Back to index
Eternalism
The conviction that a world view can only be constructed from the temporary eternalisations produced by perception within the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism, which means that a world view is never permanent but must be constantly reassessed, modified and, at paradigm shifts, also rejected and replaced from scratch. Note that this state of affairs does not give any carte blanche for cultural relativism’s claim that all histories are of equal value. According to eternalism, intersubjectively and pragmatically rejected histories have for example no value whatsoever and there are great differences in truth quality between various assertions depending on their pragmatic utility and sustainability in the syntheist community.
Like so many Platonists before him, Badiou makes precisely this mistake. He falsely assumes that the eternalism that his own perception produces is more real than the mobilism that one’s perception is constantly confronted with from all directions in one’s physical surroundings. Badiou thus thinks in a closed or anthropocentric way, rather than in an open and universocentric way, when he investigates the ontological status of mathematics. Exactly as Plato did 2,300 years ago, Badiou lets his own neurosis get in the way of his philosophical perspicacity. It is one of syntheism’s most important tasks to eliminate the whole idea of eternal, external laws with an assumed origin in an eternal, external world to which we have no access. This is superstition rather than science.
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.
Mobilist thinking experiences a veritable golden age in Greece during the early Axial Age. The influence from Zoroastrian Iran is considerable. Heraclitus, Greece’s own Zoroaster, lays the foundation for both philosophy.html">process philosophy and paradoxism. He gives priority to sight (mobilism) over hearing (eternalism) among the human senses and direct experience over indirect interpretation. And while he is at it, Heraclitus also creates dialectics; he argues that creativity only can develop and grow where a clear opposition to the prevailing order reigns. Homer’s myths and Aeschylus’ classic drama revolve around holistically thinking people who live in a monist universe, and these ancient texts bear witness to a protosyntheist world view. It is during this period that Thales, the father of the natural sciences, produces the first syntheist tweet in history: All things are full of gods.
As long as the soul is kept separate from the body, it can be held morally responsible for any possible transgressions of the body. This explains why totalism is always followed by moralism, and with it, the possibility to threaten, persecute, imprison, monitor and terrorise people. If there is anything that totalism is constantly obsessed with, it is the thought of creating the perfect society, where the law is always adhered to and need never be changed. The totalist mind is thus obsessed with stasis and hates all forms of variability. The variability that can be observed in society and in nature is regarded as a regrettable anomaly which, with some good will and a suitable mix of remedial measures – that is, through criminalising the undesired behaviour that disturbs the statis fantasy – one should be able to wipe out. Totalism is an eternalism that refuses to be part of a dialectics with mobilism. It is, if we use McGilchrist’s metaphors again, the left cerebral hemisphere which runs amok devastatingly in the absence of the right hemisphere, and at its expense.
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.
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.
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.
The existential experience places the subject in the world of psychology, and psychology is embedded in eternalism and in itself has nothing to do with the mobilist reality outside the mind. The human mind and its peculiarities primarily belong in empirical psychology and not in the world of ontology. Syntheism regards them as creative attributes of their divinities, rather than as philosophical foundations. Subjectivity is thus a subconscious by-product of an external movement rather than a conscious construction in a stagnant mind. It is, as the existentialist Martin Heidegger would say, the activity in the lifeworld and not the passivity in the mind that gives the subject its essence. The syntheistic agent thus arises in the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos. Syntheism is thus supremely a proud heir of existentialism from its founder Sören Kierkegaard via Nietzsche to Heidegger. The syntheist agent’s existential experience is definitely a Dasein in the Heideggerian sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hume and Meillassoux depart from Kant’s troublesome, incorrect determinism and opens up philosophy to the empirically established indeterminism in Bohrian quantum physics. It should be noted here that Leibniz presages relationalism even before Hume does so with his principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz was not only one of the most significant and most original predecessors among the philosophers, but also an innovative and brilliant mathematician. He built a Monadology, a kind of early variant of the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, which precedes Kantian Platonism. Above all, with his credibility within the natural sciences, Leibniz created the most clearly defined mobilist alternative to the contemporaneously developed Newtonian totalism. The metaphysical antagonism between Leibniz and Newton presages the struggle within our own contemporary physics between on the one hand relationalism and its cosmological Darwinism, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more complex; and on the other hand relativism and its fixation with the second law of thermodynamics, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more simplified as it expands and disperses.
In the world of physics, the concept of eternalism is used as a designation for the conviction that all points on the line of time are ontologically as real as each other. All moments that have ever existed or ever will exist are regarded as radically equal from an ontological perspective. The opposite view, that only the present is real, is called presentism. Note how the concepts correlate with the phenomenological pair of opposites eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire). Physical eternalism is the conviction we end up in if we allow phenomenological eternalism – with its radically equal fictives, since no fixation of the chaos of existence can be more fixed than any other – to run amok because we have forgotten to place it ontologically within mobilism. These radically equal, frozen fictives in space–time are mistaken for being reality itself instead of the chaos of existence from which we produce them. Obviously, Plato, Newton and Einstein are all physical eternalists, and they are such for the very reason that they overestimate the possibilities that phenomenological eternalism offers in what actually is an ontologically mobilist universe.
