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Ethics
From the Greek ethos, originally customs: values based on intention in relation to expected processes of cause and effect. In contrast to their opposite morals, they lack both an external agency of judgement and any references whatsoever to different emotional states, for example empathy, as if these were relevant in terms of value. Ethics therefore only refers to the syntheist agent herself, who thereby gets her ethical substance by identifying completely with her libidinal intentions.
According to the Austrian monk David Steindl-Rast, religious practice starts with doctrine, which is followed by ethics and finally consummated in ritual – all with the purpose of creating a social emergence, to unite people around an entity that they experience as greater than themselves individually, and greater than the sum of the group of individuals. This is definitely something worth bearing in mind: the original point of religion was to create affinity and loyalty within a dynamic collective. In this context, God is no more than the arbitrarily chosen name for the sense of belonging that people seek. Nowhere is this usage of God as a productive object of projection clearer than in the person who has failed in life in his or her own mind and is bravely struggling for self-restitution. When Bill Wilson founds Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States in the 1930s for example, it was with the unshakeable conviction that religion – in whichever form it appears, as long as it preaches a sense of belonging that is greater and mightier than the small, cramped prison, which is how the addict experiences his/her own subjectivity – is the best possible springboard out of alcohol addiction. Religion is that within us which is greater than ourselves and for precisely this reason it is closer to our hearts than our fragile little egos.
Note that philosophy is religion according to the definition we are now putting forward. It follows from this that religion can also be philosophy. In this context, it is important to understand that reality is not quite as real as we are biologically and socially programmed to believe. While philosophy tries to come as close to the truth as possible in life’s chaos of information, religion transforms this information and formulates its own particular truth based on this approximation. When truth is thus regarded as an active endeavour, by definition philosophy should be regarded as truth, while religion is philosophical truth manifested in practice. Syntheology constantly returns to this concept of truth as an act. The passion for activism is the very foundation of syntheist ethics.
Kant is unarguably the prophet of individualism par excellence. His individual is a tragic solipsist who – precisely because of her solipsism – is free to act as a ruthless egoist. Kant’s radical subjectivism – with its emphasis on free will, dominance, abstract inner experiences and strict, soldier ethics – is built around the subject’s transcendental separation from the object, which means that the object can be deified undisturbed, to be later conquered, colonised and plundered. Individualism is a master ideology. The individual has taken over God’s place as the only thing that is certain in life according to Descartes’ basic tenet I think, therefore I am, which Kant later develops to perfection. Humanism and representationalism grow rapidly out of and presuppose individualism and atomism as metaphysical axioms. Through its prioritisation of the representation over the represented, representationalism suits exploding capitalism right down to the ground. With its actively observing subject and passively observed object – this object merely exists because the subject must have something to relate to – representationalism is a sublime expression of capitalist ideology. Society is based on strong, active, expanding subjects. Around them flock weak, passive, delimited objects, pining for the subject’s gaze and attention. These objects are to be hunted, conquered, tamed, exploited and finally discarded before the entire process is repeated with ever-new objects as targets.
Zoroaster wants to see his followers as hedonists and self-affirming Mazdayasni with a deep ethics constructed on the basis of their intentions, instead of terrified and submissive Ahurayasni with their morality constructed on the basis of the consequences of their actions. Zoroaster thereby turns his back on primitivism’s consequentialism and instead develops the first intentionalism in the history of ideas; his religion is the first that happens inside the minds of people rather than out there in the endless cosmos. Ironically it is the Arabic neighbour Islam that later develops and consummates the opposite idea – of Ahurayasna as its own, radically moralist religion (the term Islam itself means submission in Arabic).
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.
Evolution is quite simply such a strong and captivating metaphor for many of the 19th century’s intellectuals that they very much want to make it the fundamental ethical principle, as if it were the task of the righteous in some bizarre way to speed up a history whose development is of course anyway preordained according to their own determinist conviction. For Marx, the Communist revolution of the proletariat, for example, is a deed that he must command his readers and disciples to carry out, in spite of the fact that, according to his own view, it will take place anyway because of the historical necessity that he himself and Friedrich Engels describe in their writings. In a similar manner, Comte regards his social evolutionism as so perfect that strangely enough he wants to turn it into a secular religion. Social evolutionary ideas continue to thrive in Europe up until the mass murders of Nazism and Stalinism around the mid-20th century. Then, if not before, the danger of arguing for a militant ethics based on a vulgar natural determinism and driven by alienation’s ressentiment rather than by religion’s search for benevolent dialogue with one’s fellow man, becomes manifest. In this way the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century are the dark flip side of the Enlightenment. Rationalism without consciousness of its own fundamental blind faith is, as Habermas’ gurus Horkheimer and Adorno show in Dialectic of Enlightenment, literally lethal for humanity.
A flagrant example of such a compensatory narcissist ideology is the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian vision of a future prison, erected according to the architectural Panopticon model, a complete institution built in pie wedges around a single human, all-seeing eye at its centre. Bentham imagines a prison built from a central viewpoint from which a sole actor constantly surveys all other activities within the construction. The panopticon is of course nothing other than a material reflection of Bentham’s own self-image and world view, his attempt at a Napoleonisation of bureaucratic architecture. The panopticon is quite simply the dark flip side of Bentham’s utilitarianism, his runaway fantasy of a hyperrationalist ethics, which can calculate every individual’s wishes in advance, put a price on and determine the value of all people’s wishes vis-à-vis each other and then compile how one might be able to maximise these wishes into empirically measurable, maximised total utility.
