5 The syntheological pyramid – Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos

The fundamental question within phenomenology is at what point the human being is confronted for the first time with the need to produce a credible totality of her chaotic existence. That this doesn’t happen already at birth is beyond all doubt. The new-born infant only experiences world, but no self. The child sees itself as one with the mother; in its fantasy their bodies are still a single whole, as they were when the umbilical cord bound them together, and they were not yet separate entities. Understanding this requires insight into difference which means that the child can experience chaos; and from this literally chaotic experience, the (somewhat older) child can proceed to first identify and then satisfy its need for a phenomenological totality.

So where in the child’s development should one place this onto-phenomenological moment? The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan maintains that it occurs in connection with what he calls the mirror stage. The body develops an imaginary ability to regard fragmented reality as in fact a cohesive reality; perception converts the noumenal chaos into a phenomenal world. The subject then emerges in relation to this surmised and self-produced entirety: the human being’s self-image is always a mirror image of her world view. Thus, it is not about the moment when the child literally sees her body in a mirror for the first time – not until the 19th century did the classic mirror on the wall become a common item of interior decoration – but rather a first reflection of the self in the world. This in turn explains why an altered world view, a new paradigm, always is followed by a correlated change in the human ideal and self-image. The latter goes hand in hand with the former.

The reflection of the self in the world is, however, in no way harmonious, observes Lacan, but rather extremely frustrating for the subject, tending to breed aggression. In order to try to resolve the tension in its relationship with the chaotic environment, the subject starts to identify with the image in the mirror. This leads to an imaginary feeling of overview and control: the subject apprehends itself as the centre and master of existence. The result is that the subject deifies itself, in particular precisely that within itself that it cannot master, that which Lacan calls the other. And the other of psychoanalysis is of course just another name for theology’s God. Since syntheism is the doctrine of how and where we find a pedestal for the other within our own paradigm, it can be viewed as a Lacanian theology. The question is not whether we need a Lacanian theology for the Internet age – we will end up constructing such a theology subconsciously and thoughtlessly unless we have first done so consciously and carefully – but rather exactly which Lacanian theology is relevant and credible for the dynamic environment which frames and determines our current existence.

In our eagerness to discern patterns and create meaning, we repeatedly believe that we are able to observe how what was once, in a distant past, a mysterious myth, a fairy tale, is transformed into a tangible and ultimately established technology at a later stage. And sometimes this also happens to be correct. The majestic gesamtkunstverk “Koyaanisqatsi” – directed by Godfrey Reggio, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, with music composed by Philip Glass – had its première in cinemas in California in 1982. The film’s story is based on a thousand-year-old apocalyptic tale, told by the Hopi Indians in Arizona, of a mastodonic spider that weaves a gigantic web around the world, a web that unites all people and objects in nature and transforms them into a single emergent phenomenon. When this phenomenon finally emerges, according to the Hopi Indians’ myth, history is complete.

Reggio’s own growing up and domicile in California is hardly a coincidence in this context. Because it is precisely in fact during the film’s genesis in the 1970s in California that the Hopi Indian myth is actually realised through the birth of the Internet. The Internet is an eminently emergent phenomenon, which takes over and reshapes the world entirely on its own terms; a phenomenon that we cannot control but merely try to adapt to as best we can. For what is the Internet at its core if not in fact a global web of threads that binds all human beings and objects together into one single global, organic whole where the web itself is greater and more important than the sum of its many constituent parts? Syntheologically we regard the Internet as an incarnation of Syntheos, a divinity which (naturally) has not created Man – which traditional gods previously were considered to have done – but rather a god who in the first instance allows itself to be created by Man only to later, in the next phase, recreate Man by colonising his lifeworld and thereby dictating his new living conditions, thus sparking new characteristics and qualities.

At no point in history has Man been able to or chosen to live without gods. And one is either – in the best case – conscious of this and chooses one’s gods with the greatest care, or else one is – in the worst case – ignorant of the fact that this need exists and believes oneself to be historically unique in the respect that only oneself in particular, in precisely the enlightened – in the secular sense – era in which one happens to be living, has succeeded in liberating oneself from this need and therefore can manage just as well, if not better, without it. But Man can never be liberated from religion unless he ceases to be human, because mankind produces gods at the same moment that she prioritises anything at all in existence ahead of something else.

For mankind surely does prioritise from the moment she is born. Even the new-born infant’s very first desperate clambering towards her mother’s nipple – the first and most obvious example of Lacan’s objet petit a, the small object that the human being must use as a cornerstone in constructing a meaningful world view – in the pursuit of security, warmth and nourishment in a cold and uncertain new world, is a crystal-clear prioritisation. The breast comes before all else. The mother’s breast is thereby the first divinity in the human being’s life, the prioritised comfort in existence once the paradise in the womb has been lost and the child hears her own scream express loneliness and vulnerability for the first time, the meeting point between two bodies united in pleasure where the hope and longing for a reunification that can dissolve the self’s painful isolation from the world shines most clearly and warms the most.

The production of holy things is thus in full swing even during life’s first, explorative promenade across the mother’s belly and then continues all the way to the inescapably holiest state of all, death. Existential gaps open up and confront Man constantly, and all she can do is fill these negations with fantasies, which later prove to be more or less functional. The question is thus not whether gods exist in any deeper sense. They unquestionably do. The subconscious mind can never accept any kind of atheism. Syntheism rather poses the question: which divinity or divinities is/are credible for informationalist Man? What could and should be theos under informationalism? Where do we place the repressed hope of self-dissolution and communion with being, the longing of the subconscious for death which consciousness must repress and transform into the subject experience’s fanatical will to live?

