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Atheism
The conviction that a specific God concept lacks existential substance and/or social-psychological relevance. According to the principle of explanatory closure, atheism can never be directed towards all theological concepts at the same time; it can thereby never be universally valid but merely particular. It is always a particular god that atheism cannot believe in; it can never deny all gods simultaneously. See, by way of comparison, theism, monotheism, polytheism and syntheism.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
In large part, this reasoning may be transferred to the question of the excesses and crimes carried out in the name of God. God is innocent, to the extent he actually exists: it is we humans who are guilty. Thus, we cannot blame religion with any degree of preserved credibility, and maintain that it was religion that forced us to act brutally towards our neighbour, when the truth is that – countless times throughout the course of history and under every possible pretext – we have tortured and massacred people who in some sense have belonged to a group other than ourselves, quite voluntarily and with great enthusiasm. We just don’t like strangers or what is different: this is deeply rooted in us. The cure is civilisation, but it is far from all-embracing and probably never will be. Nevertheless, all of these ecclesiastical sins and crimes are one of articulated atheism’s two principal arguments against religion as it has been manifested thus far.
In addition, there are also many widespread religions that are atheist, that is, they devote no energy at all to theist questions. Taoism in China and Jainism in India are well-known examples. Even many forms of Buddhism, such as Zen in Japan and Chan in China, lack a belief in God. Brahmanism in India and Zoroastrianism in Central Asia both lack active deities – while it is true that they are pantheist, they are centred on human rather than divine religious activity, which means that even these religions in practice are atheist. Insofar as God exists, if anything this entity is present through its absence, and accordingly these religions are deist. Note that syntheism is fully compatible with both pantheism (God is created by Man, as a sacralising projection onto the Universe) and atheism (God has not created the world, in all likelihood does not exist today in any philosophically interesting sense, but is fully possible in the future, in particular if the idea is regarded as a human invention).
The productive and fruitful response to atheism is not to indifferently accept the death of God, but to instead realise that it was a mistake to place God in the past as the ageless progenitor of us and the cosmos. We have already killed the God of the past by producing and accumulating large quantities of knowledge with which this divinity is not compatible. God as a functional utopia is instead the name of what we dream of creating; God is Syntheos, the created rather than the creating God. God is not (any longer) dead, since (we have now realised that) God has never been born: God belongs to us because God belongs to the future, and we already live in the future. The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux expresses the syntheist passion in the words: “God is too important a concept to be left in the hands of the religious.” Or to quote the American novelist William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
The atheism that denies longing – between theism and syntheism – has played out its role as the necessary antipole between thesis and synthesis. For in its lack of content, and as pure negation, atheism is completely meaningless as the goal of the dialectical process. This acute lack of essence explains why atheists have never succeeded in building any cathedrals or anything at all except vapid paper monuments to their own excellence. It is like a philosophical temperance movement: you meet and are sober together, totally oblivious of the ecstatic party that is going on somewhere else entirely. Classical atheism can only say what it is not, but not what it de facto is. This purely negative and in essence substance-less doctrine is quite simply a worthless weapon against alienation. It consoles no one and explains nothing.
It is hardly tone-deaf atheism that inspires us most. Rather it is Spinoza’s pantheism that is philosophically consummated through a further development of syntheism. God is no longer only the final idealisation of Spinoza’s pantheism, God as the subject of the Universe; rather, God acts as humanly produced idealisations even on other planes, among which the Internet as a theological realisation is a typical example in our time. If divinities both can and should be created through idealisations necessary for survival – why then, like Spinoza, settle for Pantheos, the Universe, as the only god? In particular since the Internet actually has its own agenda, controls us rather than lets us control it and, to put it bluntly, is beginning to assume divine proportions. Moreover, there is a long list of idealisations available to the syntheologists to develop into divinities in order to then make themselves into their memetic host organisms and preachers and thereby contribute to their dissemination. In this book, we are concerned with the four most basic idealisations from the world of metaphysics: the void, the Universe, the difference and the utopia.
Accordingly, the entire basis of classical atheism disappears. Existence is no mistake. The existence of existence is wondrous in its indeterminist necessity rather than in any kind of supposed determinist randomness. A non-existence in the sense of a balance without energies – the only non-existence that physics can even contemplate – is the only really bizarre and impossible probability in this context. Everything in the Universe, including its seemingly enormous void, is boiling with a constant, intense, virtual activity. Its imagined non-existence is, like its (at some time in the future anticipated) cessation, nothing other than anthropocentric fantasies with a metaphorical origin in mankind’s own intrusive thoughts around our own mortality and impermanence. However, this human mortality has in fact nothing at all to do with the world of physics.