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.
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.
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.
But it is not just Foucault and his successors that inspire Barad. From another of her predecessors, Donna Haraway, she borrows the idea that the diffraction of wave motions is a better metaphor for thinking than reflection. Ontology, epistemology, phenomenology and ethics are all influenced radically and fundamentally by the new universocentric perspective. They all interact in the new onto-epistemology around agential realism. Quantum physics radically breaks away space–time from Newtonian determinism. With this shift it is also necessary to abandon the idea of geometry giving us an authentic picture of reality. It is with the aid of topology rather than through geometry that we can do syntheist metaphysics justice, Barad argues. Neither time nor space exist a priori as transcendental, determined givens, before or outside any phenomena, which is of course what Kant imagines. Time is not a thread of patiently lined-up and evenly dispersed intervals, and space is not an empty container in which matter can be gathered. The role of the engine of metaphysics is shouldered by non-linear network dynamics, which drives the equally non-linear event, rather than the old linear history, which is supposed to drive the equally linear progress. Entheist duration is thus also a dynamic, not a linear, phenomenon.
Cause and effect arise through intra-activity within the phenomena. According to Bohr, cause and effect are not deterministic, nor do they perform in any absolute freedom. Cause and effect operate with varying degrees of probability in openness to the future. Exclusions in every intra-acting movement close the possibility of all forms of determinism and keep the future open. Agential realism is thus radically indeterministic, but does not on that account permit any free will in the classical sense. Free will namely presumes that everything desirable is possible, but this is of course never the case since every individual process comprises an infinite number of exclusions and takes place in a situation which is defined precisely by its limitations. Thus all the fancy talk about free will is pointless. All the more since no Cartesian cogito exists that might be able to exercise this free will, if it were to exist in spite of everything. However, free choice is a credible and extremely interesting concept for syntheist ethics; however free choice is an entirely different concept to free will.
From a relationalist perspective, Brassier however makes three mistakes in his reasoning. First of all, there is nothing that says that ethics must be governed by, or in any way be connected with, how nature works. If that were the case, in principle one would never have needed to question 19th century social Darwinism, and the concept of civilisation would be uninteresting in this context. Brassier’s ethics really don’t deviate on any important point from social Darwinism’s bizarre quest to reduce the human being to a creature whose only task it is to put Darwinian evolution on the right track, so to speak, as if history – paradoxically enough thus both deterministic and indeterministic at the same time – just like evolution for some obscure reason would need speeding up and to be guided towards its own, explicitly inevitable fulfilment. Brassier is here guilty of a kind of naturalist masochism, an existential resignation in the face of the human being’s possibilities of finding her own identity-creating ethics that is independent of her environment’s presumed historical direction. Therefore, his ethics comes down to an ambition to given in to and copy what nature is presupposed to tell us through its blind fickleness, and an edict to perceive these ruthless and highly arbitrary culling processes as commendable.
Against the idea of the human being as a malleable creature subject to a fate which is paradoxically both unavoidable and his duty to create, syntheism puts forth the ideals of Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze: the human being as an affirmative activist battling against all that which she apprehends as nature’s – or for that matter even culture’s – systematic arbitrariness in the form of imposed rules of play. Rather, according to syntheist ethics it is precisely in the protest against the‘ given conditions of existence and in the human being’s civilizational redirections of history that she makes his imprint as an ethical creature. It is Man’s concrete actions in the battle against nature’s givens which subsequently generates ethical substance, which thus has nothing to do with any personal suitability for subservience. The same obviously applies for every thought of an indeterministic world where the task of ethics would be to call on the human being, against his better judgement, to behave as though he were deterministic after all; a position that can be exemplified by the vulgar and stupid imperative “Follow your nature!”. If existence indeed were deterministic, which it certainly isn’t, this call would be completely superfluous, since there are no alternatives. Nor any ethical problems to contemplate either.
It is instead the memory of ecstasy that frames existence, and it is this framing in itself that generates experiences of meaning, value, identity and ethical substance. Here, syntheist ethics breaks not only with Brassier’s neuronal quantity fixation, but also with utilitarianism’s autistic overconfidence in statistical utility functions on the whole; the most important things in life might not always be free, but they are definitely not measurable, nor are they thereby objectively comparable between people. That which cannot be measured cannot be treated as something measurable with one’s intellectual credibility still intact. Even less so can an entire ethical system be based on such impossible and childish quantitative comparing. In the same way that utilitarianism must fail to grasp the central role of the transcending experience in the syntheist agent’s lifeworld – utilitarians are evidently themselves both emotionally and spiritually handicapped – syntheism is definitely not some kind of utilitarianism.
