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Entheos
Originally means the god within in Greek and refers to the divine that the syntheist agent derives from inside herself, the third of the four divinities in the syntheological pyramid. Entheos for difference and distinction, and thereby also for time, duration, change, multiplicity and ecstasy. Entheos is celebrated at the spring equinox, which is followed by the quarter Enthea.
According to Critchley, mystical anarchism is the true engine starter for the genuinely revolutionary project. Critchley’s mystical anarchism is of course synonymous with the syntheism we are talking about and advocating in this book. The already established syntheist Meillassoux sees in his distinction between the potential and the virtual the possibility for an event where God suddenly appears in history as the metaphysical justice, where justice arrives with the same importance as existence, life and thought, the previous virtualities that have been shockingly and dramatically realised through history. Meillassoux argues that God as justice is the missing fourth virtuality that is now waiting to be realised. Syntheologically we express this as a focus on the oscillating axis between Entheos and Syntheos in the syntheological pyramid.
Since it is Kant’s philosophical contributions that pave the way for the death of humanism and the individual, it is scarcely wrong to regard Kant as the last humanist. When Hegel and Nietzsche arrived on the scene in the 19th century, the anti-humanist revolution was already in full swing. With Nietzsche and his concept of The Death of God – which Michel Foucault half a century later finally accomplishes by also proclaiming The Death of Man – nothing whatsoever remains any longer of the humanist paradigm. Hegel’s religiosity is found in Atheos while we place Nietzsche’s spirituality with Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.
This is the core of Zoroaster’s revolution within the history of ideas: the advent of Zoroastrianism sounds the death knell for religion’s primitivist role as a placating of narcissistic and psychopathic gods. For Zoroaster religion is instead a creative and existentialist attitude (Entheos) vis-à-vis fellow humans (Syntheos) and the cosmos (Pantheos), sprung from an existential decision about truth (Atheos) that Zoroaster calls asha. Following asha, the cornerstone of Zoroaster’s amoral ethics, is quite simply to make a pragmatic decision to live in harmony with and together with the surrounding world as it actually is. When Zoroaster shifts the focus of theology from Ahura to Mazda, the world stops being primarily threatening and instead becomes primarily engaging. Without the psychopathic gods, moralism’s pathological foundation perishes and the values become ethical, that is, grounded in their intentions to attain certain anticipated effects and nothing else.
Historically speaking, syntheism returns to McGilchrist’s right cerebral hemisphere and its enormous, unexploited potential to build the new Renaissance rather than the new Enlightenment. It does this from a conviction that eternalism without mobilism is both misleading and self-destructive. Eternalism (the world of rationality) must be subservient for its own sake to mobilism (the world of reason); otherwise eternalism results in totalism, the blind faith – since the days of Parmenides and Plato – in all motion being illusory, and therefore it is the eternalist reproduction of the mobilist reality that is the only actual reality instead of the other way around. Thus syntheism also includes entheism, Taoism’s fundamental idea – which was launched by Lao Tzu in Axial Age China in the 7th century B.C. – that change per se, and thereby also its by-product time, is what is fundamental to existence. According to Lao Tzu, change over time is anything but illusory, and thus mobilism and not eternalism is primary in existence. Taoism’s idea of yin and yang as an ontological foundation is summarised under syntheism’s concept of Entheos.
With the arrival of the law, mankind is separated from her internal compass, the oscillation between desire and the libidinal drive, and is subordinated to an external set of regulations which immediately attack desire and the libidinal drive in particular and denigrate these as the vanguard for the Fall of man. What then happens is that desire moves up in consciousness and internalises the law, making it into its own obsession, its own propulsion engine. Desire becomes a desire to either follow or oppose the law, but primarily a desire to constantly keep the law alive in order to cultivate one’s own obsession with it. Thanks to this coalescence with the law, desire receives what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls an extimate structure. The drive is instead displaced into the subconscious, where it churns away and constantly triggers disturbing eruptions of reality in consciousness. It is the drive that incessantly reminds the human being that she will never be able to get inside the law, that there is always a residual part of her that shuns the law, that the law is a trespassing alien in her mind. It is this restless residue of the naked drive that constitutes the core of mankind’s subjectivity, which drives her longing for a utopian freedom beyond her existential predicament. From a syntheological perspective, we argue that this obscure core of the subject is located in Entheos. It is only in the most intense religious experience, in the infinite now, that man confronts his innermost being, the coalescence of desire and the libidinal drive in their naked forms.
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.
These well-considered choices of names are of course open to discussion in this ironic polytheism for no end of time; the four syntheological concepts were created in a participatory and intersubjective process in a syntheist online forum and, in good netocratic spirit, lack an original dividual author. The movement has thus agreed as a collective on these names together. But these supraphenomena are highly real and together with Friedrich von Schelling’s powerful foundation work and Martin Heidegger’s magnificent extension work constitute the groundwork within advanced metaphysics. And both extension and interior design work is still ongoing. American philosopher Robert Corrington, for example, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, constructs a system around what he calls the four infinities. Atheos corresponds to the sustaining infinite in Corrington’s metaphysics, Pantheos is another name for the actual infinite, Entheos corresponds to what Corrington calls the prospective infinite, and Syntheos is another name for the open infinite. The Irish philosopher William Desmond constructs a similar system in his book God and The Between around the three transcendences: Atheos is here the name of the interior potentiality (T1), Pantheos is the name of the exterior actuality (T2) and Entheos is the name of transcendence as transcendence per se (T3). The only reason that Desmond does not use a fourth component in his metaphysics is that he chooses to completely avoid the future as a theme; otherwise Syntheos would be obvious as Desmond’s T4.
