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Dialectic(s)
An ongoing logical system where the opposites thesis and antithesis are dissolved and transform into a synthesis which however must not be viewed as a kind of compromise between the thesis and antithesis but instead is the necessary exit from the antithesis, primarily by virtue of the aspect of the thesis that the antithesis lacks. Dialectics are first and foremost associated with their founder Heraclitus in ancient Greece and modern master G W F Hegel.
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.
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.
Mobilist thinking experiences a veritable golden age in Greece during the early Axial Age. The influence from Zoroastrian Iran is considerable. Heraclitus, Greece’s own Zoroaster, lays the foundation for both philosophy.html">process philosophy and paradoxism. He gives priority to sight (mobilism) over hearing (eternalism) among the human senses and direct experience over indirect interpretation. And while he is at it, Heraclitus also creates dialectics; he argues that creativity only can develop and grow where a clear opposition to the prevailing order reigns. Homer’s myths and Aeschylus’ classic drama revolve around holistically thinking people who live in a monist universe, and these ancient texts bear witness to a protosyntheist world view. It is during this period that Thales, the father of the natural sciences, produces the first syntheist tweet in history: All things are full of gods.
As long as the soul is kept separate from the body, it can be held morally responsible for any possible transgressions of the body. This explains why totalism is always followed by moralism, and with it, the possibility to threaten, persecute, imprison, monitor and terrorise people. If there is anything that totalism is constantly obsessed with, it is the thought of creating the perfect society, where the law is always adhered to and need never be changed. The totalist mind is thus obsessed with stasis and hates all forms of variability. The variability that can be observed in society and in nature is regarded as a regrettable anomaly which, with some good will and a suitable mix of remedial measures – that is, through criminalising the undesired behaviour that disturbs the statis fantasy – one should be able to wipe out. Totalism is an eternalism that refuses to be part of a dialectics with mobilism. It is, if we use McGilchrist’s metaphors again, the left cerebral hemisphere which runs amok devastatingly in the absence of the right hemisphere, and at its expense.
Even though Bentham himself does not even seem capable of understanding that his bizarre ultrautilitarianism is a physical impossibility – what can never be formulated in advance, for example human utility, can of course never be measured in advance either – the Panopticon is an exceptionally interesting metaphor for Bentham’s own and his many followers’ autistic fantasies about their own castrated and isolated subjects as the self-evident centre of the Universe. It is hard to imagine a clearer example of how the psychotic reversal from impotence to autocracy constitutes the necessary dialectics for generating the Cartesian fantasy. What we see is a battle over who is the most autistic out of the two most autistic thinkers in the history of philosophy. Through his utilitarianism, if possible Bentham makes himself even more Cartesian than René Descartes himself. But thereby also even more alienated and alienating. The Panopticon exposes utilitarianism’s view of humanity, the concept reflects Bentham’s total lack of trust in his fellow humans and also in himself. The legacy from Bentham has given us what is possibly alienation’s clearest contemporary symbol, the paranoid surveillance camera.
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.
It is eminently possible to use the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concepts to describe the current dialectics between eternalism and mobilism: eternalism is a territorialisation, a fixation of a specific phenomenon (which for example occurs when the interiority Atheos is applied to the exteriority Pantheos); and mobilism is a deterritorialisation, a shaking-up and setting-in-motion-again of the phenomenon in question (as when the exteriority Entheos is applied to the interiority Syntheos). Territorialisation is fundamentally preserving; deterritorialisation is fundamentally radicalising. Thus, to take a concrete example from netocracy theory, new information technologies are deterritorialising, while identity production in a society is territorialising. Movement within the syntheological pyramid is thus initiated by a territorialising (a preserving but productive fixation), but is concluded by a deterritorialising (a radical liberation of sundry expansive potentials in the direction of the absorbing utopia). Syntheism is supremely a theological Deleuzianism.
Entheos means the God from within in Greek. And our inside is fundamentally split, for we are dividuals and not individuals and thus tangible evidence ourselves of the irreducible multiplicity of existence. Therefore Entheos is the difference as a divinity, and since difference piled on difference becomes a duration of differences, we are also speaking here of the god of time. Entheos is quite simply the historical differentiation as divinity, simply because the lapse of time is and must be a constant repetition of ever so small differences and not an eternal repetition of the same. Aside from being the divinity of difference and duration, Entheos is also the divinity of contingency, oscillation, plurality, transcendence, ecstasy, melancholy, transformation and emergence. Entheos is the borderland between Atheos and Pantheos, that which sets the dialectics between Atheos and Pantheos in motion, the medium through which Atheos and Pantheos communicate with each other. Entheos is the very relation between Atheos and Pantheos set in motion, but also the constant, high-octane oscillation within both Atheos and Pantheos. Entheos is the syntheist agent’s god and the common name for, and oscillation between, Taoism’s yin and yang.
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.