Thirdly, Brassier follows in the post-structuralist Jean-Francois Lyotard’s footsteps and is obsessed with the future death of the stars as a horizon for ethics. But this is based on a misunderstanding of what physics tells us. According to M-theory, universa are incessantly generated in a multiverse that has no limits whatsoever for its possible expansion. Regardless of whether our current universe eventually levels out into an endless and cold, black goo, or if its accelerating expansion is dramatically turned into a compressing contraction – or in any other way is suddenly transformed into a new round of accelerating expansion, as the physicist Roger Penrose suggests in his book Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe – there are no obstacles to the rise of new universa both within and outside our own universe. Physics supplies no such obstacles, and once we have got past the spatial and temporal limitations – which in our intuition we find it so infinitely hard to think ourselves past – the death of the stars disappears as a necessary or even conceivable horizon for ethics.
This has the consequence that syntheist ethics cannot be based on anything other than a kind of constantly variable existentialist adaptation to the irrefutably overwhelming ontic and ontological flows of existence, a pragmatist as well as spiritual subordination in relation to the expanding, mobilist enormity. For us as temporal creatures, this existentialist adaptation must take the form of amor fati, the unconditional acceptance of and love for the past as the basis for syntheist ethics. Once we have accepted the past as one long line of always equally unlikely but nevertheless real actualities in an endless ocean of never realised potentialities – just think of how many millions of sperm nature wasted in order for just one sperm to penetrate the only egg at your own genesis – we turn amor fati towards the future, a future that is open, indeterminist and full of potentialities that can all be brought to life. In this future, the utopia may be highly unlikely and yet fully possible, and this fact becomes the target of our syntheist faith. Amor fati is consummated as a truth as an act in a fixed direction towards the utopia; an act from which everything else of importance in our lives subsequently gets its ethical substance.
Syntheist ethics is thus sociorelationalist and not cultural relativist, based on the original Zoroastrian understanding that intention, decision and interaction sooner or later coincide and together form the only possible ethical substance of both the individual human being and the collective civilisation. This means that the principle of explanatory closure not only kills Kant’s rationalist idea that Man is born with the natural ability to understand rather than simply subordinate himself to the world in its entirety; even Kant’s rationalist idea of Man being able to understand himself as a being within his own lifeworld is dead. The solid, closed and primary individual is replaced by the divided, open and secondary dividual as the human ideal. This means that the conceited idea that our thoughts and words belong to ourselves, that we can identify ourselves with what we think and say without connecting this to body, action and environment – as though what we are thinking and saying were originally created by and exclusive to ourselves – is dead. We will never have any sustainable identity as the inventors of these ideas, but on the other hand as their potential thoroughfares and interim receptacles.
Syntheist ethics is based on this state of affairs. At the same time that the syntheist agent understands the terror of eternal life, right up until the moment of death she still seeks the continued dividuation in survival as desire’s conscious response to the drive’s subconscious longing for dissolution in constantly new phenomena. Therefore – as the syntheist philosopher Martin Hägglund shows in his book atheism.html">Radical Atheism – survival is the cornerstone in syntheist ethics, while immortality, because of its infantile premises, does not belong in the syntheist utopia at all. There is a logic in wanting to live longer, deeper and more intensely. But there is no logic whatsoever in trying to prolong something forever, since immortality robs that which is to be prolonged of all its meaning. To wish for immortality is the same as wishing away desire, and without desire the whole point of wanting to exist as a human being disappears. And then there is not either any reason to survive. We express this as the drive.html">death drive being the compulsion to return to the inorganic – which expresses itself as a constant striving to minimise, avoid and defer life’s intensity – while desire is the will to prolong and maximise the expression of the organic in the infinite now.
In the intimate relation with the other, ethical and moral values arise, respectively (see The Body Machines). The concepts ethics and morality originally had the same meaning: ethics comes from the Greek word ethos and morality comes from the Latin word morales, and both these terms can be translated as customs. But after Spinoza’s philosophical divide between ethics on the one hand and morality on the other in the 17th century, the concepts have come to have completely different meanings. Ethics thus concerns an attitude connected to an identity, confronted with a choice between different anticipated constructive or destructive effects of the contemplated intervention in a surmised course of events. Being an ethical being is to go through life with the right, and in all respects reasonable, intentions. Ethics thus concerns the right or wrong choice in relation to the actor herself. It is an internalised evaluation process. Being an ethical agent is to identify oneself with the intentions of the decisions one makes.
Morality implies a gloomy seriousness, while ethics implies a playful abundance. Note how the pair of opposites good versus evil implies moral decadence, which must be rectified by being offered a reward, or the threat of punishment. On the other hand, the ethical pair of opposites right versus wrong implies a search for and strengthening of the inner identity, quite irrespective of the outcome of the course of events in question. Note that we are speaking of an inner ethical identity that is created through the intention and is strengthened through action: it is definitely not about some kind of essence that is already at hand in the way that Descartes and Kant imagine the moral subject. The syntheist agent thus does not see ethics as arising from any kind of individual identity, but as a truth as an act that provides the tangible void in the centre of the subject with a sincerely longed-for attribute, however short-lived.
One way of clarifying the difference between ethics and morality is to study a typical borderline case. Kant creates his transcendental philosophy in the 18th century in the borderland between monotheistic Christianity and atheistic individualism. On account of the growing German and French bourgeoisie, he carries out the self-imposed task of calculating how Man could replace God as the metaphysical centre of existence. Kant borrows the answer from Descartes and maintains that Man is the Master of existence for the simple reason that he can think. But existence can of course only be experienced by Man, the reason being that it requires a consciousness in order to be able to experience it and only Man thinks consciously. He is thus master of a house that he inhabits all by himself.