The syntheological pyramid starts with a relational interiority with Atheos at the one end, which shifts to a relational exteriority with Pantheos at the other end. In the world of cosmology this even occurs literally: a black hole absorbs, it happens interiorly, while the Universe expands, it happens exteriorly. Exteriority then continues with Entheos, with its explosions of irreducible differences, multitudes and emergences over time, but shifts back to an interiority with Syntheos, as the utopia, the concentrated point or God for all of humanity’s dreams of the future. Atheos and Syntheos are primarily introvert or absorbing concepts, while Pantheos and Entheos are primarily extrovert or expansive concepts. If we express this relation phenomenologically, we say that an eternalism apprehends a mobilism – it is when Atheos is applied to Pantheos that Pantheos emerges as the One: a mobilism that is augmented in the next step and then switches back to an eternalism. It is for example when Entheos is applied to Syntheos that the agent finds its place within the phenomenon and syntheist activism takes shape as the truth as an act.
The syntheological pyramid can be traced back to Zoroaster and his work Gathas, which he authored as early as 3,700 years ago. According to Zoroaster, Ahura (being personified) is generated by the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos, while Mazda (the mind personified) is generated by the next level, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos. If the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos has a name of its own, it is Ahura; if the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos has a name of its own, it is Mazda. When Zoroaster proclaims his universal religion, interestingly enough he calls it mazdayasna (love of the mind) and not ahurayasna (love of being). This explains why we refer to him as the first protosyntheist. Zoroaster prioritises the god that the human being creates, Mazda, over the god that creates himself independent of Man, Ahura, while also uniting them under the name Ahura Mazda, being that includes consciousness. According to Zoroaster, Man is an internal agent within the Universe as a phenomenon and not some kind of external, alien accident in relation to the rest of existence, as in the Abrahamic religions and their philosophical offspring.
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.
It is important to point out that syntheism sees the world itself as fundamentally mobilist, and not as eternalist. Faith in the world itself as eternalist belongs within totalism, the trap that we strive to avoid at all costs. Like interiority and territorialisation, eternalism must be limited to phenomenology. Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos are creative eternalisations of the void, the cosmos, the difference and the utopia. It is as fundamental and powerful eternalisations that we use them for constructing a functional, relevant and, in the deepest sense of the word, credible metaphysics for the Internet age. Since they are ontological eternalisations, we do not need to look for them and demonstrate their external ontic existence in nature in relation to us humans; the crews of the space stations are never ever going to find our gods above the clouds. All four of them are figments of the brain of some kind, but highly consciously created and creative such.
Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos do not receive their enormous potency as some kind of long-lived giant beings from parallel universes, like antiquity’s or Hinduism’s worlds of divinities, but as dramatically useful metaphors for the structure of existence (from Atheos to Pantheos) and the place of consciousness and scope for action within this structure (from Entheos to Syntheos). Therefore the syntheist divinities are immanent, finite and mortal, rather than transcendent, eternal and immortal, like traditional gods. Mortal creatures in a finite universe can only create mortal and finite divinities. The immortal god, created by mortal creatures, is an absurdity, a self-contradiction in a Derridean sense. Therefore, in the name of consistency, syntheology stops at mortal gods. Here it is worth recalling Blaise Pascal’s pragmatic concept Deus Absconditus from the 17th century: it is quite correct to say that syntheism stops at gods that reveal themselves only to those who seek gods, but avoids the gaze of all those who would rather avoid gods.
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.
Here it is important to understand that time is probably the most mysterious concept within both philosophy and physics. Even if totalist-oriented philosophers such as Plato and scientists such as Einstein in some strange way were to be proven correct in that time is an illusion, they still do not succeed in thinking of the world without a metatime within which this illusory time is presumed to exist. Even if Einsteinian mathematics succeeds in magically tinkering with time by turning it into an extra dimension in connection with space, and thereby, for example, forcing it to move backwards as well as forwards, there is no proof whatsoever that any such time as an extra dimension in connection with space actually exists in physical reality. Nobody has yet succeeded in turning the uncompromising arrow of time, which inexorably moves from the past into the future through a now which is in constant motion (at the very moment that you speak the word now it has been supplanted by yet another now and has therefore advanced to become a then). This explains why duration stubbornly bounces back as a metatime every time the Platonists try to convert it into an illusion. It is quite simply impossible to get past time, and already with time as god, Entheos thus is necessary in syntheology.
When Einstein proves that time is relative, he also proves that time elapses more quickly or slowly depending on the local context, but this does not change the fact that it still and always travels in one and the same direction through the Universe. Within syntheology one is careful to distinguish between time as a physical phenomenon and duration as the existential experience of the direction of the arrow of time. In any case, Entheos is the divinity of both time and duration, since time and duration present the clearest evidence that the difference is the foundation of identity production. We can talk about the arrow of time, duration, history – we find many names for the things we love – but what we are actually talking about is a recurring feedback loop with infinitesimally but – thanks to their identity-dislocating function – extremely significant changes for every cycle that occurs. Entheos is quite simply the name of the constant repetition of the difference itself, that which Nietzsche and Deleuze call the eternal return of the same.
Entheos is also the divinity we encounter when we experience what Sigmund Freud calls the oceanic feeling. To devote oneself to Entheos is to worship the brain’s and the body’s ability to carry out mental voyages and to emotionally experience the sacred, to allow oneself to be transcended into a new and qualitatively different subject. Entheos is therefore also the divinity of the sublime and of art. Syntheistic transcendence is entirely a subjective experience; it thus has nothing to do with any Platonist dualism or Kantian transcendentalism. Syntheistic transcendence takes place in a completely immanent world, just as the eternalisations of perception are housed within an otherwise completely mobilist world. Entheos is driven by the desire towards immanent change and the search for transcendental intensity; it is the divinity that we encounter in the psychedelic experience, which personifies the entheogenic worlds. Entheos is not just Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s divinity, but also the god of Heraclitus and Lao Tzu, and is celebrated at the spring equinox, which is the syntheist calendar’s new year. The Spring equinox represents the celebration of the enormous and irreducible multiplicity of life and thereby also the celebration of our own human dividuality.