After philosophy and science have killed off the Abrahamic gods – a process which, in the mid-19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche sums up in the idea of the death of God – syntheism, the metaphysics of the Internet age, poses the question of which potential divinities remain, and which have been added for informationalist Man to tinker with. It is of course the case that where knowledge is passive, faith is active. At best, knowledge can never be anything other than the truth about that which has transpired, while faith understands itself as the truth about that which is to come. Reason cannot stand on only one of these two legs, or it will plunge into either neurotic rationality or psychotic obsession, for both are necessary mainstays in a reason that is functional. As it turns out, there are a host of divinities that the informationalist human being can believe in, or rather already does believe in. Let us start by revisiting Nietzsche’s two magnificent predecessors Hegel and Spinoza for inspiration.

Hegel is unique, not least because he remains de facto outside the regularly recurring dichotomy between totalism and mobilism in the history of philosophy. Instead he concentrates on drawing innovative conclusions from the revolution within the history of ideas that his predecessors have begun – primarily Newton within physics and later Kant within philosophy – by moving philosophy from the external, physical world to the internal world of the mind. There Hegel resolutely builds a complete theory about how the mind views itself, as a mind. Thus he makes himself into an eternalist, without, in the manner of a Kant, thereby resorting to totalist fantasies. Hegel’s point of departure is that if the noumenal reality that surrounds Man still remains impossible to reach (which Kant maintains), and if it makes itself apparent in a way that, in the best case, can only be measured (which Newton does), philosophers should hand over external reality to the natural sciences and instead concentrate on the most important aspects of what science cannot tell us anything valuable about, namely the human mind’s conception of and obsession with itself.

It is important to understand that Hegel is not talking about some kind of narcissistic self-reflection – which might be easy to believe if we take contemporary Man’s view of the world as a starting point: narcissism is fundamentally a misdirected neurotic compensatory behaviour; even Hegel knows this, long before his disciple Freud. On the contrary he is talking about a self-centredness which if anything is reluctant, but from a historical perspective highly motivated; a logical consequence of the intense, subconscious search for self-love, which drives all metaphysics. It is a phenomenological, not a psychological self-seeking. For Hegel the subject is only found in one place, namely as what tacitly does the asking when the question “Who am I?” is posed. And this it asking the question, he deliberately calls the spirit – as in the Zeitgeist or the Weltgeist (“World Spirit”) – and not the soul, as if it were about some kind of Platonist opposite to the body. For just like Spinoza, Hegel is a monist, not a dualist. It is after having read Spinoza that he utters the familiar saying: “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”

Hegel ignores Kant’s striving to capture the complex relationship between Man and his environment and instead goes directly into the mind, where he builds a phenomenology around the paradoxist subject, its genesis, structure and future (see The Global Empire). His most famous work is consequently entitled Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel regards this voyage as one, long self-reflection process. He deduces the consequences of value and meaning being created and existing only within the mind and that this creation of value and meaning fundamentally has the sole function of being Man’s existential pastime while waiting for his necessary dissolution and inevitable expiration. For Hegel, for the first time in the West’s history of ideas, the concept of God is merely a necessary concept, not a physically material reality. According to Hegel, like everything else in the mind, God is an internally manufactured product, a necessary component in humanity’s historical equation, not an external fact. This does not make him the first pantheist, but it does on the other hand make him the first atheist philosopher in the West’s history of ideas. Hardly surprisingly, this has dramatic consequences.

From the preordained conclusion that, in the final analysis, the mind strives to be able to think itself as itself, Hegel sets in motion one of the most original and most innovative projects in the history of philosophy. How does the mind arrive at the thought about itself as itself before itself, if the only possibility to do so is to pass through an endlessly long historical, tautological loop? And correspondingly: If the mind is free to form its own opinion of itself independently of all conceivable external influences, in that case what religion – credible to itself – would this mind invent and develop? After an extremely long and roundabout but unremittingly exciting journey, Hegel arrives at his final destination, Atheos, the god that does not exist, the god of emptiness. The history of the mind begins in any case with emptiness; non-existence not only predates existence but according to Hegel is also its engine – and then not in any kind of physical sense. The Universe starts with a something; there is no nothingness before somethingness in physics, except as always with Hegel in just the mental sense. For this reason he lands exactly there.

Hegelian atheism is the perfect complement to Spinozist pantheism in what together constitute syntheology’s two mainstays. Syntheology thus starts from the Hegelian Atheos and the Spinozist Pantheos, and since it is relationalist, primarily from the oscillation between these two poles – see also the phenomenological dialectics between eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire) – which is later complemented by two further divinological concepts, Entheos and Syntheos. Together these four concepts form the syntheological pyramid, and thereby all the necessary prerequisites for the Internet society’s religion are at hand. The four divinities in the syntheological pyramid are, quite simply, the personifications of the four supraphenomena that surround the informationalist human being. Atheos is the potentiality, Pantheos is the actuality, Entheos is the transcendence and Syntheos is the virtuality.