The sexual revolution under capitalism was followed by the chemical liberation during informationalism (see The Global Empire). The development of a post-atheist religiosity, which is built around the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborative, syncretist and religio-social practices, and not least by the exploding plethora of entheogenic substances, laid the foundation for a resolution of the conflict between theism and atheism which, in a Hegelian dialectics, has grown into syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. This occurred at the same time as the sexual revolution was rejected when its unavoidable flip side, the hypersexualisation of the individual, was exposed as the underlying engine of capitalist consumption society; the sexual revolution ended up being a straitjacket of the superego where the chemical liberation offered a possible way out.
The dependence of bodies on each other is real. We know that dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin hold people together in a collective that accords pleasure to those in the group, and in this pleasure a meaning arises, produced by and for ourselves. Therefore we have arrived at the historical juncture when theism and atheism must be consummated as dialectical opposites, not through some kind of hybrid, but through us seeing and accepting their historically consummated interconnection as a unit and being able to push this unit aside and go forth in history, into syntheism. Today’s fusion between our historical understanding of the fact that when all is said and done our cohesiveness is what is most holy to us, and the exploding, genuinely new virtual connection between people thanks to the arrival of the Internet, interacts with and is creating the foundation for the new era’s syntheist metaphysics. God (theism) and Man (atheism) are quite simply followed by the network (syntheism) as the fundamental event of metaphysics.
If history is viewed as a Hegelian dialectics, we see a clear pattern: monotheism is the thesis, individualism is the antithesis and syntheism is the synthesis. That syntheism is the synthesis in this dialectical process is a consequence of the fact that theism and atheism can never meet; they are fundamentally and definitionally incompatible. Syntheism should absolutely not be understood as a compromise between theism and atheism – in Hegelian dialectics, a synthesis is something considerably more sophisticated than just a banal coalescence of thesis and antithesis – rather, it is a necessary continuation of theism’s and atheism’s combined dichotomy, the only possible way out of the paralysing deadlock that arises when theism and atheism are pitted against each other. As the logical synthesis of this pair of opposites (theism versus atheism), syntheism offers a possibility for the atheist to go further and uncompromisingly deepen atheism. Thus, in a historical sense syntheism is a radicalised atheist ideology. It is even atheism’s logical deepening and elaboration.
Just like all epoch-making ideas, syntheism arrives in history right when philosophy has run aground between a traditionalism (in this case theism) and a cynicism (in this case atheism). Only through perfecting the individualist paradigm can mankind grasp its terrible consequences, and then, and only then, the door to the syntheist possibility swings open. It is only syntheism that can liberate atheism from its logical curse: its inheritance from theism’s negative attitude towards immanent life. Only by going from atheism to syntheism can we open the way for a genuinely sensual and thereby also spiritual understanding of the immanence. Atheism robs the human being of her access to the holy and the divine by first sharing theism’s conviction that the holy and the divine must be synonymous with the transcendental, and then murdering the transcendental and thus reducing the human being to a cold and indifferent immanence, which is axiomatic for atheism. What syntheism does is that it picks up mankind in precisely the immanence where atheism has abandoned him and makes him apprehend the immanent as the truly holy and divine without any nostalgic longing for transcendentalism at all. Through syntheism’s deepening of the very premises of atheism, atheist cynicism becomes syntheist affirmation.
French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux analyses classical atheism’s dilemma in his book Après la finitude. According to Meillassoux, atheism’s problem is that it inherits the tragic remains that are the leftovers from Abrahamic religion when it retires, but does not succeed in building any independent platform of its own. That is, classical atheism retains the Abrahamic idea of the world as destroyed and lost, but without preserving Abrahamism’s faith and hope in the possibility and reality of the utopia. It is literally just an a-theism, a negation without any own content of its own. Classical atheism quite simply bases its world view on a false premise, namely the idea that existence without God must be mere chance, when life is in fact a necessity if we fully think through physics’ basic concept of contingency.