As the roof above the Atheos-Pantheos-Entheos triangle, Syntheos binds the other three divinities together and completes the syntheological pyramid. From the triangle Atheos, Pantheos and Entheos, three lines strive upwards and are merged in a point that is Syntheos, which thereby holds the entire structure together and gives it its name. Syntheos is the divinity of the collective, humanity, the future, creativity, dreams, aspirations, visions and utopias. All gods that have ever been invented are illustrations of one and the same god, namely the need for a personified, cohesive component in order for the world to appear as the One, a meaningful whole. A human being without desires is a dead human being. In the same way, a society without a utopia is a dead society. Syntheism therefore maintains that it is not the content of the utopia but the utopia in itself that is the divine. According to the speculative logic of the syntheist, the need for the divine is divine in itself. The Greek word for the creating god is Syntheos, from which syntheism gets its name. God is no longer a patriarchal creator of worlds from the past or a longed-for saviour on a white steed, but the de facto name of the collective utopia of the collective itself in the future.
The movement in the syntheological pyramid goes from the possible in Atheos to the realised in Pantheos; from the mutable in Entheos to the consummated in Syntheos. The syntheist calendar is constructed around syntheology’s four cornerstones and their quarters: Enthea starts at the spring equinox which is the syntheist new year, Panthea starts at midsummer, Synthea starts at the autumn equinox and Athea starts at midwinter. And then everything starts again from the beginning: repetition but with constant displacements. The movement within the syntheological pyramid also goes from the top down. When Syntheos is completed, Entheos gets a cohesive meaning: the chaotic differences and repetitions get a context since they suddenly appear as creative intensities on top of the stable community that Syntheos constructs. Entheos can be apprehended as the individual human being, the dividual subject, divided and fundamentally homeless. Syntheos is the collective subject, the holy community which is bigger for the dividual subject than the dividual subject is in relation to itself. We can express this in the following way: Syntheos is the emergent dimension where Entheos finds its home and is realised. Syntheos is the place where Entheos is transformed into the syntheist agent and meets its transience with dignity.
This means that the cosmos no longer appears as a cold and indifferent machinery grinding away, but instead as an holistic divinity filled with meaning – Pantheos. The arrival of this Pantheos in turn opens the way for a new appreciation of the creativity that emanates from the void of its predecessor, Atheos, the non-god, which is the origin of all subjectivity processes. For while Pantheos resides in consciousness, Atheos rules in the subconscious. This is completely in line with what Lacan says: the subject is created in and belongs to the subconscious. Therefore Lacan also speaks of the barred subject, that is, the subject’s inability to know its own origin, and how this very impossibility is constitutive of the subject itself. It is the uncompromisingly barred Atheos that is the source of the subject. Note how the four concepts in the syntheological pyramid are completely dependent on and include each other. Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos all reside within Atheos. Atheos, Entheos and Syntheos are all housed within Pantheos. Atheos, Pantheos and Syntheos all reside within Entheos. Atheos, Pantheos and Syntheos are all housed within Syntheos. If Christianity is based on God as a trinity, syntheism is instead based on God as a quadrinity.
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.
Faith is always a belief in the impossible being possible. Only a faith without assurances is an authentic faith. That is what the word faith actually means. Therefore syntheistic faith is the authentic faith par excellence. Ultimately, all forms of faith up until syntheism have been based on calculations of utility and anticipated rewards. There is no such speculative appeasement, no servility and no sucking up to an external fetishized power within syntheism. Atheos gives without taking, Syntheos takes without giving, while Entheos is always being recreated, and Pantheos always is. This means that syntheist ethics is based on the principle that the agent gives in and of pure joy, without expecting any kind of reward in return. Syntheism’s ethos is a wilful act, an identification with the act, I am doing this only because I am the one who is to do this, without the slightest trace of the traditional religion’s at times appeasing, at times calculating, ulterior motives. Syntheist ethics is a pure form of activism – rather than a passive reactivism – an activism which in turn is founded on faith; on a faith which through being activated unleashes a truth, the truth as an act, an action that uses the void’s vacuum energy as an engine to revolutionise the world, in order to constantly create the world anew in a similarly constant expansion.
Atheos is the void that generates the repetitious drive. Pantheos is the cosmos that generates desire that is always on the hunt and never entirely satisfied. Entheos is the transcendence within the immanence, the engine behind all change, difference and diversity. Syntheos is the divine dissolution of the self in the collective, of the self in the cosmos, the sacred meeting between bodies and minds. Syntheos is also the creation of the syntheist religion through the creative coalescence of Atheos, Pantheos, and Entheos as the consummated and healing (whole-making) syntheology. Therefore it is also in Syntheos that we find the ethical imperative to overcome and become one with something much greater than one’s own subject, that is to become one with Syntheos. The dance between Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos opens the way for divinities that are finished with their work – divinities that hand us over to ourselves.
All of these four concepts relate to the search for the sublime as equivalent to the deepest pursuit of religion. The quest for the religious experience is the quest for a life intensity which is so strong that it bridges the gap from the moment to eternity – what syntheology calls the infinite now. Atheos motivates and drives the religious impulse, Entheos is the impulse in itself, Pantheos is its horizon and Syntheos is the moment when the impulse reaches its target and religion is realised as pure religion. Metaphors borrowed from the diachronic world of quantum physics shed light on the process: Atheos is the wave and Pantheos is the particle. Entheos is the relation between them, the movement between; on the one hand the perfect wave where no particle exists any longer, and on the other hand the perfect particle where no wave exists any longer. Syntheos is this entire complex seen as a cohesive unit, as a single phenomenon. It is through the presence and realisation of Syntheos that the phenomenon becomes an active agent.
Physicist Stephen Hawking argues that physical reality becomes accessible to us via models that function within our world view, that are relevant for our era and above all are scientifically verifiable. He calls this conviction model-dependent realism. We create history (Entheos) through our specific participation in it, rather than history creating us. When Hawking’s colleague Edward Witten launches the M-theory in the mid-1990s, he presents a multiverse theory where all previously relevant explanatory models for physics are brought together under a common mathematical roof. According to M-theory, there are at least 10 to the power of 500 different possible string-theory universes. What M-theory de facto does with these multiple, possible universes, means that existence can no longer be regarded as a miracle loosely dangling in nothingness, but rather must be seen as a necessity with a solid anchoring in somethingness.
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.