These well-considered choices of names are of course open to discussion in this ironic polytheism for no end of time; the four syntheological concepts were created in a participatory and intersubjective process in a syntheist online forum and, in good netocratic spirit, lack an original dividual author. The movement has thus agreed as a collective on these names together. But these supraphenomena are highly real and together with Friedrich von Schelling’s powerful foundation work and Martin Heidegger’s magnificent extension work constitute the groundwork within advanced metaphysics. And both extension and interior design work is still ongoing. American philosopher Robert Corrington, for example, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, constructs a system around what he calls the four infinities. Atheos corresponds to the sustaining infinite in Corrington’s metaphysics, Pantheos is another name for the actual infinite, Entheos corresponds to what Corrington calls the prospective infinite, and Syntheos is another name for the open infinite. The Irish philosopher William Desmond constructs a similar system in his book God and The Between around the three transcendences: Atheos is here the name of the interior potentiality (T1), Pantheos is the name of the exterior actuality (T2) and Entheos is the name of transcendence as transcendence per se (T3). The only reason that Desmond does not use a fourth component in his metaphysics is that he chooses to completely avoid the future as a theme; otherwise Syntheos would be obvious as Desmond’s T4.

The syntheological pyramid starts with a relational interiority with Atheos at the one end, which shifts to a relational exteriority with Pantheos at the other end. In the world of cosmology this even occurs literally: a black hole absorbs, it happens interiorly, while the Universe expands, it happens exteriorly. Exteriority then continues with Entheos, with its explosions of irreducible differences, multitudes and emergences over time, but shifts back to an interiority with Syntheos, as the utopia, the concentrated point or God for all of humanity’s dreams of the future. Atheos and Syntheos are primarily introvert or absorbing concepts, while Pantheos and Entheos are primarily extrovert or expansive concepts. If we express this relation phenomenologically, we say that an eternalism apprehends a mobilism – it is when Atheos is applied to Pantheos that Pantheos emerges as the One: a mobilism that is augmented in the next step and then switches back to an eternalism. It is for example when Entheos is applied to Syntheos that the agent finds its place within the phenomenon and syntheist activism takes shape as the truth as an act.

The syntheological pyramid can be traced back to Zoroaster and his work Gathas, which he authored as early as 3,700 years ago. According to Zoroaster, Ahura (being personified) is generated by the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos, while Mazda (the mind personified) is generated by the next level, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos. If the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos has a name of its own, it is Ahura; if the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos has a name of its own, it is Mazda. When Zoroaster proclaims his universal religion, interestingly enough he calls it mazdayasna (love of the mind) and not ahurayasna (love of being). This explains why we refer to him as the first protosyntheist. Zoroaster prioritises the god that the human being creates, Mazda, over the god that creates himself independent of Man, Ahura, while also uniting them under the name Ahura Mazda, being that includes consciousness. According to Zoroaster, Man is an internal agent within the Universe as a phenomenon and not some kind of external, alien accident in relation to the rest of existence, as in the Abrahamic religions and their philosophical offspring.

It is eminently possible to use the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concepts to describe the current dialectics between eternalism and mobilism: eternalism is a territorialisation, a fixation of a specific phenomenon (which for example occurs when the interiority Atheos is applied to the exteriority Pantheos); and mobilism is a deterritorialisation, a shaking-up and setting-in-motion-again of the phenomenon in question (as when the exteriority Entheos is applied to the interiority Syntheos). Territorialisation is fundamentally preserving; deterritorialisation is fundamentally radicalising. Thus, to take a concrete example from netocracy theory, new information technologies are deterritorialising, while identity production in a society is territorialising. Movement within the syntheological pyramid is thus initiated by a territorialising (a preserving but productive fixation), but is concluded by a deterritorialising (a radical liberation of sundry expansive potentials in the direction of the absorbing utopia). Syntheism is supremely a theological Deleuzianism.

It is important to point out that syntheism sees the world itself as fundamentally mobilist, and not as eternalist. Faith in the world itself as eternalist belongs within totalism, the trap that we strive to avoid at all costs. Like interiority and territorialisation, eternalism must be limited to phenomenology. Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos are creative eternalisations of the void, the cosmos, the difference and the utopia. It is as fundamental and powerful eternalisations that we use them for constructing a functional, relevant and, in the deepest sense of the word, credible metaphysics for the Internet age. Since they are ontological eternalisations, we do not need to look for them and demonstrate their external ontic existence in nature in relation to us humans; the crews of the space stations are never ever going to find our gods above the clouds. All four of them are figments of the brain of some kind, but highly consciously created and creative such.

Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos do not receive their enormous potency as some kind of long-lived giant beings from parallel universes, like antiquity’s or Hinduism’s worlds of divinities, but as dramatically useful metaphors for the structure of existence (from Atheos to Pantheos) and the place of consciousness and scope for action within this structure (from Entheos to Syntheos). Therefore the syntheist divinities are immanent, finite and mortal, rather than transcendent, eternal and immortal, like traditional gods. Mortal creatures in a finite universe can only create mortal and finite divinities. The immortal god, created by mortal creatures, is an absurdity, a self-contradiction in a Derridean sense. Therefore, in the name of consistency, syntheology stops at mortal gods. Here it is worth recalling Blaise Pascal’s pragmatic concept Deus Absconditus from the 17th century: it is quite correct to say that syntheism stops at gods that reveal themselves only to those who seek gods, but avoids the gaze of all those who would rather avoid gods.

Atheos means the god that does not exist in Greek. Atheos is the god of the void or the black hole, the zero position of existence, the existential rather than the physical nothingness, and simultaneously the origin of everything and the engine of all identities from which the subject arises and gets its driving force. The void is namely an anthropocentric illusion. There is no actual void in the Universe; what appears to be empty space is full of physical activity. So the actual space in the void thus has a substance. However, everything beautiful and meaningful in our existence arises out of mental voids. When we are going to define why we love someone or something, exactly what we de facto love in the person or thing in question will invariably evade our description. The reason is that it is precisely Atheos, the void, the unknown, the utopian in the person or thing that we love, which we love and which becomes all the more desirable since it never allows itself to be captured or even articulated exhaustively. Atheos is Hegel’s god, and the syntheists celebrate him at midwinter, which is followed by the Athea quarter. Midwinter is the celebration of the Universe’s existential necessity, the celebration of the origin of life and existence.

