4 Living religion versus deadly alienation

When Friedrich Nietzsche, as far back as Thus spoke Zarathustra and beyond, establishes and announces the death of God in the latter half of the 19th century, it also means death to the idea of the availability of objective truth. This is because objective truth as an idea is entirely dependent on a metaphysical constant, the primary gaze before which the true object arises. But if this primary gaze does not exist, if the metaphysical god beyond time and space does not exist, the whole foundation for the fixation of the object also falls apart. The phenomena start to dance in increasingly complex patterns of interdependencies, and with the beginning of that dance, the possibility of an objectively attainable, valid truth about the phenomena disappears. There is no longer an authority that issues certificates of authenticity. There is no longer anyone who serves as the object’s universal apprehender of truth. All truths become contingent upon the relative position of the postulator of the truth, which subsequently means that all truths become subjective.

Even before Nietzsche, Kant shows that reality as it is and perceived by no one, the noumenal, by definition is inaccessible to the human being, who instead has to put up with the noumenal’s reproduction as the object in a world view that consists exclusively of subjectively experienced phenomena. Thus the object is subjective, mediated by our unreliable senses, and not the least bit objective per se. After Kant, all forms of objectivism are impossible for anyone reflecting philosophically on the matter – the ‘objectivists’ of the 20th century, such as Ayn Rand, devote themselves exclusively to a kind of autistic vulgar-philosophy without any understanding of the Kantian revolution – and this notion is replaced by various forms of subjectivism, and thereby also various forms of relativism. Moreover, Nietzsche successfully demonstrates that truths not only must be subjective, they are also influenced by the subject that produces them. By psychologising the observer and thus turning this figure into a mobile body instead of a fixed soul, Nietzsche completes the Kantian revolution.

Relativism is already apparent in language. Every concept, every linguistic component, is in a state of constant flux, constantly changes meaning: in time, in space, between and also within those who use spoken sounds or written signs with which to communicate. Seen as a social tool, language can therefore never be objectively valid, and thereby neither can it reflect an enduringly objective truth. According to the French philosopher Alain Badiou there is, however, an exception to this general rule for language, and this is mathematics. While mathematics is in essence tautological – what the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 conveys is of course really that 2 + 2 is another way of saying 4, the informational value is therefore extraordinarily low – as the optimal eternalisation it nonetheless beguiles us with its implicit promises of fixed values located in frozen space–time. Through the natural sciences, mathematics seems to offer a possibility for the human being to establish a truer and more effective contact with objective reality. It beguiles us with the possibility of objectively establishing qualitative differences between subjective statements.

German philosopher Jürgen Habermas launches intersubjectivity as the highest truth that humans can aspire to after Kant has shifted objective reality to where it is hopelessly out of reach. According to Habermas, the absence of this objectivity can only be confronted and militated against by an extensive plurality of subjective voices. Habermas imagines that intersubjectivity is negotiated between actors on an equal footing in the public sphere, which is both laborious and time-consuming, but which in the end nonetheless yields a satisfactory result, due to lots of subjective positions confronting and interacting with each other. To take one example, the credibility of science is based on the conviction that intersubjective truth can be fished out through the process referred to as peer review. No position gains recognition if it is not first sanctioned by a collective consisting of formally educated experts; and contrariwise: if a text contains an abundance of footnotes, it is considered academically true, or at least trustworthy.

Badiou however argues that mathematics modifies Habermas’ premises; with the aid of mathematics, we can go beyond intersubjectivity and achieve an objectivity that Kant does not understand. The wide acceptance of the quantum physics paradigm within the sciences – and its subsequent dramatic effects on philosophy, for example through the effect that Niels Bohr’s ideas have on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy, and vice versa – in spite of its initially highly counter-intuitive claims, proves that this is the case. Badiou argues that thanks to the progress of mathematics, ontology can at last leave representationalism, correlationalism and even relativism behind, only to thereafter take the decisive leap over to relationalism. The Kantian paradigm would thus be passé and objectivity would again be possible.

However, the problem is that the phenomenal and indisputable utility of mathematics in the most diverse of contexts has blinded humanity repeatedly throughout history and tricked humans into making the most fatal mistakes. The subconscious attraction in Plato’s dualist philosophy – when it becomes widely accepted in ancient Greece in the 4th century B.C. – probably lies to a large extent in Plato’s religious aspirations, and it is of course also these that later make Platonism Judaism’s perfect partner when they together constitute the two main ingredients in the aggressively dualist Christianity. Paul is the Greek Jew, the hybrid between Moses and Plato; Pauline Christianity is ancient Egypt’s cosmological dualism, resurrected through the reunification of its Judaic and Greek branches (comparable to ancient Iran’s cosmological monism in Zoroaster, represented by Heraclitus among the Greeks).

But it is important to understand Plato’s philosophical temperament. He constantly and neurotically seeks exactitude: the incontrovertible definition. Since life is chaotic and boundless, and since death really is the only thing that is precise, indisputable and definite, the inevitable consequence is that the Platonist is most profoundly a death worshipper. If predecessor and rival Heraclitus is the Iranian Greek who worships life, Plato is the Egyptian Greek who worships death. Heraclitus accepts and embraces the open-ended infinity of existence and of life. Plato, on the other hand, hates both openness and infinity, and it is in mathematics that he finds the magic weapon that will enable him to force the chaotic world, which is impossible to determine and define exhaustively, into one single preordained and limited totality.

This means that physical reality, according to Plato, is merely a chimera: a world of shades populated by imitations of secondary quality. The real reality is instead the pure and elevated world of ideas, accessible only to those philosophers who think along the lines that Plato himself designates. Here, or course, the chaos and impermanence of the physical world does not prevail; rather, everything is regulated by mathematics’ preordained and eternally valid laws. As a predictable consequence of this, Plato also advocates philosophy’s enlightened despotism as the most desirable form of government. He has no sympathy for the Athenians’ democratic and thus intersubjective experimental work. Without insight into and understanding of what is true, the ruling collective can only lead the state astray.