It is in mathematics rather than in our senses that we find the opening to the new realism, which, while being a model-dependent realism, is nonetheless a realism in the sense that our senses achieve an authentic contact with our environment. In a defence of the mathematical revolution that Georg Cantor initiated, with the launch of transfinite cardinals in 1904 Cantor’s colleague Ernst Zermelo proves the existence of an actual but indeterminist infinite. Thereby the door is left wide open to model-dependent realism, beyond naive realism, which of course Kant dismisses by insisting on a necessary, radical separation between the phenomenal and the noumenal. In syntheology, the Kantian precipice is replaced by the oscillation between an Entheos in escalating expansion and a Syntheos of creative pleasure that arises in the playing in earnest with a ceremonial quest for understanding in the explosive multiplicity of Entheos. To live in Syntheos is to enjoy the philosophical creation and redesign of models of fleeting reality in a never-ending flow.
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.
In the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos, there are only completely open pluralities, like the infinities placed on top of each other in Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. This means that the One is always postponed into the future; here the One is namely equivalent to the syntheist utopia per se – a utopia of imperfect multiplicity rather than of the Platonist utopia’s perfect simplicity – which constantly avoids its own realisation. If Entheos is the division of Pantheos into an endless quantity of multiplicities stacked on top of each other – what the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin in a salute to Heraclitus in the 19th century calls “the only thing that differentiates itself as the basic condition of existence” – Syntheos is its opposite: the attempt of perception to try to connect the irreducible multiplicity into a cohesive, creative, collective identity. Syntheos is quite simply the name of perception’s attempt to convert the chaos of existence into religion. Syntheism is thus literally the pure religion, the netocratic eternalism (see The Netocrats), religion as religion in its innermost essence.
The syntheist world is a world of relations and only relations. Syntheism is a relationalism. It is the syntheological pyramid which constitutes the ontological foundation for all agents in the relationalist universe. The oscillating relation between Atheos and Pantheos, followed by the oscillating relation between Entheos and Syntheos, together form a cohesive, pan-dimensional, vibrating coordinate system: syntheology as a phenomenon. The syntheist symbol – which for example adorns the website syntheism.org – shows Pantheos on top of Atheos as a white ellipsis that represents the Universe on top of a black circle that represents the void, with Entheos as the boundary between them and Syntheos as the complete symbol in itself, drawn by people in whose speculative imagination the most essential relations and intensities in existence have been personified. Syntheists are quite simply people who, once again in history, unabashed, and this time also consciously, create gods.
A central component in syntheism is how it takes a stand for positive and consequently rejects negative theology. To start with, the repression of the drive.html">death drive has a clear function: according to pantheist ethics we live because the Universe seeks its own existence and its own consciousness through us. As conscious beings we are not only part of the Universe; we human beings also together constitute the Universe’s own consciousness of itself. In syntheological terms, we express this as Pantheos emerging into Syntheos through our truth as an act. But syntheism supports positive theology also because it sees time or Entheos as both a physical and ideological foundation. Death has its place at some point along the arrow of time, but the time for death is not now. The present always belongs to survival in consciousness. Syntheism’s activist ethics can therefore only be constructed out of survival as a propelling principle – not from immortality. Totalist death-worshipping moralism is fundamentally just a form of reactionary masochism.
Eternalisations are not just ontologically but also epistemologically explosive if they are understood and used as precisely relationalist phenomena and nothing else. Syntheologically we can describe the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism as the constantly ongoing oscillations along the axes between on the one hand Atheos and Pantheos, and on the other hand Entheos and Syntheos. Eternalism on its own should be regarded as an outright neurosis; mobilism on its own should be viewed as an equally outright psychosis. The functional balance arises in the dialectic between them where eternalism is also set in motion, is cast back into mobilism, is mobilised, in order to be able to steer perception’s selection of conceivable deviations from previous eternalisations of the enormous, continuous inflows of information to the sense organs. The sum of eternalism and mobilism can never exceed one hundred percent. The stronger the eternalisation, the weaker the mobility; the higher the mobilisation, the lower the eternality.
There is no external god outside the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism. The syntheological concepts of Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos for example are produced within and not outside the dialectic. The fact that nature itself constantly produces new emergences means – as the syntheistic complexity theoretician Stuart Kauffman demonstrates in his book Reinventing The Sacred – that no external god is necessary. The deeper we delve into the relationalist onto-epistemology, the more clearly it generates an ethics of its own in stark contrast to Platonist moralism with its condemnation of movement and change in favour of the eternal being; the perfect and therefore immutable world which does not exist. But relationalist ethics does not maintain some kind of chaos at the expense of the cosmos. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism instead generates entheist ethics. To open oneself up to variability is to affirm the active affirmation. On the other hand, to close oneself off in order to fight variability is to surrender oneself to the reactive ressentiment. Lacan picturesquely describes eternalism as the masculine and mobilism as the feminine pole in the dialectical relation between them. Taoism’s founder Lao Tzu, the entheist philosopher par excellence, of course calls them yin and yang.
The shift from the human to the universal centre is the necessary and correct manoeuvre. In the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos, Barad finds the new divinity that replaces the human being that had been declared dead by her predecessor Foucault, namely the universal subject as a kind of Bohrian supraphenomenon. It is important to point out that the purpose of Barad’s anti-anthropocentrism is not to eliminate the human being from all equations. Instead, it is concerned with giving the human being as agent her onto-epistemologically correct place in the greater phenomena that existence is comprised of, and this occurs only when the Universe is held up as primary and the human subject is reduced to something secondary. The Universe is not some transcendental category in Man’s orientation through existence, which Kant imagines in his autistic phenomenology. The Universe is instead real and expresses itself in and through the many billions of human subjects that it produces among other things, rather than the other way around. The Universe lives, thinks, speaks, creates, feels pleasure and multiplies through us. Nor is this all: through us the Universe dies and leaves room for constantly new phenomena. All this taken together is supreme motivation for naming Barad’s book Meeting The Universe Halfway a syntheist manifesto.