Since ethics is a more or less free choice between various alternatives – the more freedom that exists in a context, the more ethics is required – and since Kant has made the subject and object of ethics into one and the same thing, he is forced to reduce his ethics to a tautology. When asked the question why it is right to do the right thing, Kant answers laconically that every action should be carried out as if it were universally valid. In other words, it is right to do what is right for the simple and pointless reason that it is right to do the right thing. And then we have not even touched upon the question of exactly what this automatically executed right thing actually is. The only reasonable reaction to Kant’s tautological imperative comes from his successor Nietzsche, who realises that all notions that value philosophy is able to formulate as the right thing in advance must be rejected. Instead he recasts value philosophy as an anthropological project occupied with what Man is anyway already doing and why. The prescriptive value philosophy of Kant is answered commendably by Nietzsche with a descriptive and interactive enlightenment project. Thereby Kant is reduced to a banal moralist, while Nietzsche stands out as the real ethicist.
The point here is that in the Kantian borderland between two value paradigms, interestingly enough Man has neither the amoral God’s freedom to behave as he pleases, nor any judge left to appease in order to get his points registered in his quest for an anticipated reward in eternity. The consequence is that when Kant desperately tries to build a new ethics on top of the old morality – without any foothold in an amoral god – he reduces his phenomenologically divine human being to an ethically paralysed robot. Thereby moralism returns with full force, but this time as a self-referencing feedback loop, where moralism itself has become its own external judge. Understandably enough it is precisely Kant’s peculiar moral philosophy that the succeeding ethicists Hegel and Nietzsche direct their sharpest criticism towards when it comes to Kantianism; in their eyes Kant is nothing other than a naive nihilist, distressingly unaware of the theocide he has just committed. For this reason, both Hegel and Nietzsche pit their pantheist predecessor Spinoza against the deist Kant, and thereby open the way for affirmative nihilism (see The Global Empire), the creative generation of value out of Atheos.
Ethics is an intention founded in an identity in relation to the anticipated result of a cause and an effect. It is the anticipated effect of the action that gives it its ethical weight. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas thinks of ethics as an internal, intersubjective process without any requirements whatsoever on external, objective truths. Various conceivable intentions are weighed against various conceivable chains of cause and effect in a kind of civilised dialogue. Regardless of whether we apply ethics to a dividual or a collective, ethics is founded on an attitude. Nietzsche argues that this attitude is either active or reactive. The active attitude seeks an impression, an impact on existence, a confirmation of the agent’s interaction with its surroundings, in order to attain existential affirmation, a realisation of its own substance. Nietzsche calls this attitude the will to power. Against the will to power stands the reactive attitude, the will to submission, obliteration, a production of identity through identification with the victim rather than with the hero. This reactive attitude creates a bitterness towards existence, it produces and is driven by ressentiment, a perverted pleasure – rather than authentic pleasure – based on an escalating narcissistic self-loathing.
Nietzsche’s idea-archaeology project leads to a powerful recognition of nature’s enormous rather than Man’s minimal power over both the elements and the mind. With Nietzsche, Nature has of course not only the last word about itself, it is also Nature that acts through Man regardless of what this subject, as with Kant, imagines about itself. What would the subject be otherwise, if not in fact a portion of Nature? This means that Nietzsche transposes ethics into an open issue of what culture is possible on top of such a dominating and framing Nature. It is thus in culture that we find the affirmative in Nietzsche’s affirmative nihilism: a cultural concept that Nietzsche transforms, in a pioneering way, from Nature’s opposite into an emergent phenomenon arising out of otherwise indifferent Nature. According to Nietzsche, culture is nothing other than an engaged extension of Nature – or as we express the matter in The Futurica Trilogy: Culture is Nature 2.0. Only by bravely attempting to build culture on top of Nature, rather than to just yield to Nature, can Man procure an ethical substance.
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 ethical consequence of the Nietzschean revolution is that the subject – which hovers in the minimal space between the current event and the next thought – must contemplate the ongoing identity-producing cycle, which de facto is the subject’s engine, in order to be able to shape the next thought as a free choice, a choice whose freedom means that the accomplishment of the intention rewards the subject with ethical substance. Nietzsche’s ethics is thus founded on a syntheist contemplation, which is followed by concrete action that is consistent with the contemplation. It is precisely this human being, she who consistently completes the necessary cycle of ethics to its inexorable end, that Nietzsche terms the übermensch, and it in on her that he pins his hopes when it comes to culture. It is hard to get further away from Kant’s morality robot paralysed in value philosophy than this.
There is an infinite number of agents at an infinite number of levels. According to the mobilist Spinoza, the consequence is that it is the prime task of ethics to maximise potentia agendi, every current agent’s potential. Here memetics comes into the picture and provides us with an excellent, non-linear alternative to Cartesianism’s linear world view. Instead of a subject that is manifested as an individual through giving full expression to its ideas, we get a memeplex that materialises as an agent by invading and occupying a body. It is and has always been our thoughts that control us, instead of the other way around. There is no subject beyond or behind the mental activity that is driven by memes. What is amazing is not that there is a little subject somewhere inside the brain – in the form of a man or woman staring at his or her own cinema screen, on which the incoming stimuli from his or her perception apparatuses are projected, and who then makes and executes decisions based upon the received information (which thus is a fiction manufactured by himself or herself) – but that the brain is so clever that it produces the illusion of a subject which the body harbours for its own survival’s sake.
