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God
The name of all the dreams of humanity projected onto one single point. In Bard & Söderqvist’s philosophy the God concept is used exactly as the philosopher G W F Hegel uses it, that is, as an empty concept binding together all loose threads within metaphysics to one cohesive, ideological unit, without the concept thereby requiring any relevance whatsoever outside the metaphysical equation itself.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
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(In »Everything is religion«)
Many people regard this question as almost ludicrously simple, and thus also as provocative and confrontational. But the problem is that major and polarising discord remains concerning the answer. Some say that the answer to this simple question obviously is a resounding no: Of course there is no God! All talk of a God is an expression of a tenaciously persistent superstition that has stuck with humanity throughout all of known history, ever since the rain dances of the first shamans. A superstition that in all likelihood will wither away and die as our knowledge of the nature of physics at the macro and micro levels grows sufficiently to be able to refute the many foolish notions of religion and document how these are tied to various sociocultural conditions.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
But as we know, some others are as unshakeably convinced that God not only exists with the greatest certainty, but also that this God painstakingly keeps track of all of our sins as well as our good deeds. And as if that were not enough, this same God created our planet and all its innumerable life forms at the dawn of Time. This God, who thus exists, permeates every aspect of our existence, and not believing in Him and admitting this is something that sooner or later will incur punishment. Possibly for all eternity. But the matter is complicated further by the lack of agreement among these many people who are convinced of His existence as to exactly which god really does exist, and throughout history this has given rise to innumerable conflicts – battles and wars that have claimed countless human lives in the name of God. So how could God not exist?
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(In »Everything is religion«)
So in fact, this seemingly simple question must be nuanced and made more specific, at least somewhat, in order for us to be able to discuss it in a meaningful way. What the answer will be – and what the question actually means – depends, of course, partly on what we mean by “God”, and partly on what we mean by “exist”. Let us start with the latter, which might perhaps be the most convenient place to start. A beautiful poem, untitled, one of the very last authored by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – the manuscript is dated as November 19, 1935 – reads as follows:
There are sicknesses worse than any sickness;
There are pains that don’t ache, not even in the soul,
And yet they’re more painful than those that do.
There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us...
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls...
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.
Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
(Translation: Richard Zenith. From Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Books 2006.)
In the poem several assertions are made; assertions about the texture of existence. The poem states that things are this way and that way. There are sicknesses that are worse than any sickness and therefore are also something other than sickness (although they are, nonetheless, sicknesses), and the anxieties from dreams are more real than those that afflict us in what we call life or reality (which means that the concepts “dream” and “reality” must be challenged), and so on. Sicknesses, anxieties, a hint of elusive hopes and a significant measure of resignation. If we were to attempt to identify some sort of all-encompassing feature of Pessoa’s poem, we might perhaps agree that it encapsulates a frame of mind, even an acquired outlook on life. And that this frame of mind and this outlook are coloured by an increasingly lucid sadness.
There are sicknesses worse than any sickness;
There are pains that don’t ache, not even in the soul,
And yet they’re more painful than those that do.
There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us...
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls...
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.
Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
(Translation: Richard Zenith. From Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Books 2006.)
In the poem several assertions are made; assertions about the texture of existence. The poem states that things are this way and that way. There are sicknesses that are worse than any sickness and therefore are also something other than sickness (although they are, nonetheless, sicknesses), and the anxieties from dreams are more real than those that afflict us in what we call life or reality (which means that the concepts “dream” and “reality” must be challenged), and so on. Sicknesses, anxieties, a hint of elusive hopes and a significant measure of resignation. If we were to attempt to identify some sort of all-encompassing feature of Pessoa’s poem, we might perhaps agree that it encapsulates a frame of mind, even an acquired outlook on life. And that this frame of mind and this outlook are coloured by an increasingly lucid sadness.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
With this flexible understanding of the various nuances of the concept of “being”, and with Pessoa’s and Heidegger’s insights that there exists so much which does not exist in the ontic sense, but which nonetheless does exist, we are cautiously approaching the concept of “God” and posing questions such as how we should understand this concept fairly correctly – or at least in a way that is reasonable – and whether what is accommodated within the definition we finally settle on actually does exist in an ontic or an ontological sense. Or are we merely talking about hot air here? The handling of the issue becomes somewhat easier however when it dawns on us that the ontological question in all likelihood answers itself, since God – whatever this turns out to be – is something we humans have created ourselves. Throughout history, there has never existed a human society where religion was not exercised in some form. At any rate, there have been no research findings of any kind anywhere indicating the tiniest trace of the presence of human collectives of any significance that did not have a religious community. This is indisputable. Even our dead cousins the Neanderthals buried their near and dear ones under ritual forms that indicate the presence of some kind of religion. From this, one may then draw a number of different conclusions.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
One of the conclusions that was particularly frequently and eloquently proposed around the millennium shift was that God – and here we are speaking mainly about the Christian God and his Almighty colleagues within Judaism and Islam – is pure delusion. This is in fact the title of the central work of the radical atheist genre, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, a celebrated evolutionary biologist and pugnacious atheist. Many other titles by others who share Dawkins’ views develop fairly similar arguments. The common and recurring idea is one that describes how, roughly up until now, human beings have been so ignorant and superstitious that it became necessary to invent sundry varieties of religion in order to extract various useful things such as solace, community morals, and something that might resemble a pattern in, and a meaning for, a gloomy existence filled with privation and suffering.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
In connection with this, one might argue – and indeed not without reason –that with the passing of time, religion turns into the story that those in power tell to the people in order to legitimise the prevailing order and thereby also, conveniently enough, their own privileges. Those in power promise abundant rewards in the afterlife to obedient subjects who pay taxes and without complaint accept their subservient places in this life on this Earth. In this way, the emperor gets his way without fuss and in practice at really no cost at all. In this way, religion becomes both the opiate that keeps the people asleep and the pretext with which one commandeers people into war whenever it benefits the interests of those in power. Whoever succeeds in usurping the office of God’s spokesperson here on Earth need not risk being contradicted to any greater extent, at least not within his or her own faith community. And what the others – the infidels – have to say by definition is of little or no value at all. For it is with them that one makes war, it is them one hounds from places that one considers sacred, it is them one plunders and torments the life out of with God’s clear blessing. That the infidels believe in the wrong god conveniently enough makes it possible to strip them of all humanity.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
Hardly anyone would deny that hideous atrocities and cruelties have been committed in the name of this or that god throughout history: the examples are innumerable and a complete catalogue of all the crimes carried out under a religious banner would require a book of its own. Nor is this in any way a unique speciality of the Abrahamic religions. In Polynesia, prisoners of war and heretics were sacrificed to the gods. The Aztecs refined human sacrifice to an activity that was carried out on a near-industrial scale, administered by the state and clergy in an effective symbiosis. Dispatched soldiers carried out raids on the neighbouring peoples in order to bring home prisoners in great quantities, after which these prisoners, courtesy of the clergy, were sacrificed to the great god Huitzilopochtli by cutting the hearts out of their living bodies, which subsequently, not quite as alive, were rolled down the steps leading up to the altar.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
It is of course possible to find calls for cruelty towards the impure of faith in both the Bible and the Quran, as well as in other religious scriptures, but it is also possible to find calls for loving kindness. The programmatic inconsistencies in religious scriptures is part and parcel of their nature, since they are a collage produced from a multitude of various texts, written by various people on various occasions and under various conditions for completely separate purposes, which means that one may find support for almost any position by quoting various Bible verses and Qur’anic suras. And it is with this painstakingly selective citing of scripture – or alternatively without any support whatsoever in any significant source at all – that various groups invoke God’s blessing for their acts of violence directed at dissidents. Which ought to invite a certain caution when pointing the finger at this or that religion as responsible for this or that act of violence.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
In large part, this reasoning may be transferred to the question of the excesses and crimes carried out in the name of God. God is innocent, to the extent he actually exists: it is we humans who are guilty. Thus, we cannot blame religion with any degree of preserved credibility, and maintain that it was religion that forced us to act brutally towards our neighbour, when the truth is that – countless times throughout the course of history and under every possible pretext – we have tortured and massacred people who in some sense have belonged to a group other than ourselves, quite voluntarily and with great enthusiasm. We just don’t like strangers or what is different: this is deeply rooted in us. The cure is civilisation, but it is far from all-embracing and probably never will be. Nevertheless, all of these ecclesiastical sins and crimes are one of articulated atheism’s two principal arguments against religion as it has been manifested thus far.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
