Back to index

6:44

(In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

A few really profound spiritual experiences may suffice, or even just one, in order to motivate a syntheist believer to endure and soldier on in a life replete with toil and set-backs. The syntheist philosopher Robert Corrington sets up this qualitative spiritual ideal as intense ecstasy against its opposite, drawn-out melancholy, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy. Here the memory function of consciousness plays a central role. We need not return to life’s greatest intensities all the time in order to recall them, but thanks to memory we can return to, and in this way reuse, life’s greatest and most valuable intensities as creators of existential meaning. And it is of course precisely in the form of memories, and not as direct experiences, that emotional intensities give life its meaning. As experiences per se the most powerful intensities are almost unbearable in their extension; constantly being in an ecstatic climax must be regarded as a form of psychotic madness rather than perfect pleasure of life.