9 The syntheist agent and her desires and drives

As physics migrates to informationalism and thereby becoming relationalist, a new view of humanity and a new world view are becoming apparent. Metaphysical individualism is dead; it disappears along with physical atomism, since these constitute two sides of the same outdated coin. Both stem from Kant’s onto-epistemology from the second half of the 18th century, which in turn is based on Descartes’ classic proposition “Cogito, ergo sum”, where the subjective experience is the only indisputable thing in existence and therefore constitutes the point of departure for all assertions about anything at all. This axiomatic subject then relates to other objects, which in the same way as the subject and its Cartesian theatrical stage is construed first as noumenal and then as phenomenal, indivisible entities with solid substances, that is, as individuals and atoms.

But since syntheism, when it investigates the world, finds neither individuals nor atoms, it becomes necessary to break with the individualist-atomist paradigm in order to connect instead to the metaphysical alternative that actually has support in the sciences’ observations of the world, that is, network dynamics and its attendant relationalism.html">social relationalism. Just like in relationalist physics, there are only relations on top of other relations and probabilities on top of other probabilities even within psychology and sociology, and these relations and probabilities do not stop at the externally interactive: they are very much also internally intra-acting. First there is the network, then there is the node and only thereafter does the subjective experience arise. What applies here is thus an inverted procedure compared to Descartes’ and Kant’s narcissistic fantasy of the genesis of the subject and its position in the Universe: “I am, therefore I think.” Man himself is a phenomenon of network dynamics, localised within other network-dynamical phenomena. But when she also becomes conscious of this, he can start to act as something far more than merely a relationalist subject, namely as the syntheist agent, syntheism’s ethical human ideal.

The human being’s self-experience is of course as relationalist as everything else in existence. According to relationalist phenomenology, the human subject arises, if anything, as a kind of minoritarian by-product of a larger majoritarian phenomenon, where the majoritarian phenomenon that transcends the subject’s self-experience is its agent. It is thus not the case that separate souls sit and wait to be mounted inside shiny new bodies in some kind of creation factory – which Descartes’ and Kant’s dualism requires – but the self-experience is instead a highly efficient but nevertheless illusory by-product of the body’s many other doings – the borrowed component, taken out of empty nothingness, which means that the human equation suddenly seems to achieve an acceptable solution for itself. The self-experience is quite simply the logical end point where the subject process ties together for itself. Thus it does not come first, as Descartes and Kant presume, but rather last, so that the void that ties together all divided components within the dividual so that it can experience itself as a phantasmic unit and as a whole. All this thus takes place within the agent, the transient subject that cannot in any way precede or exist outside the basic agency. The body, the congregation and the society can all be agents, but without an agent that houses this subjectivity, it cannot exist at all.

Thus, the conditions for the development of consciousness are not either in any way universal, but rather highly contingent and bound to a very specific, spatio-temporal situation. The Kantian transcendental subject must be replaced by the syntheist immanent subject. And the syntheist immanent subject has no need whatsoever of any kind of correlationalism, in either the weak Kantian or the strong relativist sense. In a radically relationalist universe the need for correlationalism disappears. Thus, the syntheist immanent subject does not arise in opposition to the phenomenon but instead is an integral part of the same. The subject is best described as the phenomenon’s agentiality.

The syntheist agent does not seek contact with the outside world from any kind of passive observer position. Instead she lives as an intra-acting phenomenon, participating interactively, at the centre of the world. Quite simply, no original individuation arises that can be regarded or used as the cornerstone of existence. There is no individuation whatsoever. What arises is a dividuation, and it is a by-product of the current region’s many relations and not the other way around. Syntheism does focus at all on the subject, which it decentralises, but takes the inversion of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum very seriously and therefore shifts the existential focus to agentiality as a phenomenon, an intra-acting concentration of intensities, which is an irreducible multiplicity of identities within a diffuse and mobile field. These identities gather around a truth as an act, namely the subjective experience as the impoverished void Atheos within the rich multiplicity Entheos, located in overwhelming existence Pantheos. The subject’s illusoriness is not externalised however, as relativist critics of Descartes and Kant such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Derrida imagine – these philosophers are quite simply not radical enough in their break with Kantian correlationism –they are instead internalised right from the very beginning. The illusory aspect of the subject, its self-experienced substancelessness, is included as a fundamental and integral part of the subjective experience as such.

Among the old authorities, it is the godfather of German Romanticism Hegel who really displays an understanding of the genesis of the subject, which is apparent when he becomes the first to construct a subject theory using the concept of Atheos as his point of departure. According to Hegel, the subject is not just fundamentally empty and developed as a kind of tragic response to unanswered existential questions – it is moreover a highly temporary and local eternalisation complex without any relevance whatsoever outside of itself. There is, to express the matter in Kantian terms, nothing universal outside the subject that it can transcend into. If, for example, we were to amuse ourselves by condensing the Hegelian and relationalist subject experience into three words, then the concepts emptiness, diminutiveness and transience fit just perfectly.