Barad’s agential realism may to good effect be pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s psychoanalytic version of the transcendental subject; syntheologically it would correspond to Barad’s Pantheos being pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s Atheos. It is historically necessary for Barad to act as a radical mobilist in order to once and for all divest herself of Kantian representationalism and think her way fully through the consequences of the quantum physics revolution. Rather, she therefore operates as a personified oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos. No thinker succeeded in taking mobilism to its furthest extremity before Barad – not even radical mobilists such as Whitehead and Deleuze – in order thereby to create the necessary opposite to eternalist thinking which together enable the syntheological consummation. Thus, Barad thus does not operate in any kind of opposition to Atheos’ two prophets Lacan and Zizek. Rather, she fills the tragically large intellectual void that is the necessary antithesis to their own highly intellectualised void within the syntheological pyramid.
The unifying narrative can only be told by the subservient agent with which all other agents can identify. When the Deleuzian dividual is placed before the enormity of Pantheos, capitulation is the only logical response. But it is then not a question of just any old capitulation. Because it is about a kind of Spinozist capitulation, which in turn enables a dialectical continuation in the shadow of Pantheos through the establishment of Syntheos in conjunction with the other particularities of the universal subject. Therefore Zizek and Deleuze are united in their passionate search for the Internet age’s revolutionary utopia, where it is Deleuze in his capacity as the voice of Entheos – in relation to Zizek as the voice of Atheos’ and Barad as the voice of Pantheos – who is closest to the realisation of Syntheos within the syntheological pyramid.
For in the same way that the axis between Atheos and Pantheos vibrates in the syntheological pyramid, the axis between Entheos and Syntheos vibrates. Entheos represents immanent becoming and difference; Syntheos represents utopian being and identity. As Deleuze points out: Entheos always precedes Syntheos. First Entheos generates the Deleuzian dividual; thereafter Syntheos generates the revolutionary utopia. What is important is that syntheology places transcendence in becoming and not in being. There is no transcendental being within syntheism, which is a radical point of departure from all dualist religions. Transcendental becoming is instead consolidated in a radically monist and relationalist universe. Becoming is primary, but wills itself into being and does this time after time through perception’s creative eternalisations. This will from becoming to being is the movement from Entheos to Syntheos.
The Universe obviously needs no preceding divinity in order to exist. There is no need for any religion whatsoever when existence is in a state of constant expansion. However, the moment we move from becoming to being, the theological perspective becomes necessary. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism requires a syntheological accompaniment. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos in itself gives rise to the metaphysical impulse. We express this by maintaining that being requires God. We see this movement with Hegel when he transports himself from Atheos to Pantheos and sees the World Spirit (Welt Geist) being born out of this movement. But the same thing also occurs with Deleuze when he moves from Entheos towards Syntheos and sees the plane of immanence being born out of this movement. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos is in itself the original sacralisation of existence, the birth of metaphysics. Through the process of eternalisation, chaotic existence is transformed into a single coherent substance, what the mobilist philosophers call the One. And the One is of course the name of immanence philosophy and process theology for God.
According to Whitehead, God is quite simply not particularly dead, but rather is just dramatically altered by – in turn – dramatically changed conditions. There is no hateful desire in him to slash God’s throat, when the concept actually appears more useful than ever, but in that case precisely as a syntheist tool and nothing else. The parallel with the syntheological formulation of Entheos as the name of the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos is striking. For what is Whitehead’s obsession with creativity as the driving force of existence, if not in fact a deification of the entheist production of difference? Process and Reality is so radically relationalist and theologically creative that the work – in which the origin as Atheos and the events as Pantheos are brought together with creativity as Entheos, and where the result is today’s Universe – deserves to be regarded as the syntheist manifesto par excellence. That the term process theology is coined and used for the first time by one of Whitehead’s disciples, the American theologian Charles Hartshorne, is not the least bit surprising.
When in 1992 the relationalist physicist Lee Smolin launches the idea that the Universe operates according to cosmological Darwinism – where the maximisation of black holes in a universe is linked to the maximisation of possibilities for the genesis of life – he refers to Peirce’s and Whitehead’s revolutionary pragmatism. With a simple manoeuvre, Smolin disposes of the recurring problem that haunts the competing physical models, namely that all these models presuppose coordinates for the Universe which means that it is constantly balancing on a kind of existential pinhead in order to be able to exist. With a multitude of possible universa over time, as in Smolin’s model, our Universe’s specific coordinates do not seem particularly remarkable any longer. Of course they appear extremely well-adapted for the genesis of life and the existence of our own species, but then this must reasonably be the case in at least one of the many universa that are presumed to exist, and in that case the one is just a logical consequence of the other. Irrespective of whether Smolin’s speculative cosmological theory of evolution is correct or not, time or Entheos has returned with full force as the bedrock of physics. Peirce, James, Whitehead and the other pragmatists could hardly be more satisfied.
The arrow of time acts as an emergent phenomenon of its very own. Outside of mathematics’ tautologies, time and space do not need to have anything whatsoever to do with each other; they are distinctly different phenomena and an honest ontology also treats them in that way: as essentially different. Liberated from eternity, time returns with full force as physics’ most remarkable player, as Zurvan or the personification of the mysterious duration of the ancient Iranians, as Cronus or the irrevocable fate of the Ancient Greeks, or as Entheos, the multiplicity of events that stream out of the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos in the syntheological pyramid. Time is the uniting constant of existence. There is nothing outside duration. Plato, Newton and Einstein have quite simply got it wrong: there is no timelessness in physical reality, no more than there is any actual void. Because of the return of time in the history of ideas, the post-structural obsession with non-linearity also finds itself under great pressure. Linearity returns as a strong cultural metaphor, but in a new and deeper variant, as a deep linearity which relates to global rather than local duration.
The idea that all of existence and its history is reduced in this way to a limited and handy little box, a block universe, must have enchanted the physicists. This is understandable. And philosophically speaking, the myth that we live in a block universe is of course an expression of the phenomenological eternalism without the necessary dialectic with mobilism, if possible an even more radicalised version of Plato’s dualism – where Einstein actually advocates a totalist monism rather than Plato’s totalist dualism. But surely it must be the case that not just the arrow of time but all the motion and changes in the history of the Universe must be illusory in Einstein’s block universe. Duration is of course the very foundation for all motion and change per se – which explains why Entheos is the divinity of time, motion, difference and creativity in syntheology. But Einstein really does everything in his power to revive Parmenides’ absurd conception from Ancient Greece that there is no real change in physical reality, that everything is one and the same and that difference and change therefore have no ontological validity.