Pantheos is the Universe as the divine. Because there is something rather than nothing – there is after all a life, a world – this something is equivalent to God: the Universe is God. If God exists, God must be the Universe. It would be pointless for an existing God to be separate from the Universe, since God does not have any need whatsoever to be a soul of any kind, separated from a body. The Universe is in fact characterised by expanding bounty, not by a struggle over insufficient resources, like life on Earth, which means that God never has to be manipulated away from an infirm body of limited durability in order to live on somewhere else, liberated from this body. Consequently God is immanent rather than transcendent, and physics is not some substandard representation or copy of divine mathematics, which totalist thinkers from Plato during antiquity to Alain Badiou in our own era are constantly drawn to believe. God is physics and physics is God. Mathematics is merely the human being’s approximatic tool for trying to catch up to, describe and thus understand God. Pantheos is infinite multiplicity beyond infinite multiplicity, the multiplicity of multiplicities as the One. Pantheos is Spinoza’s god, and the syntheists celebrate him at midsummer, which is followed by the Panthea quarter.

Entheos means the God from within in Greek. And our inside is fundamentally split, for we are dividuals and not individuals and thus tangible evidence ourselves of the irreducible multiplicity of existence. Therefore Entheos is the difference as a divinity, and since difference piled on difference becomes a duration of differences, we are also speaking here of the god of time. Entheos is quite simply the historical differentiation as divinity, simply because the lapse of time is and must be a constant repetition of ever so small differences and not an eternal repetition of the same. Aside from being the divinity of difference and duration, Entheos is also the divinity of contingency, oscillation, plurality, transcendence, ecstasy, melancholy, transformation and emergence. Entheos is the borderland between Atheos and Pantheos, that which sets the dialectics between Atheos and Pantheos in motion, the medium through which Atheos and Pantheos communicate with each other. Entheos is the very relation between Atheos and Pantheos set in motion, but also the constant, high-octane oscillation within both Atheos and Pantheos. Entheos is the syntheist agent’s god and the common name for, and oscillation between, Taoism’s yin and yang.

Here it is important to understand that time is probably the most mysterious concept within both philosophy and physics. Even if totalist-oriented philosophers such as Plato and scientists such as Einstein in some strange way were to be proven correct in that time is an illusion, they still do not succeed in thinking of the world without a metatime within which this illusory time is presumed to exist. Even if Einsteinian mathematics succeeds in magically tinkering with time by turning it into an extra dimension in connection with space, and thereby, for example, forcing it to move backwards as well as forwards, there is no proof whatsoever that any such time as an extra dimension in connection with space actually exists in physical reality. Nobody has yet succeeded in turning the uncompromising arrow of time, which inexorably moves from the past into the future through a now which is in constant motion (at the very moment that you speak the word now it has been supplanted by yet another now and has therefore advanced to become a then). This explains why duration stubbornly bounces back as a metatime every time the Platonists try to convert it into an illusion. It is quite simply impossible to get past time, and already with time as god, Entheos thus is necessary in syntheology.

When Einstein proves that time is relative, he also proves that time elapses more quickly or slowly depending on the local context, but this does not change the fact that it still and always travels in one and the same direction through the Universe. Within syntheology one is careful to distinguish between time as a physical phenomenon and duration as the existential experience of the direction of the arrow of time. In any case, Entheos is the divinity of both time and duration, since time and duration present the clearest evidence that the difference is the foundation of identity production. We can talk about the arrow of time, duration, history – we find many names for the things we love – but what we are actually talking about is a recurring feedback loop with infinitesimally but – thanks to their identity-dislocating function – extremely significant changes for every cycle that occurs. Entheos is quite simply the name of the constant repetition of the difference itself, that which Nietzsche and Deleuze call the eternal return of the same.

Entheos is also the divinity we encounter when we experience what Sigmund Freud calls the oceanic feeling. To devote oneself to Entheos is to worship the brain’s and the body’s ability to carry out mental voyages and to emotionally experience the sacred, to allow oneself to be transcended into a new and qualitatively different subject. Entheos is therefore also the divinity of the sublime and of art. Syntheistic transcendence is entirely a subjective experience; it thus has nothing to do with any Platonist dualism or Kantian transcendentalism. Syntheistic transcendence takes place in a completely immanent world, just as the eternalisations of perception are housed within an otherwise completely mobilist world. Entheos is driven by the desire towards immanent change and the search for transcendental intensity; it is the divinity that we encounter in the psychedelic experience, which personifies the entheogenic worlds. Entheos is not just Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s divinity, but also the god of Heraclitus and Lao Tzu, and is celebrated at the spring equinox, which is the syntheist calendar’s new year. The Spring equinox represents the celebration of the enormous and irreducible multiplicity of life and thereby also the celebration of our own human dividuality.