Platonism is the first exhaustively formulated totalism, and it exercises a powerful escapist pull by stressing a stable, symmetrical and thoroughly regulated alternative to the obviously defective and imperfect life that we live in the everyday. The rising aristocracy thus obtains a brilliantly designed free gift – which it then in turn can pretend to bestow on the cheated and cowed peasants and slaves in feudalist society – namely eternal life, the paradisiacal world where a reward for patiently endured poverty and toil awaits the one who has submitted without complaint to every whim and order of those in power. Plato allows himself to be seduced by mathematics’ promises of symmetrical perfection and eternal validity. And if mathematics is perfect and eternal, in the sphere of mathematics existence must also be perfect and remain perfect forever. The consequence is that if existence in the mathematical sphere is already perfect, it no longer has any reason to allow itself to be changed. A change in something that is characterised by perfection can of course only lead in one direction, namely to a deterioration, in the form of imperfection. Since time requires change in order to exist – duration is change stacked on top of change – this must mean that time is an illusion.

However, the problem with this very thing is that Plato’s world view is based on an entirely idiosyncratic and untenable premise. His own autistic neurosis when faced with the shapeless multiplicity of life forces him to devote himself to beautiful reveries of a make-believe world where everything is perfectly ordered (which is easy to effect, since it is only make-believe). But as it turns out, there are plenty of evangelists in the growing feudalist society that are of the same temperament as Plato and who eagerly want to spread his hierarchical ideology. His message is received with joy and appreciation by the Greek and later the Roman aristocracy. By accepting Platonism’s false premise and furthermore emphasising the strict logic that later ensues from his imaginary premise, this doctrine is spread with devastating efficiency. Platonism also attracts the great masses with its promise of the perfect paradise that one ought to be able to attain if one only thinks and acts correctly, and it is so incredibly practically arranged that by definition it is out of reach of every form of empirical study.

When Paul later launches Christianity, thereby placing Plato’s parallel theory of ideas beyond death, there is unfortunately no Heraclitus at hand to call his bluff in this bizarre and seemingly endlessly generous promise, which is issued without any risk or cost whatsoever on the issuer’s part. Platonism thus wins a crushing victory. And Alain Badiou, unfortunately, makes the same mistake as his predecessor Plato. He is tempted by the aura of perfectionism of mathematics to cultivate an aspiration of being able to discover the eternal laws of physics before the physicists themselves do so. But his view of mathematics’ relationship to physics is, unfortunately, both historically and ontologically incorrect. It is physics that is primary and real, and it does not follow any mathematical laws per se. Or as Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate in physics, expresses it: “A law of nature is nothing other than a condensed description, assumed and available in advance, of the regularities that an observed phenomenon displays during the period of observation.” Therefore the mathematical laws, when they are applied to physics, cannot either be anything other than, in the best case, just approximations; they can never be physically, but only mathematically, and thereby basically tautologically, exact.

On the whole, mathematics is a tautological way for people to tell one and the same approximatic history of the world from a host of different perspectives. This is in contrast to an approximate history, which is full of constants, but which for some reason must be regarded as rounded off as a whole, while an approximatic history consists of an infinite series of roundings without any anchoring constant whatsoever, as a stubborn attempt to eternalise a world which in reality is entirely mobilist (which it of course is). However, mathematics is nothing over and above this. For in all its richness, mathematics never does anything other than tell self-referencing and self-validating stories that in the best case might appear to reflect physical reality, but which de facto never can be this reality, and even less so set an example for it, legislate for it or replace it. Therefore, ontologically physics and mathematics must be kept strictly separate. In spite of the fact that many mathematicians and even philosophers have wanted to see mathematics as a language of God, this is unfortunately not true. The Universe is namely an analogue, not a digital, phenomenon.

The human gaze is so libidinally attracted to symmetrical patterns that it fancies that it finds these in nature, in the same way that the human being tautologically formulates them in mathematics. But however appealing such symmetries may be to the human libido, they are unfortunately not to be found in nature, and above all they are never necessary. Nature does not make it easy for itself, quite simply because nature does not need to (or cannot) make it easy for itself in the way that man must (and sometimes even can) maximise his conditions for survival on a planet where the constant lack of food, energy, housing and other resources is a fundamental living condition. The Universe on the whole exists in fact in a state of immeasurable bounty. It is only in a world characterised by scarcity that the genetically conditioned search for symmetries that is typical of mankind arises, as if these symmetries were some kind of metaphysical signs of health.

The fact remains that the constant adding of new dimensions and other internal complexity-raising factors to mathematics merely increases the risk of its tautological foundation sinking even deeper into oblivion, and that the mathematician thereby is even more easily fooled into believing that mathematics reflects reality even better. We call this the tautological trap of mathematism. The history of Platonism is in principal one big, cautionary tale of this fundamental mistake of perspective. If anything, science is in need of a powerful demathematisation to an unparalleled degree. It is one thing to add reasonably relevant external facts to a narrative in order to increase its credibility, but the more internal, complexity-raising factors that are added, the higher the risk, psychologically speaking, of mathematics getting stuck in mathematism’s tautological trap.

Like so many Platonists before him, Badiou makes precisely this mistake. He falsely assumes that the eternalism that his own perception produces is more real than the mobilism that one’s perception is constantly confronted with from all directions in one’s physical surroundings. Badiou thus thinks in a closed or anthropocentric way, rather than in an open and universocentric way, when he investigates the ontological status of mathematics. Exactly as Plato did 2,300 years ago, Badiou lets his own neurosis get in the way of his philosophical perspicacity. It is one of syntheism’s most important tasks to eliminate the whole idea of eternal, external laws with an assumed origin in an eternal, external world to which we have no access. This is superstition rather than science.