Syntheologically, we express this as Einstein in practice doing everything he can to kill off Entheos, the divinity of process theology, and he must then in the name of consistency also try to kill off Atheos and Syntheos while he is at it. But Einstein never succeeds anywhere in proving any phenomenon in existence that moves backwards in time. However relativist time is, the arrow of time survives the block universe’s mythological attack and strengthens in fact its Zurvanite and Chronist magic. Time has still only one direction: forwards. Entheos keeps the syntheological pyramid in motion and is travelling with determination onwards to Syntheos. Physical eternalism and the Einsteinian block universe are, in fact, impossible to combine with quantum physics’ most basic axiom: Niels Bohr’s principle of indeterminacy. A block universe requires a compact determinism – without real time there is no real change – the future is by necessity as fixed in advance as the past is frozen in history. However, this is an absolute impossibility according to Bohr and his relationalist followers, since physics according to the principle of indeterminacy is incomplete, and that fact in itself is incompatible with a block universe where everything, without the least exception, invariably has already happened.
What disturbs the Platonists about relationalism is that the mobilist world view sooner or later must yield to the principle of explanatory closure. The ontic flow must be eternalised in order for it to be converted into words and numbers. The principle of explanatory closure means that eternalisation is unavoidable, but the trick is of course partly to freeze eternalisation where it captures mobilist reality as well as possible, partly to most humbly realise that every eternalisation is only a clumsy digital rounding-off of a much more complex, analogous phenomenon in expansive motion. philosophy.html">Process philosophy, and in the case of syntheism process theology, is therefore the best vaccine against the taxonomic deification of the object. Only a consistently executed philosophy.html">process philosophy can immunise us against totalism’s tempting, simplifying superstitions. Syntheologically we express this as Entheos’ presence preventing us from getting stuck in Atheos or Pantheos per se, and instead continuing to direct our attention towards the real oscillation between them.
We can express this as though the relation between on the one hand Entheos and on the other hand the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos links back to Spinoza’s classical division between natura naturans (active nature) and natura naturata (passive nature) in the monist universe, which is a productive division within the One, the pantheistic deity. Entheos is quite simply the name of nature’s own built-in activism, its constant quest for change, its enormous production of differences and multitudes; while Pantheos is the name of nature as a gigantic and historically speaking passive object where the differences and the multitudes dwell before Entheos’ gaze (with Atheos as the hidden but necessary underside of Pantheos). The Spinozist relation between natura naturans and natura naturata thus has a syntheological equivalent in the relation between Pantheos and Entheos.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
The romantic elevation of a single other human being to the only other, followed by a shutting out of the rest of the world as if it were hierarchically inferior to this only other is bizarre enough. That this deification is then mistaken for love is even more absurd. But if nothing else, the dark underbelly of this symbiosis-seeking manipulation is revealed by its ethical consequences. What characterises authentic ethics is namely that it is merely carried out, without a single iota of calculating ulterior motive, as an identity-reflecting truth as an act. Only then does the action become ethical: if not, the act can only be regarded as a cynical manipulation, a banal attempt to harness another person’s body and mind for short-sighted, egotistical purposes. Authentic love may indeed be an emotion, but the ethics that it must be based on are considerably more robust; it is a love that does not wait and see, that actually and most profoundly defies death. Syntheologically we express this by saying that love reveals itself in Entheos with its sights set on Syntheos, as a truth as an act originating in Atheos, carried out in Pantheos. But in order to understand how this complicated process works in practice, we must divide love into several dialectical steps.
An authentic attraction must be about loving the radically other passionately without hopes of any love whatsoever in return. Otherwise it is not a case of authentic attraction, but merely a case of hypocritical and banal bartering which we call internarcissism. This explains why Spinoza argues that amor dei intellectualis must come first, before agape, philia and eros, quite simply so that authentic love can gain a foothold at all in the Greek inclined triangle. Syntheologically, Spinoza’s idea of the fundamental value of intellectual love has the consequence that neither the empty subject (Atheos) nor existence on the whole (Pantheos) leaves room for any emotional opinion of them; instead these are to be loved without reservation, since they can neither be added nor dropped. All of life’s other experiences are then based on Atheos and Pantheos, including everything else that is loved, hated or in any way at all related to emotionally. Amor dei intellectualis is this dutiful, logically cogent and fundamental attraction. An authentic agape, an authentic eros and an authentic philia with their strong emotions can only arise as a consequence of amor dei intellectualis first offering a necessary platform. Syntheologically, we express this as we must first submit to Atheos, in order to subsequently be able to abandon ourselves to Pantheos and Entheos on the way to the ethical objective, the authentic love of the radically other, where Syntheos arises.
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.
Mathematics is actually just advanced, idealistic addition. If you take something and then add something else to this thing, all in all the whole obviously expands. It becomes something more. From this unavoidable fact, the first mathematicians draw the conclusion that 1 plus 1 might possibly be 2, and then go on to build the entire science of mathematics from this axiomatic assumption. The problem is however that this line of reasoning only works in theory, which means that it is only applicable to mathematics itself. And why is that? Because in nature the second 1 is never identical to the first 1. In nature there are never two absolutely identical objects to symmetrically add or exchange for each other. Nature is not only analogue but also fundamentally asymmetrical in all directions. There are never two of anything at all – phenomena in existence not only have fluid boundaries but are also completely unique, which has the consequence that all our generalisations, however epistemologically necessary they might be, can never be more exact than arbitrary approximations. Syntheologically we express this as Entheos being ontologically in the same class with Atheos and Pantheos – or to express the matter more poetically: two is the first sum for the fundamental difference within the One, and it is in the capacity of this scientific axiom that multiplicity is the foundation of ontology.