Meillassoux argues that the only possible way out of classical atheism’s deadlock is to embrace syntheism’s idea of a philosophical and immanent divinity rather than a theological and transcendental one in the traditional sense. He advocates the thesis that the constant contingency that characterises existence must be regarded as the logical opening for a possible future God based on the idea of justice instead of the idea of amorality. Meillassoux’s syntheist divinity – he calls his philosophy a divinology rather than a theology – lacks the Abrahamic God’s bond to the amoral chaos that the logic of moralism demands. Meillassoux thus treats traditional religion’s passions in a way that radically differs from classical atheism: it is the utopia and not the fall of Man in classical religion that must be won back. And winning back the utopia and turning it into an immanent divinity is, with contemporary physics’ revolutionary advances, quite plausible. Meillassoux’s God, as a synonym for the utopia, is of course syntheism’s Syntheos.
Meillassoux constructs an alternative that the failed, atheist project in itself cannot produce: existence is eternally contingent and thereby full of potential hope. Classic atheism is namely based on the faulty assumption that existence is controlled by chance when in actual fact it is controlled by contingency. It is contingency which, through the advances of contemporary physics – in its capacity as the metaphysical constant of physics – unites philosophy and religion in a new holy conjunction beyond the narrow horizon of deadlocked atheism. By deepening atheism and developing it to its logical conclusion, we implement the dialectical shift over to syntheism. Syntheism is atheism.html">radical atheism.
The syntheist ambition can hardly be formulated more clearly. In the conflict between the traditional roles of the philosopher and the priest – where Meillassoux of course takes the philosopher’s side – the atheist is reduced to little more than a deeply irritating, passive observer. Where the atheist lets the priest keep religion as his monopoly, Meillassoux responds with the words: God is much too serious a subject to be left to the priests. Transcendentalism must be rejected quite unsentimentally in order to leave room for a religion that loves, worships and believes in the immanence and its enormous potential. Only philosophy can carry out this necessary action. For Meillassoux, the demystification of existence, the striving for deconstruction – classical atheism’s big project – has namely reached the end of the road. Deconstruction appears to be only paralysing for mankind, making him incapable of conceiving of the utopia, and thereby also incapable of formulating the vision, and in this way cultivating hope for the future. Meillassoux turns this upside down and argues that the real blasphemy and idolatry must be to insist on a transcendental god in the contemporary world. According to Meillassoux, God is to be placed in the future and be completely immanent. Like all utopias, Meillassoux’s God is virtual rather than potential; neither possible nor impossible, but contingent and thereby beyond any kind of probability calculation.
Nevertheless, the Universe remains totally indifferent to our story. And it is this very indifference that keeps the psychosis at bay. The only thing that would be even worse than the Universe – as is now the case – being all-knowing and at the same time indifferent, would be if the Universe were all-knowing and actually had an opinion and an intention. What happens instead in the syntheistic religious experience is that the necessary split does not happen within God, as is the case within Abrahamism and atheist humanism, but rather the necessary split arises between the Universe and one’s fellow man, who subsequently take care of their respective metaphysical protagonist roles. While Pantheos is manifested in the Universe, Syntheos is manifested in one’s fellow man. Syntheism is therefore not just something more than atheism as deepened or atheism.html">radical atheism, it is also something more than pantheism as deepened or radical pantheism.
Syntheism is the Hegelian synthesis of the deadlocked dichotomy between theism and atheism. When we left theism for atheism, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We became anti-religion rather than anti-theism. But having lived through the atheist paradigm and having come out on the other side, we are ready for the syntheist paradigm with its grasp of the human being’s constant and basic need for a functional metaphysics. Syntheism stands out as the only credible metaphysical system for the intellectual human being of the third millennium. Which means that the only alternative to syntheism is to settle for a subconscious and tacit metaphysics, and such a metaphysics can of course be as ill-considered and destructive as anything, since by definition it is not conscious and thus hardly very sensible either. And how intelligent does this alternative, on closer inspection, appear to be?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quantum physics thereby opens the way for a whole new metaphysics, a radical monism connected to an irreducible multiplicity. Kant’s humanist phenomenology no longer has any validity. Starting with Hegel, the way is instead opened for a new phenomenology where the observer always must be included as an actor in every event-constellation, in every individual, fundamental phenomenon. After Hegel’s phenomenological revolution, the Hegelian view of the observer in relation to the observed is fundamental to the field of philosophy.html">process philosophy. Thus, Kantian representationalism and its naive atheism are gradually wiped out in three steps: in the first step by Hegel, in the second step by Nietzsche and in the third step by Bohr. It is with Bohr and his relationalism that we land at the arrival of the Internet age. Ontology, epistemology and even phenomenology are merged into a common relationalist complex. We see how syntheist metaphysics is solidly founded in contemporary physics.