In so far as this sort of nonsensical reasoning is gaining ground, there is of course good reason to criticise religion. Anything of this kind sooner or later inevitably leads to a more or less brutal oppression of dissenting opinion, which in turn leads to a wholesale destruction of knowledge in the name of God. Which of course unarguably implies that ignorance in important areas is a necessary prerequisite for at least some types of religion. When, for example, Christian fundamentalists try to launch creationism under the ridiculous label of intelligent design as an alternative on an equal footing with Darwin’s theory of evolution – that is, as a sufficiently respectable alternative in order for it to be part of the curriculum in American schools – this is in fact a case of intellectual sabotage of the worst kind. Genuine knowledge is pitted here against bizarre nonsense. Anyone who seriously claims that “intelligent design” is an adequate “theory”, deserving of being discussed in the same halls of learning in which the evolutionary process through natural (and sexual) selection is studied – which according to this reasoning also is just a “theory” – does not know what actually constitutes a theory, and refuses to understand what the theory of evolution actually says and explains.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
But let us now return to our initial question: does God exist? We are talking here about the God of Christianity that Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced dead as early as the 19th century. The atheist Dennett answers both yes and no to this question. What does not exist is the supernatural, omniscient and all-seeing God of which the Bible speaks, the God that created our world and everything else, and who sent his only son to our Earth for him to die a sacrificial death on the cross and thereby, in a transaction which in many ways is utterly unclear, purchase our liberation from our dreadful sins (that God himself thus takes no responsibility for despite the fact that he apparently created us as the wretched sinners that we are). At least this is what Dennett says, with reference to, among other things, the worthlessness of the “evidence” for God. Take for example Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument, according to which God quite simply has to exist by logical necessity since God by definition is above all else, which means that God cannot lack existence, since this unthinkable scenario would make God incomplete and in at least one important respect inferior to all that indisputably does own existence, such as that saucepan on the stove containing the stew. And according to our accepted idea of God, God must then be above all else, in particular saucepans.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
This argument runs, as can be seen, in a tight little circle, and Dennett is not impressed. According to the same logic, everything that is said to be perfect and complete also must exist, and this is of course not something we can accept. And if this applies only to God, it is hardly the kind of logic to write home about. Nor does the cosmological argument – according to which everything must have a cause and everything that is created must have a creator, and that this creator is what we call God – appear particularly convincing on closer inspection. The idea here is that the causative link cannot stretch back in all eternity: this appears unreasonable. But if God in some way has created himself out of nothing and has no underlying cause, what is actually stopping the Universe itself from having created itself out of nothing? As we know nowadays, there is absolutely nothing to preclude this. What we know about the Universe actually indicates precisely that it did create itself out of what through ignorance we used to think of as nothing, but which instead turns out to be very much something.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
There are, according to Dennett, no good reasons to believe that this God exists, and there are an almost infinite number of good reasons to believe that he does not exist. This prompts Dennett to view himself as an atheist. But he also claims, with an argument borrowed from Dawkins, that all of us, even the most devout and literal believers among theists in our cultural sphere, are in fact radical atheists when it comes to all those other gods that the rest of humanity believe in or have believed in once upon a time: Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Amun-Ra, and so on. Theists around the world thus don’t just believe in one god or the other, but also in their fantastic luck that the god they believe in within their particular congregation, and that they have been raised to believe in – as long as they do not happen to be converts – just happens to be the only god that actually exists, as opposed to all the other false gods, who thus do not exist.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
However, what really exists without a doubt, according to Dennett, is the idea of God. What could be more obvious? One can believe in that idea and fill it with any number of different values without actually believing that only the Christian God (or Baal or the Gold Calf) actually exists. Dennett calls this belief in belief. You can believe that a religious faith supplies various commodities, and thus you can, which many do, believe in this faith without thereby necessarily believing in what the faith community for this religion believes in. You can also observe how the content of the idea of God has gradually changed almost beyond recognition from the old days of the folk religions up until the present day. This was brought to light as early as towards the end the 18th century by David Hume in The Natural History of Religion, where he calls the polytheists “superstitious atheists”, since they do not recognise any phenomenon that is in accordance with “our idea of a deity”.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
Dennett argues that no idea has ever undergone such a dramatic transformation act as that of “God”. On the one hand, this naturally creates a large measure of uncertainty. Many protest a faith in one and the same idea, but in actual fact they believe in completely different things, and if one expands the definition of God to comprise whatever it was that created life on Earth, it might turn out that God is, or at least could be, Darwin’s natural selection, in which case all atheists are in principle ardent believers in God. But that the idea of God has kept its name through all these shifts in meaning – from human-like jealous monsters and autocratic avengers to a diffuse kind of higher being with fuzzy boundaries – does mean, on the other hand, that religion and the religious attitude have co-opted large parts of, if not all of, existence; and that the God brand has retained a strong and extremely valuable loyalty, courtesy of its long history.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
Consequently, we have every reason to expect that the idea of God will undergo additional transformation acts, because social structures continue to change, and because consequently believers will continue to demand more useful things from God. It is precisely these that are the foundations of this book. Voltaire writes that “If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him” (“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer”). And that is exactly what we humans invariably do: invent God anew, filling this flexible and robust idea with ever-new dreams and desires. Syntheism is quite simply the name of the next revolutionary phase in this development without end.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
What we do, according to Dennett, is believe that anything asserted about the formula e=mc2 is actually true. But in truth we do not know. And for this reason, it is impossible to attain anything even resembling consensus on, for example, the issue of the climate crisis. What opinion the layman has about it depends largely on what authorities he chooses to believe in, which in turn is governed by his political positions on issues that pertain to economic growth and government regulation, among other things. We believe in what agrees with what we already believe in. We are religious. For this reason, the tough atheists’ criticism of religion misses the mark completely, however brilliantly formulated it actually may be in lengthy paragraphs. The God one is kicking is already long dead, and to once more joke about the old proofs of God’s existence is entirely pointless.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
The new, rational human being, freed from superstition and systematic self-delusion by the sciences that are making heroic progress, is a completely unrealistic utopia without any foundation in what research actually tells us about how people really function. We are religious, whether we understand it or not. We believe, and believe that we know much more than we actually do know. And actually it really does not matter at all what content is proclaimed from pulpits or in scripture. The person who enters into a discussion about the apparent self-contradictions or absurdities in a religious doctrine is barking up the wrong tree. Some believe in God X, endowed with certain attributes and preferences, while others believe in something else, which is either called God or something else. What is important and interesting is whether, and in that case how, religion actually works. Trying to understand religion’s tenacity and fervour by studying various ideas of God is, writes Jonathan Haidt, like trying to understand the attraction of football games to their audience by studying how the ball moves on the pitch.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
The crucial point of having a god is that the god is said to reward loyalty and cooperation, while punishing selfishness and mendacity. An all-seeing god is particularly effective in such a context, since people cheat less when they feel that they are being watched. Common sacrifices and collective rites increase coherence, which creates the trust within the group that enables intimate and trusting cooperation outside the circle of family members. According to Haidt with support from Charles Darwin and the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the main function of religion is that it produces groups whose coherence makes them function like organisms. The biologist David Sloan Wilson writes in his book Darwin’s Cathedral that religions primarily exist in order for it to be possible for people to accomplish together what they cannot accomplish on their own.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
Thus we have actually answered our opening question. God does exist. At least and without a doubt in an ontological sense. We have ourselves created the idea, just as we have created the ideas of democracy and art and a host of others. Religion lives, even among those who believe they have left it. Everything is religion and everyone is a believer. Anyone claiming the opposite, is truly, literally speaking, blinded by their faith. The really interesting question which thereby opens up is what to do with God and religion in the Internet age, when all the basic assumptions of our lives and existence are changing. How can God and religion become relevant, credible and engaging concepts for us and for future generations? That is the question which Syntheism seeks to answer.