As the roof above the Atheos-Pantheos-Entheos triangle, Syntheos binds the other three divinities together and completes the syntheological pyramid. From the triangle Atheos, Pantheos and Entheos, three lines strive upwards and are merged in a point that is Syntheos, which thereby holds the entire structure together and gives it its name. Syntheos is the divinity of the collective, humanity, the future, creativity, dreams, aspirations, visions and utopias. All gods that have ever been invented are illustrations of one and the same god, namely the need for a personified, cohesive component in order for the world to appear as the One, a meaningful whole. A human being without desires is a dead human being. In the same way, a society without a utopia is a dead society. Syntheism therefore maintains that it is not the content of the utopia but the utopia in itself that is the divine. According to the speculative logic of the syntheist, the need for the divine is divine in itself. The Greek word for the creating god is Syntheos, from which syntheism gets its name. God is no longer a patriarchal creator of worlds from the past or a longed-for saviour on a white steed, but the de facto name of the collective utopia of the collective itself in the future.

Syntheos is driven by the desire for meaningful fellowship and an idea of the perfection of history. If the Father died with the Word, and if the Son died on the Cross, Syntheos is what is left of Christianity after its ideological collapse. Syntheos is the divinity of theological anarchism, a kind of independent Holy Ghost without either the Father or the Son. Syntheos is introduced historically, of course, by the syntheists themselves and is celebrated at the autumn equinox. The autumn equinox is the celebration of the community as the manifestation of the divine. The autumn equinox is also the celebration of the return of everything to its origin, of how creativity and destructiveness are two sides of the one coin, of the perfection of all circles, of death on the horizon as the creator of meaning for every living thing, and is followed by the Synthea quarter.

The movement in the syntheological pyramid goes from the possible in Atheos to the realised in Pantheos; from the mutable in Entheos to the consummated in Syntheos. The syntheist calendar is constructed around syntheology’s four cornerstones and their quarters: Enthea starts at the spring equinox which is the syntheist new year, Panthea starts at midsummer, Synthea starts at the autumn equinox and Athea starts at midwinter. And then everything starts again from the beginning: repetition but with constant displacements. The movement within the syntheological pyramid also goes from the top down. When Syntheos is completed, Entheos gets a cohesive meaning: the chaotic differences and repetitions get a context since they suddenly appear as creative intensities on top of the stable community that Syntheos constructs. Entheos can be apprehended as the individual human being, the dividual subject, divided and fundamentally homeless. Syntheos is the collective subject, the holy community which is bigger for the dividual subject than the dividual subject is in relation to itself. We can express this in the following way: Syntheos is the emergent dimension where Entheos finds its home and is realised. Syntheos is the place where Entheos is transformed into the syntheist agent and meets its transience with dignity.

This means that the cosmos no longer appears as a cold and indifferent machinery grinding away, but instead as an holistic divinity filled with meaning – Pantheos. The arrival of this Pantheos in turn opens the way for a new appreciation of the creativity that emanates from the void of its predecessor, Atheos, the non-god, which is the origin of all subjectivity processes. For while Pantheos resides in consciousness, Atheos rules in the subconscious. This is completely in line with what Lacan says: the subject is created in and belongs to the subconscious. Therefore Lacan also speaks of the barred subject, that is, the subject’s inability to know its own origin, and how this very impossibility is constitutive of the subject itself. It is the uncompromisingly barred Atheos that is the source of the subject. Note how the four concepts in the syntheological pyramid are completely dependent on and include each other. Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos all reside within Atheos. Atheos, Entheos and Syntheos are all housed within Pantheos. Atheos, Pantheos and Syntheos all reside within Entheos. Atheos, Pantheos and Syntheos are all housed within Syntheos. If Christianity is based on God as a trinity, syntheism is instead based on God as a quadrinity.

Syntheism presupposes both a religious atheism and a subjective pantheism. It is important to distinguish between on the one hand a subjective and on the other hand an objective pantheism. Subjective pantheism is an active choice to see the fact that there is something rather than nothing as the foundation for the holy. The truth is an act. Through this decision, the Universe and its history are put on a par with the divine. That which exists is made into something holy. However, objective pantheism requires a blind and indisputable conviction that the Universe actually is God. But this position is of no interest to syntheism. In order for pantheism to be woven together first with atheism and then with entheism – in order to lead on to syntheism – in fact requires that it is strictly subjective. We find no signs that the Universe regards itself as divine – it displays no signs whatsoever of having a consciousness of its own that can produce a religious conviction similar to that of humans – and if this were the case, the syntheist premise would collapse. The four divinities in the syntheological pyramid are in fact all created by ourselves for ourselves, as named projections of existence; they are all syntheist, so too are Atheos, Pantheos and Entheos.

There are grounds for declaring that syntheism can and should be regarded as ‘New Age’ for the thinking man. The critically thinking Man, one should then add. For with a blind faith built into the core of the construction, syntheism would never hold up logically. The truth is of course that syntheism is anything but ‘New Age’. It is a construction on top of modern physics and after the atheist revolution, without in any way therefore opposing the preceding advances in the natural science and metaphysics – but rather by deepening these further. While New Age at best must be regarded as a kind of postmodern laissez-faire laughing stock, full of folly, an anti-intellectual mishmash of superstition, nonsense and general fear of conflict in sundry variants – as well as a variety of old ideas that are trivialised and commercialised so strongly that they become meaningless, an unsystematic recycling of worthless thinking from times gone by – syntheism is instead the logically deduced metaphysics for a new era. For real.

It is important to distinguish between classical atheism and syntheist atheism. Classical atheism not only maintains that God does not exist, it also presumes that God cannot exist. Syntheist atheism, on the other hand, maintains that God might well exist, partly as a divinity placed and created in the future (syn-theos), partly also as a constantly present productive void (a-theos) in space–time that supplies the cosmos (pan-theos) and its conscious inhabitants with subjectivity in an indeterministic process of constant change (en-theos). The reason for this is that existence expresses itself unremittingly, and quite regardless of whether or not there is an internarcissistic, human participant present in the process.