So where then does relationalist metaphysics find its historical allies? It is, for example, more correct to say that syntheism strives towards a new Renaissance rather than towards a new Enlightenment. British philosopher Iain McGilchrist with his tome The Master and his Emissary builds a veritably syntheist manifesto around this basic idea. According to McGilchrist, the history of ideas is a struggle between the human being’s two cerebral hemispheres for the power and the glory. If the right hemisphere – which is holistically oriented and seeks wholeness in its eternalisations – is allowed to rule, or at least to dominate, it produces mobilist, emotionally driven and culturally explorative epochs such as the Renaissance and Romanticism. The left hemisphere – which prefers to eternalise the world as if it consisted of a series of isolated components without a context – instead produces totalist, logo-centric and culturally closed epochs such as the Enlightenment and Modernism.

Even if McGilchrist devotes several chapters to trying to prove the physiological validity in these controversial theories, it is highly dubious. There is quite simply no medical proof for the cerebral hemispheres being as dramatically different as he claims. The interaction between them is intimate and complex. But as metaphors for different temperaments in collective thinking McGilchrist’s hemispheres are useful. If the left hemisphere, according to this view, is left to its own devices without the right hemisphere’s holistic influence, it soon generates a neurotic, inconsistent, and near-autistic world view, which has more in common with the schizophrenic patient’s unimaginative closed-mindedness than with contemporary physics’ inspiring and expansive geometries.

McGilchrist champions the thesis that when the human being is thinking only with her left hemisphere, and thus immediately breaks everything down into a solid logic of isolated eternalisations, life appears completely meaningless. All that remains is aleatorically joined and basically meaningless utility functions, propelled by a folly of instrumentality. This, he argues, is because it is only the right hemisphere that can perceive and produce a cohesive meaning between the many eternalisations, give them a metaphysical dimension, while the right hemisphere is utilitarianism’s worst enemy.

If it is the role of religion to have a literally making-whole, a healing, effect on people and societies, to create a functioning unit that is greater than the sum of its constituent parts, then alienation is its opposite – an alienation that separates people both from the world around them, from each other, and ultimately even from themselves. The syntheological connection is evident: McGilchrist’s holistic right hemisphere is home to religion, while his separatist left hemisphere, consequently, is home to alienation. McGilchrist even goes so far as to claim that various epochs in the history of ideas can be connected without further ado to a kind of hemispherical dialectic: the Renaissance and Romanticism give priority to the right hemisphere and heighten religion rather than alienation, while the Enlightenment and Modernism give priority to the left hemisphere and engender alienation rather than religion. Seen from this perspective, it is with the Renaissance and Romanticism that syntheism – as a dialectical reaction to Modernism – finds its allies and precursors in the history of ideas.

A clear example of an ideology where the left hemisphere runs amok at the expense of the right hemisphere is Auguste Comte’s positivist nightmare from the mid-19th century. Comte highly arbitrarily divides the history of ideas into three stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the scientific phases. With each stage, the human being becomes increasingly ennobled and perfect, and once she knows how matters actually stand, when she is completely scientific and thus also all-knowing – that is, when the human being becomes Comte himself – it is precisely then that history will be complete. Similar to thinkers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, Comte adheres to the scientistic conviction, the blind faith in the unlimited potential of not only rationality but also science.

Evolution is quite simply such a strong and captivating metaphor for many of the 19th century’s intellectuals that they very much want to make it the fundamental ethical principle, as if it were the task of the righteous in some bizarre way to speed up a history whose development is of course anyway preordained according to their own determinist conviction. For Marx, the Communist revolution of the proletariat, for example, is a deed that he must command his readers and disciples to carry out, in spite of the fact that, according to his own view, it will take place anyway because of the historical necessity that he himself and Friedrich Engels describe in their writings. In a similar manner, Comte regards his social evolutionism as so perfect that strangely enough he wants to turn it into a secular religion. Social evolutionary ideas continue to thrive in Europe up until the mass murders of Nazism and Stalinism around the mid-20th century. Then, if not before, the danger of arguing for a militant ethics based on a vulgar natural determinism and driven by alienation’s ressentiment rather than by religion’s search for benevolent dialogue with one’s fellow man, becomes manifest. In this way the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century are the dark flip side of the Enlightenment. Rationalism without consciousness of its own fundamental blind faith is, as Habermas’ gurus Horkheimer and Adorno show in Dialectic of Enlightenment, literally lethal for humanity.

Syntheism is the exact opposite of Comte’s sociology as religion. In syntheism it is science that gives birth to philosophy and philosophy that gives birth to syntheology. Religion is dependent on and builds on science, not the other way around. But then syntheism is also, if we borrow McGilchrist’s metaphors for a while yet, the result of the right cerebral hemisphere’s constant search for an applicable holism. It is only through setting these eternalisations in motion and in relation to each other, through remobilising and thereby making her existence sacred, that mankind produces and experiences meaning in life and is able to alleviate alienation. It is only when the human being becomes an agent that her life gets a meaning. Adding a holistic perspective to life thus in itself constitutes making the world religious: recreating (an idea of) a context, a (basis for) fellowship. Regarding everything that exists as an endless multitude of expressions of and for one and the same substance, the One, is syntheism’s innermost core.

What happens, historically speaking – if we continue to borrow McGilchrist’s cerebral hemisphere metaphors for a little while longer – is that the Enlightenment and the capitalist-industrialist society that it results in, constantly give priority to the left hemisphere over the right one in its increasingly marked and extreme mathematisation of existence. By initially delimiting, then separating and measuring everything in the name of science, mankind also subsequently starts to objectify, instrumentalise, conquer, colonise, plunder and consume every thinkable resource in her environment, including himself and her fellow humans. But the mathematisation of existence not only leads to a ruthless and ultimately also self-destructive exploitation of the Earth’s finite resources. The exploited identity also generates a particularly trenchant alienation, and with it the lack of a context-creating religion. The right cerebral hemisphere, which experiences wholeness and builds meaning, remained, according to the view that McGilchrist puts forward, underdeveloped for several centuries, which had considerable consequences at all levels in society.