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.
Philosophy is founded on metaphysics, and metaphysics in turn is founded on theology. However solid the logic in a world view may seem, its logic is nonetheless based on a metaphysical assumption that is a functional but blind faith and definitely not any form of knowing. Under the primitivism of hunting and gathering, the tribe’s presumed primordial father and mother constituted the theological foundation for the collective’s ancestor worship. Primordial fathers are definitely not just any people at all, since unlike all others they lack parents – accordingly they must be a form of primitive god with extraordinary power. Under feudalism, God took over the role of the metaphysical foundation. God is the common primordial father of all tribes, the primordial father of primordial fathers. In this way, the particular stories of small tribes are bound up with the universal stories concerning human beings of larger regions and the forces that wreak havoc in their lifeworld. Monotheism is born.
With the Cartesian revolution in the 17th century, the metaphysics of individualism arrived on the scene, with Man gradually replacing God as the theological foundation, even if this revolutionary change was kept hidden as far as possible in order to avoid outbursts of ecclesiastical rage. God is thus not dead to start with; God has only gone to bed and fallen asleep. But ultimately, what role does His potential presence play when His creation is perfect anyway? The main thing for the individualists is that God has become superfluous, which enables the individual to slowly but surely take His place. It soon became evident that humanism fitted perfectly as the religion for the new capitalist and industrialist paradigm, and society clung to humanism and its individualist and atomist ideal right up until the late 20th century, when the network society emerged with full force and the idea of the network as the new metaphysical foundation caught on. Syntheism is the metaphysics of the Internet age. A shift is necessary because the philosophy of every paradigm must have its own blind but nonetheless relevant faith as a basic axiom. The masters of informationalism – the netocrats – quite simply perceive the network as the most striking metaphor for the necessary metaphysical foundation of the paradigm.
It is important here to make a distinction between religion and theism, that is, faith in the existence of one or more gods. Since most people throughout history have believed that gods in various guises actually exist, it is totally plausible that most of the metaphysical systems that have been developed have also been theist: monotheistic systems are based on a faith in only one god, while polytheistic systems are based on a faith in many gods coexisting in parallel and more or less peacefully. Pantheistic systems, on the other hand, presuppose that the Universe and God in one way or another are one and the same thing, while what we now call syntheistic systems assume that all gods are necessary, human constructs; historically determined projections on existence that engender supra-objects that are shaped by and adapted to the social situation.
In addition, there are also many widespread religions that are atheist, that is, they devote no energy at all to theist questions. Taoism in China and Jainism in India are well-known examples. Even many forms of Buddhism, such as Zen in Japan and Chan in China, lack a belief in God. Brahmanism in India and Zoroastrianism in Central Asia both lack active deities – while it is true that they are pantheist, they are centred on human rather than divine religious activity, which means that even these religions in practice are atheist. Insofar as God exists, if anything this entity is present through its absence, and accordingly these religions are deist. Note that syntheism is fully compatible with both pantheism (God is created by Man, as a sacralising projection onto the Universe) and atheism (God has not created the world, in all likelihood does not exist today in any philosophically interesting sense, but is fully possible in the future, in particular if the idea is regarded as a human invention).
Beyond the ongoing paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism (see The Netocrats) we need a new metaphysics, a new religion, a new common arena for collective spirituality in the Internet age. Without a credible metaphysics – no philosophy and no meaning either. Man is the meaning-generating animal constantly scanning his environment for patterns that indicate and keep confirming various causative links that engender a feeling of security. And if we do not find any such patterns, we don’t hesitate to quite simply invent them. With a utopia on the horizon, we give our lives a direction and a context. God is another name for utopia, and utopia is another name for God.
The productive and fruitful response to atheism is not to indifferently accept the death of God, but to instead realise that it was a mistake to place God in the past as the ageless progenitor of us and the cosmos. We have already killed the God of the past by producing and accumulating large quantities of knowledge with which this divinity is not compatible. God as a functional utopia is instead the name of what we dream of creating; God is Syntheos, the created rather than the creating God. God is not (any longer) dead, since (we have now realised that) God has never been born: God belongs to us because God belongs to the future, and we already live in the future. The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux expresses the syntheist passion in the words: “God is too important a concept to be left in the hands of the religious.” Or to quote the American novelist William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
God is just one of the infinite number of conceivable forms of revelation of the great Other throughout history. The primordial father, the chieftain, the feudal lord, the priest, the monarch, the saint, the president, the boss, the manager, even the subject’s own parents, are all examples of figures who, through history, people have fantasised about as being the great Other. And even if the most die-hard atheists actually succeed in eliminating all these figures from their fantasy worlds, there is still a great Other that they never succeed in fleeing from: the fantasy of themselves (the subject) as the object of their own submission. The phenomenon of the great Other is thus an integral and extremely important part of the experience of being a subject. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, takes this thesis to its ultimate conclusion. He argues that the ego, constantly in terror, experiences the superego as the great Other par excellence.
Since syntheism is the metaphysics that, so to speak, is already built into interactive technologies, it has already invented itself. The Internet has gone from being a virtual god to becoming plainly a potential god, all in accordance with the radically new meaning that Quentin Meillassoux gives the concept of God, as something belonging to the future rather than the past. Syntheism is the religion that the Internet created. The dedicated political struggle for a free and open Internet is based on the blind faith that the network has a sacred potential for humanity. The Internet is thereby transformed from a technological into a theological phenomenon. The Internet is the God of the new age, and furthermore extremely appropriate for an age characterised by an unlimited faith in the possibilities of creativity. Thus, the Internet is a god that even those who regard themselves as atheists can devote themselves to. Syntheologically, we express this state of affairs as that the Internet is a manifestation of Syntheos, the new god that we humans are creating rather than the old god which, according to our ancestors, is said to have created us once upon a time in a distant past.
If there is anything we can say with certainty, it is that alienation in the new network society will increase dramatically. A growing alienation is the price we pay for every increase in the technological and social complexity that we are experiencing now and for years to come. With the Internet’s breakthrough, it is literally exploding. And there is only one functional weapon against alienation, namely its opposite: religion. Traditional religion’s mistake was to place the name of its longing for another world, God, in the past (theism, belief in a preordained God), when the logically correct and only reasonable manoeuvre of course is to place the object of all human longing, God, in the future (syntheism, the belief in a God that man himself creates).