Barad’s role-models Michel Foucault and Judith Butler also take a thrashing as she constructs her universocentric onto-epistemology. As post-structuralists, Foucault and Butler are, in Barad’s eyes, still too anthropocentric. Post-structuralism is wedged between Einstein’s Cartesian representationalism and Bohr’s agential realism: it has not gone the whole hog and left Cartesian representationalism behind. Kant’s ghost lives on. Post-structuralism has, to use Barad’s own wording, still not transported itself from antihumanism to posthumanism. Therefore, post-structuralism still in fact dances around the Cartesian subject that it both claims to and believes it has dissolved. Barad does go all the way however and leaves post-structuralism’s antihumanism behind. The Hegelian dialectic between humanism (personified by Descartes) and antihumanism (personified by Nietzsche) is consummated in Barad’s appeal for posthumanism; a parallel movement to the dialectic between theism and atheism, which dissolves into syntheism. It is not just objective reality that returns in a surprising new guise through agential realism. The same thing also applies to theological truth, which returns with full force as syntheist process religion.
This functionalised and utility-centred view of religion stems to a large extent from the theories of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Interestingly enough, it is self-evident for Durkheim that capitalist ideologies such as nationalism and individualism must be regarded as religion’s latest forms of revelation. Ironically enough, two of memetics’ prominent figures – Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins – who are also two of militant, scientific atheism’s pioneering mouthpieces, speak for a diametrically opposed point of view. If the atheist Freud regards religion as an illusion determined by existential anxiety and feelings of defencelessness vis-à-vis the overwhelming and inexplicable forces of Nature, Dennett and Dawkins argue that the memeplexes of religion should be regarded as a dangerous virus that, without invitation and without offering any advantages whatsoever, penetrates people’s brains and devastates their cognitive abilities. Accordingly, religion’s role vis-à-vis mankind would be purely parasitical and not symbiotic in any respect.
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.
But if environmentalism is the most powerful reaction directed towards the old paradigm’s destructive drive.html">death drive, it is only with the fight for the free and open Internet that we observe the growth of a political ideology that is grounded in the new paradigm’s utopian possibilities rather than in the old paradigm’s dystopian variants. In its capacity as a negation of capitalism, environmentalism is a parallel to atheism in the history of metaphysics. The digital integrity movement on the other hand is a dialectic negation of the negation, and is thereby to be regarded as a parallel movement to syntheism. Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party and one of the digital integrity movement’s foremost pioneers, pinpoints the relationships of the movements to each other in his book Swarmwise. Environmentalism is driven by the conviction that nature’s resources are finite rather than inexhaustible, which capitalist mythology constantly assumes. At the same time, argues Falkvinge, the Pirate movement is based on the axiom that culture and knowledge that is shared without friction between people in a society where information sharing no longer incurs any surplus cost, is an infinite rather than a finite resource for the future.
When nation states construct heavy barriers along their borders and waste enormous sums of money on gigantic, impregnable and corrupt intelligence bureaucracies – with the stated or implicit aim that the free and open Internet must be brought to nothing – this is done with the rationalist arguments and concomitant demands for silence and obedience of the Enlightenment and Modernism. But it is once again a logic grounded in a blind paranoia and not in any scientific approach (the logic is occasionally dazzling, it is just that the foundation poor). The similarity with the axiomatic self-glorification of the Enlightenment and Modernism is striking. The only decent reply is syntheism’s requirement of a global opening of borders and free communication without either state or corporatist control and supervision: the libertarian truth as an act par excellence. Not because this response is a logically rational reaction, but because it is in fact an intuitively Romantic action; it is the only possible way out of suffocating alienation to the living religion. The dialectical transition from paralysing atheism to revitalising syntheism of course runs in parallel with this phase shift. Atheism’s hopeless dilemma is that it is the child of the Enlightenment and Modernism and, just like its parents, unaware of its own built-in, paralysing limitations. Syntheism is a radical response that also resolves this dilemma.