In the same way that cosmologists and quantum physicists strive for agreement on a theory of everything in physics, syntheologists are working towards constructing a social theory of everything for informationalism. What is striking about the syntheist utopia is that it cannot be formulated beforehand – since it is located in a contingent and indeterministic universe – which means that instead it must be practised before it is articulated. Therefore it is of central importance for both syntheist ethics and creative development that the ideas in a society are not kept locked away behind virtual firewalls or towers of legal papers, but that they can be exchanged in complete freedom between the active dividuals on the Internet. The syntheist utopia is thus first and foremost a society where ideas are free and are not owned by anybody, where the memes form memeplexes that wander freely from human to human, from network to network, and are transformed during these movements without being met with any resistance whatsoever anywhere, apart from the lack of attention that sifts out all memetic losers. Therefore, the digital integrity movement receives the syntheist movement’s full support as the necessary path to this state, which we consequently call utopian memetics.
We seek the answers to these questions for example in the French philosopher Michael Foucault’s pragmatist ethics: If the transparentisation begins from the top down – that is, if it is the rulers who have all of their secrets exposed first – it can be implemented painlessly throughout the entire power structure from the top and all the way down. On the other hand, if the transparentisation begins from the bottom up, the consequence will no doubt be a capitalist police state, and thereby – apart from all the other misery that such a development would entail – the ecological apocalypse would soon be unavoidable. It is the citizens who must first know everything about the activities of the nation state and the major corporations rather than the statist-corporatist establishment being allowed to bug and register the citizens’ opinions and preferences.
Attention has of course in reality few or no links at all to capital, aside from the fact that they have both been power-generating during different historical epochs. Attention is, for example, not a structural lubricant, even if it both creates and changes power structures to a dramatic extent. Its power instead arises as a response to the Internet’s enormous information offering and the plurarchical chaos which this abundance creates. The need for curatorship, qualified information processing, is growing explosively, and the sorting of information is much more important and more valuable than the production of the same. At the very moment that information sorting becomes more important than information production, power over the society shifts from the producers of goods and services, the capitalists, to information sorting and its practitioners, the netocratic curators. We go through the paradigm shift from capitalism to attentionalism. With the advent of attentionalism, the focus of ethics shifts over from the individual’s self-realisation, the capitalist ideal, to the network-dynamical utopia, or what is termed the ethics of interactivity. What is important in existence are the nodes in the network and how these nodes can be merged as often and as much as possible in order to maximise agential existence. The power in this hectic network-building ends up with those who succeed in combining plausibility and attention in the virtual world. And even if this attention can be measured – according to the brilliantly simple but correct formula credibility multiplied by awareness yields attention – it cannot be substituted or in any other way used in transactions in the same way as capital and capitalism’s other valuable assets.
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.
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.
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.
According to relationalism, as the Swedish philosopher of religion Matz Hammarström claims, an intra-acting interdependence between Man and his environment always prevails. Or to put the matter phenomenologically: there is no real boundary between Man’s near-world and his surrounding world. All phenomena that Man is confronted with already include himself ontologically. Then even epistemology, and ultimately also ethics, must submit to this fact. Knowledge of one’s surrounding world cannot be attained without the human being herself being an integral part of the object of this knowledge, the relationalist phenomenon, whose participation must be constantly discounted in every eternalised calculation. It is here that Plato and his mathematics depart radically from mobilist thinking. For Plato, the duality that mathematics offers is a fundamental given for ontology, but existence contains no such dualities outside the world of mathematics. Phenomena can be diachronic in relation to each other, but that in itself does not mean that they are dual, which mathematics beguiles us to believe. Two phenomena can arise concurrently or in the same area, but never both at the same time. And conversely: if two things occur either at different points in time or in different places, they are thereby automatically always different phenomena.
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.
Love and mysticism in the infinite now constitute the very nucleus of the ethics of survival. Here, an alternative to all forms of moralism based on the preconceived state of things appears. That valuations that are loosely founded in the state of things being able to motivate a kind of “the future should be more of the same as now” as an ethical beacon, is not something that has any logical robustness. That nature appears to act in a certain way in a certain given situation of course does not mean that Man must have nature’s mechanisms as an ethical beacon. While amor fati is a dutiful love to the closed past, the imperative does not include the open future; rather, it implies a contradictory encouragement to break with everything that has been, that is, to expand rather than minimise the spatio-temporal multiplicity, as the arch-Nietzschean Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. Thus to act ethically is at least as often about violating nature, participating in and driving the cultural and civilisational process, as it is about following it. Nature is not any kind of Abrahamic god and neither is truth an ethical guiding principle.