Even relationalist philosophers can fall into the trap of wanting to convert Nature’s behaviour into precisely such an ethical beacon. In his Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier depicts a kind of fascinating Freudian cosmology with the Universe as an entropic giant, dazzled and on his way towards his own extinction – what he calls an organon of extinction. Brassier’s point of departure is that culture has done everything it can to eschew the trauma of extinction. His ambition is instead to construct meaning based on the inevitable annihilation of existence. This Brassier does by attacking both the phenomenological and the hermeneutic branches of Continental philosophy, but also Deleuzian vitalism, which he argues tries to inject all sorts of meaning into existence, as a kind of failed and fundamentally ineffective invocation against the trauma of extinction. Brassier instead bases his ideas on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland and Thomas Metzinger when he makes his appeal for his radical ultranihilism. He points out that the Universe comes out of nothing (syntheism’s Atheos), and his idea of the organon of extinction as a philosophical point of departure – the fact that life can only be experienced against the backdrop of its own inevitable annihilation – according to Brassier is also the condition for thinking existing at all. Syntheologically, we express this by saying that he regards Pantheos and Entheos as merely subordinated aspects of the thoroughly dominating Atheos, where any form of Syntheos is nowhere to be seen at all.
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.
Brassier’s philosophy is indeed firmly anchored in syntheology’s cornerstones Atheos, Entheos and Pantheos (what he misses is the affirmative launching to Syntheos). He is right in saying that this nihilist fundament must be understood as a great historical achievement, a kind of collective intellectual maturation, and not as a regrettable spiritual emergency. But since Brassier’s world is nothing but sublime physics – and he does not, in contrast to Alain Badiou for example, take into consideration Man’s ability to create the truth through an act – he also opens the way for the counter-question of whether his own nihilism means the end of history. And there Brassier has no unequivocal answer. His Freudian cosmology is not even verified within physics. It is sufficient – in the manner of Niels Bohr – to regard time as physics’ real constant, in an indeterministic rather than deterministic universe, in order for Brassier’s drawn-out apocalypse to collapse.
The utopia is the God called Syntheos, and the core of Syntheos is the existential experience of ego-dissolution and uniting with the One, the unit of existence. Here syntheism leaves classical philosophy and steps into the world of theology. For the step from an illusory existential dividuality to a considerably more credible existential oceanity requires that one leaves philosophy as a transcendental totalism in order to proceed to theology as immanent mobilism. Therefore Brassier’s role model François Laruelle describes the speculative totalism of Hegel as the pinnacle of the history of philosophy, since totalism – which Hegel first completes and then also turns around dialectically – at its core is the essence of the philosophical exercise. If this is the case, mobilist thinking must use theology as a weapon in order to change the course of philosophy away from its fixation on extinction. Since it evidently requires a theological dialectical reversal to reintroduce Man’s emotions as the decisive factor – or syntheologically expressed: Syntheos must be added to the metaphysical triangle Atheos–Entheos-Pantheos – mobilist thinking must claim that theology is deeper than philosophy. Thereby syntheology can begin to act as the necessary metamorphosis that saves philosophy from totalism’s wearisome and destructive death wish.
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.
Never before has the ethical imperative of the truth as an act been clearer. What then follows in a Badiouian scenario is that the activism that emanates from the three unnamable names Atheos, Entheos and Pantheos builds the stable foundation for Syntheos, the formalisation and realisation of the utopia. Since syntheism’s mobilist universe is both contingent and indeterministic, obviously Syntheos cannot be realised through the historical objective’s mystical, eschatological arrival, in keeping with what Marxism and the Abrahamic religions so imaginatively preach. Syntheos is instead realised through a focused but nomadic, creative activism in a capricious, contingent universe, driven by the hope of the impossible suddenly appearing and being realised as the fourth singularity – an idea which is consummated by being theologised by Badiou’s declared syntheist disciple Quentin Meillassoux. The lesson from both Badiou and Levinas is that life-long devotion to truth as an act is the innermost existentialist substance of metaphysics.
To philosophise is to metathink, and what Jacques Lacan calls the real and what Badiou calls the unnamable is philosophy’s eternal variability, its own built-in impossibility, its genesis that consistently avoids transitioning into a becoming. Here Badiou stubbornly opposes Gilles Deleuze’s process philosophical foundation: where Deleuze in following Spinoza states that multiplicity is identical with the One, that multiplicity is univocal, Badiou argues that multiplicity is undefinable. He accuses Deleuze of building a lovely constructivism that relies entirely on intuition, while he himself relies only on the stringency of mathematics. Against this Spinozist and Deleuzian multiplicity of the One (Entheos through Pantheos) he posits the multiplicity of emptiness (Entheos through Atheos), an emptiness that is a non non-being. Only in this ontological equation of multiplicity and emptiness does Badiou see the possibility of correctly reflecting the nature of multiplicity. It is only when somebody gets the energy from Atheos to formulate the truth that the truth becomes an event.
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.
Meillassoux’s British colleague Simon Critchley defines the syntheist faith as a pure faith in his syntheist epic The Faith of The Faithless. Critchley argues that it is faith per se and not its object that is utopianism’s innermost essence. He calls his conviction mystical anarchism, and this is of course identical with the theological anarchism that we formulate in this work. From this position, there is then nothing that stops us from taking one further step; from the pure faith of mystical anarchism to syntheism’s pure religion, a spirituality in which the religious practice in itself is the innermost essence of the religion. In the spirit of Critchley, the pure religion’s basic faith is in the idea that faith itself is necessary in order to make the impossible possible. Creativity runs from Atheos via Pantheos to Entheos, and the name of the enabled impossibility is of course Syntheos. Pure faith in a practised form is thus syntheism, the pure religion. As pure religion, religion is alienation’s complete opposite and the only available weapon against the cynical isolationism in our contemporary world. Critchley’s answer to the question of what must be done in our time is identical with syntheism’s subtraction and its ensuing monastisation; he has had enough of the classical Left’s bloody cultural revolutions – led by malicious and irresponsible tyrants and fanned by pompous and adventure-loving philosophers – who quite apart from wreaking great havoc and destruction, sooner or later are always absorbed by precisely the power structures that they purport to attack, and thereby in the long run actually strengthening rather than weakening them. This occurs since this sort of revolutionary, just like the quantum physics researcher, is internal and not external in relation to the relationalist society within which she acts. Subtraction must therefore always precede the revolution as truth as an act.