However, this basic illusoriness should be understood as something extremely productive: a limitation of external stimuli is a fundamental prerequisite for the flowering of inner creativity. The less information that is added to the syntheist agent’s mind, the more richly she can fantasise about and expand her subjective experience. The Hegelian philosopher Slavoj Zizek develops the idea of illusoriness as basic to the subjective experience. He argues that, seen at its most profound, the subject must be regarded as the excluded in the subjective experience, as the subjective experience’s excrement, the piece of the puzzle that does not fit in, that which constantly fails and never succeeds in hitting home, that within the subject that the subject itself tries to push away and hide from itself and from the surrounding world. We call this the abjective subject. Or as Zizek himself expresses the matter: “I am my own lack, I am my own excrement.” This restricted subject is maintained through a pronounced internal distance. And the distance is existentially necessary; if it is nullified, the subject collapses.

The Zizekian abjective subject is fundamentally internally divided. The split within the subject precedes and is also the prerequisite for the ensuing distinction between the subject and the object. The subject is thus a reaction against its own cause; its modus operandi is to constantly rework the constant failure of being its own substance. The subject is quite simply the product of its own failures. Above all it is a product of the failure of the mystery. Only through insight into this state of affairs – let us say obtained through the syntheist schizoanalysis (see The Body Machines) – is the subject’s understanding of and functional relation to the real enabled. In the schizoanalytical process, the syntheist agent gets the chance to construct an infinite number of credible dividual identities within one and the same body. But that which ties all these identities together into one big circle – and makes them one single cohesive agential phenomenon for itself – this is the gaping void in the middle of the circle, Zizek’s abjective subject, Atheos.

Individualism’s misleading anthropomorphisation of consciousness leads straight towards an impossible dead end. But it is not merely Kantian correlationism that must be discarded in conjunction with the necessary massive clean-out associated with the transition to relationalism. This also applies, to take one example, to all Eastern or New Age-related ideas of some kind of cosmic consciousness. The Universe not only lacks a brain to be conscious with: the Universe has de facto no incentive to acquire a consciousness, since consciousness is only produced in order to cover up the failings that are specific to the life situations of human beings. Not only is Man the only animal that talks – and thereby also thinks in the abstract – he is also the only animal who develops this ability in order to be able to survive at all. Language is developed as a Darwinian response to the human being’s evolutionary shortcomings. To speak and think is just the human being’s way of compensating for her own physical weakness and the evolutionary advantages of other animal species.

It is fully understandable that language acquires a magical aura, since it is a devastatingly effective weapon for Man against competing species in the struggle for limited resources. If mankind lacked these communication-technology advantages, these rivals would, without further ado, have killed mankind and relegated him to the long list of losers wiped out by the evolutionary process. However, language has no other function over and above this contingent and emergent role, and this of course also applies to the thoughts and consciousness which it in turn produces. The primary aspect of Man is his existence and enjoyment in this existence, that is, the nature she shares with, and not the culture that separates him from, all other animals. The secondary capacities of language and thought have arisen in order to enable the development and enjoyment of existence, not the other way around.

However, the Universe has no need whatsoever of or interest in language or thoughts or any kind of consciousness. While consciousness might be extremely valuable and remarkable for the human being in her self-absorption, it is completely meaningless for all other significant entities in the Universe. There really was not even the slightest trace of words in the beginning. The Word can only be placed at the beginning of Creation when the uniquely talkative Man uses language in order to try and comprehend that which is difficult to comprehend, locked in a consciousness that is furnished and wallpapered with language. Language and thereby also thinking and consciousness has actually been around for 200,000 years at most. And what do a mere 200,000 years of gossiping and reflecting within one single species of animal on just one single planet matter in a 14 billion-year-old, gigantic and moreover constantly expanding Universe? The question is of course rhetorical and the answer is nought. We have an endearing tendency to mistake what appears important to ourselves for what is important in an overarching perspective.

When it comes to the historically necessary decentralisation of consciousness, syntheism differs radically from objective pantheism in all its variants, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism and New Age. Searching for a cosmic consciousness outside Man, as these ideologies are doing, is nothing other than a childishly misdirected projection of anthropocentric, internarcissistic fantasies onto something that is particularly ill-suited for this. The truth is that the Universe, with its enormous creative potential, is far too fantastic to need a consciousness. Narrowly limited human beings on the other hand are – probably – the only consciousness in the Universe, since consciousness has arisen solely as a means of damage control, precisely because of Man’s existential limitations. Syntheism therefore only professes itself an adherent to subjective pantheism and not to the objective variant. We choose to project divinity onto existence as a whole – subjective pantheism is instead truth as an act par excellence – instead of believing that the cosmos imposes its divinity on us through a variety of dubious and self-appointed messengers. Syntheologically, we locate consciousness between Entheos (the dividual subject) and Syntheos (the collective subject), dancing on top of Atheos (the engine of the subject). But it is extremely important to keep it as far away as possible from Pantheos and all other superstitions regarding a cosmic consciousness.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze devoted a lot of work to the art of managing the chaos that occurs in the world before Man appears. He goes back to humanity’s nomadic roots and calls this deeper picture of the human being the dividual (the divisible human being), in contrast to the capitalist individual (the indivisible human being). Deleuze’s post-humanist dividual in turn happens to fit perfectly as an ideal for the rising netocracy under informationalism (see The Netocrats). Deleuze argues that the dividual is autoimmune. To be autoimmune is to see both good and bad sides in oneself as necessary. To be autoimmune is to acknowledge that one is finite and constantly divided in every moment, driven by internal desires and drives, which in the encounter with an incessant flow of external memes unite around the nomadic, dividual identity. To be autoimmune is to give full expression to our pathological sorrow and fear of death. The dividual is of course always conscious of the fact that the Universe has both the right and the capacity to crush her at any moment. Life is very fragile for real; this is not just some maudlin, sentimental phrase.