While classic atheism zeroes in on the one god after the other in its dedicated ambition to deconstruct and empty these of content – there is thus no cohesive, classical atheism, which means that classical atheism can only exist in the plural, where every orientation has a specific god in its sights – syntheist atheism is based on something that actually exists already: Atheos, the non-god, or the void per se, and it focuses on the enormous productivity of this void – from quantum fluctuations to subjectivity processes. Where classical atheism is merely reactive – always awaiting new theist innovations to attack and thus being dependent on the gods it so eagerly denies – syntheist atheism is active and thereby offers an existential substance which classical atheism lacks. The syntheistic atheist builds cathedrals to celebrate her conviction and the collectively edified fellowship, while the classical atheist on her part just has to make do with sitting on the side-lines, paralysed by a religion-envy that must be kept secret. Classical atheism is instead the little temperance movement of the territory of spirituality and outlook on life, forever doomed to miss out on all the fun parties.

Faith is always a belief in the impossible being possible. Only a faith without assurances is an authentic faith. That is what the word faith actually means. Therefore syntheistic faith is the authentic faith par excellence. Ultimately, all forms of faith up until syntheism have been based on calculations of utility and anticipated rewards. There is no such speculative appeasement, no servility and no sucking up to an external fetishized power within syntheism. Atheos gives without taking, Syntheos takes without giving, while Entheos is always being recreated, and Pantheos always is. This means that syntheist ethics is based on the principle that the agent gives in and of pure joy, without expecting any kind of reward in return. Syntheism’s ethos is a wilful act, an identification with the act, I am doing this only because I am the one who is to do this, without the slightest trace of the traditional religion’s at times appeasing, at times calculating, ulterior motives. Syntheist ethics is a pure form of activism – rather than a passive reactivism – an activism which in turn is founded on faith; on a faith which through being activated unleashes a truth, the truth as an act, an action that uses the void’s vacuum energy as an engine to revolutionise the world, in order to constantly create the world anew in a similarly constant expansion.

Atheos is the void that generates the repetitious drive. Pantheos is the cosmos that generates desire that is always on the hunt and never entirely satisfied. Entheos is the transcendence within the immanence, the engine behind all change, difference and diversity. Syntheos is the divine dissolution of the self in the collective, of the self in the cosmos, the sacred meeting between bodies and minds. Syntheos is also the creation of the syntheist religion through the creative coalescence of Atheos, Pantheos, and Entheos as the consummated and healing (whole-making) syntheology. Therefore it is also in Syntheos that we find the ethical imperative to overcome and become one with something much greater than one’s own subject, that is to become one with Syntheos. The dance between Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos opens the way for divinities that are finished with their work – divinities that hand us over to ourselves.

All of these four concepts relate to the search for the sublime as equivalent to the deepest pursuit of religion. The quest for the religious experience is the quest for a life intensity which is so strong that it bridges the gap from the moment to eternity – what syntheology calls the infinite now. Atheos motivates and drives the religious impulse, Entheos is the impulse in itself, Pantheos is its horizon and Syntheos is the moment when the impulse reaches its target and religion is realised as pure religion. Metaphors borrowed from the diachronic world of quantum physics shed light on the process: Atheos is the wave and Pantheos is the particle. Entheos is the relation between them, the movement between; on the one hand the perfect wave where no particle exists any longer, and on the other hand the perfect particle where no wave exists any longer. Syntheos is this entire complex seen as a cohesive unit, as a single phenomenon. It is through the presence and realisation of Syntheos that the phenomenon becomes an active agent.

Physicist Stephen Hawking argues that physical reality becomes accessible to us via models that function within our world view, that are relevant for our era and above all are scientifically verifiable. He calls this conviction model-dependent realism. We create history (Entheos) through our specific participation in it, rather than history creating us. When Hawking’s colleague Edward Witten launches the M-theory in the mid-1990s, he presents a multiverse theory where all previously relevant explanatory models for physics are brought together under a common mathematical roof. According to M-theory, there are at least 10 to the power of 500 different possible string-theory universes. What M-theory de facto does with these multiple, possible universes, means that existence can no longer be regarded as a miracle loosely dangling in nothingness, but rather must be seen as a necessity with a solid anchoring in somethingness.

According to this, our latest, model-dependent realism the metaphysicists Martin Heidegger and Slavoj Zizek make one and the same mistake when they construct their respective ontologies on the premise that nothingness is just as reasonable an assumption as somethingness. For nothingness has never been a possible or even a conceivable alternative in the world of physics. Zizek thus misinterprets Bohrian quantum physics when he says that the Universe is a mistake (even if the statement naturally, as usual for Zizek, works as a funny and thought-provoking provocation). Existence itself is namely the only sufficiently stable state in the physical world. Non-existence, on the other hand, is an extremely unsteady state and it is precisely for this reason an impossibility in a long-term perspective, since existence itself is constantly being offered such an infinite number of possibilities to be brought to life. Nothingness is thus unstable in itself, and with this instability it necessarily follows that a quantity of universes are produced in it at a torrential rate. Something always exists. Nothingness in principle never exists. And to the extent that it does exist, it is always something in any case.