Syntheism is radical and evolved atheism, a philosophical concept that captures the inexhaustible and unattainable in existence that philosophy and theology sooner or later must confront. Not least theology, since traditionally utopianism belongs in the world of theology rather than philosophy. More often than not it has been a matter of a longed-for reconstruction of a lost paradise. Syntheology thus takes theology back from its dull life among the traditional religions and gives it a renewed relevance historically. By leaving its traditional hermeneutic search for a meaning that is externally produced in advance, theology instead gains the central role as the intellectual engine for Man’s internal production of credible and functional utopias. For it can no longer pretend to be occupied with silent and inaccessible gods that do not exist. But theology can aid in building longed-for and credible gods centred in, for example, physics, psychoanalysis and utopianism. Syntheology forces theology to give up its historical fondness for transcendence to instead give structure to the new and growing religious immanence. Classical theology shifts over to syntheology, and when all is said and done, syntheology is a utopology. The question of whether any particular god exists or not syntheologically speaking is completely irrelevant. Such a question of course assumes that we are intimately acquainted with some kind of god who does not exist anyway nor has ever existed, and beforehand at that. The correctly posed syntheological question is instead which god might come to exist, and the answer to this question is always synonymous with the core of the vision that is driving the paradigm in question. The syntheological response runs as follows: Tell me your utopia, and I will tell you what god you are seeking and following.
This question brings us to the dramatic difference between classical atheism and syntheism. We repeat time after time in our work the dialectical necessity – personally as well as socially and historically – of removing oneself from traditional religion via the atheist baptism of fire in order to only then be able to arrive at the syntheist position. Syntheism is thus not a reaction against atheism, but instead its logical conclusion, its historical and intellectual deepening (the philosophical concept of atheism.html">radical atheism as it is used by the philosopher Martin Hägglund among others is synonymous with syntheism). Syntheism is eternally grateful to atheism for a cultural act of cleansing that was as grandiose as it was necessary. But classical atheism has an obvious weakness, and it is not particularly surprising that it is from this very vulnerability that the syntheist impulse arises. Atheism is of course reactive in nature and a pure negation; it has no content in itself, and at the full extent of its creativity it can only represent one of the four basic concepts within syntheology, namely Atheos. But that is all there is.
Philosophically, classical atheism lacks a logical conclusion and fears instead its necessary extinction; the point where atheism becomes so strongly radical that, in the best spirit of fallibilism, it can finally leave the arena to give way to syntheism. And while the rumblings that herald the syntheist revolution grows stronger, a considerable proportion of atheism’s militant proponents hide away in an ill-considered, conceptually confused and blind contempt for religion; a kind of autoimmune defensive reaction against its own flagrant meaninglessness. The reason for this behaviour hides behind classical atheism’s Achilles heel: atheism in itself lacks an understanding of Man’s highly justified sense of wonder at existence. It does not see that Man only exists as a being in the midst of a world from which she gets her substance. It does not understand that the psychological tension in the relation between Man and the world is existentially fundamental. Thus, classical atheism has no qualifications for being anything other than a temporary springboard between two religious paradigms.
When classical atheism is placed alongside holistic syntheism, the latter suddenly stands out as a conservative, autistic perpetual loop that has got stuck and just repeats phrases that are increasingly pointless. While syntheism represents what Nietzsche calls and celebrates as the Dionysian drive, atheism gets stuck in its retrospective opposite, the Apollonian drive. This is not to say that the Apollonian drive is illegitimate: it is no more illegitimate than the left hemisphere (if we once again allow ourselves to borrow metaphorically the human cerebral hemispheres’ apparent peculiarities). But it cannot act unimpeded without a fatal imbalance arising. Atheos must be placed in relation to Entheos, Pantheos and above all Syntheos. The Apollonian drive that Atheos displays in isolation must be made subservient to the Dionysian drive in the other parts of the syntheological pyramid. In the same way that the eternalising left cerebral hemisphere, which divides up and freezes events in separate fragments, must interact with the mobilising right cerebral hemisphere and its holistic perspective in order for the human being’s self-image and world view to be complete.
While the atheists stay with their positions and protest against all other illusions than their own, to which they are blind, while they ironically enough wonder why nobody wants to engage emotionally in their noble cause – except with a limited but intense envy directed at something one lacks and never believes oneself capable of achieving, namely a living faith – the affirmative post-atheist syntheists decide to engage and integrate emotional life directly into their world view. By moving through four concepts rather than just one; by leaving the categorical cold in Atheos and letting in the emotional warmth of Entheos in the appreciation of Pantheos, a formidable religious experience springs to life. It is this indisputably religious emotion, this strong mystical experience, that sets the syntheist agent in motion towards the utopia, towards the syntheological pyramid’s consummation, since the experience generates a desire to make the impossible possible. Here the desire to create Syntheos is awakened. Or to express the matter poetically: Syntheism is the light that lets itself be sensed at the end of atheism’s dark tunnel.