In contrast to the fixed individual, the nomadic dividual is just as playfully divisible inwardly as he is flexibly inconstant outwardly. In addition, the dividual is not the least bit interested in acting as some kind of centre of existence on individualism’s ramshackle, theatrical stage. In contrast to the Cartesian individual’s existential self-absorption – what else could we expect from a starting point that says “the only thing I am aware of is that I myself exist” – the dividual sees and understands herself as a kind of auto-suggested spectre of the mind, an emergent by-product from a specific evolutionary process, a highly peripheral creature in a monstrous Universe, who only gets a value for itself through creative interaction with other dividuals, who also themselves in the same way are always mutable. The dividual is not merely the historical and philosophical replacement of the individual, but also the consequence of the dismantling and decentralisation of the individual. Because it is not the dividual but the network that is syntheism’s metaphysical core.

This means that syntheism liberates Man from anthropocentrism and internarcissism. That the individual human being is freed from the responsibility of being an individual and instead is being encouraged to be a dividual is something that syntheism regards as a kind of existential salvation. Dividualism colours every fibre of the syntheist agent. Man is not the centre of existence any more than the ego could be the centre of Man (since it does not exist – see The Body Machines). Obviously, humanity and its attributes have no primary status in the Universe. Civilisations have arisen as an emergent phenomenon on a planet after aeons of history without any people at all. They have also perished without the Universe taking the slightest bit of notice. Humanity is a phenomenon that has sprung from other intra-acting phenomena. Nor is any human being created by other humans. Biological parents do not create their offspring – despite the fact that they would like to believe that this is the case – but are rather tools for the Universe’s constant production of new organisms furnished with bodies, language, ideas, consciousnesses and subconsciousnesses.

In this context it is extremely important to distinguish between psychotherapy’s utilitarian search for happiness in life and psychoanalysis’ existentialist search for the truth about existence. Psychotherapy is a product of psychology, which is a social science. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is a product of philosophy, which means that at its deepest level it is an art form. Psychotherapy is an anthropotechnical project – developed by the capitalist power structure and its nation states and large corporations – which is dedicated to defining patients, that is, deviants from the momentarily prevailing societal norm. The scientists supply these patients with functional diagnoses, filled with an expanding flora of pathologies, which must be treated in order to promote the societal body’s well-being. Historically speaking, and possibly with a measure of cynicism, we can regard the psychotherapist as the capitalist tamer of individuals – a professionalised and commercialised replacement for the shoved-aside, good-old, good friend – whose task it is to adapt the citizen to a closed life-cycle of work, consumption and sleep, by robbing her of all forms of authentic intimacy with other people.

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, starts from the vantage point that all people are and must be fundamentally pathological creatures; the human being is, and has never been anything but, homo pathologicus. The very fact that the human being believes that she exists as a subject and that she will live and not die attests to a pathological foundation for consciousness that is as powerful as it is necessary. The pathological subject exists in a dialectical tension between the two contracting parties desire and drive. Western philosophy reflects this dialectic as the history of desire from Spinoza and onwards (materialism), pitted against the history of the drive from Hegel and onwards (idealism). The dialectic is essential for both of these forces to be able to survive. Desire is ultimately an attempt to flee from the drive, and the drive is viewed at the most profound level as an attempt to flee from desire.

Syntheism regards the antagonism between desire and drive as equivalent to the existential experience itself, and its syntheological equivalent is of course the oscillation between Pantheos and Atheos. Riding the intensity at the centre of the oscillation is to be merged with Entheos; building utopias of other worlds in other times with other human beings based on the current position is to create Syntheos. Here, it is important to understand that desire is specific to Man and her consciousness. Desire is a by-product of language and belongs to culture. The drive, on the other hand, belongs to nature and literally drives everything outside of Man’s consciousness. Although the subconscious is structured so that it really wants to die, and although the subconscious is therefore an engine of the drive.html">death drive, consciousness fights to the end for survival in the struggle with irrevocable death.

Syntheist ethics is based on this state of affairs. At the same time that the syntheist agent understands the terror of eternal life, right up until the moment of death she still seeks the continued dividuation in survival as desire’s conscious response to the drive’s subconscious longing for dissolution in constantly new phenomena. Therefore – as the syntheist philosopher Martin Hägglund shows in his book atheism.html">Radical Atheism – survival is the cornerstone in syntheist ethics, while immortality, because of its infantile premises, does not belong in the syntheist utopia at all. There is a logic in wanting to live longer, deeper and more intensely. But there is no logic whatsoever in trying to prolong something forever, since immortality robs that which is to be prolonged of all its meaning. To wish for immortality is the same as wishing away desire, and without desire the whole point of wanting to exist as a human being disappears. And then there is not either any reason to survive. We express this as the drive.html">death drive being the compulsion to return to the inorganic – which expresses itself as a constant striving to minimise, avoid and defer life’s intensity – while desire is the will to prolong and maximise the expression of the organic in the infinite now.