It is hardly tone-deaf atheism that inspires us most. Rather it is Spinoza’s pantheism that is philosophically consummated through a further development of syntheism. God is no longer only the final idealisation of Spinoza’s pantheism, God as the subject of the Universe; rather, God acts as humanly produced idealisations even on other planes, among which the Internet as a theological realisation is a typical example in our time. If divinities both can and should be created through idealisations necessary for survival – why then, like Spinoza, settle for Pantheos, the Universe, as the only god? In particular since the Internet actually has its own agenda, controls us rather than lets us control it and, to put it bluntly, is beginning to assume divine proportions. Moreover, there is a long list of idealisations available to the syntheologists to develop into divinities in order to then make themselves into their memetic host organisms and preachers and thereby contribute to their dissemination. In this book, we are concerned with the four most basic idealisations from the world of metaphysics: the void, the Universe, the difference and the utopia.
The modernist social structure was aggressively questioned in the 20th century, first by the Frankfurt School and later by post-structuralism, and collapsed under both external and internal pressure. A philosophical renaissance was begun by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Manuel De Landa, Thomas Metzinger and Karen Barad with The Death of Man as a starting point – which can be compared with how 18th century philosophers launched the project The Death of God – and with this development a fundamental shift from the anthropocentric to the universocentric world view was initiated, which is being realised by the post-structuralists’ heirs in the 3rd millennium, with empirical support from experimental metaphysics.
The problem with humanism is that it is basically Christianity without Christ. Humanism is an attempt to keep Christian moralism alive, while it pretends that there is no need for Christ in order to maintain this desired conception of the world. Simply put, the humanist tries to keep the illusion of the individual – there are only human bodies, there are no individuals other than in the humanist’s fantasies – alive in the same way that the Church tried to keep the illusion of God alive during the previous paradigm shift. This is never clearer than within Communism with its atheist Christianity, with its blind faith in the human being’s own mystically predetermined realisation of the Christian paradise. Without underlying religious conviction, a theological foundation, Communism is an impossibility; it lacks the engine that can engage the activists. Therefore it continually decays into corruption and hypocritical dreams of a capitalist feast of consumption.
According to Critchley, mystical anarchism is the true engine starter for the genuinely revolutionary project. Critchley’s mystical anarchism is of course synonymous with the syntheism we are talking about and advocating in this book. The already established syntheist Meillassoux sees in his distinction between the potential and the virtual the possibility for an event where God suddenly appears in history as the metaphysical justice, where justice arrives with the same importance as existence, life and thought, the previous virtualities that have been shockingly and dramatically realised through history. Meillassoux argues that God as justice is the missing fourth virtuality that is now waiting to be realised. Syntheologically we express this as a focus on the oscillating axis between Entheos and Syntheos in the syntheological pyramid.
Since it is Kant’s philosophical contributions that pave the way for the death of humanism and the individual, it is scarcely wrong to regard Kant as the last humanist. When Hegel and Nietzsche arrived on the scene in the 19th century, the anti-humanist revolution was already in full swing. With Nietzsche and his concept of The Death of God – which Michel Foucault half a century later finally accomplishes by also proclaiming The Death of Man – nothing whatsoever remains any longer of the humanist paradigm. Hegel’s religiosity is found in Atheos while we place Nietzsche’s spirituality with Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.
For this reason, syntheism necessarily arrives after humanism. Syntheism is the logical response to the crisis of humanism. Man cannot replace God, since man is every bit as much of an illusion as God ever was. The protosyntheist Martin Heidegger and his follower Jacques Derrida wrestle in their work with metaphysics as an idea and claim to be working for the death of all metaphysics. However, they end up instead becoming metaphysicists par excellence, proponents of precisely what we call the eternally postponed end of metaphysics. The more forcefully you try to flee from metaphysics, the more deeply entangled you become in its yarn. So what syntheism does is that it places God, Man and the network next to each other and says: we know that these illusions have never existed in any physical sense. Nonetheless we have learned pragmatically from history that we cannot live without them. A life without the great Other is both a phenomenological and psychological impossibility. These entities are essential for a world view to be coherent. The consequence is that we choose to include the three black holes – God, Man and the network – concurrently in our new world view, as the black holes they actually are, that is, as culturally productive voids.
The dependence of bodies on each other is real. We know that dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin hold people together in a collective that accords pleasure to those in the group, and in this pleasure a meaning arises, produced by and for ourselves. Therefore we have arrived at the historical juncture when theism and atheism must be consummated as dialectical opposites, not through some kind of hybrid, but through us seeing and accepting their historically consummated interconnection as a unit and being able to push this unit aside and go forth in history, into syntheism. Today’s fusion between our historical understanding of the fact that when all is said and done our cohesiveness is what is most holy to us, and the exploding, genuinely new virtual connection between people thanks to the arrival of the Internet, interacts with and is creating the foundation for the new era’s syntheist metaphysics. God (theism) and Man (atheism) are quite simply followed by the network (syntheism) as the fundamental event of metaphysics.
It is of the utmost importance here to distinguish between living religion and dead religion. Quite irrespective of whether a metaphysical explanatory model is in any way true, or just merely functional and relevant for its own time, it is either living or dead in its practice. The modern human being is under the impression that previous generations really believed. The myth of the classical faith is incredibly tenacious, not least as a backdrop to the myth of the modern human being’s non-faith. The Austrian, syntheist philosopher Robert Pfaller shows in his book Illusionen der Anderen that this is a double falsification of history. It is the modern human being who really believes, and this, in contrast to previous generations, without any distance whatsoever. Therefore, it is only in modern society that fundamentalism is possible. Religious fundamentalism is based on the conviction that God is dead, that God is active only in the past, which is why the fundamentalist must act without God’s help and so to speak force life back to the time when God was still alive. Syntheism’s response to fundamentalism is of course as brilliant as it is self-evident; it instead runs in the opposite direction, towards the God and the religion that has never existed, but which we only now are able to create. You could not get further away from religious fundamentalism than syntheism.
The Enlightenment constructs a new humanist mythology in opposition to Feudalism’s monotheism – with the individual as the bourgeoisie’s substitute for the aristocracy’s God – while the Reformation constitutes religion’s backlash against the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion. Here, the hybrid between the God of feudalism and the new individual emerges when the Protestant theologians position the suddenly established direct dialogue between God and the individual at the centre of metaphysics. The Reformation quite simply recasts God as the perfect bourgeois individual, the atomistic God, Jesus. These consequences – fatal for the Catholic Church – of the printing press putting cheap, mass-produced, vernacular editions of the Bible into the hands of the people, were probably not something that Gutenberg, a pious Catholic, could reasonably have conceived of, which once again underlines that every dominant metatechnology plays out its hand regardless of any intentions of its inventor and other serious stakeholders. The Internet is going to do the same.
The information technology metahistory began with the tribe’s oral camp fire stories about itself in the spoken word society (mythos). Thereafter followed the painstakingly documented story of God’s fate and adventures in the written word society (logos), which in turn was followed by the printed story of the idolised human being in the mass media society (ethos). The corresponding transition in our time means that we now gather around the narrative – spread at lightning speed – of the holy network in the Internet society (pathos). The paradigm shifts are supremely material; the suddenly increased quantities of available information enable a powerful expansion of complexity and specialisation in human relations. Simultaneously, the new forms and extent of communication in our society are dictating a radical qualitative change in the conditions of the cultural ecosystem. This results in the older paradigm collapsing, and with it also its outmoded narrative and power structure. The old story must be replaced by a new, more credible metanarrative, which contains and popularises the allegories and metaphors that are relevant for the new paradigm. Above all, the new history must reflect the new power structure and its assumptions, or else it will not achieve acceptance or be spread.