Historically speaking, syntheism returns to McGilchrist’s right cerebral hemisphere and its enormous, unexploited potential to build the new Renaissance rather than the new Enlightenment. It does this from a conviction that eternalism without mobilism is both misleading and self-destructive. Eternalism (the world of rationality) must be subservient for its own sake to mobilism (the world of reason); otherwise eternalism results in totalism, the blind faith – since the days of Parmenides and Plato – in all motion being illusory, and therefore it is the eternalist reproduction of the mobilist reality that is the only actual reality instead of the other way around. Thus syntheism also includes entheism, Taoism’s fundamental idea – which was launched by Lao Tzu in Axial Age China in the 7th century B.C. – that change per se, and thereby also its by-product time, is what is fundamental to existence. According to Lao Tzu, change over time is anything but illusory, and thus mobilism and not eternalism is primary in existence. Taoism’s idea of yin and yang as an ontological foundation is summarised under syntheism’s concept of Entheos.

If religion has functioned as a cohesive force within both man and society, the history of alienation is a converse but closely related history of how man and society are divided over the course of history. Most metaphysical systems are based on the premise that there is an original paradisiacal state and that alienation arises through a dramatic event, for example as a consequence of the Fall of Man (according to the Abrahamic religions), or through the deleterious effects of capital (according to Marxism). The mission of the faithful is therefore – with or without the help of God or history – to restore the original, paradisiacal state. But the problem is then that these ideologies of the Fall from grace are considerably more focused on alienation than on the alleviating utopia, which remains a diffuse mirage on the horizon. It is not what was once good that comes into focus – if anything it is left completely outside the writing of history – but rather the narratives are obsessed with one thing and one thing alone, namely that which has corrupted and devastated all of existence (sin in Christianity, capital in Marxism, environmental devastation in environmentalism, etc.).

It is thus the dystopia, not the utopia, which acts as a narrative engine in the ideologies of the Fall from grace. This explains why alienation must be subconsciously stimulated rather than rectified in order for the ideology to be kept alive. Reading between the lines, the sinner must be tacitly stimulated into continuing to sin, capitalism must be spurred on to continue claiming victims with its customary ruthlessness, or else the ideology’s very raison d’etre will evaporate. The Fall from grace determines the ideology, which without the Fall is pointless. Therefore the ideologies of the Fall from grace constantly produce new moral decrees which thereby keep them alive. For example, Christianity has grown strongest and exercised the most power when it is has preached most aggressively against sin and the sinners, and moreover eagerly added new thoughts and acts to the growing list of sinful crimes. There is, in other words, good reason for the aggressive Church having been the expansive version, rather than the diplomatic version having been so. The aggressive Church is strongly focused on reproducing and promoting the deviations of immorality that legitimise and necessitate the Church in itself as well as its aggressiveness. It is like an old marriage.

Syntheism lacks all forms of nostalgic philosophical theory of a lost paradise and prehistoric world worthy of idealising and bemoaning in general, and it thereby has no reason to stimulate alienation by enticing us with any amount of libidinal transgression. Which is quite simply due to the fact that no such original paradise has, nor ever needs to have, existed. Within syntheism, alienation is instead a contingent fact, produced by highly tangible and comprehensible material circumstances, such as the exploding abstraction in increasingly extensive and complex inter-human relations throughout history. This state of affairs is then heightened by internarcissistic thinkers – ruled by their left cerebral hemispheres according to McGilchrist’s view – equipped with megaphones that the prevailing power structures officiously supply; thinkers who are enamoured of their own grandiose protagonist roles in totalist ideologies. We must therefore study the history of alienation more closely in order to be able to determine where, in the informationalist society, it actually abides and how syntheism can confront and neutralise it.

Mobilist thinking experiences a veritable golden age in Greece during the early Axial Age. The influence from Zoroastrian Iran is considerable. Heraclitus, Greece’s own Zoroaster, lays the foundation for both philosophy.html">process philosophy and paradoxism. He gives priority to sight (mobilism) over hearing (eternalism) among the human senses and direct experience over indirect interpretation. And while he is at it, Heraclitus also creates dialectics; he argues that creativity only can develop and grow where a clear opposition to the prevailing order reigns. Homer’s myths and Aeschylus’ classic drama revolve around holistically thinking people who live in a monist universe, and these ancient texts bear witness to a protosyntheist world view. It is during this period that Thales, the father of the natural sciences, produces the first syntheist tweet in history: All things are full of gods.

But in the 5th century B.C. totalism arrives and with it also alienation across a broad front in the history of ideas. It is ideas about reality and not physical reality in itself which are the focus for the totalists. The belief in the unlimited possibilities of rationality is proclaimed by Socrates and relayed by his disciple Plato, diligently noting it all down. Deductively reasoning science is everything, and art is worthless or something even worse and must, according to Plato, be expunged from society. Physics is subordinated to mathematics. Pre-Socratic monism ends up under attack. The totalists instead construct a strictly dualist world view. The eternal soul is separated from the corruptible body. The left hemisphere overshadows and dominates the right one, if we once again see the development from McGilchrist’s perspective. The human being is no longer associated with either her body or her environment. A human being who has been alienated from the image of her incarnate self, who sees herself as a constantly inflamed, internal hotbed of conflict instead of as a harmonious whole, is easily reshaped from the tribe’s incarnation of its members into an isolated peasant slave in the fields and in the pastures of the cattle herds, constantly on the lookout for some kind of abstract healing through hard work. It is important to understand that alienation serves a purpose and that it produces an identity that generates an extensive enjoyment without pleasure.