The cosmological drive is without a doubt considerably more complex than any anthropocentric projection can ever do justice to. Above all, it wants nothing in advance. It is not a hunter who fells its prey in order to try to impress a partner in conjunction with an approaching tribal mating dance. And it does not seek any kind of power, since it does not find anything that it must control in order to serve a specific purpose. Honestly, it does not matter if we ourselves exist; in the universocentric world view the main thing is that the Universe – this something without a doubt, rather than nothing – manifests itself for itself through us. If we only leave our own subjective experience of the surrounding world and consider that the Universe is the world before the world itself, then we ourselves are not wiped out by death either, since existence continues beyond death. Existence in fact never ceases to exist; dying is to return to the enormous dimensions of existence from which we come. Death is nothing other than the termination of the momentary, marginal fluctuation in the vast history that we, from our twisted perspective, call our existence, the Universe’s minimal and local game with itself. Birth is the loan and death is the just and reasonable payment. The Universe always wins in the end, just as the house always wins at the casino. And we are and always will be participants in the Universe.

The oscillation between Pantheos and Atheos vibrates in the subconscious, and it is there that we find the starting point for Man’s self-image: the subject lives in and is construed from the subconscious. However, the subject lacks an essence of its own. It is the extimacy in the subjective experience that carries the subject. Quite simply it arises through extimacy, and not through intimacy. As compensation for the strenuous extimacy in relation to itself, the dividual seeks intimacy in the other. The driving force is that intimacy with the other should soothe the existential angst that arises from the necessary, inner extimacy.

In the intimate relation with the other, ethical and moral values arise, respectively (see The Body Machines). The concepts ethics and morality originally had the same meaning: ethics comes from the Greek word ethos and morality comes from the Latin word morales, and both these terms can be translated as customs. But after Spinoza’s philosophical divide between ethics on the one hand and morality on the other in the 17th century, the concepts have come to have completely different meanings. Ethics thus concerns an attitude connected to an identity, confronted with a choice between different anticipated constructive or destructive effects of the contemplated intervention in a surmised course of events. Being an ethical being is to go through life with the right, and in all respects reasonable, intentions. Ethics thus concerns the right or wrong choice in relation to the actor herself. It is an internalised evaluation process. Being an ethical agent is to identify oneself with the intentions of the decisions one makes.

Morality instead concerns a displayed attitude to the arbitrariness of a powerful external judge who might be, for example, God, the nation, the State, the leader, or the law per se, that is, the phantasmic figure that is called the great Other within psychoanalysis. The subject is forced to take a stand in the struggle between good (pleasing the judge) and evil (rebelling against the judge). Morality is thereby an externalised evaluation process. This is on the assumption that the subject who acts needs to be castigated, tamed and made subservient to the powers that be, rather than acting freely from a will of its own. Being moral thus primarily concerns following laws without questioning them. Moralising is attempting to impose one’s own values, in the form of laws or quasi-laws, on others, for example through laws or other regulations. This is in contrast to being ethical, which can best be described as intentions and actions following an inner conviction for the purpose of becoming one with this conviction, without taking account of, for example, prevailing social norms. The purpose of the ethical agent is not to placate any external judge, but to give oneself an ever-so-momentary existential substance, internally for oneself.

Morality implies a gloomy seriousness, while ethics implies a playful abundance. Note how the pair of opposites good versus evil implies moral decadence, which must be rectified by being offered a reward, or the threat of punishment. On the other hand, the ethical pair of opposites right versus wrong implies a search for and strengthening of the inner identity, quite irrespective of the outcome of the course of events in question. Note that we are speaking of an inner ethical identity that is created through the intention and is strengthened through action: it is definitely not about some kind of essence that is already at hand in the way that Descartes and Kant imagine the moral subject. The syntheist agent thus does not see ethics as arising from any kind of individual identity, but as a truth as an act that provides the tangible void in the centre of the subject with a sincerely longed-for attribute, however short-lived.

Morality also has a rationality, but it is produced from an external subject that is irrational in itself. This dark origin of morality can be summed up under the term the crazy dictator syndrome. In order to be able to maintain the requisite claim on universal validity, morality namely requires as its foundation an abundant libidinal power, that which the Abrahamic religions refer to as the divine omnipotence. The problem is just that power in abundance must logically be viewed as irrational. The dictator in question cannot make himself subservient to any external power, and every form of logic assumed in advance would be precisely such an external power. He must therefore be illogical and irrational, that is, in fact crazy, in order to be able to autocratically dictate the laws and rules of morality. As law, morality thus must apply to everything and everybody, without exception, except precisely the one who creates the morals. God, the nation, the State and the leader – that is, the great Other – need not follow the law. The creator of morality must not in fact follow the law, but must be fundamentally amoral and thereby evil in order for morality to be coherent. The price for morality’s apparent external consistency is thus that it is entirely subject to a single internal amoral source, namely the crazy dictator’s capricious libido.

One way of clarifying the difference between ethics and morality is to study a typical borderline case. Kant creates his transcendental philosophy in the 18th century in the borderland between monotheistic Christianity and atheistic individualism. On account of the growing German and French bourgeoisie, he carries out the self-imposed task of calculating how Man could replace God as the metaphysical centre of existence. Kant borrows the answer from Descartes and maintains that Man is the Master of existence for the simple reason that he can think. But existence can of course only be experienced by Man, the reason being that it requires a consciousness in order to be able to experience it and only Man thinks consciously. He is thus master of a house that he inhabits all by himself.