As early as during its first years of emergent self-organisation on the Internet – for example on collective web sites such as syntheism.org – the syntheist liturgy developed four different categories of rituals. The first category consists of ceremonies that support and confirm transitions in life, such as naming ceremonies, manhood rituals, baptism, confirmations of belonging, divorce rituals and burials. The second category is periodic festivals which are connected to the four seasons: Atheos is celebrated at the winter solstice and begins the Athea quarter; Entheos is celebrated at the spring equinox and begins the Enthea quarter; Pantheos is celebrated at midsummer and begins the Panthea quarter; and Syntheos is celebrated at the autumn equinox and introduces the Synthea quarter. The third category is meditative techniques, such as contemplation, meditation, yoga and contact improvisation. The fourth and last category comprises rituals focused on the infinite now, the transcendental experience, through structured shamanism and advanced psychedelic practices.
When we move from the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos to the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos, we are also in a deeper sense moving from the transcendent to the immanent. That which binds the Universe together, for example, is not that it de facto is a cohesive unit per se – over time different parts of the Universe may have developed completely different laws, substantially independent of one another – but that the Universe has a single common origin and since then has been tied together by cosmic time. This means that the void and the Universe as transcendental concepts are tied together by the immanent time line. However, this does not mean that the possibility of a credible transcendental experience must be ruled out. Through structured shamanism and advanced psychedelic practices – for each and every one as dividuals, or even better and more powerfully as a community – the possibility of a transcendent experience that we associate with Entheos is opened up; an acceptance and enjoyment within the entheist oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos, with the utopian focus directed towards Syntheos.
The syntheist religious experience is thus a transcendental experience within an immanent world, and absolutely not some kind of mystical excursion to some other parallel world in a dualist universe. Syntheism is of course de facto radically monist. We therefore speak of an immanent transcendentalism, a strongly emotional experience of both boundary-transcendence (Entheos) and entanglement (Syntheos) within and deeper down in a strictly immanent world (localised between Atheos and Pantheos). Instead of for example the Abrahamic ascendance to a supernatural Heaven, here we are talking about a syntheist entry into immanent reality. And since syntheism is a metareligion, with Syntheos constantly in its sights, it promotes and celebrates this connection of people.
Practising sensual actions in the entheogenic state liberates the actions from all forms of sexuality; they can therefore advantageously assume a central role in the entheogenic ritual without the ritual thereby being sexualised. Entheogens namely make the subject aware of the meaningless emptiness of the sexual act, which means that the sensual act without sexuality – where Atheos transitions into Entheos – releases a powerfully transcendent ecstasy in the entheogenic state. Man constantly longs to get away from extimacy within himself towards intimacy with his closest friends. But intimacy is only possible when two or more agents really understand each other. Where language does not suffice to convey understanding, sensuality through eros and the entheogens through philia are used as precisely the spiritual tools that strengthen and maintain the intimacy between people. It is precisely because of their enormous existential and subversive potential that sexuality and the entheogens have regularly become the objects of the most false accusations, the most bizarre taboos and the most brutal persecutions throughout history. The forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge is the oldest and probably best known euphemism for the psychedelic substance.
Syntheism’s sacred locales might just as well be dance floors on Saturday evenings as quiet rooms of contemplation on Sunday afternoons. Periods of unbridled carnival celebrations could be alternated to advantage with periods of meditation, yoga, fasting or quite simply just silence and concentration. The four quarters in the syntheist calendar – Athea, the three months after Atheos (winter solstice), Enthea after Entheos (spring equinox), Panthea, the three months after Pantheos (summer solstice) and Synthea after Syntheos (autumn equinox) – open up possibilities of celebrating a host of different festivals and commemorative days, coupled with specific rituals and ceremonies. But the question is where the inspiration and guidance for the development of these rituals and ceremonies is sourced from. Traditionally, philosophy and theology have of course had that specific role. But at the dawn of the Internet age, these disciplines are in deep crisis. In fact, they have not even succeeded in predicting the arrival of the Internet age, the netocracy or syntheism, and now that these are established facts, both philosophy and theology are having difficulties in formulating relevant questions, never mind any credible answers. These disciplines are helplessly stuck in the past, fixated on increasingly irrelevant social antagonisms, unable to see and reflect on the utopian potential of the future.
Both nature and the creative arsenal of Man himself are full of these entheogens – the term was coined by the historian Carl Ruck, as a more factual replacement for the erroneous term hallucinogens, and it is of course derived from syntheism’s Entheos, the god within ourselves – which have always been used for spiritual purposes. This was the case despite many nation states, on the pretext of the most bizarre and prejudiced excuses, assiduously trying to stop the use of entheogens in what must be regarded as the current paradigm shift’s most obvious form of bourgeois religious persecution of the emerging netocracy’s metaphysical lifestyle choice. It is from this radical equality, in this literally syntheist procedure, that the ethics of interactivity is born and developed – not in Levinas’ sentimental and anti-Nietzschean self-sacrificing romanticism.
Note that outside the anthropocentric fantasy, this entire mythological construction is in a worthless limbo. It is only within the capitalist fantasy, which revolves around the centrality of the individual and the substantiality of the atom and the insurmountable gap between them, that these mythological assertions can be distorted into categorical axioms. The sacralisations of life, the body and consciousness are by-products of the massive internarcissism; the collective self-glorification, which in turn is a consequence of fully implemented alienation. The truth is, however, that life, the body and consciousness are emergent phenomena in an open and contingent universe; phenomena that are characterised by constantly higher degrees of complexity, rather than by any form of sacredness. That which one can relate to in a deeper sense is not these three anthropocentric projections in themselves, but the common underlying variable; the constantly higher intensities of the current emergences. To a syntheist, concepts such as life, body or consciousness are not fundamental; rather, these must be regarded as secondary and precisely as anthropocentric projections onto the rich, creative ability of the Universe to produce hosts of different intensities. And it is the intensity that is sacred. The name of the intensity is Entheos.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58