Instead of Brassier’s organon of extinction, syntheist ethics is based on Zoroaster’s classic axiom: Man’s ethical substance is his thoughts, his words and his actions, and in precisely that order. It is only on the basis of a radical identity creation that ethics finds its mark. And what is this ethical principle founded on if not self-love’s being or non-being? Only the creature who loves herself as she is, from a crassly logical and ethical acceptance of herself, rather than based on any kind of sentimental and unreliable emotional passion, can act in an ethically correct way. And then survival is the ethical beacon, based on the principle of maximisation of existential pleasure – most clearly manifested in the religious ecstatic state that syntheologists call the infinite now – rather than any kind of premature mimicking of an alleged future universal annihilation.
Nietzsche, the father of European nihilism, interestingly enough goes in the opposite direction compared to Brassier and instead argues for an ethics based on resistance to nature’s doings. He pits culture against nature and finds the heart of the übermensch in a kind of aesthetics of resistance – but not without first confronting Man with his deep animalistic nature – an ethical turnaround that is investigated and applied to perfection by his French successor Georges Bataille among others who, with his extensive atheological project in the 1950s in turn is one of Lacan’s and obviously also syntheism’s foremost sources of inspiration. According to Nietzsche and Bataille, it is precisely by opposing the natural – by surviving rather than conforming – that Man gets his own ethical substance. So if the Universe really is on the road to a final death and extinction, a Nietzschean response to this state of affairs might be to defend survival against extinction as a norm through every thought, every word, every act. Thereby Nietzsche with his wealth of tragic heroes is the ethicist of survival par excellence. He pits the principle of maximisation of existential pleasure against Brassier’s ambition to speed up and put into effect the death-wishing masochism of the subconscious.
Badiou defends the mobilist position with the relationalist argument that the pure multiplicity must be the ethical starting point. Syntheologically, this means that Badiou converts the unnamable into Pantheos. The Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas – another of Cantor’s most famous philosophical interpreters, and the one who probably lies closest to Cantor’s own persuasion concerning the theological consequences of transfinite mathematics – defends the eternalist position in a radically inverse way with the relativist argument that the One must be the starting point. Thereby Levinas chooses to follow the opposite path, seemingly on a direct collision course with Badiou, and converts Pantheos into the unnamable. And it is precisely here, in the dramatic meeting between Badiou and Levinas on ethics’ tautly strung tightrope, that syntheism appears most clearly as the social theory of everything par excellence. Since syntheism comprises the entire syntheological pyramid – and therefore understands the origins and supports the pathos of both Badiou and Levinas – it maintains of course that both alternatives are correct. The ethical act in this context is to choose any of these alternatives and then faithfully act in accordance with this decision.
The concept truth as an act is central in understanding syntheist utopianism’s refusal to be either optimistic or pessimistic. It is possible, not to say likely, that the great majority of people will always turn with sparkling eyes towards the charismatic authority up on one stage or another and demand an answer as to whether she is an optimist or pessimist in terms of the future, but even to formulate this question in a reasonable way requires so many nuances and so much clarification that a meaningful reply for mass consumption is impossible to imagine at all. The syntheist who protects her integrity and values a serious discussion about the future naturally declines, in a friendly but firm way, to express an opinion. This is where epistemology is replaced by ethics. It is here that we must refer to faith and its possibilities and to reject the demand for certain knowledge.
First of all syntheism assumes that time is real in a contingent universe. This makes all predictions extremely uncertain, at least in the long-term, just like within meteorology or ecology. But there is also a built-in paralysis in the faith in some kind of generally positive or predominantly negative development. Whether the expectations tip this way or that way basically does not matter; merely the fact that the expectations tip in any direction whatsoever weakens the will to act. If the driving existentialist principle in syntheist ethics is that truth is an act – you are everything if you act, you are nothing if you do not act and are content to react – it has the consequence that if the actor is to maximise his or her opportunities for power and influence, all predictions concerning the future must start from an absolute neutral position. The future is not better or worse in any objective sense: meliorism is fundamentally mendacious, the mythology of doom likewise, the future is merely open, full stop. It is from this prediction-neutral starting point that the syntheist ethical imperatives can be formulated. The impossible is possible – if you want to be associated with truth: act!
The truth about existence is so deep, so complex, so multifaceted, that it is impossible to reach, since it lies infinitely far from the outermost limit of Man’s perception and the power of mankind’s imagination (designed by the process of evolution for functional orientation in our environment, not for revealing the truth), on the other side of the border to psychosis. This means that quite irrespective of whether Man likes it or not, he is forced to outsource the deepest truth to theological mysticism. For what is the concept of God seen at the deepest level, if not the ultimate truth about existence which Man, with his mental limitations, never can reach? We therefore place the deepest truth with Syntheos, the God that we create based on the insight into our mental limitations, and we place it in the open-ended future, while at the same time we generate both scientific and existential truths through our actions. The truth as an act is not just the most important principle within ethics; according to transrationalism it is also the only possible truth within epistemology.
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.
Meillassoux bases his philosophical system on four concepts: potentiality, contingency, virtuality and chance. These constitute two spheres of being. At the local level, potentiality is pitted against chance; at the global level virtuality is pitted against contingency. His Syntheos is justice, where justice consummates a history that runs via existence, life and thinking as the previous immanent miracles. Note that according to Meillassoux, a miracle is to be understood as proof that God does not exist. Rather, miracles open up the possibility of the Universe being God – a universe as a god that expresses itself to itself. But as the radical indeterminist that Meillassoux is, he opens the way for the possibility that justice never occurs (a reminder of the neutral position of Badiouian ethics). And above all, Meillassoux claims that justice can never occur unless it is first desired. His god is thereby the Marxist god par excellence. But it is a contingent Marxist god in an indeterministic world with a wide-open future, a singularity that Karl Marx himself would scarcely have understood.