The new power structure is strengthened by a new metaphysical narrative and vice versa. In this way, history repeats itself at every information technology paradigm shift. The tribe’s story is the foundation of paganism and its primitivist power structure. The story of God’s creation and control of the world forms the foundation of monotheism and the feudal power structure. The story of the genesis and perfection of Man as a rational being is the foundation of individualism and the capitalist power structure, while the story of how networks give content and meaning to everything in existence forms the foundation for syntheism and the informationalist power structure. Paganism uses survival as a metaphysical engine, while monotheism’s metaphysical engine is eternity and that of individualism is progress. Syntheism’s metaphysical engine is the event (see The Global Empire).
Feudal metaphysics achieved the intended effects by preaching totalism and dualism to enable the unimpeded formulation of eternal truths as the foundation for the law. Steadfastness and obedience are everything, there is no room left for openness or questioning of the prevailing order of any kind. The state is presented as founder, upholder and guarantor of the holy law and all the good values that it claims to represent, in the same way that monotheist religion preaches that God is founder, upholder and guarantor of existence as a whole. Paul is therefore quite right when he builds his Christian theology on the premise that the law is the manifesto of the drive.html">death drive, an assertion of the drive.html">death drive with the aim of restricting and economising with the intensity of life. This becomes all the more clear when the metaphysical ideal of feudalism, the law-abiding citizen, is asserted as a personification of the drive.html">death drive itself.
What is brilliant about the law is that it is based on a clear representation of the divine. Although it pays homage to God – to pay homage to someone who anyway never interferes with anything costs nothing, and it is therefore also the oldest metaphysical trick in the book – but what is important is to whom the law pays homage, but that it is based on something physically absent so that, with the homage as camouflage, it can furtively hand over the actual power to the (self-appointed) representative of the object of homage. The monarch who is present therefore becomes the representative on Earth of the absent god (with ancient Egypt’s pharaoh as the most flagrant example). To obey the monarch is thus in practice to obey God, which must be seen as a powerful incentive. Power thereby ends up with the monarch and his allies, the landed aristocracy and their common truth producer, the monotheistic religion. The feudal paradigm’s triangle of power is thus complete. The monarch, the aristocrat and the High Priest can sit down to an expensive and well-prepared dinner in peace and quiet together and in complete understanding share the power and the glory between themselves.
The law’s external and eternal values are pitted against the internal and arbitrary values of chaos. And the idea follows on from the principle, which says that the values of metaphysics must be external and eternal in order for the narrative to hang together, that mankind must be offered the possibility of becoming one with the law, that mankind should be able to become external and eternal in relation to the internal, mental limitation and physiological transience that she/he experiences existentially every day of the week. The idea of eternal life as the reward for the law-abiding citizen for his/her demonstrated fidelity and reliability throughout life is born, and with this essential prerequisite in place, monotheistic metaphysics, which revolves around the idea of eternity, arrives with full force. Previously every tribe had had its own mythological progenitor, but with monotheism all tribes – since they have begun to trade and communicate with each other whenever this can be more profitable than, each according to his abilities, killing each other – get one and the same progenitor, God. Hinduism in India keeps its local subordinate deities and Catholicism in Europe cultivates its saint myths, but all feudal metaphysics is based on a solid monotheistic foundation where God is the personification of the law. It turns out to be a metaphysical necessity in order for feudal society to be able to maintain its cohesiveness and endure over time.
When the Enlightenment eliminates God as the cohesive factor for metaphysics – either, as the deists do, by anaesthetising Him, or as the atheists do, by killing Him off – the focus is shifted onto the individual, the idea of Man himself as the existential atom and the very cornerstone of existence and the social model. Thus, metaphysics no longer allows any angels who come to prophets to hand down the truth, which is already perfectly formulated by God, from God to Man. Man must instead construct his own metaphysics, and Man reckons that this is best done by deriving the truth directly from his/her own lifeworld, by basing a world view on empirical facts and defending it with logical arguments. However, this ambition requires in itself an unfounded and illogical faith in Man’s innate ability to take in and understand all of life with his limited intellect and imperfect access to information. This blind faith is rationalism – the irrational core of individualist metaphysics that gives the individual divine qualities. The individual is made into a being that suddenly grasps, comprehends and has mastered absolutely everything in her own wishful thinking.
According to Kant and his followers, rationalism is a necessary linchpin in individualist mythology. Individualism requires blind faith in Man’s own thinking – given time and necessity – being able to understand and solve all the world’s riddles and problems. While rationalism does accept that the individual is not omnipotent today, for the individual is evidently a mortal being, but with the individual’s omnipotence – since she actually is a latent god – according to rationalism, the solution to the problem can only be a matter of time. From the early 19th century onwards, individualist metaphysics becomes as conveniently as it is effectively self-fulfilling: individualism is proclaimed from the universities, and at the same universities, professors and researchers are also organised as individuals, encased in increasingly specialised subject area atoms, where they devote their days to quoting one another within closed coteries under the pretext that they are engaging in some sort of objectively true knowledge production. And as long as one stays within the mythology of individualist metaphysics – and why wouldn’t you, if you are part of the elite that reap the full rewards of it – it is hard to see the individualised human being in relation to the atomised world in any other way. The external signals that interfere with the generally held mythology are of course immediately removed by the system itself.
By building a maximally functional hierarchy of literate soldiers – even the cannon-fodder at the front lines were educated before waging war in Napoleon’s army – with himself in the function as God’s all-seeing eye at the very top of the hierarchy, Napoleon created a fascinating killing machine of a kind never beheld before. Subsequently, all the institutions of industrialism were built in the 19th century with Napoleon’s army as a shining example: the nation state and all its bureaucrats, the company and its factories, the police, the prison, the school, the hospital, the colony on the other side of the ocean: organisationally they are all direct copies of Napoleon’s feared and admired army. According to Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, history is a kind of perfect machine that grinds away in a completely deterministic manner without the smallest departure from preordained laws and rules. Newton’s idea of the Universe as a (by God) wound-up clock that ticks on forever inspired both Napoleon’s organisational architecture and Hegel’s historicism.
René Descartes opened the way to individualism by penning the 17th century’s most famous tweet: I think, therefore I am. But what consummates individualism’s metaphysics is Immanuel Kant’s transcendentalism a century later. By isolating the subject from the object, Kant makes it possible for the subject to both deify the object and simultaneously plan for its material and sexualised seduction, conquest and colonisation. History repeats itself: God created the world in order to be able to deify and then seduce, conquer and colonise it. Now it is the 18th century’s growing bourgeois middle class of patriarchal Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, industrialists, capitalists and colonists that see and grab the opportunity when the new individualist and atomist metaphysics lends support to their ambitions. Bourgeois ambitions are quite crassly transformed into the individualist ideal.
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.
Syntheism can be described as one long showdown with all the ideologies that are based on the historical case. Religion and metaphysics were developed under feudalism from being a cohesive and community-generating world view into becoming a well-honed tool for power and control. The monotheistic religions demand submission; the word is suddenly an order rather than a promise. Sin is basically a revolt against God, a questioning of the divine arbitrariness that is the very foundation of the Abrahamic religions. In practice, the Asian religions accomplish the same thing through making sinful behaviour function as the driver for desperate reincarnation rather than invoking hellish damnation. However syntheism in no way entails a return to paganism, but instead a dialectical further development. The real return to paganism at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism is instead the bewildering hodgepodge of naive ideas and quasi-religious nonsense that go under the label New Age, the phenomenon that, not without reason, syntheologians dismiss as theological cultural relativism.
French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux analyses classical atheism’s dilemma in his book Après la finitude. According to Meillassoux, atheism’s problem is that it inherits the tragic remains that are the leftovers from Abrahamic religion when it retires, but does not succeed in building any independent platform of its own. That is, classical atheism retains the Abrahamic idea of the world as destroyed and lost, but without preserving Abrahamism’s faith and hope in the possibility and reality of the utopia. It is literally just an a-theism, a negation without any own content of its own. Classical atheism quite simply bases its world view on a false premise, namely the idea that existence without God must be mere chance, when life is in fact a necessity if we fully think through physics’ basic concept of contingency.
