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Eternalisation
Freezing or fixation of the mobilist chaos, an existential necessity for perception to be able to create a satisfactory order from the chaos of existence and give the incipient consciousness a functional world view within which the subject can arise and build an identity of its own. The problem is that the eternalisation is not reality; it has so to speak ceased to exist in the same moment that it is produced. It is thus not the ideas that are real in contrast to the chaos of existence, as Plato claims, but exactly the reverse is the case: mobilism precedes and is always primary in relation to eternalism in the dialectics between them.
The conflict over the metaphysics behind physics – clearly illustrated in Albert Einstein’s and Niels Bohr’s passionate correspondence from the mid-1930s – finally gets its resolution through experimental metaphysics, also called the second quantum revolution; a long list of complicated scientific experiments from the 1980s onwards, the results of which have had dramatic consequences for metaphysics. The results of this development strengthen Bohr’s position considerably in the above-mentioned conflict, which is why both Newtonian and Einsteinian metaphysics with their requirements of timeless, universal laws seem increasingly passé. Bohr’s indeterministic relationalism overshadows Einstein’s deterministic relativism. The constant of physics is time, not space. Time is not an illusory dimension of space, but highly real. Mathematics does not precede the Universe: mathematics is never anything more than an idealised approximation in hindsight of constantly dynamic Nature, an arbitrary and anthropocentric eternalisation of a genuinely mobilist reality (see The Global Empire).
Relativism is already apparent in language. Every concept, every linguistic component, is in a state of constant flux, constantly changes meaning: in time, in space, between and also within those who use spoken sounds or written signs with which to communicate. Seen as a social tool, language can therefore never be objectively valid, and thereby neither can it reflect an enduringly objective truth. According to the French philosopher Alain Badiou there is, however, an exception to this general rule for language, and this is mathematics. While mathematics is in essence tautological – what the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 conveys is of course really that 2 + 2 is another way of saying 4, the informational value is therefore extraordinarily low – as the optimal eternalisation it nonetheless beguiles us with its implicit promises of fixed values located in frozen space–time. Through the natural sciences, mathematics seems to offer a possibility for the human being to establish a truer and more effective contact with objective reality. It beguiles us with the possibility of objectively establishing qualitative differences between subjective statements.
This syntheist, primordial eternalisation however is not some deeper truth about existence that suddenly makes its entrance into the arena, but the necessary contraction of information in the perception of mobilist existence. Only a minute fraction of all sensory impressions are processed at all by one’s consciousness. If the brain really were to catalogue all sensory impressions from a single experienced second, it would take thousands of years to do so, during which one’s consciousness consequently would be blocked and paralysed (and thereby unable to apprehend anything, be it important or unimportant, in the next second, and the next after that, and so forth). In other words, perception must be extremely selective in order to process information while it registers changes in the always fleeting present. Eternalisation then becomes the engine in the transcendentalisation of immanent reality. The transcendent is accordingly strictly fixed compared to the inexorable mobility of the immanence, but as such is necessary in order to enable the phenomenon to stand out as precisely a phenomenon.
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.
Within philosophy.html">process philosophy, ontology and epistemology are intimately intertwined in each other. Being and the movement interact in such a way that the movement can only be transformed into and apprehended as being through an agglutinative onto-epistemology. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism is the onto-epistemology of the Internet age (see The Global Empire). Contingent reality must be frozen in space–time in order for it to be apprehended and decoded; it must be eternalised. The more factors that interact in such a freezing, the more qualitative the eternalisation becomes. The internal eternalisation must then be set in motion anew and is cast back into the external mobilist reality, and not – however tempting this may be to the Platonist impulse – be misinterpreted as a kind of eternal truth about existence. On the whole syntheist onto-epistemology is not well-served by any eternal truths in a Platonist sense; its utopia is imperfect rather than perfect. On the other hand, it is interested in the enormous intellectual advances that can be achieved when the qualities of truth in precisely the relations between different hypotheses are compared. Truth is not eternal, nor is it relativist – even truth is relationalist.
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.
It should be added that experimental metaphysics from the 1980s onwards actually proves that the syntheist onto-epistemology is not merely a perceptional phenomenon; it is not perception alone that makes eternalisation necessary and possible. Even physics itself creates eternalisations and mobilisations. Quantum physics starts from wave motions, and when several monochrome wave movements interact and generate a superposition, something near-miraculous appears. The superposition between the wave motions displays clear differences even beyond the obvious interference in each of the individual wave motions; the more monochrome wave motions added to the wave package in question, the more clearly it is localised in space–time. Ultimately, already in physics itself a clear phenomenon becomes apparent: add an infinite number of wave motions and the position is determinised; there are no longer any wavelengths left to speak of, and a particle appears, locked in space. The more fixed the localisation in space, the weaker the wavelength; the stronger the wavelength appears, the more the phenomenon spreads itself out in space. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism is thereby not merely an onto-epistemological complex; the oscillation evidently has an exact equivalent in the complementarity between wave and particle in experimental metaphysics.
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.