Once the foundation of self-love is laid, the syntheist agent is open and receptive to the process that is called transparency within the community. The purpose of transparentisation is to maximise openness within the congregation, to bring its members closer to each other, to allow intimacy to develop, so that the collective manifestation of Syntheos is realised. Religion is about bringing people together and giving them an emergent, collective identity that is greater than the dividuals separately and greater than the sum of all the dividuals together. This occurs, for example, through the establishment of sharing circles, where the agents bear witness to their innermost thoughts and experiences in front of each other. However it is of the utmost importance that the transparentisation – in the spirit of the French philosopher Michel Foucault – follows the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines) and therefore is carried out from the bottom up rather than from the top down; that is, it is those who are strongest, most powerful, those most established who open themselves up first before the community in a process where everyone shares more and more of their innermost emotions and thoughts for every round of the sharing circle.
Through this transparentisation, agentiality in the phenomenon in question migrates from the separate dividuals to the community itself. This is what we call the manifestation of Syntheos. The ethics of interactivity are intimately connected with the identity of the subject. Therefore the syntheist agent – both as dividual and community – is very much an ethical being. And with conscious ethics as a generator of identity, the subject in turn becomes a formidable syntheist agent. Here we reconnect with Zoroaster’s amoral but highly ethical ideal: “You are your thoughts, your thoughts govern your words; you are your words, your words govern your actions; you are your actions, your thoughts, words, and actions together constitute your ethical substance, they are and shall be your identity.” At the same moment that the believer identifies fully with her thoughts, words and actions, Zoroaster’s concept asha goes from being a phenomenological description of existence to becoming an ethical ideal. It is in this merging of phenomenology and ethics that the subject and asha become one with each other.
According to David Hume, habit is a necessity for the dividual identity. We call the religious habit ritual. Syntheist rituals are often or regularly repeated habits with the purpose of strengthening the particular identity of the dividual and social identity within the community. Since syntheism unites around interactivity as an ideal, syntheists first and foremost conduct participatory rituals. Participatoryism is a principle which entails the participants meeting in radical equality without any hierarchies whatsoever between them; a meeting where each and every one is assumed to take full responsibility for herself and his own well-being as well as to actively participate and co-create rather than passively receive and consume. This means that syntheism is a radical egalitarianism. From an intersubjective viewpoint, all people have as much (or as little) value, and there is continuous work within the community to maintain this radical ideal. This means that syntheist leadership serves the community from below rather than manipulating it from above. It is driven by a will to lead the community through the mobilist chaos of existence to a more profound eternalist understanding of the conditions and opportunities of existence, from which the ethics of interactivity can be applied through truths as acts which are determined and then carried out.
Just like all establishment-controlled and competition-shy monopolies, the academic world is extremely poor at rewarding genuine creativity; it is however tailor-made to question and dismantle philosophical discourse as such in absurdum and ad infinitum, which it does with full force through its highly-specialised ethics missions and the many vulgar-Nietzschean projects that dominated cultural studies at universities in the second half of the 20th century. The problem is that the philosophical institutions obviously never turn deconstruction onto those who really need it, namely the philosophical institutions themselves. In order to once again become relevant, philosophy must therefore leave the academic world’s corrupting security and seriously question the prevailing ideological structure. Even at the price of thereby burning their own pay cheques. This is what is required if philosophy’s interests as a discipline are to take precedence over the interests of the philosopher as a career-driven individual. Only then can philosophy recapture a faith in utopia. It must start by interacting with society and dealing with the issues of the time. It must become relevant.
From a theological perspective, the syntheist fall occurs when self-love turns into narcissism. Therefore it is necessary for syntheism to steadfastly fight internarcissism. Narcissism is just as present in the self-appointed victim as in the person in power. The syntheist hero instead surrenders herself, unreservedly and anonymously, in a brotherly/sisterly communion with the syntheist community. Beyond this communion, ethics is born in the making of agency: as an agent, within and together with the syntheist congregation, the dividual seeks a strong ethical identity, an existential substance, which is realised when a promise becomes action. According to the amoral but incorruptibly ethical Zoroaster, ethics is a perpetually recurring feedback loop: You are what you think, what you think affects what you say; you are what you say, what you say affects what you do; you are what you do, what you do affects how you think, and so on. Only through identifying himself as a syntheist agent can the dividual enter into and complete the Zoroastrian ethical circle as an intra-acting phenomenon within the syntheist community.
The values and valuations of informationalism stem from what we call the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines). The network-dynamical effects must be the basis of the production of the values and valuations in a network society, where everything from physics and biology to artistic creation and religious practice is characterised by the obsession with intra-acting phenomena, and not least by their relations with each other. This is a world where everything is always at least two, as Friedrich Nietzsche expresses the matter, and often many times more than that. An agency for change in such a world is an extremely complex phenomenon in itself: multi-polar, multi-dimensional, multi-dependent and in all directions entangled with its environment. In a relationist society in a relationalist world, ethics must first be interactive and later also intra-acting.