Meillassoux argues that the only possible way out of classical atheism’s deadlock is to embrace syntheism’s idea of a philosophical and immanent divinity rather than a theological and transcendental one in the traditional sense. He advocates the thesis that the constant contingency that characterises existence must be regarded as the logical opening for a possible future God based on the idea of justice instead of the idea of amorality. Meillassoux’s syntheist divinity – he calls his philosophy a divinology rather than a theology – lacks the Abrahamic God’s bond to the amoral chaos that the logic of moralism demands. Meillassoux thus treats traditional religion’s passions in a way that radically differs from classical atheism: it is the utopia and not the fall of Man in classical religion that must be won back. And winning back the utopia and turning it into an immanent divinity is, with contemporary physics’ revolutionary advances, quite plausible. Meillassoux’s God, as a synonym for the utopia, is of course syntheism’s Syntheos.
By thinking of God as something created rather than something creating, and thereby as something that only shows itself in the future rather then something that precedes and brings forth existence – that is, Syntheos, the created God – for the first time God can be regarded as internal and not external in relation to the utopia, that is, as the utopia personified. This is in contrast to traditional theism’s creating God, where everything in the world that is created by Him comes down to an indifferent arbitrariness that is perfect for Him, and which therefore cannot have any personal connection whatsoever to the utopia as the dream of another world unless the illogical fall of Man is introduced through the back door. For example, Christianity must not just kill the Son within the Trinity; it must also sooner or later kill the Father in order to rescue its credibility concerning the utopia. Thereby, the God of Christianity is incompatible with the possibility of the utopia. The God of Christianity must die completely for the utopia to be possible.
The syntheist ambition can hardly be formulated more clearly. In the conflict between the traditional roles of the philosopher and the priest – where Meillassoux of course takes the philosopher’s side – the atheist is reduced to little more than a deeply irritating, passive observer. Where the atheist lets the priest keep religion as his monopoly, Meillassoux responds with the words: God is much too serious a subject to be left to the priests. Transcendentalism must be rejected quite unsentimentally in order to leave room for a religion that loves, worships and believes in the immanence and its enormous potential. Only philosophy can carry out this necessary action. For Meillassoux, the demystification of existence, the striving for deconstruction – classical atheism’s big project – has namely reached the end of the road. Deconstruction appears to be only paralysing for mankind, making him incapable of conceiving of the utopia, and thereby also incapable of formulating the vision, and in this way cultivating hope for the future. Meillassoux turns this upside down and argues that the real blasphemy and idolatry must be to insist on a transcendental god in the contemporary world. According to Meillassoux, God is to be placed in the future and be completely immanent. Like all utopias, Meillassoux’s God is virtual rather than potential; neither possible nor impossible, but contingent and thereby beyond any kind of probability calculation.
Here syntheist thinking refers back to Zoroaster’s philosophical revolution in the Iranian highlands 3,700 years ago. Meillassoux gets inspiration from Gilles Deleuze, while Deleuze gets inspiration from Henri Bergson. Bergson in turn takes his inspiration from Baruch Spinoza, and Spinoza, for his part, was educated by Moroccan Sufis, who in turn relayed the legacy of Zoroaster’s immanent philosophy – the pantheistic branch of Sufism should be regarded as Zoroastrian philosophy hidden under the Islamic flag – the original divinology if any. Zoroaster’s concept of a coming Saoshyant denotes a utopian character created by mankind or rather by the future itself, that is, something quite different from Judaism’s and Christianity’s Messiah as a saviour sent by a god who has failed to complete his own creation in a satisfactory way. Since syntheism takes its starting point in Zoroaster, this means that in relation to its precedent Christianity, syntheism must be seen as historically and logically consummated Christianity, a kind of monistic and immanent Christianity that accepts both the Father’s and the Son’s death and which welcomes the divine manifestation through the Holy Ghost as their replacement. God springs from the meeting between the faithful and nowhere else. The Holy Ghost, without the Father and the Son, thus becomes merely the name for syntheism’s Syntheos.
The Abrahamic God is by necessity split. The Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek bases his critique of Christianity on this logical necessity: If God really knew everything about us and was never in a state of ignorance at all concerning our thinking and our actions, both we and God would plunge straight down into psychosis. The splitting of God’s being is necessary for the cohesiveness of the world view. Without the split between the all-knowing and the naively ignorant, neither God nor the faithful can have any experience of being subjects. This split God is however not the God that appears when the spiritual syntheist bears witness to her religious experience. Here, the Universe as God differs radically from the Abrahamic God. The Universe really knows – and can tell whoever is willing to listen – everything about the past, but it knows absolutely nothing of its unknown future. And nor does anyone else either.
Nevertheless, the Universe remains totally indifferent to our story. And it is this very indifference that keeps the psychosis at bay. The only thing that would be even worse than the Universe – as is now the case – being all-knowing and at the same time indifferent, would be if the Universe were all-knowing and actually had an opinion and an intention. What happens instead in the syntheistic religious experience is that the necessary split does not happen within God, as is the case within Abrahamism and atheist humanism, but rather the necessary split arises between the Universe and one’s fellow man, who subsequently take care of their respective metaphysical protagonist roles. While Pantheos is manifested in the Universe, Syntheos is manifested in one’s fellow man. Syntheism is therefore not just something more than atheism as deepened or atheism.html">radical atheism, it is also something more than pantheism as deepened or radical pantheism.
In practice, the overwhelmingly enormous Universe cannot form the divine for us – the Universe is divine for us merely through its enormous size, power and stupendous incomprehensibility; the Universe forces us into submission – but it is rather the consoling, empathic fellow man, that is, the Zoroastrian Saoshyant, who gives God a face and a consciousness. Pantheism is thus just an incomplete form of syntheism. This indisputable fact drives syntheology from pantheism’s incomplete utopia Pantheos to syntheism’s consummate utopia Syntheos. Both Zoroaster and Meillassoux thus maintain that the advent of Syntheos is a necessity for the consummation of the utopia and of history. On its own, Pantheism is insufficient foundation for a religion for human beings.
According to syntheism and syntheist pantheism, there is no Universe to confess to – you cannot confess to a being, however enormous, if this being lacks both senses and interest – but it is rather the Saoshyant, the holy fellow human, who receives your liberating confession, who is converted into the divinity who does not already know. Even Zoroaster in his time understands this central distinction within the divine: he therefore makes a distinction between God-as-being or Ahura, and God-as-thinking-fellow-human or Mazda. Zoroaster himself almost always distinguishes between the concepts of Ahura and Mazda in his work Gathas. The umbrella term Ahura Mazda is only used when his theology for some reason needs a connecting core. And it is Mazda (the mind) and not Ahura (the cosmos) that is prioritised in Zoroastrian theology. This explains why Zoroaster names his remarkably prophetic religion Mazdayasna, love of wisdom – the same term as the Greeks 1,200 years later translate as philosophia – rather than Ahurayasna, love of being. Pantheos is Ahura, but Syntheos is Mazda, and a faithful Zoroastrian – and for that matter a faithful syntheist – is a Mazdayasni (a human being who is primarily faithful to the mind) rather than an Ahurayasni (a human being who is primarily faithful to being).