Since ethics is a more or less free choice between various alternatives – the more freedom that exists in a context, the more ethics is required – and since Kant has made the subject and object of ethics into one and the same thing, he is forced to reduce his ethics to a tautology. When asked the question why it is right to do the right thing, Kant answers laconically that every action should be carried out as if it were universally valid. In other words, it is right to do what is right for the simple and pointless reason that it is right to do the right thing. And then we have not even touched upon the question of exactly what this automatically executed right thing actually is. The only reasonable reaction to Kant’s tautological imperative comes from his successor Nietzsche, who realises that all notions that value philosophy is able to formulate as the right thing in advance must be rejected. Instead he recasts value philosophy as an anthropological project occupied with what Man is anyway already doing and why. The prescriptive value philosophy of Kant is answered commendably by Nietzsche with a descriptive and interactive enlightenment project. Thereby Kant is reduced to a banal moralist, while Nietzsche stands out as the real ethicist.

The point here is that in the Kantian borderland between two value paradigms, interestingly enough Man has neither the amoral God’s freedom to behave as he pleases, nor any judge left to appease in order to get his points registered in his quest for an anticipated reward in eternity. The consequence is that when Kant desperately tries to build a new ethics on top of the old morality – without any foothold in an amoral god – he reduces his phenomenologically divine human being to an ethically paralysed robot. Thereby moralism returns with full force, but this time as a self-referencing feedback loop, where moralism itself has become its own external judge. Understandably enough it is precisely Kant’s peculiar moral philosophy that the succeeding ethicists Hegel and Nietzsche direct their sharpest criticism towards when it comes to Kantianism; in their eyes Kant is nothing other than a naive nihilist, distressingly unaware of the theocide he has just committed. For this reason, both Hegel and Nietzsche pit their pantheist predecessor Spinoza against the deist Kant, and thereby open the way for affirmative nihilism (see The Global Empire), the creative generation of value out of Atheos.

Ethics is an intention founded in an identity in relation to the anticipated result of a cause and an effect. It is the anticipated effect of the action that gives it its ethical weight. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas thinks of ethics as an internal, intersubjective process without any requirements whatsoever on external, objective truths. Various conceivable intentions are weighed against various conceivable chains of cause and effect in a kind of civilised dialogue. Regardless of whether we apply ethics to a dividual or a collective, ethics is founded on an attitude. Nietzsche argues that this attitude is either active or reactive. The active attitude seeks an impression, an impact on existence, a confirmation of the agent’s interaction with its surroundings, in order to attain existential affirmation, a realisation of its own substance. Nietzsche calls this attitude the will to power. Against the will to power stands the reactive attitude, the will to submission, obliteration, a production of identity through identification with the victim rather than with the hero. This reactive attitude creates a bitterness towards existence, it produces and is driven by ressentiment, a perverted pleasure – rather than authentic pleasure – based on an escalating narcissistic self-loathing.

The active attitude produces a steady stream of identities, it seeks creative novelty in an active engagement with its environment, it builds an emergent event emanating from the oscillating phenomenon that includes the syntheist agent. On the other hand, the reactive attitude thrives on maintaining distance, through a narcissism turned away from reality, where the energy is used to stimulate ressentiment for the purpose of repudiating the surrounding world, so that the subject can cultivate the belief in itself as an abandoned and isolated object, floating in a state of permanent masochistic enjoyment. Since the slave mentality – dissected by Nietzsche – constantly seeks a minimisation of its own living throughout life in order to be as close to extinction as possible (what Freud calls the drive.html">death drive), it also seeks submission in relation to other agents, because it flees from authentic intimacy for fear of losing the masochistic enjoyment where it has found its existential sense of security. The slave mentality prefers safe totalist suffering over unsafe mobilist pleasure.

This deep-seated and serious mental masochism should of course not be confused with playful sexual sadomasochism, which has nothing at all to do with any kind of ressentiment. However, there is in all masochism a desire to engage in play-acting, to pretend intimacy when the sadomasochistic act in reality aims to maximise and maintain the distance to the other, which, for example, explains the strong connection between sexual sadomasochism and polyamorousness. This play-acting in the public sphere becomes an (often fully conscious) protection against intimacy in the private sphere in the same way that the connection to many in practice is the same as the connection to no one at all. To the extent syntheism is a doctrine of salvation, it is thus about salvation from this masochistic enjoyment and towards the affirmation of authentic intimacy, completely independent of sexual practices. It is about making the syntheist agent and her desires and drives into an existential hero instead of a pathetic victim. In other words, the syntheist agent is identical with the Nietzschean übermensch.

Nietzsche’s idea-archaeology project leads to a powerful recognition of nature’s enormous rather than Man’s minimal power over both the elements and the mind. With Nietzsche, Nature has of course not only the last word about itself, it is also Nature that acts through Man regardless of what this subject, as with Kant, imagines about itself. What would the subject be otherwise, if not in fact a portion of Nature? This means that Nietzsche transposes ethics into an open issue of what culture is possible on top of such a dominating and framing Nature. It is thus in culture that we find the affirmative in Nietzsche’s affirmative nihilism: a cultural concept that Nietzsche transforms, in a pioneering way, from Nature’s opposite into an emergent phenomenon arising out of otherwise indifferent Nature. According to Nietzsche, culture is nothing other than an engaged extension of Nature – or as we express the matter in The Futurica Trilogy: Culture is Nature 2.0. Only by bravely attempting to build culture on top of Nature, rather than to just yield to Nature, can Man procure an ethical substance.