Totalism is driven by the self-sacrifice myth, the libidinal connection to self-hatred. What is brilliant about totalism is how for the first time in history it denies the human being’s feeling that the whole of her is greater than the sum of her many different constituent parts. Totalism appears with reductionism as its faithful side-kick. A whole, according to reductionism, can always be deconstructed into ever smaller components without the phenomenon’s mental weight or value being affected. Thus, the human body can be reduced to just body parts; the body itself has no value as an emergent phenomenon according to the totalists. Therefore, Plato can contend that the body is inadequate to define the human being. He picks out of humans that which arises as an indisputable surplus when the various components are combined, and converts this into a separate magnitude with unique and obviously completely fictitious properties: the soul. If the body parts cannot speak or think for themselves, while the body as a whole and as a unit talks and thinks, it must be a matter of a contribution from the outside. It is this soul, added from the outside, not the emergent body that talks and thinks. After this manoeuvre, Plato returns to the body. The fact that there even exists a feeling or a thought in conjunction with the whole body’s status as – in fact – an entire body only goes to prove, according to this line of argument, the existence of the soul.

Reductionism is based on tautological circular reasoning rather than on scientific insight. But its attraction is enormous, and all the way through to the 20th century, totalism’s many faithful believers actually persevere in trying to weigh the soul in order to thus establish that it constitutes a physiological surplus which in some essential sense it would be possible to distinguish from the body, for example by throwing dying people onto industrial scales, whereby a few grams of exhaled air disappearing from the lungs at the moment of death are immediately interpreted as scientific evidence of the soul’s existence. Reductionism also makes it possible for the totalists to atomise existence, divide it up and sort the world into isolated units, which one naturally does one’s best to try to domesticate and control with the aid of constantly ongoing and increasingly far-reaching moralising. Totalism has a formidable weapon at hand in this endeavour, namely the most important by-product of written language, the law.

When the reductionist outlook on man establishes itself, the totalists return to the human being with the law in their hands and accuse the soul of not managing to restrain the body. Because the law requires a division within the accused between that which obeys the law and that which breaks the law, so that the part which obeys the law can be refined and buffed up in prisons and clinics, while the part which breaks the law can be discarded and hopefully even rectified out of existence. Platonist dualism therefore suits the burgeoning jurisprudence perfectly. The soul is transformed into that which obeys the law, the body is transformed into that which breaks the law. The soul itself is thus never guilty of any criminal act, it is merely guilty of various sins of omission. Consequently, the law condemns the soul because it cannot manage to curb and tame the body in the same successful and convincing way that the law and its owners curb and tame the accused criminal.

With the advent of the law, there is an explosion of what the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls the anthropotechnics, that is, attempts by the human being to domesticate not only plants and animals, but also to develop techniques to curb and tame herself. From the arrival of the law and onwards, anthropotechnics and its concomitant asceticism dominate human life. In an age obsessed with the successful and wealth-generating domestication of plants and animals in the building of civilisation – made possible by and organised through written language – Platonist totalism functions perfectly as the feudalist metaphysics for the masses. As long as reductionism is considered to be natural and beyond all question, totalism maintains its hold on metaphysics. It is not until Leibniz launches his mobilist monadology in the 17th century that totalism starts being questioned.

With the arrival of the law, every dialogue between two people gets a third participant. What is said between two people can suddenly be written down and preserved for the future, and this text soon starts to live its own life entirely: it becomes a third legal person present in the room, moreover always with the decision in its hand in every type of conflict. The arrival of the law has dramatic effects for all inter-human relations. Suddenly he or she who is adept at exercising and controlling written language also dictates all kinds of rules for how people must conduct themselves in relation to one another, including how transgressions of these rules are to be punished. And not surprisingly this set of rules is constantly adjusted to the advantage of the author of the law himself. The more complex the laws that are written, the more complex societies one can control and regulate by making use of them. And the higher the degree of complexity of the system, the more dependent it becomes on the existence of the law and its assiduous enforcement.

However, the problem here is that the human libido never allows itself to be satisfied. It never gets enough, never lets the human being settle down, satisfied. The libido emanates from desire’s constant search for new unsatisfied desires, in its constant postponement of satisfaction in order to keep itself alive. When desire is relegated to anthropotechnics, the libido is therefore shifted from sexuality to asceticism. Anthropotechnics strengthen desire through constantly postponing or re-locating it. Therefore the human being’s self-domestication presupposes a libidinal castration, and the Abrahamic religions with their stronger anti-sex moralism fit perfectly for this purpose. The anthropotechnical practitioners get their energy from the dictates of the law, and since according to Sloterdijk the human being constantly strives for verticality – a longing to create a connection with the divine, to be able to satisfy the syntheological imperative of finding and subordinating herself to a functional metaphysical story – this leads to the law becoming synonymous with God himself.

The law’s evident and indisputable ability to engender and maintain complex civilizations bestows upon it a holy aura. Since the law is such an excellent instrument for directing culture, and since nature itself also seems to be held together with mathematics’ somewhat frightening exactitude, nature too must obey another, even more far-reaching and eternally valid law. This law of nature in turn requires an author; quite simply there must be a god behind the law, the god of the law. In other words, nature obeys the law of God. This law is so enchantingly powerful that it is soon worshipped as a god in itself. The Abrahamic religions launch the idea that everything else is dependent on and must be subordinate to the law, that this precedes and dictates everything else. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Thanks to the arrival of the law, the Fall of Man gets a clear narrative, the temporal and therefore supremely human Fall from grace is the absolutely worst imaginable crime against the eternal and therefore divine law. So where is God and wherein lies God’s essence, if not in the will to administer justice and enforce submission by means of the law? The law has proven such a powerful metaphor that even after Nietzsche announces the death of God in the late 19th century, physics continues its manic search for God’s law in nature, as if the law as God was still very much alive. The explanation for this is that the preordained and compelling law has exercised its magic on humans so extensively and for so long that humans can only imagine a Universe without the law’s existence with the greatest difficulty. Enjoyment without pleasure drives the determinist world view. Note that this process continues without human law being able to have any equivalent in nature whatsoever. In spite of everything of course, human law functions because the receivers of the decrees, the people, listen to and understand the recited text and shape and calculate their own behaviour based on the current set of rules. People can either allow themselves to be frightened into obeying the decree, integrate it into what Sigmund Freud calls the superego, or allow themselves to be tempted into enjoyment occasioned by a transgression of the decree – to surrender to the libidinal transgression. In any case, it is man’s ability to engage in and become obsessed with the law that makes him its object.