The ethics of interactivity can and should be pitted against the hypersubjectivist ethics of the last great individualist ethicist, the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, the other has lost all substance and has become an empty goal for the survival of ethics at all. With an almost psychotic conviction, Levinas claims that ethics is the primary philosophy, that it precedes and dictates ontology, epistemology and metaphysics. Justice is the promise to remember the victims of the past and the quest to act justly in the future. Levinas pursues his ethical fundamentalism by reducing the other to merely a face, in the presence of which Levinas claims to experience a blind existential love of almost biblical proportions.
Without this blind ethics there is no subject for Levinas. Only in the meeting between strangers does metaphysical infinity appear. The relationship between the isolated subject and the isolated object, as its emotionally overburdened target, can hardly be made clearer than with Levinas. And what in fact was individualism’s built-in logical terminus if not this fundamentally banal mystification of the other? The only discernible way out is to make a clean break with individualism, as syntheism is doing. There is no cohesive subject which experiences itself as a permanent essence, either in itself or as a bizarre by-product of the romantic worship of the other. Instead the entanglement is primary. And in that entanglement, something entirely different from Levinas’ individualist infatuation, with its Abrahamic nostalgia, arrives.
Syntheism opens the way for an ethics of interactivity, based on the entangled, outstretched phenomenon’s quest for its own survival, its will to intensity and expansion. It is not in ethics and what the subject feels for the other that the primary arises. The primary is instead the existence of the Universe and how this existence manifests itself for itself by setting people in motion towards and with each other. Levinas’ individualistic infatuation is replaced by the manifestation of Syntheos in the encounter between people. This encounter does not get its existential substance via a certain emotion or a holy sacrifice in only one direction between two subjects isolated from each other, as Levinas imagines it, but in a conscious joint act between two equal agents – at once both entangled and autonomous – who realise that, through an act of will, they actually can and therefore choose to let agape into the relationship between them, who thus choose to sacralise the encounter and the joint action. Syntheos quite simply arises when love between people is established as a joint truth as an act.
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.
Against Levinas’ transcendentalist ethics vis-à-vis the other we can posit Alain Badiou’s genericist ethics vis-à-vis the same. Badiou argues that what is constantly recurring is what characterises existence, and it is only in the recognition of the constantly recurring – the universal in the particular – that ethics is possible. The genericism of Badiou is pitted against the constructivism of Levinas. Badiou’s anarchist ethics is pitted against Levinas’ Abrahamic moralism. Badiou’s ethics is a duty based on chance – quite simply because chance takes us precisely where we end up – there is no external meaning attached to anything, but once we have arrived where chance has actually taken us, it is still our duty to live ethically. Why? Because ethics makes us what we are as contingent beings. It is our agential essence.
Compared to Badiou, Slavoj Zizek takes yet another stride away from Levinas when he stands firm with their common antecedent Jacques Lacan and the psychoanalytical ethics. According to Zizek, ethics is only possible as a fidelity to the crack in the current view of the world, rather than as a fidelity to any decision made blindly. Only by holding onto the sinthome – the importunate little disturbance that constantly reminds us of the illusoriness of our world view, its incompleteness and thereby necessary, constant variability – are we able to use this world view in any way to orient ourselves, and then a sustainable ethics must be pinned to the sinthome and nothing else. We can never trust our world view, we cannot even trust ourselves: the closest we come to something we can actually trust, which we have to trust, is the sinthome itself, the real from both the internal and external reality that we are capable of experiencing at all. From a syntheological perspective, both Zizek and Badiou, of course, are located inside the syntheological pyramid, at opposite ends of the oscillation between Atheos (Zizek) and Pantheos (Badiou).
However, beyond the ethics of interactivity a landscape opens up for a pure syntheist ethics. It is an ethics where human actions can occur without any imagined observer, where the other as a target disappears from the equation. The Nietzschean übermensch does whatever should be done merely because it should be done and without any ulterior motive whatsoever. We can describe this as an ethical vacuum state. It is a case of a metaethics; a constantly ongoing investigative study of how the syntheist agent is changed by acting this way or that way. The artist that bases her whole creativity on her own desire and nowhere else is an early example of a syntheist ethicist. But there is really nothing to prevent all human behaviour in the syntheist utopia from taking as its point of departure such an ethics of intra-acting rather than an ethics of interactivity – because the ethics of intra-acting follows logically from the development of the syntheist agent as a human ideal.
Since syntheism is fundamentally relationalist, it follows that syntheist ethics also must be relationalist. To begin with, ethics is always a matter of prioritisations. Nothing in itself has any kind of objectively valid value. In a greater objective sense, everything is meaningless, since no external god exists who cares about giving anything a value that endures regardless of the prevailing conditions. It is only a being whose existence is characterised by recurring deficits and limitations, and consequent necessary prioritisations, who is in need of a values system. A state of complete plenty – such as the Universe in itself – however needs no values at all. All argumentation around what Man values in the form of things and actions consequently revolves around the relationships of these things and actions to, and their significance for, himself as a creature inhibited by deficits and limitations.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58