The difference between Zoroastrianism’s intentionalism and Islam’s consequentialism is clarified in the syncretistic meeting between them in the Sufi hybrid religion. Instead of a god that does not already know, the Sufi master must step in and assume the role as the one who does not already know and who nevertheless still decides everything after the disciple’s fetishistic submission. Islam is therefore most clearly and precisely described as the theory of blindly obeying the one who does not already know, if for no other reason than for the exemplary value that Islam attaches to submission itself. This makes Islam the perfect religion for feudalist society, and in this very capacity it is the fastest and most furiously expanding metaphysics thus far in history. This is not to say that Islam is logically coherent. Memetic success has of course nothing to do with either truth or logical coherence, at least not in any other sense than the strictly Darwinian. However, we understand why Sufism, in its capacity as a permanent state of armistice between intentionalism and consequentialism, developed into the ironic religion par excellence; a doctrine that can only be expressed through flowing paradoxical poetry but which never lends itself – to the great vexation of Islamist fundamentalists; they all hate Sufism – to any kind of solid dogmatic fundamentalism.
When Friedrich Nietzsche, as far back as Thus spoke Zarathustra and beyond, establishes and announces the death of God in the latter half of the 19th century, it also means death to the idea of the availability of objective truth. This is because objective truth as an idea is entirely dependent on a metaphysical constant, the primary gaze before which the true object arises. But if this primary gaze does not exist, if the metaphysical god beyond time and space does not exist, the whole foundation for the fixation of the object also falls apart. The phenomena start to dance in increasingly complex patterns of interdependencies, and with the beginning of that dance, the possibility of an objectively attainable, valid truth about the phenomena disappears. There is no longer an authority that issues certificates of authenticity. There is no longer anyone who serves as the object’s universal apprehender of truth. All truths become contingent upon the relative position of the postulator of the truth, which subsequently means that all truths become subjective.
On the whole, mathematics is a tautological way for people to tell one and the same approximatic history of the world from a host of different perspectives. This is in contrast to an approximate history, which is full of constants, but which for some reason must be regarded as rounded off as a whole, while an approximatic history consists of an infinite series of roundings without any anchoring constant whatsoever, as a stubborn attempt to eternalise a world which in reality is entirely mobilist (which it of course is). However, mathematics is nothing over and above this. For in all its richness, mathematics never does anything other than tell self-referencing and self-validating stories that in the best case might appear to reflect physical reality, but which de facto never can be this reality, and even less so set an example for it, legislate for it or replace it. Therefore, ontologically physics and mathematics must be kept strictly separate. In spite of the fact that many mathematicians and even philosophers have wanted to see mathematics as a language of God, this is unfortunately not true. The Universe is namely an analogue, not a digital, phenomenon.
If religion has functioned as a cohesive force within both man and society, the history of alienation is a converse but closely related history of how man and society are divided over the course of history. Most metaphysical systems are based on the premise that there is an original paradisiacal state and that alienation arises through a dramatic event, for example as a consequence of the Fall of Man (according to the Abrahamic religions), or through the deleterious effects of capital (according to Marxism). The mission of the faithful is therefore – with or without the help of God or history – to restore the original, paradisiacal state. But the problem is then that these ideologies of the Fall from grace are considerably more focused on alienation than on the alleviating utopia, which remains a diffuse mirage on the horizon. It is not what was once good that comes into focus – if anything it is left completely outside the writing of history – but rather the narratives are obsessed with one thing and one thing alone, namely that which has corrupted and devastated all of existence (sin in Christianity, capital in Marxism, environmental devastation in environmentalism, etc.).
However, the problem here is that the human libido never allows itself to be satisfied. It never gets enough, never lets the human being settle down, satisfied. The libido emanates from desire’s constant search for new unsatisfied desires, in its constant postponement of satisfaction in order to keep itself alive. When desire is relegated to anthropotechnics, the libido is therefore shifted from sexuality to asceticism. Anthropotechnics strengthen desire through constantly postponing or re-locating it. Therefore the human being’s self-domestication presupposes a libidinal castration, and the Abrahamic religions with their stronger anti-sex moralism fit perfectly for this purpose. The anthropotechnical practitioners get their energy from the dictates of the law, and since according to Sloterdijk the human being constantly strives for verticality – a longing to create a connection with the divine, to be able to satisfy the syntheological imperative of finding and subordinating herself to a functional metaphysical story – this leads to the law becoming synonymous with God himself.
The law’s evident and indisputable ability to engender and maintain complex civilizations bestows upon it a holy aura. Since the law is such an excellent instrument for directing culture, and since nature itself also seems to be held together with mathematics’ somewhat frightening exactitude, nature too must obey another, even more far-reaching and eternally valid law. This law of nature in turn requires an author; quite simply there must be a god behind the law, the god of the law. In other words, nature obeys the law of God. This law is so enchantingly powerful that it is soon worshipped as a god in itself. The Abrahamic religions launch the idea that everything else is dependent on and must be subordinate to the law, that this precedes and dictates everything else. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Thanks to the arrival of the law, the Fall of Man gets a clear narrative, the temporal and therefore supremely human Fall from grace is the absolutely worst imaginable crime against the eternal and therefore divine law. So where is God and wherein lies God’s essence, if not in the will to administer justice and enforce submission by means of the law? The law has proven such a powerful metaphor that even after Nietzsche announces the death of God in the late 19th century, physics continues its manic search for God’s law in nature, as if the law as God was still very much alive. The explanation for this is that the preordained and compelling law has exercised its magic on humans so extensively and for so long that humans can only imagine a Universe without the law’s existence with the greatest difficulty. Enjoyment without pleasure drives the determinist world view. Note that this process continues without human law being able to have any equivalent in nature whatsoever. In spite of everything of course, human law functions because the receivers of the decrees, the people, listen to and understand the recited text and shape and calculate their own behaviour based on the current set of rules. People can either allow themselves to be frightened into obeying the decree, integrate it into what Sigmund Freud calls the superego, or allow themselves to be tempted into enjoyment occasioned by a transgression of the decree – to surrender to the libidinal transgression. In any case, it is man’s ability to engage in and become obsessed with the law that makes him its object.
However, the law is just a metaphor on which we base blind faith in the pre-eminence of the prevailing order. But the metaphor is so strong that even today it colours not just our view of social relationships, but also feeds our recurring conviction that a society without laws must be a society that is rushing head-long towards its own annihilation. The law is such a powerfully charged metaphor that we cannot even look at nature and the Universe without presuming that these operate according to preordained and eternally valid laws. However there is no proof whatsoever of any such laws, and nor should there be. If we really are serious about our conviction that God is dead, we must also draw the conclusion that the legislator is dead. And without the original legislator, the eternal and metaphysical law does not exist either. Were we to carry this line of argument one step further, it would reveal that natural law is to be regarded as an incoherent battery of anthropocentric chicanery without foundation in anything whatsoever, and particularly not in nature.
Narcissism is alienation’s clearest symptom. Narcissism is a compensatory phenomenon, it originates in its own radical opposite: the fantasy of the world without the subject. The subject must choose to manage the fantasy of the world outside itself in one of two possible ways. Either all production of value and identity is shifted back to the world – for example by creating and worshipping a god – or else the shock of the insight into the subject’s fundamental emptiness is internalised by turning this emptiness dialectically into its radical opposite: the castrated subject is transformed into the omnipotent centre of existence. The fantasy of the world without the subject is so hard to grasp that the simplest way to manage it – if no divinities are invoked – is to place the subject in the driving seat of existence. But if the subject ends up in the driving seat – where it does not reasonably belong, almost everything that happens to us within our lifetime is really out of our control, even if we believe in the illusion that the subject has the possibility to influence its environment – this immediately triggers a whole series of reactions that only can be described as powerful compensatory behaviour, which results in the narcissist condition. Thus the Cartesian fantasy of the subject as the only unerring fixed point in existence and thereby also its centre, becomes a reality.