The recurring mistake is Man’s constant anthropocentric, internarcissistic projection on the terms of existence: it is the absurdities we experience in our own existence that make us regard the Universe as a mysterious coincidence where existence miraculously enough happens to defeat non-existence. This anthropocentrism rests on facts that are irrelevant for the cosmos such as the fact that only one of several million sperm succeeds in fertilising one of millions of eggs in order for ourselves to arise as embryos; or that millions and again millions of possible variants of ourselves die every moment to enable just one of all this infinite number of variants of ourselves to survive, all the way through to all the variants finally perishing when death catches up with everything living within us. But in the world of physics there are no such balances, no trade-offs between something and nothing as probable, equivalent alternatives. The possibilities of somethingness completely crush the probabilities of nothingness through the entheistic oceans of existence, until somethingness becomes the metaphysical foundation of model-dependent realism.

The human mind is the arena for a constant battle between the extremes Atheos (the absorbing subject) and Pantheos (the expanding cosmos), where Atheos represents the drive while Pantheos represents the desire within psychoanalysis. Atheos is the Universe as it apprehends itself, it is the subject’s experience of itself as a subject. In the same way that we must regard ourselves as voids where life seeks meaning through an always unsuccessful but nonetheless always repeated struggle to fill the void with content; in the same way Atheos is the idea of what the Universe sees when the Universe observes itself, from the inside. Pantheos is the Universe that we humans observe and to which we ascribe divinity; it is the Universe as object, observed by a subject (the believing dividual or the community). This means that syntheology emanates from a dialectics between Atheos and Pantheos, it is between these two concepts that we are moving – constantly, restlessly – they are our sacred extremes, midwinter and midsummer in the syntheist calendar, where Entheos is their common product, the fate that we unconditionally love: amor fati.

It is Atheos who drops the event as a bombshell into the metauniverse that beforehand appeared to be balanced. The Universe arises as a minimal but decisive quantum deviation in a metauniverse where something is less than nothing. It should be pointed out in this context that the void is never empty. A nothing in the classical sense does not exist in physics. In its apparent emptiness, a void is also full of pure activity and, as long as the total energy amount is zero, is capable of producing and maintaining any amount of quantitative substance. Existence, life, and consciousness are all examples of magical, incomprehensible, unpredictable emergences that Atheos drops into history. Every event of every kind in the Universe is of course actually incredibly unlikely on closer inspection, but occurs nonetheless only according to the principle that something happens because something must happen sooner or later. Atheos is the engine in syntheism’s Pantheos. What separates Man from other animals is not just that Man is endowed with a consciousness, but that he also has a subconscious. It is the subconscious that spurs mankind on in her quest for the truth event. The quest for the truth event is the focus of the drive.html">death drive. Or as the a-theist Hegel would express the matter: Atheos is constantly on the lookout for itself.

It is in mathematics rather than in our senses that we find the opening to the new realism, which, while being a model-dependent realism, is nonetheless a realism in the sense that our senses achieve an authentic contact with our environment. In a defence of the mathematical revolution that Georg Cantor initiated, with the launch of transfinite cardinals in 1904 Cantor’s colleague Ernst Zermelo proves the existence of an actual but indeterminist infinite. Thereby the door is left wide open to model-dependent realism, beyond naive realism, which of course Kant dismisses by insisting on a necessary, radical separation between the phenomenal and the noumenal. In syntheology, the Kantian precipice is replaced by the oscillation between an Entheos in escalating expansion and a Syntheos of creative pleasure that arises in the playing in earnest with a ceremonial quest for understanding in the explosive multiplicity of Entheos. To live in Syntheos is to enjoy the philosophical creation and redesign of models of fleeting reality in a never-ending flow.

Through Cantor’s revolution in mathematics and Niels Bohr’s in physics, the natural sciences land once and for all in the victory of indeterminism over determinism. But there has always been a cosmological logic that argues for indeterminism. And it is based on the ontically necessary presence of chance. In a determinist universe absolutely nothing can happen by chance, which every friend of order will realise is tautological; determinism means of course that everything is predestined in which case this of course applies without exception, otherwise the position would be untenable, including predestination itself too. Determinism thus argues that if we only know the historical conditions and the physical factors that exist and precede each course of events, we can calculate with absolute certainty how every course of events (and in principle the entire history of the world) will unfold.

This requires however that there be only one possible course of events for every set of given premises. And above all, this requires that the laws of the Universe precede the Universe itself. Including the necessary law of the law’s own existence, that is, the metalaw. If we are to take determinism seriously, we are thus mercilessly cast back into the arms of the pre-atheist god: the patriarchal creator, dualistically distinct from the rest of the Universe. And with him also follows his necessary creator, and this creator’s creator, backwards in a chain in all infinity. But no such pre-atheist god exists, as we know. The future is thereby not closed and illusory in the way that determinism both suggests and requires. Rather, it is the case that if the Universe were not open to the future, and thus indeterministic, it could never exist either. It is not just a matter of exactly the same premises in physics being able to yield more than one result, as Bohr points out. It is in fact the case that these very premises must be aleatoric in order to even be able to exist as premises at all.

The existence of the Universe per se is indeed no accident, but the fact that the Universe is constituted precisely as it is includes considerable and decisive amounts of chance. Determinism collapses at the same moment that we are confronted with the minutest unpredictability in the history of the Universe. But the history of the Universe is filled with chance, or rather filled with widely differing outcomes that are the results of defined probabilities. Even our specific universe per se represents such an accident. Not aleatorically like existence – that something rather than nothing exists is a necessity rather than an accident – but aleatorically as a detailed phenomenon, that is, as its own specific history. Or as the syntheist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux expresses the matter: “The only thing that is necessary in existence is contingency.” But contingency is then all the more necessary.