In the next step of the subjectivity process, the dividual, divided subject takes shapes as Entheos, and the collective, assembled subject takes shape as Syntheos. Here, it is Entheos that assumes the role of mobilism and Syntheos that takes eternalism’s role within the dialectics between mobilism and eternalism. It is, for example, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos that vibrates through Deleuze’s classic work Différence et Répétition. Entheos stands for the differences and Syntheos stands for the generalities in Deleuzian metaphysics. The second oscillation in the syntheological pyramid arises between these two poles. The first oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos revolves around the One, which expresses itself as a single cohesive substance with an endless quantity of attributes. The second oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos however lacks the One as a cohesive point of departure, since the multiplicity in question which takes its starting point in Entheos is irreducible.
Kant’s idea of the mobilist noumenon as primary in relation to the eternalist phenomenon is fundamentally an idea of a transcendent God as a passive observer rather than an immanent God as an active participant in the Universe. Kant quite simply imagines that the noumenon is what God observes when the human being merely sees the phenomenon. But an object can reveal itself in innumerable different guises, of which the phenomenon that human perception generates is only one single phenomenon, and an external, divine observer is not needed either. Instead it is Niels Bohr’s phenomenon, the compact intertwining of the subject and the object, which is the primary starting point in the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, rather than some kind of unattainable Ding an sich in the Kantian sense. A syntheist Ding an sich is quite simply the bringing together of the thousands of varying perspectives that one individual phenomenon invites. For perception does not distort reality, which Kant assumes. Perception merely provides both a necessary and intelligent priority for precisely that which is new and different in the information flow compared to earlier sensory impressions, so that a new and constantly minimally corrected eternalisation can occur in every individual moment (see The Body Machines). The evolutionarily developed balance between transcendental eternalisation and immanent mobility is merely a question of optimising survival possibilities. The information selectivity is quite simply an evolutionarily smart and beneficial phenomenological strategy. But it really says nothing ontologically about existence.
Hume and Meillassoux depart from Kant’s troublesome, incorrect determinism and opens up philosophy to the empirically established indeterminism in Bohrian quantum physics. It should be noted here that Leibniz presages relationalism even before Hume does so with his principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz was not only one of the most significant and most original predecessors among the philosophers, but also an innovative and brilliant mathematician. He built a Monadology, a kind of early variant of the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, which precedes Kantian Platonism. Above all, with his credibility within the natural sciences, Leibniz created the most clearly defined mobilist alternative to the contemporaneously developed Newtonian totalism. The metaphysical antagonism between Leibniz and Newton presages the struggle within our own contemporary physics between on the one hand relationalism and its cosmological Darwinism, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more complex; and on the other hand relativism and its fixation with the second law of thermodynamics, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more simplified as it expands and disperses.
There is of course an ongoing oscillating dialectics between eternalism and mobilism in the human mind, but the truth and reality beyond Man’s perceptional fantasy world is fundamentally mobilist. The Universe is thus contingent and not symmetrical. Stability and necessity have nothing whatsoever to do with each other: connecting them logically is to let oneself be hypnotised by an eternalist illusion. That existence on a fundamental level is transfinite does not mean that it cannot produce temporarily stable states. Quite the opposite: temporary stabilities in complex systems can be every bit as common as explosive changes. They are however, just like the explosions, always temporary. Since everything influences everything else in a mobile and contingent universe, everything will sooner or later change and transition into completely new emergent states. And what is this if not the physical realisation of Zoroaster’s ethical ideal of haurvatat?
The syntheist response to Brassier’s radical nihilism is of course that it gets stuck half way in syntheist dialectics, in a kind of permanent masochistic enjoyment under Atheos, without completing the pyramidal thought movement via Pantheos to the affirmative oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos, where the four corners of the syntheological pyramid are radically equal. Brassier’s role model Nietzsche of course never based his affirmative nihilism in his otherwise beautifully failed concept of the will to power. Nietzsche’s affirmativeness can instead only be achieved through a fully conscious existential act of truth, where the act produces the truth, which in turn produces the Übermensch. There is thus considerably more of Nietzsche’s postnihilist affirmativeness in his role model Badiou’s existentialism than Brassier seems to understand. It is also therefore that Brassier’s otherwise impressive nihilist reasoning – except that it is based on a probably incorrect although particularly interesting reading of modern cosmology – lands only half way in syntheist dialectics.
Heidegger attempts to change transcendence from within. He argues that transcendence acquires a new, credible role if it can be understood as an internal human activity and not as an external separate domain that Man tries to achieve and conquer, that is, as a transcendental psychology rather than a Kantian phenomenology. Heidegger’s search can be compared with the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire). Without eternalism, perception would end up in a complete psychosis. While without mobilism we would end up in an equally complete neurosis, since everything would then be transformed into a single gigantic, incalculable mess without any distinction or limitation whatsoever. Eternalism is the expression of transcendence, mobilism is the expression of immanence, in a Heideggerian sense. And both are just as necessary, and moreover in a dialectical relationship to each other, in order for Man to be able to construct a functional world view to be de facto present in.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58