However, no such legal object exists in nature. Minerals, plants and animals are, for example, completely unable to assimilate a text which is read to them, just as they lack the wherewithal to allow themselves to be entranced libidinally by the existence of a set of rules. There are quite simply no laws in nature. There are only fields, forces and relationships. When and if an event seems to repeat itself in nature before the human observer’s attentive gaze, it is merely because the conditions in terms of the forces and relationships in two or more different situations have been equivalent. Therefore, the law is an extremely clumsy and basically misleading metaphor for how nature works. Its popularity as a metaphor is entirely related to the human being’s internarcissism; it has no connection with any sort of science. Anthropocentrism, as we know, continually throws a spanner in the works for mankind’s understanding of the world around him. We believe that we are observing the world, but we are in fact looking into a mirror manufactured by ourselves, produced out of our self-centred ideas and delusions.

With the arrival of the law, mankind is separated from her internal compass, the oscillation between desire and the libidinal drive, and is subordinated to an external set of regulations which immediately attack desire and the libidinal drive in particular and denigrate these as the vanguard for the Fall of man. What then happens is that desire moves up in consciousness and internalises the law, making it into its own obsession, its own propulsion engine. Desire becomes a desire to either follow or oppose the law, but primarily a desire to constantly keep the law alive in order to cultivate one’s own obsession with it. Thanks to this coalescence with the law, desire receives what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls an extimate structure. The drive is instead displaced into the subconscious, where it churns away and constantly triggers disturbing eruptions of reality in consciousness. It is the drive that incessantly reminds the human being that she will never be able to get inside the law, that there is always a residual part of her that shuns the law, that the law is a trespassing alien in her mind. It is this restless residue of the naked drive that constitutes the core of mankind’s subjectivity, which drives her longing for a utopian freedom beyond her existential predicament. From a syntheological perspective, we argue that this obscure core of the subject is located in Entheos. It is only in the most intense religious experience, in the infinite now, that man confronts his innermost being, the coalescence of desire and the libidinal drive in their naked forms.

The law-abiding subject loves to hate itself and longs passionately for its own domestication, its own castration and finally also its own extinction – all under the idealised law which is exalted above all else. Desire no longer oscillates with the drive, but is instead placed above and pitted against it. The good, self-sacrificing soul is separated from the evil, self-absorbed body. Thereby dualist totalism is complete. It promises a future where once and for all man is separated from his filthy desires and drives and with a kind of smug indifference is merged into the law. Therefore its reward in the form of life after death is in essence life in death. With its cultivation and praise of alienation, dualist totalism is a form of death worship.

The lawless society is presented as a complete nightmare. In the Old Testament, the lawless society – a world where people actually give vent to their desires and drives – goes under the names Sodom and Gomorrah. The citizen in the lawless society is the evil one or the sinner. To sin is not just to break the law; at a deeper level it is about questioning its authority and thereby undermining the entire good world order. A person who just breaks the law and later confesses, thereby submitting to its authority, can be punished and forgiven after having shown sufficient contrition in word and deed. But the person who cultivates a rebellious attitude vis-à-vis the law, who refuses to accept its imposed alienation, becomes the arch-enemy of the entire order. The Abrahamic religions call this figure Lucifer, the angel of light, the figure who ignores the eternal law and uncompromisingly follows his desires and drives, as a temporal and finite being.

However, the law is just a metaphor on which we base blind faith in the pre-eminence of the prevailing order. But the metaphor is so strong that even today it colours not just our view of social relationships, but also feeds our recurring conviction that a society without laws must be a society that is rushing head-long towards its own annihilation. The law is such a powerfully charged metaphor that we cannot even look at nature and the Universe without presuming that these operate according to preordained and eternally valid laws. However there is no proof whatsoever of any such laws, and nor should there be. If we really are serious about our conviction that God is dead, we must also draw the conclusion that the legislator is dead. And without the original legislator, the eternal and metaphysical law does not exist either. Were we to carry this line of argument one step further, it would reveal that natural law is to be regarded as an incoherent battery of anthropocentric chicanery without foundation in anything whatsoever, and particularly not in nature.

In the situation that thus arises, metaphysics itself is the only way to balance the variants of the law. Metaphysics is namely the opposite of the law. Without metaphysics’ constant production of hope, visions, utopias and alternative worlds, the human being would never be able to think of any alternative to the law’s libidinal security. A society without metaphysics immediately and without resistance submits to the totalitarian law. It cannot even imagine any alternative. Consequently, physicists ought to stop talking about laws at all. In relationalist physics there are no longer any eternal laws, but merely a multitude of open and contingent processes. The presumed laws can be changed, they even must be changed over time – not least when new emergences suddenly arise, and they constantly do – and then these laws are of course no longer eternal laws that dictate in detail all imaginable events in advance, but are simply probable courses of events in specific, spatio-temporal contexts.

The syntheist utopia therefore entails a longing for a society where the law is no longer recognised and allowed to exercise its libidinal power. It is a society where religion has replaced alienation. In the syntheist utopia, bodies identify with their desires and libidinal drives and nothing else. Today’s politics might just as well be liberal-minded pragmatist, with its sights set constructively on the syntheist utopia by opening up to religion’s potential to counteract alienation. Because after all, politics is intimately intertwined with contemporary society and its citizens and material conditions. But the syntheist utopia is a completely different phenomenon than liberal-minded pragmatism – to begin with it can, of course, unabashedly take the immensity of the future as its point of departure, instead of, like pragmatism, being forced to stay within the narrow confines of the present – and therefore professes theological anarchism and nothing else.

