Amor fati

5:41 (In »The syntheological pyramid – Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos«)

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.

6:52 (In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

The Nietzschean reaction to this collective fantasy of extinction is of course amor fati, that is, not just the acceptance of, but also the unconditional love of fate. Goodness and evil meet in the present where fate breaks them down and joins them in a neutral history substance that the Nietzschean übermensch loves because it is to be loved as being the only thing that exists in history. Only based on the unconditional acceptance of everything in world history up until now – where one’s own experience as a subject is included to the highest degree – can the syntheist agent create a radically different utopian future beyond the present. For what is the religious impulse and its search for the spiritual experience if not a reason where the human being concentrates herself on herself and her innermost emotional needs and lets intuition lead her past all of life’s excuses that claim that the impossible really is impossible? For this is of course not true: it is precisely when reason takes over from rationality that the impossible becomes possible and Syntheos arrives in the future. It is there and then that the human being can realise his wildest dreams and create God.

8:6 (In »From semiotics via memetics to the collapse of militant atheism«)

This has the consequence that syntheist ethics cannot be based on anything other than a kind of constantly variable existentialist adaptation to the irrefutably overwhelming ontic and ontological flows of existence, a pragmatist as well as spiritual subordination in relation to the expanding, mobilist enormity. For us as temporal creatures, this existentialist adaptation must take the form of amor fati, the unconditional acceptance of and love for the past as the basis for syntheist ethics. Once we have accepted the past as one long line of always equally unlikely but nevertheless real actualities in an endless ocean of never realised potentialities – just think of how many millions of sperm nature wasted in order for just one sperm to penetrate the only egg at your own genesis – we turn amor fati towards the future, a future that is open, indeterminist and full of potentialities that can all be brought to life. In this future, the utopia may be highly unlikely and yet fully possible, and this fact becomes the target of our syntheist faith. Amor fati is consummated as a truth as an act in a fixed direction towards the utopia; an act from which everything else of importance in our lives subsequently gets its ethical substance.

11:26 (In »Syntheism as a radicalisation of atheism – and its dialectical dissolution«)

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

11:36 (In »Syntheism as a radicalisation of atheism – and its dialectical dissolution«)

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

13:19 (In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

Self-love is naturally no guarantee for the genesis of any other love. On the other hand, the person who genuinely loves herself in the capacity of a syntheist agent within an intra-acting phenomenon has the ability to also love the rest of the world outside the subjective experience. World view and self-image are two sides of the same coin, the one being dialectically dependent on the other for its existence. This also applies of course to the relationship to one’s own reflection. Therefore self-love is both a mental and physiological necessity for being able to love at all, including amor fati, the logically and ethically conditioned love of world history up until now. She who lacks self-love, who hates or is indifferent towards herself, is unquestionably unable to love anything else whatsoever. Moreover, she who hates herself must shift that hate onto some other person or some other object in order to be able to experience her existence without constantly being reminded of the hated self. However, the self-hating human being cannot love at all. Therefore she transfers this self-hatred onto the existential dissolution into ressentiment – bitterness against existence as a whole. This expresses itself as the idea that things could and should be different than they are, which they cannot and therefore are not going to be, which in turn can be experienced as comfortable by the self-hater who, without any doubt or reservations, can settle in permanently in his ressentiment.

13:28 (In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

The obligation to love fate under all circumstances, Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s ethical ideal amor fati, is a central concept in syntheism. The Universe is indifferent to our human cares and woes, does not give our species preferential treatment over someone or something else, accords no special status whatsoever to anyone or anything in relation to anyone or anything else. We can only forgive ourselves for our shortcomings as human beings precisely because we are human beings, not heroes. And in this self-forgiveness, the now plays a central part. Since, according to Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s imperative, we are duty-bound to love all of history up until now – partly because it is the only history there is, partly because it is something that at any rate we cannot do anything about – we are also duty-bound to love our own life story up until now. And in this imposed love there also lies self-forgiveness as a logical obligation and not as a longed-for emotion. Syntheists create rituals in order to constantly return to the necessary self-forgiveness, including collective rituals to support the journey towards the insight of self-forgiveness, and then not least rituals that question and combat the enjoyment that is connected with self-hatred, the moralistic opposite of ethical self-forgiveness. There is in fact no place for self-hatred and its enjoyment within syntheist spiritual work.

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