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.
According to the myth that we live in a block universe, which follows from the Einsteinian revolution, the Universe and history are regarded as united in eternally frozen four-dimensional space–time. Time must be an illusion then, in its capacity as an ontic flow, if it is regarded as the fourth space dimension. There is no evidence whatsoever for this view of time being physically correct, yet it is precisely this that Einstein maintains when the idea of time as illusion becomes widely accepted in conjunction with his theories of relativity gaining adherents. That time is made into a kind of fourth spatial dimension – and thereby is transformed into a kind of mathematically, and doubtlessly also existentially, tempting expansion of existence – seems historically speaking not to have any deeper cause than a purely subjective arbitrariness. It mainly revolves around physics suddenly becoming a little more playful as a mathematical exercise in model construction. The thing is though, that if time in principle is regarded as a kind of space, there is not much difference between the ticking of a clock and a measuring tape placed on a stretch of road. The ticking of the clock becomes a smooth way of measuring the distance between two points, which according to the accompanying physical eternalism fittingly enough is ontologically just as real.
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.
The eternalist world view exists because the human being needs it: physics on the other hand manages splendidly without eternalism in our mobilist Universe. The perception process transforms the mobilist field into an eternalised thing. The abstract thing thus does not exist in an ontic sense, it must instead be understood as a kind of concrete field. Evolution has conveniently developed perception into a highly efficient information prioritisation mechanism, rather than into the ontological truth producer that Kantian rationalism in its superstitiousness desires it to be. It is thus the perception that freezes the concrete field in space–time and decodes it as a delimited fictive. The key word here is intensity. A phenomenon is mainly a kind of noumenal intensity. The higher the activity and complexity within a concrete field, the higher the intensity. The physicists Julian Barbour and Lee Smolin have defined complexity in a physical sense as multiplicity. The greater the difference within a subsystem, the greater the variation. Self-organised systems organise energy flows as feedback loops, for both positive and negative feedback. Thereafter it is simply a case of multiplying the variation by the activity in order to be able to calculated the intensity of the phenomenon in question.
There is of course an ongoing oscillating dialectics between eternalism and mobilism in the human mind, but the truth and reality beyond Man’s perceptional fantasy world is fundamentally mobilist. The Universe is thus contingent and not symmetrical. Stability and necessity have nothing whatsoever to do with each other: connecting them logically is to let oneself be hypnotised by an eternalist illusion. That existence on a fundamental level is transfinite does not mean that it cannot produce temporarily stable states. Quite the opposite: temporary stabilities in complex systems can be every bit as common as explosive changes. They are however, just like the explosions, always temporary. Since everything influences everything else in a mobile and contingent universe, everything will sooner or later change and transition into completely new emergent states. And what is this if not the physical realisation of Zoroaster’s ethical ideal of haurvatat?
In his book Time Reborn Lee Smolin draws attention to the recurring dilemma, that scientists constantly assume that ontologically speaking existence is both mobilist and eternalist. But as we have seen that is not at all the case. Existence per se is only mobilist. Eternalism is something that our senses and our consciousness produces, but it has nothing to do with the world outside our senses and our consciousness; crassly speaking eternalism is just a phenomenological by-product. This relationalist position results in the wave (mobilism) having priority over the particle (eternalism); they are thus not ontologically equal in merit, for the wave is primary in relation to the particle, which is secondary. And yet science is constantly tempted to fall into the trap which entails assuming there is an eternalist background to the Universe, either through the mistake of mixing eternalism into mobilist physics, or, which is even worse, through assuming that eternalism is the real reality, while our mobilist Universe in that case must be a chimera. Both Newton and Einstein are Platonists who get stuck in this trap, and the same goes, for example, for the majority of contemporary string theoreticians.
If we use Iain McGilchrist’s division between the role of the cerebral hemispheres in The Divided Brain metaphorically, the left hemisphere thus constitutes a centre of eternalism, subjectification, objectification, mathematisation, individuality, hierarchisation and logical cogency. If left to its own devices, or if allowed to dominate too much, it leans towards neurosis, and remains at a distance and acts indirectly vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is the centre of mobilism, motion, change, holism, dividuality, diversity and intuition. If left alone or allowed to dominate, it leans towards psychosis, and it remains engaged and acts directly vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The left hemisphere is thus the centre of the drive.html">death drive, and its transcendental philosophers champion immortality as a principle, which means that the present life that we are actually living should be ignored and should just be gone through and stoically endured, since its intensity can be postponed in all eternity anyway. Correspondingly, the right hemisphere is the centre of the libido, and its immanent philosophers fight for survival as a principle, where the actual life that we are actually living is to be lived with the greatest possible passion and intensity, since it gets its subliminal quality precisely from its transience.