Because totalism separates the soul from the body, it considers itself able to neutralise the soul and make it independent and reliable, disconnected from the body’s many chaotic, emotional storms and unpredictable whims. The soul thus becomes a command centre for pure thought and it rewards the human being with a kind of chic essence. Rationalism is thus also an essentialism. This essence is of course not just constant throughout life; it also makes the soul immortal. Thereby the rationalists can construct social ideologies without interruption, according to which obedient and subservient slaves are rewarded with a life after death, as free-floating souls without ties to their corruptible and despised bodies.

According to Plato, the soul is allied with the higher world of ideas, while the body must be content with being connected to the lower-tier, corruptible material world. The soul never changes; it is the constant which stands firm at the centre of the body’s capricious emotional turbulence. From this dualism, all of human existence is then divided up into the categories eternal ideas and corruptible matter. This dualist escapism is a perfect fit as the ideology of patriarchy: the man is calm, balanced and constant, just like the soul, while the woman is reduced to an irrational and volatile emotional tempest, just like the body. Power must therefore fall to the man who, by definition, is of course of a higher standing, and the woman must be subordinated to him in order for society not to collapse under the pressure of internal instability, all in accordance with dualism’s self-perpetuating, circular reasoning.

Rationalism is based around the idea that the human mind can process information about its surroundings to such an extent that nothing in it need appear the least bit mysterious or inexplicable to the mind. Everything can be experienced, everything can be understood. As long as the human being gets the time needed to process her sensory impressions and organise them logically, everything can be incorporated and appraised, and none of all this that is incorporated and appraised will ever be contradicted by any other conclusions that reason gets to think through to the end. However, the problem is that rationalism per se is not grounded in any kind of reason, but instead in a sort of quasi-religious wishful thinking and a blind faith that does not permit any criticism whatsoever. There is not even any reason at all behind the belief that the soul should be able to exist independently of the body. The independence of the soul is rather a product of the agrarian society’s need to be able to hold all its members accountable in relation to the rapidly expanding and successively ever-more powerful law.

As long as the soul is kept separate from the body, it can be held morally responsible for any possible transgressions of the body. This explains why totalism is always followed by moralism, and with it, the possibility to threaten, persecute, imprison, monitor and terrorise people. If there is anything that totalism is constantly obsessed with, it is the thought of creating the perfect society, where the law is always adhered to and need never be changed. The totalist mind is thus obsessed with stasis and hates all forms of variability. The variability that can be observed in society and in nature is regarded as a regrettable anomaly which, with some good will and a suitable mix of remedial measures – that is, through criminalising the undesired behaviour that disturbs the statis fantasy – one should be able to wipe out. Totalism is an eternalism that refuses to be part of a dialectics with mobilism. It is, if we use McGilchrist’s metaphors again, the left cerebral hemisphere which runs amok devastatingly in the absence of the right hemisphere, and at its expense.

The syntheist response to rationalism does not entail any flight back to the irrational. It instead continues dialectically to transrationalism: the idea that reasoning first and foremost must embrace the insight of one’s own built-in limitations in relation to one’s environment. Man is a highly limited creature in both time and in space, and moreover completely dependent on the strictly limited quantity of sensory impressions he has the time to assimilate from a rapidly expanding universe where much more information is produced every moment than any active participant, let alone any passive observer, ever has the time to process. Existence is literally rushing away from the human being; it does not lie down obediently, neatly packaged in his narcissistic bosom, ripe for consumption.

Just like syntheism, as a whole transrationalism and its basic condition can be viewed as both a logical deduction and a historical conclusion. There is no rational foundation per se for naturally limited human rationality to ever have the capacity to comprehend everything in a constantly expanding universe. Plato’s and Kant’s variants of rationality get caught in their own trap; they are both per se founded on a blind faith and not on any kind of rationality. Humanity has repeatedly surrendered itself to rationalism as a social ideology, but the results are frightening. Sooner or later, rationalism – in spite of considerable achievements in civilisation – invariably degenerates into totalitarian utilitarianism. Therefore Plato is quite correct in claiming that a consistently practised rationalism must develop into a dictatorship. Anything else is impossible.

Before the arrival of totalism, man apprehends himself as a cohesive whole. There is no need to separate an eternal soul from a corruptible body. Although he is mortal, man is part of a natural cycle where life and death are both natural and necessary, regularly recurring fixed points. Above all, everything hangs together with everything else in a monist universe. Totalism destroys this harmony between mankind and her environment. In conjunction with the mobilist Heraclitus being overshadowed by the totalist Plato as an influential thinker in ancient Greece in the 4th century B.C., we can easily note totalism’s ideological victory, at least temporarily, and from this follows also alienation’s invasion – as rapid as it is destructive – of man’s conception of himself and the world.

Narcissism is alienation’s clearest symptom. Narcissism is a compensatory phenomenon, it originates in its own radical opposite: the fantasy of the world without the subject. The subject must choose to manage the fantasy of the world outside itself in one of two possible ways. Either all production of value and identity is shifted back to the world – for example by creating and worshipping a god – or else the shock of the insight into the subject’s fundamental emptiness is internalised by turning this emptiness dialectically into its radical opposite: the castrated subject is transformed into the omnipotent centre of existence. The fantasy of the world without the subject is so hard to grasp that the simplest way to manage it – if no divinities are invoked – is to place the subject in the driving seat of existence. But if the subject ends up in the driving seat – where it does not reasonably belong, almost everything that happens to us within our lifetime is really out of our control, even if we believe in the illusion that the subject has the possibility to influence its environment – this immediately triggers a whole series of reactions that only can be described as powerful compensatory behaviour, which results in the narcissist condition. Thus the Cartesian fantasy of the subject as the only unerring fixed point in existence and thereby also its centre, becomes a reality.

A flagrant example of such a compensatory narcissist ideology is the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian vision of a future prison, erected according to the architectural Panopticon model, a complete institution built in pie wedges around a single human, all-seeing eye at its centre. Bentham imagines a prison built from a central viewpoint from which a sole actor constantly surveys all other activities within the construction. The panopticon is of course nothing other than a material reflection of Bentham’s own self-image and world view, his attempt at a Napoleonisation of bureaucratic architecture. The panopticon is quite simply the dark flip side of Bentham’s utilitarianism, his runaway fantasy of a hyperrationalist ethics, which can calculate every individual’s wishes in advance, put a price on and determine the value of all people’s wishes vis-à-vis each other and then compile how one might be able to maximise these wishes into empirically measurable, maximised total utility.