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche tells of how he allows himself to be inspired to develop the idea of ethics as the agential identity of Zoroaster, history’s first great ethicist. Through recasting the Iranian author of Gathas as the protagonist in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche reconnects with the pagan, non-linear circle rather than with the monotheistic linear road to doomsday as the foundation of ethics – all in accordance with Zoroaster’s words of wisdom “I am my thoughts, my thoughts govern my words, I am my words, my words govern my actions, I am my actions, and my actions govern my thoughts”. Where the radical aspect lies of course is in the minimal contingency that is added for every new revolution in the ethical feedback loop, the minimal difference that every morning makes the world a completely new world that is expanding along the arrow of time. Zoroaster’s and Nietzsche’s syntheological divinity is of course called Entheos.

The ethical consequence of the Nietzschean revolution is that the subject – which hovers in the minimal space between the current event and the next thought – must contemplate the ongoing identity-producing cycle, which de facto is the subject’s engine, in order to be able to shape the next thought as a free choice, a choice whose freedom means that the accomplishment of the intention rewards the subject with ethical substance. Nietzsche’s ethics is thus founded on a syntheist contemplation, which is followed by concrete action that is consistent with the contemplation. It is precisely this human being, she who consistently completes the necessary cycle of ethics to its inexorable end, that Nietzsche terms the übermensch, and it in on her that he pins his hopes when it comes to culture. It is hard to get further away from Kant’s morality robot paralysed in value philosophy than this.

The subject arises as an emergent phenomenon when perception is forced to prioritise in the overwhelming flow of information from the sensory organs – that which the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce dubs semiosis – in order to give the enormous amount of data an actual utility. It is in this freezing and regulating of the perceptual flow that dividuation occurs; it is then and there that the subject arises as a necessary eternalisation of the body’s mobilist chaos, as an organised contraction rather than a galloping inflation in the mind. The reward for dividuation is that a tangible and manageable world view is immediately produced, with the contentless subject as its fictitious centre. When the subject then contemplates itself as objectively being before itself, it becomes conscious of itself as the empty subject, Atheos.

Just like all other eternalisations, dividuation is based on deviations and asymmetries in the perceptual flow. The mind has no reason whatsoever to make an effort or to be switched on when a phenomenon repeats itself identically or follows predictable symmetries. It is only when a clear departure from the pattern appears that the mind switches on the subconscious. And it is only if the deviation evokes strong emotions – at the same level as earlier dramatic peaks in life have done – that the information processing makes the effort to shift itself from the subconscious to the conscious and thereby plays along with or against the current self-image and world view. This also applies very much to the subjective experience. The subject slumbers comfortably until its perception process imposes a change upon it. Then and only then does the subject experience itself as a subject.

The existential experience is thus fundamentally conditioned by change in the semiotic flow. Thereby the subject per se is in a mobilist process, provided that its products are eternalist. The eternalist subject is thus never eternalist per se; it becomes eternalist, it gets its name, precisely through being eternalised by itself into its own object. In the syntheological pyramid, we place consciousness with Entheos. At the most fundamental level, thinking is of course an ongoing organising of differences. The syntheist subject arises as a consequence of provocations from differences in intensities. Without a preceding problem of some kind, there would be no thinking; and without dividuation, which arises when thinking shuts down the semiotic flow, there would be no subject. Since the task of perception is to transform chaos into order, to eternalise the mobilist environment, thinking is first and foremost thinking’s reduction of itself into a dividuation. The subject is neither more nor less than a necessary by-product of thinking as a process.

The discrepancy between Man’s external and internal being, the difference between the human, physical brain and Man’s mental image of his own thinking, has always been a fascinating topic for philosophers; in modern times often dealt with within the borderland between philosophy and neuroscience that is called theory of mind. When we make comparisons, the brain has often drawn the short straw and been considered a relatively simple organ, while the mind has been presumed to be incredibly complex and therefore has often been made into something much greater than the brain, into an external phenomenon, a soul that in some mysterious way transcends the obviously limited body. Research concludes however that the human brain has a degree of complexity that is not far behind the rest of our enormous universe. The brain is actually by far the most complex phenomenon that we have so far found in the Universe. A mere fraction of the brain’s capacity is needed for the mind to work satisfactorily. And what we call the soul, that is, the illusory and fundamentally contradictory feeling of owning and being a soul, is very much just a small internal aspect, rather than a great external agent within this greater phenomenon. On the contrary, it is our thinking that is limited and historically speaking a relatively recent acquisition in this context. The difference between the philosophical phenomena the human being (the creature with a mind) and the animal (the creature without a mind) is actually minimal.

We break down the mind into two divisions: consciousness and the subconscious. To start with, consciousness can be neither understood nor surveyed by consciousness itself. And in actual fact there is no compelling reason for consciousness to devote valuable resources to acquiring an insight into itself in real time, which means that consciousness itself is located in its own dead angle. Consciousness must instead devote itself to tracking itself only after the fact, and then only through its effects. The reason that we use the newer concept of the subconscious instead of the older concept of the unconscious is that there is no clear boundary between our consciousness and that which influences our thought processes without us being aware of it. A large part of the subconscious fluctuates from one moment to the other between consciousness and the unconscious. Quite simply, there is an ongoing information exchange between consciousness and the subconscious; the border between them is highly arbitrary from one moment to the next and in every moment is fleeting, indeterminable. We therefore replace the relativist concept of the unconscious with the relationalist concept of the subconscious in our work.