Between these extremes we find people in alternating states of confusion and wonder where everything, including ourselves, exists in ecstatic intensities. What classical atheism does not seem to understand is that it is precisely in this existential confusion and wonder that religion has its origin, not in any quasi-scientific, more or less lame logic. Religion comes out of mysticism’s handling of the immensity of existence, and that immensity has neither shrunk physically nor become any less fantastic as a result of the last century’s overwhelming scientific advances – from quantum physics to cosmology. Logically, we ought to be considerably more religious now than ever before. The miracle of reality is constantly becoming ever more fascinating. From our wonder at the immensity of existence (Pantheos) we continue to our wonder at our fellow human being’s difference in relation to ourselves (Entheos) and to reconnection between people as an empathic collective (Syntheos). For where the Universe meets us with indifference, we meet the potential for love in our fellow humans. It is when we build further from pantheism to syntheism that love comes into the picture. By definition love cannot expect love in return as a condition. Then it is not love, but merely internarcissistic manipulation (what follows from this manipulation is then the individualistic idea that the other is to be conquered and owned as a kind of colonised possession).
But if nature does not actively provide us as passive receivers with any valuations whatsoever, a possible future extinction of the Universe does not do so either, since the annihilation most definitely also is part of the nature that, according to Brassier, is silent. Syntheism is therefore based on an even more radical nihilism than that of Brassier, since its emptiness is even deeper and above all lacks Brassier’s wishful-thinking foothold along one of Atheos’ slippery verges. Within syntheology per se, the existential experience – regardless of whether it has the trauma of extinction as a backdrop or not – offers no possible values. The insight that reaches us when we take atheism to its utmost limit is instead that valuations really must be created strictly ex nihilo. This is atheism.html">radical atheism, the dialectical turning point where the fully reasoned nihilism, as a notorious extinguisher of all historical values and valuations, is converted into affirmative syntheism.
The theological consequence of Cantor’s transfinite number series is that they confirm and formalise the dogma of negative theology: God is the nothingness! Beyond all multiplicities there lies a solid and overwhelming emptiness. And what name does this Badiouian, ontological emptiness go under if not Atheos, the engine of the multiplicities and existence within syntheology? Whether one then like Badiou decides to regard Cantor’s mathematical revolution as the final proof that the Abrahamic God does not exist, as atheism thought through to its ultimate conclusion; or like Cantor himself one throws Entheos into the game and chooses as a point of departure that the transfinitude in itself is God – a thought that gets strong support from the American syntheist Leon Niemoczynski for example – in the syntheological, always pragmatist sense, it does not matter at all. What is important, according to both Badiou and Niemoczynski, is to accept and to act based on the ethical decision through the power from the unnamable, which is the foundation of and constitutes the decision itself as such. The foundation is always called Atheos, as F W J Schelling would express it.
We return to syntheism as the social theory of everything, and of course it accommodates both the Deleuzian and the Badiouian variants of pathos. Deleuze’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Pantheos, while Badiou’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Atheos. Deleuze is the pantheological prophet, Badiou is the prophet of atheology, and entheology is the oscillation between these two antipoles; a movement that is completed through the addition of Syntheos to the syntheological pyramid. In the midst of this earth-shattering oscillation, Deleuze and Badiou, the event’s two prophets above all others, are in agreement that what is most important for the syntheist is the decision to enter at least one of the temples that is devoted to either Pantheos or Atheos and engage in its activities, while the ethically reprehensible thing to do is to remain passively outside. Both these temples are needed as foundations. Both these temples fill us with wonder and produce spiritual truth. Deleuze’s pantheology moves in the direction of Entheos, Badiou’s atheology reaches out towards Syntheos. It is pantheology that makes us appreciate the existential intensity of existence, to further develop pantheism into entheism, while it is atheology that drives us to long for the fulfilment of the utopia and which makes us consummate atheism via its deepening in syntheism.