Even though Bentham himself does not even seem capable of understanding that his bizarre ultrautilitarianism is a physical impossibility – what can never be formulated in advance, for example human utility, can of course never be measured in advance either – the Panopticon is an exceptionally interesting metaphor for Bentham’s own and his many followers’ autistic fantasies about their own castrated and isolated subjects as the self-evident centre of the Universe. It is hard to imagine a clearer example of how the psychotic reversal from impotence to autocracy constitutes the necessary dialectics for generating the Cartesian fantasy. What we see is a battle over who is the most autistic out of the two most autistic thinkers in the history of philosophy. Through his utilitarianism, if possible Bentham makes himself even more Cartesian than René Descartes himself. But thereby also even more alienated and alienating. The Panopticon exposes utilitarianism’s view of humanity, the concept reflects Bentham’s total lack of trust in his fellow humans and also in himself. The legacy from Bentham has given us what is possibly alienation’s clearest contemporary symbol, the paranoid surveillance camera.

Monotheistic fundamentalism is the religious version of the Enlightenment’s rationalist fantasy. Note how the sectarian leaders who want to maintain their superiority vis-à-vis the rest of humanity always position themselves as the enlightened. Monotheistic fundamentalism is a rash and furious ratio, literally founded on an idiotic divinity that lacks a raison d’être, where this ratio is frenetically maintained by the practitioner’s manic conviction that he himself would disintegrate and be annihilated if he really were to recognise God’s non-existence. This explains why the fundamentalist does not care whether he lives or dies (which makes him such a resolute terrorist, frustratingly difficult to defend oneself against). The threat to the fundamentalist’s fantasy is not physical death, but the disintegration of blind faith. So what is this, if not theological rationalism in its purest form?

It is thus also fully logical that the fundamentalists refuse to listen to and reason with their opponents, but would sooner murder them at the first opportunity. It must be extremely taxing to refute intellectual attacks on a divinity which one does not believe in oneself. Least of all if one has lost all faith in the potential of religion and sees the elevation of alienation to a religious foundation as the only possible way out. For it is precisely when one reaches the point where alienation replaces religion that one starts to execute those who do not agree with, or who quite simply just deviate from, the pattern of one’s own fantasies – without remorse. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union functioned according to these same mechanisms. The actor knows that he is lying, but tries to convince himself that everyone else also must be lying, as if this mutual lying and a contest in murdering each another was the only reasonable response to hyperalienation. But as it happens, syntheists refuse to participate in this lying. Their reply to the dead religion of the fundamentalists is the living religion.

The living religion that moves away from alienation and towards the resumption of community is the opposite of monotheistic fundamentalism, which moves in the opposite direction and makes alienation its religion. For the living religion is, like art, implicit rather than explicit, admits several interpretations rather than being simple-minded, is reasonable rather than rational, open to contingencies and emergences rather than fixed in space-time; and above all, it is always embodied. Even before fundamentalism surrenders itself to a near-autistic denial of the fact that the meaning of the words which it professes devotion to are in a constant state of flux, this fundamentalism is tripped up by another and more fundamental premise: since fundamentalism always puts the word before God, it reveals that it uses the word to protect itself against the subconscious realisation that whispers that God in truth is already dead. If the law is the only thing left when God has disappeared from the equation, the law must be regarded as God. But a living god does not need the word as protection. A living god stands without any irresolute tottering or any ulterior motives in front of the word instead of anxiously hiding behind it. A living god exists based on the premise that an overwhelmingly large part of all communication between people is non-verbal. Already the well-known words of the Gospel of John “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” reveal a religion which has lost faith in God’s existence. The only thing left even at this early stage is just the empty incantation as God’s proxy.

The more acute the alienation, the more powerful the narcissism becomes. In late capitalist society with its hyperalienation, the Cartesian fantasy transitions into a hypernarcissism, a state characterised by a complete distrust in all intersubjective intentions other than the purely instrumental. Hypernarcissism is internalised as the subject’s own instrumentality world view, where other people are reduced to isolated bodies, monitored and controlled by an authority with a far-reaching mandate and with the aid of game theory calculations. This is a subject whose libido is obsessed with strategic planning, conquest, colonisation, plundering and displacement. When the libido tries to adapt itself to hypernarcissism’s instrumentality view of humanity, the result is not only a consistent sexualisation of all intimate relationships, but also a powerful fetishisation of sexuality per se. The hypernarcissist – whose own sexual activity ironically can be both manic and minimal, often oscillating violently between extremes – sees reproductive organs everywhere and in nearly everything. Culture is filled with them to the extent that it almost becomes parodical. In this paralysed libidinal state, no living fellow humans remain, but only dying bodies drenched in disdain for their lack of Platonic perfection. The alienation is complete, and the living religion is conspicuous by its tangible absence.

When hypernarcissism becomes socially burdensome, the result is yet another subject that can act as an agent of transfer, another subject with which the hypernarcissistic subject establishes an apparent trade, a kind of psychological “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. When the compensatory self-worship becomes psycho-socially unbearable, it also becomes the object of a transferring exchange between the subjects. One subject worships another subject in exchange for the corresponding worship in return, as if to conceal that the original compensatory act is banal narcissism in itself. Thus hypernarcissism transitions into internarcissism, precisely the state that completely dominates the late capitalist social arena. Syntheism however offers a possible way out of the internarcissistic cul-de-sac. By confronting the trauma from the fantasy of the world without the subject and through seeing the living religion as the way out of murderous alienation, the subject can at last be liberated into something greater than its limited, incarcerated self and become incorporated into the syntheist community, the manifestation of Syntheos!

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