. Only through its mortality can the subject, Atheos, be experienced in its fundamental, creative emptiness. To live is therefore to live in the direction of death and the subject is that within the agent that is constantly dying. Life is a becoming: only death supplies the being. Syntheologically, we express this by saying that only through dying can God become God for God’s self. By reconnecting Man to this historical origin, this meta-theological fundamental prerequisite, syntheism brings Man back to his rightful place in existence, and in the safest possible company, surrounded by his own most beautiful invention: the created and therefore by definition mortal God’s religion.

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58