There are only processes in syntheism; everything is pure movement on top of pure movement, and only in the antagonism and oscillation between the extreme states of these fields do eternalisable phenomena arise. The world reflected by perception is the scene of the antagonism between Atheos and Pantheos. This antagonism between Atheos and Pantheos is the phenomenological engine; the oscillation between them is the arena in which the subject can arise as the self-image Atheos, which initially positions itself in relation to and then chooses to project the holy onto the Pantheos world view. This fundamental, religious truth as an act, the movement from atheism to pantheism, generates the dividual entheism, on which syntheists then choose to build the collective syntheism.

The existential experience places the subject in the world of psychology, and psychology is embedded in eternalism and in itself has nothing to do with the mobilist reality outside the mind. The human mind and its peculiarities primarily belong in empirical psychology and not in the world of ontology. Syntheism regards them as creative attributes of their divinities, rather than as philosophical foundations. Subjectivity is thus a subconscious by-product of an external movement rather than a conscious construction in a stagnant mind. It is, as the existentialist Martin Heidegger would say, the activity in the lifeworld and not the passivity in the mind that gives the subject its essence. The syntheistic agent thus arises in the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos. Syntheism is thus supremely a proud heir of existentialism from its founder Sören Kierkegaard via Nietzsche to Heidegger. The syntheist agent’s existential experience is definitely a Dasein in the Heideggerian sense.

In the next step of the subjectivity process, the dividual, divided subject takes shapes as Entheos, and the collective, assembled subject takes shape as Syntheos. Here, it is Entheos that assumes the role of mobilism and Syntheos that takes eternalism’s role within the dialectics between mobilism and eternalism. It is, for example, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos that vibrates through Deleuze’s classic work Différence et Répétition. Entheos stands for the differences and Syntheos stands for the generalities in Deleuzian metaphysics. The second oscillation in the syntheological pyramid arises between these two poles. The first oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos revolves around the One, which expresses itself as a single cohesive substance with an endless quantity of attributes. The second oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos however lacks the One as a cohesive point of departure, since the multiplicity in question which takes its starting point in Entheos is irreducible.

In the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos, there are only completely open pluralities, like the infinities placed on top of each other in Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. This means that the One is always postponed into the future; here the One is namely equivalent to the syntheist utopia per se – a utopia of imperfect multiplicity rather than of the Platonist utopia’s perfect simplicity – which constantly avoids its own realisation. If Entheos is the division of Pantheos into an endless quantity of multiplicities stacked on top of each other – what the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin in a salute to Heraclitus in the 19th century calls “the only thing that differentiates itself as the basic condition of existence” – Syntheos is its opposite: the attempt of perception to try to connect the irreducible multiplicity into a cohesive, creative, collective identity. Syntheos is quite simply the name of perception’s attempt to convert the chaos of existence into religion. Syntheism is thus literally the pure religion, the netocratic eternalism (see The Netocrats), religion as religion in its innermost essence.

This syntheist, primordial eternalisation however is not some deeper truth about existence that suddenly makes its entrance into the arena, but the necessary contraction of information in the perception of mobilist existence. Only a minute fraction of all sensory impressions are processed at all by one’s consciousness. If the brain really were to catalogue all sensory impressions from a single experienced second, it would take thousands of years to do so, during which one’s consciousness consequently would be blocked and paralysed (and thereby unable to apprehend anything, be it important or unimportant, in the next second, and the next after that, and so forth). In other words, perception must be extremely selective in order to process information while it registers changes in the always fleeting present. Eternalisation then becomes the engine in the transcendentalisation of immanent reality. The transcendent is accordingly strictly fixed compared to the inexorable mobility of the immanence, but as such is necessary in order to enable the phenomenon to stand out as precisely a phenomenon.

Kant’s idea of the mobilist noumenon as primary in relation to the eternalist phenomenon is fundamentally an idea of a transcendent God as a passive observer rather than an immanent God as an active participant in the Universe. Kant quite simply imagines that the noumenon is what God observes when the human being merely sees the phenomenon. But an object can reveal itself in innumerable different guises, of which the phenomenon that human perception generates is only one single phenomenon, and an external, divine observer is not needed either. Instead it is Niels Bohr’s phenomenon, the compact intertwining of the subject and the object, which is the primary starting point in the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, rather than some kind of unattainable Ding an sich in the Kantian sense. A syntheist Ding an sich is quite simply the bringing together of the thousands of varying perspectives that one individual phenomenon invites. For perception does not distort reality, which Kant assumes. Perception merely provides both a necessary and intelligent priority for precisely that which is new and different in the information flow compared to earlier sensory impressions, so that a new and constantly minimally corrected eternalisation can occur in every individual moment (see The Body Machines). The evolutionarily developed balance between transcendental eternalisation and immanent mobility is merely a question of optimising survival possibilities. The information selectivity is quite simply an evolutionarily smart and beneficial phenomenological strategy. But it really says nothing ontologically about existence.

The syntheist world is a world of relations and only relations. Syntheism is a relationalism. It is the syntheological pyramid which constitutes the ontological foundation for all agents in the relationalist universe. The oscillating relation between Atheos and Pantheos, followed by the oscillating relation between Entheos and Syntheos, together form a cohesive, pan-dimensional, vibrating coordinate system: syntheology as a phenomenon. The syntheist symbol – which for example adorns the website syntheism.org – shows Pantheos on top of Atheos as a white ellipsis that represents the Universe on top of a black circle that represents the void, with Entheos as the boundary between them and Syntheos as the complete symbol in itself, drawn by people in whose speculative imagination the most essential relations and intensities in existence have been personified. Syntheists are quite simply people who, once again in history, unabashed, and this time also consciously, create gods.

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