Physical presentism, however, is a phenomenological eternalism placed within the mobilist conception of reality; a transrationalist eternalism with factually motivated limitations. It is based on the conviction that the past is fixed, while the future is open and nebulous, and only the present is ontologically real. But the presentist position is only correct with the caveat that the present must be regarded as an eternalisation of an ontic flow which thereby is not an abstract thing but rather a concrete field. For example, the present as an event is already shifted to the past, as a fictive, in every contemplative moment. Phenomenological eternalism is merely an ontological, perceptional necessity, but not an ontic, physical truth about existence outside the mind. This applies to presentism just as much as to physical eternalism. The present is real, but it is only real as a relationalist phenomenal field rather than as a relativist noumenal thing. Just like the experience of the object’s exactitude as a substantial particle, the experience of the present’s exactitude as an infinitesimal moment is nothing other than an eternalist illusion. The experience in itself does not constitute ontological proof of anything at all. Thus, the correct transrationalist presentism should not be confused with the incorrect classical presentism.
The thing in itself cannot be experienced as an object, since it is de facto not an object, but merely a highly arbitrary eternalisation. It is not the thing in itself but the eternalisation of the thing that must be regarded as the real conjuring trick in Kantian correlationism. Once we understand this, we need no longer accept the Kantian axioms. A new kind of ontological realism at once becomes possible, what Barad calls agential realism and Stephen Hawking names model-dependent realism. The relationalist response to Kant is that the phenomena are fields rather than particles. The fields consist of intensities and probabilities and in fact never have any clear boundaries. For physics per se has no use whatsoever for clear boundaries. The clear boundaries must rather be viewed as an expression of narcissistic wishful thinking in an anthropocentric world view which is wrestling with its lack of processing capacity in relation to the inexhaustible oceans of information in existence. Every time we are forced to hear the clichés about quantum physics being obscure, mysterious and startling – or see how it is accused of being some kind of shallow forgery of reality, a mirage which clearly hides a more intuition-friendly and therefore more real reality, hidden behind some kind of cosmic, mysterious veil – it is Kant’s voice within us and in the prevailing culture that is speaking.
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.
At the same moment that the eternalisation is carried out, as Heraclitus points out, existence has already changed and moved somewhere else in history. The Platonists are of course disturbed by the epistemological impossibility of de facto knowing and discerning a mobilist world when their evidently clumsy eternalisations are the only way to gain contact with physical reality. They flock around the fetishistic dream of gaining direct access to an existence that constantly eludes them. When the relationalists then claim that existence is radically contingent, that the future is open, that all apparently durable laws can be altered at any time; then we can of course, and unfortunately, write off all attempts to achieve a sustainable universal theory of everything for physics. For it is precisely this fetish that the relationalist deprives the Platonist of; the desire to experience and rule the world as it is can never be fulfilled in any way. It is both physically and in principle impossible to catch the world in a constantly expanding universe with the magical arrow of time as a given constant. This is the meaning of the principle of explanatory closure.
The principle of explanatory closure is based on the insight that at the end of the day the Universe is a gigantic, unmanageable ontic flow that is expanding at a tremendously high rate. The Universe did not create itself in some kind of unique moment of self-genesis – in the manner that the traditional religions, and up until recently the natural sciences as well, imagined the whole process to have taken place. Rather, it creates and recreates itself all the time in a constantly ongoing process. But all explanatory models of everything require an arbitrarily chosen but nevertheless necessary freeze of this flow, an eternalisation, in order to be possible, or even conceivable. The reason is quite simply that as soon as some individual explanation has been formulated, the world with all its mutable and interacting systems of atoms has already rushed onwards in all directions from the eternalisation in space–time that the explanation requires and claims to interpret and clarify. The Universe thereby constantly evades all of Man’s pathetic attempts at explanatory candour. Everything of this nature by definition lies outside our human capabilities. This means that the only intellectually honest attitude to the Universe is to accept it as a constantly mutable entity that continuously evades us, pantheism’s the One as God, the explanatory closure par excellence.
Among the old authorities, it is the godfather of German Romanticism Hegel who really displays an understanding of the genesis of the subject, which is apparent when he becomes the first to construct a subject theory using the concept of Atheos as his point of departure. According to Hegel, the subject is not just fundamentally empty and developed as a kind of tragic response to unanswered existential questions – it is moreover a highly temporary and local eternalisation complex without any relevance whatsoever outside of itself. There is, to express the matter in Kantian terms, nothing universal outside the subject that it can transcend into. If, for example, we were to amuse ourselves by condensing the Hegelian and relationalist subject experience into three words, then the concepts emptiness, diminutiveness and transience fit just perfectly.
The subject arises as an emergent phenomenon when perception is forced to prioritise in the overwhelming flow of information from the sensory organs – that which the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce dubs semiosis – in order to give the enormous amount of data an actual utility. It is in this freezing and regulating of the perceptual flow that dividuation occurs; it is then and there that the subject arises as a necessary eternalisation of the body’s mobilist chaos, as an organised contraction rather than a galloping inflation in the mind. The reward for dividuation is that a tangible and manageable world view is immediately produced, with the contentless subject as its fictitious centre. When the subject then contemplates itself as objectively being before itself, it becomes conscious of itself as the empty subject, Atheos.