This is abundantly clear to the protosyntheists Zoroaster, Heraclitus and their Chinese counterpart Lao Tzu as early as a few thousand years before their devoted successors Nietzsche and Heidegger complete their thinking. And as for Heidegger, he of course constructs his entire ethics of presence from anchibasie – this concept is the very key to his existentialist objective, Gelassenheit, or spiritual liberation. For syntheism asha and anchibasie are not just inspiring concepts from the infancy of philosophy but also the basis for its existentialism. The search for closeness to the truth and the will to presence in the truth’s inner division – caused by its constant oscillation and the impossibility of ever being eternalised outside the fantasy world of Man – means that the core of syntheistic mysticism already existed with Zoroaster and Heraclitus. Asha and anchibasie are not just the fundamentals of syntheist onto-epistemology – we cannot in any way make use of the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism without assuming them – but are also the ethical substance in syntheist mysticism.
Thereafter we only have to reverse the addition to get subtraction, the temporarily negative addition – neither more nor less. In the next step, we build further with multiplication and division as shortcuts to increasingly complex additions and subtractions. And so on, and so forth. But we never leave eternalism within mathematics, which of course ultimately is applied eternalism par excellence. Mobilist existence outside mathematical construction does not take any notice of this however; it is not the least bit more mathematical than it is eternalist. All such things are merely illusory conceptions that are nourished by our inadequate albeit functional aids for navigating the turmoil of existence. It is important to note here that mathematics does not distinguish itself from physics as some kind of latter-day emergence – no such suddenly arisen mystical degree of complexity is needed – rather, this separation actually occurs right at the same moment that mathematics starts to come into use at all. The structured fantasy sets off in one direction, the chaotic reality in another. We live in a radically relationalist universe – not in a mathematical one. We must not follow the autistic Plato and mistake mathematics’ tempting simplifications and fancy symmetries for endlessly complex reality per se. Mathematics is merely our eternalised way of trying to understand a mobilist environment that constantly evades our descriptions of it, and at the end of the day this must also apply to mathematical formulas per se, which become tangible within Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. According to the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, one of Whitehead’s most prominent disciples, Cantor succeeds in creating a science of infinity. Syntheism can only agree and if nothing else say thank you for the inspiring metaphors.
Heidegger attempts to change transcendence from within. He argues that transcendence acquires a new, credible role if it can be understood as an internal human activity and not as an external separate domain that Man tries to achieve and conquer, that is, as a transcendental psychology rather than a Kantian phenomenology. Heidegger’s search can be compared with the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire). Without eternalism, perception would end up in a complete psychosis. While without mobilism we would end up in an equally complete neurosis, since everything would then be transformed into a single gigantic, incalculable mess without any distinction or limitation whatsoever. Eternalism is the expression of transcendence, mobilism is the expression of immanence, in a Heideggerian sense. And both are just as necessary, and moreover in a dialectical relationship to each other, in order for Man to be able to construct a functional world view to be de facto present in.
Eternalism distinguishes itself from totalism inasmuch as it does not adduce any kind of ontological status or pretend to be primary and external in relation to mobilist reality. Instead it is strictly phenomenological. The father of pragmatism Peirce emphasises mobilism’s primary ontological status precisely by calling it firstness; consequently he confers a status on eternalism denoted as secondness and in closing refers to the dialectic between them (that is, when phenomenology returns to mobilism after a digression via eternalism) as thirdness. Thus as secondness, eternalism has no Platonist ambitions at all. It instead apprehends itself as a brilliant, perceptive response to the massive semiotic flow from an immanent and contingent universe (Peirce is not very surprisingly also the father of semiotics). Eternalism is thereby very much in fact a transcendence as an activity, exactly what Heidegger would like to see, and as such it manages all of totalism’s hobbyhorses excellently without totalism being able to sneak in the back door and once again try to attack mobilist ontology.
Here Badiou has an important point: hermeneutics is the opium of the academic world. Against the cultural relativist curse of hermeneutics he pits mathematics as an opposite pole and as corrective: only through mathematics does he see contact with the real as possible; only through mathematics can Man think being. Badiou’s obsession with the possibilities of mathematics is a direct consequence of the fact that his master Jacques Lacan insists that language must be regarded as an ontological network that can only lie above, and thus both excludes and acts independently of, the real. Where language is based on an eternal stacking of vague abstractions, mathematics is instead concrete and exact. Not least thanks to its enormous accuracy within quantum physics, mathematics has proven its credibility in the role as a bearer of philosophical realism. Idea and flow are merged in mathematics; the difference between eternalism and mobilism is prised up, the vision of an eternalism that is more than just a temporary freezing in perception is realised, and a model-dependent realism becomes possible.
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.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58