The subconscious thus not only includes the unconscious in Sigmund Freud’s classical sense, but also the information that consciousness half-consciously, half-unconsciously uses in its intuitive speculation. Neither the externally observed brain, nor the internally experienced mind uses any red or green lights in order to direct incoming information flows. The brain is not a computer. The information is not transported around within the brain in tiny, fixed, compact packages. The brain is namely analogue rather than digital, it is influenced and changes continuously. The human mind is very much a relationalist phenomenon, and the really remarkable aspect of this lies not in its unique position in existence, but rather in its typical materiality in fact. It is matter that is much more complex, active and, if one so wishes, spiritual than we have previously believed. The brain and its by-product the mind should therefore be regarded as typical rather than special material phenomena, even if this insight disturbs our internarcissism.

The subconscious is driven by desire and the drive. Desire is given shelter by Pantheos, the drive comes out of Atheos. Desire is fundamentally always a desire for itself, therefore it constantly tries to postpone or displace its own satisfaction in order to be able to keep going and avoid its own self-inflicted annihilation. Desire is thus fundamentally a metadesire. The drive, on the other hand, is a repetitious will, a stubborn quest to return to the inorganic. It is best described as a compulsive repetition of the same, revolving around a fundamental, compact trauma that the mind lacks any control over. This formative, existential experience is called the great trauma and occurs already when the child is cast out at birth and separated from the safety of the womb. Here there is thus a kind of death that transpires even before birth. Therefore we call this moment the aboriginal death, since it is a kind of death that both precedes death as the end of life, but also constitutes the phantasmic backdrop onto which the living human being projects all of her fantasies of life versus death.

It is de facto the case that the closest we have been to death during life is precisely the state in which we found ourselves just before we were born. The aboriginal death is in turn the fundamental requirement for organic dividuation. At the aboriginal death, the great trauma moves downwards into and then steers from the subconscious. The great trauma quite simply becomes the engine of the drive. The trauma can be described as a vestige, but it is a vestige of something that might very well be something fabricated rather than something that has actually taken place. This is typical of the living organism, which must constantly sacrifice something of itself in order to be able to manage the enormous semiotic flow with which it is constantly inundated. The trauma thus plays a central role in the perception and consciousness system, since the process of dealing with superfluous information is much more important for survival than the receiving of new information, which is something that we definitely do not suffer from any shortage of.

So if desire is based in the organism’s existential pleasure, in what Nietzsche calls the will to power, then the drive at the deepest level according to Freud is the drive.html">death drive, the longing for the extinction of painful life and merging into the non-organic. The Freudian drive can be linked to the metaphorical usage of the cerebral hemispheres’ roles in human psychology, a psychology which, according to Nietzsche, shapes all human thought. There is no external philosophy outside Man’s own world; all philosophy is created by and for Man. Thus, philosophy is always very much influenced by psychology. Both the philosopher and the philosopher’s readers participate in the philosophising with their emotions fully switched on. There is no philosophy without emotions, without a strong psychological component.

If we use Iain McGilchrist’s division between the role of the cerebral hemispheres in The Divided Brain metaphorically, the left hemisphere thus constitutes a centre of eternalism, subjectification, objectification, mathematisation, individuality, hierarchisation and logical cogency. If left to its own devices, or if allowed to dominate too much, it leans towards neurosis, and remains at a distance and acts indirectly vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is the centre of mobilism, motion, change, holism, dividuality, diversity and intuition. If left alone or allowed to dominate, it leans towards psychosis, and it remains engaged and acts directly vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The left hemisphere is thus the centre of the drive.html">death drive, and its transcendental philosophers champion immortality as a principle, which means that the present life that we are actually living should be ignored and should just be gone through and stoically endured, since its intensity can be postponed in all eternity anyway. Correspondingly, the right hemisphere is the centre of the libido, and its immanent philosophers fight for survival as a principle, where the actual life that we are actually living is to be lived with the greatest possible passion and intensity, since it gets its subliminal quality precisely from its transience.

Free will is a dualist myth, which has been produced in order for us to be able to hold the soul responsible for the weak and dissolute body, which it is of course set to battle with in the eternal duel of dualism (see The Body Machines). On the other hand, we can speak of free choice in a contingently monist universe, with the quantity of different choices that are offered the body in every given situation. However, there is no such thing as a will that is free in the midst of this choosing, nor is there any agency of will where this illusory will could be given shelter and exercised. The will is nothing other than the status of the moment in the current tug-of-war between the desire and the drive, and since these dwell in the subconscious it is not possible to achieve any conscious balancing between them. There is thus no individual free will, but rather an endless plurality of wills, which hardly become fewer because the current situation offers so many different choices.

There is an infinite number of agents at an infinite number of levels. According to the mobilist Spinoza, the consequence is that it is the prime task of ethics to maximise potentia agendi, every current agent’s potential. Here memetics comes into the picture and provides us with an excellent, non-linear alternative to Cartesianism’s linear world view. Instead of a subject that is manifested as an individual through giving full expression to its ideas, we get a memeplex that materialises as an agent by invading and occupying a body. It is and has always been our thoughts that control us, instead of the other way around. There is no subject beyond or behind the mental activity that is driven by memes. What is amazing is not that there is a little subject somewhere inside the brain – in the form of a man or woman staring at his or her own cinema screen, on which the incoming stimuli from his or her perception apparatuses are projected, and who then makes and executes decisions based upon the received information (which thus is a fiction manufactured by himself or herself) – but that the brain is so clever that it produces the illusion of a subject which the body harbours for its own survival’s sake.