Descartes is thus correct in one sense, at least to some degree, but not in the way he himself thinks: there is really a subject, but it is a fundamentally illusory such. The subject experience is impossible to deny or even regulate or avoid once one is clear about its illusory nature. It exists only in our own heads, yet exists to the highest degree. The subject is a constantly recurring element of disturbance in the flow of being which precisely therefore succeeds in tying together being into a being that appears as something that can be taken in and is at least manageable in patches. Since first and foremost this subject is the necessary first eternalisation of the mobilist chaos of existence, we call it the eternalist subject. But the subject should in no way be regarded as a ‘managing director’ of consciousness. As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan points out, the subject is instead harboured in the subconscious. However, it is not synonymous with the subconscious. Rather, the subject is synonymous with the struggle between consciousness and the subconscious, in precisely the subconscious, and survives since this antagonism never reaches or can achieve any permanent solution. The fact that we cannot imagine the subject as a completed project, that we cannot see ourselves as complete human beings, is the very prerequisite for the subjective experience. The change in our essence and inadequacy drives us towards the change.
We arrive at asha and anchibasie at the same moment that we let their meaning pass from being-external observing to being-internal participation. From this point of departure in syntheist mysticism, of necessity we land in fact in relationalist ethics. No other philosopher either before or after Heraclitus – with the possible exception of its predecessor and source of inspiration Zoroaster – has been so close to defining metaphysical truth with such precision. For it is precisely in its intense closeness to the truth event – rather than in some kind of absorption into the event – that the metaphysical truth is manifested, in its constantly failing yet necessary attempt to unite the at least two at the core of the ontology. We express this by saying that through all the thousands and thousands of truths we constantly produce, we find the primordial eternalisation as the defining truth as an act for our existential substance, as the primal act for us as creative truth machines.
Syntheism embraces an ethics of survival as a counterweight to immortality’s moralism, which is characteristic of the dualist philosophies’ outlooks on life. The Platonist obsession with immortality and perfection attests to its hostility vis-à-vis existence and life, a phobia of change that at its deepest level is a death worship. From syntheism’s Nietzschean perspective, Plato and his dualist heirs therefore stand out as the prophets of the death wish. Syntheism instead celebrates the eternalisation of the decisive moment, the manifestation of the One in the irreducible multiplicity, as the infinite now. All values and valuations must then be based on the infinite now as the event horizon. Eternity in time and infinity in space are not extensions of some kind in Platonist space–time of some kind, but poetically titled compact concentrations of passionate presence, as Heideggerian-inspired nodes in Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism. Eternity in time and infinity in space can only meet in the infinite now, in temporality’s minimised freezing, rather than in some kind of maximised extension. We are thus not eternal creatures because we are immortal, but because we can think and experience eternity as a logical as well as an emotional representation of the infinite, focused to the current moment. Which in turn means that the syntheist transcendence is localised inside rather than outside the immanence.
In the second part of the Futurica Trilogy, The Global Empire, we describe in detail how the perceptive eternalisation of the mobilist chaos of existence is necessary in order for us to be able to act, while mobilism is eternalism’s always present, demonic shadow. In that sense, ontology is the secondary eternalisation of the primary mobilism, the presentation of the unpresentable as a schematic model, the objectification of the emptiness of the void. This perception transforms the multiplicity into functional fictives; models that the mind must be allowed to tinker with in order to be able to mobilise an overview and organise a meaningful and relevant activity at all. Badiou puts the eternalisation of the phenomenon on an equal footing with the mathematisation of existence. Infinity takes precedence over finitude, ontology is the same thing as mathematics. He then continues to the need for the situation, Badiou’s concept for the structured presentation of the multiplicity, a kind of consolidating theatrical performance of sundry fictives. Only in the right situation is the truth event possible, argues Badiou. He is inspired here by both St Paul and Vladimir Lenin: for these thinkers, the timing is not just a matter of strategic necessity: it also has a significant ethical dimension. Waiting for the right moment for the action faithful to the truth is an important component in Badiou’s ethics: the timing is a central aspect of the loyalty itself.
Syntheology is in turn the intensification of syntheism that is enabled when it sees itself as a truth as an act and focuses on one single wisely chosen eternalisation, in order to intensify the thinking based on this fundamental point. It is precisely this we mean when we say that correctly practised theology enables an intensification of philosophy. Syntheology’s well-chosen eternalisation is neither God nor the Individual, as in the previous paradigms, but religion per se as the network before all others in the informationalist society. The term religion – in its original significance as a social phenomenon that connects people with each other – is in fact synonymous with the term network. This means that syntheism is the metareligion that binds together humanity through practising a truth that sees the network – that is, religion per se – as sacred. Syntheology thus realises what has always been the innermost dream of a religion for religion’s sake.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58