A dynamic system is regarded as ergodic if its behavioural patterns on average over time concur with its behavioural patterns on average in space. Scientists are fond of ergodic systems since they are relatively simple to turn into mathematics – they are of course, seen as totalities, comfortable constants rather than messy variables – and thereby even relatively simple to use as building blocks. However we do not live in an ergodic universe, which reductionism persistently insists that we do. In fact, nothing occurs in the same way twice, every event is instead completely unique, every apparently identical repetition takes place in a completely new, specific context. Kauffman even claims that without the reductionist illusion, the metaphysical premise for classical atheism also falls down. The insight that we live in a non-ergodic universe must quite simply have dramatic consequences for metaphysics too. An anti-reductionist explanatory model is required that replaces the reductionist model. Existence is enormously much more complicated, the future is enormously much more open and harder to predict, and the Universe is enormously much more active than the reductionist illusion has led us to believe.
If emergences within hierarchies are central for the sciences, there is no reason why our studies of mental and social phenomena should be facilitated by defining emergences within mental and social hierarchies as well. It is sufficient to note that a new level in a mental or social phenomenon is no longer reducible to its constituent parts, and we have thus identified an emergence. In this way Christianity is emergent in relation to Judaism, socialism is emergent in relation to liberalism, syntheism is emergent in relation to atheism, to name just three clear and close-at-hand examples. While interactivity is emergent in relation to the mass media, the mass media are in turn emergent in relation to written language, just as written language is emergent in relation to spoken language. Etcetera.
In accordance with the reasoning above, if we regard atheism as an emergent phenomenon in relation to theism, the fundamental dismissal of the concept of God no longer appears as such – that is, that which gives the position its name – as its most important theological achievement. No, atheism’s most substantial achievement is its summation of all sorts of theist positions as a uniform and cohesive alternative to repudiate, that is, atheism’s dialectical construction of theism as an idea. Seen as an emergent phenomenon in relation to atheism, as the historical and intellectual intensification of atheism, syntheism in turn is a metareligion, a faith that its practitioners unabashedly practice as a pure religion in itself. Thereby it also confirms and supports all other art forms’ freedom to act from the metaperspective: art as art for art’s sake, literature as literature for literature’s sake, philosophy as philosophy for philosophy’s sake, and so on. And therefore syntheism instinctively rejects all of individualism’s calculations of utility. What syntheism seeks instead are the place and the time for itself as an event. This event is manifested within love, art, science, politics and religion: syntheology’s five generic categories.
The sought-after sexual liberation under capitalism if anything gets its follow-up in the chemical liberation (for a more exhaustive treatment, see The Global Empire) under attentionalism. The development of a post-atheist religiosity founded on the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborating syncretistic, religio-social practices, and not least the explosive flora of entheogenic substances, lays the foundation for a dissolution of the conflict between theism and atheism; a conflict that, in a Hegelian dialectical process, transitions into a synthesis in the form of syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. At the same time, sexual liberation is displaced when its underbelly, the hypersexualisation of the individual, is exposed as the capitalist consumption society’s underlying engine: sexualism ultimately became a straitjacket of the superego where chemical liberation offers the only possible way out. We do not lose liberated sexuality by returning to some kind of asceticism or abstinence with old-school religious overtones. We only gain access to means and ceremonies that finally enable us to start domesticating and mastering liberated sexuality to our long-term advantage. Indirect desire at last has the chance to balance the direct, vacuous, repetitive drive.
If Emmanuel Levinas is an Abrahamic atheist, the French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida is an atheist syntheist. When we move from Levinas to Derrida, we are moving from the Messianic as immortality to the Messianic as survival, as the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund insightfully includes in his pioneering reading of Derrida in his book atheism.html">Radical Atheism. The promise is always a promise against a backdrop of an open future and can therefore always be broken; it is part of the nature of the promise. This threat is already built into the promise from the start. Even the strongest will to include will therefore always exclude someone, which sets the political in constant motion, which in turn puts democracy into a state of constant reassessment. There are quite simply no objectively valid hierarchies between people. If people are special because they are strong, then it follows from this that some people are stronger than others. If 1 exists, 2 also exists, and 2 is greater than 1. Thus the ethical objective value must be 0 in order for us to attain equality. The problem is that, ever since the widespread acceptance of feudalism, Man has built hierarchies in order to maximise power for the fortunate and for the sake of its aggregated effect. Hierarchies blossom in the worlds of transcendental metaphysicists. It is only through breaking with transcendentalisation and introducing an immanent metaphysics that we can achieve a genuinely egalitarian society. Syntheism is radical egalitarianism par excellence.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58