Descartes is thus correct in one sense, at least to some degree, but not in the way he himself thinks: there is really a subject, but it is a fundamentally illusory such. The subject experience is impossible to deny or even regulate or avoid once one is clear about its illusory nature. It exists only in our own heads, yet exists to the highest degree. The subject is a constantly recurring element of disturbance in the flow of being which precisely therefore succeeds in tying together being into a being that appears as something that can be taken in and is at least manageable in patches. Since first and foremost this subject is the necessary first eternalisation of the mobilist chaos of existence, we call it the eternalist subject. But the subject should in no way be regarded as a ‘managing director’ of consciousness. As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan points out, the subject is instead harboured in the subconscious. However, it is not synonymous with the subconscious. Rather, the subject is synonymous with the struggle between consciousness and the subconscious, in precisely the subconscious, and survives since this antagonism never reaches or can achieve any permanent solution. The fact that we cannot imagine the subject as a completed project, that we cannot see ourselves as complete human beings, is the very prerequisite for the subjective experience. The change in our essence and inadequacy drives us towards the change.

It is Hegel who digs the Cartesian subject’s grave. His logic is a redoubled contingency. His rationality is a redoubled irrationality. Hegel’s most brilliant insight lies in that thinking starts and ends with paradox and inconsistency. Thinking is nothing other than a production of problems; it is only activated at all when it is confronted with enigmas. Hegel’s stroke of genius is the insight that knowledge reaches its absolute limit, is transformed into what Hegel dramatically calls absolute knowledge, just when it understands and acknowledges its own built-in limitations. Hegel thereby pokes holes in rationalism; the blind faith in the scope of human logic as the foundation for epistemology, which his predecessors Spinoza and Kant cultivate and celebrate. Hegel instead opens the door to transrationalism, the idea that Man’s thinking is founded on his conditions for survival and based on an extremely narrow perspective, as a contingent phenomenon without any chance of being able to embrace and comprehend in advance the enormity of existence.

According to Hegel, absolute knowledge is nothing other than the fundamental and historically necessary insight that reason is always relegated to a framework within which it must be limited. For Hegel, absolute knowledge is a metaknowledge, an historical consummation of epistemology, which comes down to a humble insight into its necessary built-in limitations. Transrationalism leads to paradoxism, which gets its clearest expression in the Hegelian subject’s insight into its own illusory foundation. The paradoxist subject appears before itself as the starting point and centre of existence, but at the same time is a gaping empty hole; an illusion that arises as a by-product of language and the small child’s need to eternalise, to divide itself and its surrounding world into delimited, cohesive phenomena.

Hegel’s role as a magnificently emergent phenomenon in the history of philosophy all of his own is difficult to overestimate. He realises that it is in the oscillation between the experience of an intense being and being convinced of one’s own non-existence that the paradoxist subject resides. Hegel’s transrationalist understanding of the existential experience sounds the death knell for the jewel in rationalism’s crown, the Cartesian subject. Hegel bases his transrationalism on an epistemological necessity: no truth is ever complete in a contingent universe. The stronger an emotional truth experience is, the more clearly it is revealed that it is based upon a kind of mystical, hidden core of epistemic incompleteness that the truth experience intensely tries to conceal precisely through a desperate overemotionality (compare with the fervour of the newly-saved sect member).

The future is always open and multiple. History never rests, but always hurries on. Truth and totality remain incompatible. This means that Hegel’s notorious and idiosyncratic totalism – his seemingly megalomaniacal conviction about the historical arrival of absolute knowledge through his own philosophy – is completely correct if we place it and maintain it at the metalevel. But he does not actually plead for totalism per se. Hegel is definitely not a Platonist; rather, he buries totalism at the metalevel, beyond the eternalist subject’s everyday obligations, but as an abrupt historical conclusion to its vain, narcissistic push for omnipotence. Hegel does not care at all about the individual, Descarte’s and Kant’s divine linchpin down there on the system’s basement. Hegel’s God is named Atheos, the holy void, and nothing else.

The syntheist agent stands out even more clearly with Hegel’s successor Martin Heidegger. He mistrusts Buddhism’s idea of enlightenment as a possible and desirable consciousness beyond the subject, and argues that the subject is located in and expands from its formative illusion. With Heidegger, the illusion is the subject’s engine – that is, identical with syntheology’s Atheos – and not a problem for the existential experience. It is instead the illusory quality that gives the subject its – for Heidegger decisive – presence. Heidegger here stands considerably closer to syntheism than Buddhism. The syntheist agent’s character traits present themselves most clearly in her relation to her own transience. This is the engine of culture: our mortality and the mystery of death. Death is characterised first and foremost by its anonymity; the subject is dissolved at death into a pre-dividual anonymous dimension. To die is to be dissolved into the Universe, to become part of that which is universal, which already within the subject is greater than the particular subject per se. That which dies in death is dividuation and nothing else. According to Gilles Deleuze, the death instinct should primarily be understood as a lack of imagination in relation to the existential experience. A lack of imagination which the syntheist culture is more than happy to remedy, and where the point of departure is given: Be your desire, be your drive, ignore everything else so that you may live life to the full!

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