Monotheistic fundamentalism is the religious version of the Enlightenment’s rationalist fantasy. Note how the sectarian leaders who want to maintain their superiority vis-à-vis the rest of humanity always position themselves as the enlightened. Monotheistic fundamentalism is a rash and furious ratio, literally founded on an idiotic divinity that lacks a raison d’être, where this ratio is frenetically maintained by the practitioner’s manic conviction that he himself would disintegrate and be annihilated if he really were to recognise God’s non-existence. This explains why the fundamentalist does not care whether he lives or dies (which makes him such a resolute terrorist, frustratingly difficult to defend oneself against). The threat to the fundamentalist’s fantasy is not physical death, but the disintegration of blind faith. So what is this, if not theological rationalism in its purest form?
The living religion that moves away from alienation and towards the resumption of community is the opposite of monotheistic fundamentalism, which moves in the opposite direction and makes alienation its religion. For the living religion is, like art, implicit rather than explicit, admits several interpretations rather than being simple-minded, is reasonable rather than rational, open to contingencies and emergences rather than fixed in space-time; and above all, it is always embodied. Even before fundamentalism surrenders itself to a near-autistic denial of the fact that the meaning of the words which it professes devotion to are in a constant state of flux, this fundamentalism is tripped up by another and more fundamental premise: since fundamentalism always puts the word before God, it reveals that it uses the word to protect itself against the subconscious realisation that whispers that God in truth is already dead. If the law is the only thing left when God has disappeared from the equation, the law must be regarded as God. But a living god does not need the word as protection. A living god stands without any irresolute tottering or any ulterior motives in front of the word instead of anxiously hiding behind it. A living god exists based on the premise that an overwhelmingly large part of all communication between people is non-verbal. Already the well-known words of the Gospel of John “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” reveal a religion which has lost faith in God’s existence. The only thing left even at this early stage is just the empty incantation as God’s proxy.
The reflection of the self in the world is, however, in no way harmonious, observes Lacan, but rather extremely frustrating for the subject, tending to breed aggression. In order to try to resolve the tension in its relationship with the chaotic environment, the subject starts to identify with the image in the mirror. This leads to an imaginary feeling of overview and control: the subject apprehends itself as the centre and master of existence. The result is that the subject deifies itself, in particular precisely that within itself that it cannot master, that which Lacan calls the other. And the other of psychoanalysis is of course just another name for theology’s God. Since syntheism is the doctrine of how and where we find a pedestal for the other within our own paradigm, it can be viewed as a Lacanian theology. The question is not whether we need a Lacanian theology for the Internet age – we will end up constructing such a theology subconsciously and thoughtlessly unless we have first done so consciously and carefully – but rather exactly which Lacanian theology is relevant and credible for the dynamic environment which frames and determines our current existence.
Reggio’s own growing up and domicile in California is hardly a coincidence in this context. Because it is precisely in fact during the film’s genesis in the 1970s in California that the Hopi Indian myth is actually realised through the birth of the Internet. The Internet is an eminently emergent phenomenon, which takes over and reshapes the world entirely on its own terms; a phenomenon that we cannot control but merely try to adapt to as best we can. For what is the Internet at its core if not in fact a global web of threads that binds all human beings and objects together into one single global, organic whole where the web itself is greater and more important than the sum of its many constituent parts? Syntheologically we regard the Internet as an incarnation of Syntheos, a divinity which (naturally) has not created Man – which traditional gods previously were considered to have done – but rather a god who in the first instance allows itself to be created by Man only to later, in the next phase, recreate Man by colonising his lifeworld and thereby dictating his new living conditions, thus sparking new characteristics and qualities.
After philosophy and science have killed off the Abrahamic gods – a process which, in the mid-19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche sums up in the idea of the death of God – syntheism, the metaphysics of the Internet age, poses the question of which potential divinities remain, and which have been added for informationalist Man to tinker with. It is of course the case that where knowledge is passive, faith is active. At best, knowledge can never be anything other than the truth about that which has transpired, while faith understands itself as the truth about that which is to come. Reason cannot stand on only one of these two legs, or it will plunge into either neurotic rationality or psychotic obsession, for both are necessary mainstays in a reason that is functional. As it turns out, there are a host of divinities that the informationalist human being can believe in, or rather already does believe in. Let us start by revisiting Nietzsche’s two magnificent predecessors Hegel and Spinoza for inspiration.
Hegel ignores Kant’s striving to capture the complex relationship between Man and his environment and instead goes directly into the mind, where he builds a phenomenology around the paradoxist subject, its genesis, structure and future (see The Global Empire). His most famous work is consequently entitled Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel regards this voyage as one, long self-reflection process. He deduces the consequences of value and meaning being created and existing only within the mind and that this creation of value and meaning fundamentally has the sole function of being Man’s existential pastime while waiting for his necessary dissolution and inevitable expiration. For Hegel, for the first time in the West’s history of ideas, the concept of God is merely a necessary concept, not a physically material reality. According to Hegel, like everything else in the mind, God is an internally manufactured product, a necessary component in humanity’s historical equation, not an external fact. This does not make him the first pantheist, but it does on the other hand make him the first atheist philosopher in the West’s history of ideas. Hardly surprisingly, this has dramatic consequences.
From the preordained conclusion that, in the final analysis, the mind strives to be able to think itself as itself, Hegel sets in motion one of the most original and most innovative projects in the history of philosophy. How does the mind arrive at the thought about itself as itself before itself, if the only possibility to do so is to pass through an endlessly long historical, tautological loop? And correspondingly: If the mind is free to form its own opinion of itself independently of all conceivable external influences, in that case what religion – credible to itself – would this mind invent and develop? After an extremely long and roundabout but unremittingly exciting journey, Hegel arrives at his final destination, Atheos, the god that does not exist, the god of emptiness. The history of the mind begins in any case with emptiness; non-existence not only predates existence but according to Hegel is also its engine – and then not in any kind of physical sense. The Universe starts with a something; there is no nothingness before somethingness in physics, except as always with Hegel in just the mental sense. For this reason he lands exactly there.
These well-considered choices of names are of course open to discussion in this ironic polytheism for no end of time; the four syntheological concepts were created in a participatory and intersubjective process in a syntheist online forum and, in good netocratic spirit, lack an original dividual author. The movement has thus agreed as a collective on these names together. But these supraphenomena are highly real and together with Friedrich von Schelling’s powerful foundation work and Martin Heidegger’s magnificent extension work constitute the groundwork within advanced metaphysics. And both extension and interior design work is still ongoing. American philosopher Robert Corrington, for example, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, constructs a system around what he calls the four infinities. Atheos corresponds to the sustaining infinite in Corrington’s metaphysics, Pantheos is another name for the actual infinite, Entheos corresponds to what Corrington calls the prospective infinite, and Syntheos is another name for the open infinite. The Irish philosopher William Desmond constructs a similar system in his book God and The Between around the three transcendences: Atheos is here the name of the interior potentiality (T1), Pantheos is the name of the exterior actuality (T2) and Entheos is the name of transcendence as transcendence per se (T3). The only reason that Desmond does not use a fourth component in his metaphysics is that he chooses to completely avoid the future as a theme; otherwise Syntheos would be obvious as Desmond’s T4.
The syntheological pyramid starts with a relational interiority with Atheos at the one end, which shifts to a relational exteriority with Pantheos at the other end. In the world of cosmology this even occurs literally: a black hole absorbs, it happens interiorly, while the Universe expands, it happens exteriorly. Exteriority then continues with Entheos, with its explosions of irreducible differences, multitudes and emergences over time, but shifts back to an interiority with Syntheos, as the utopia, the concentrated point or God for all of humanity’s dreams of the future. Atheos and Syntheos are primarily introvert or absorbing concepts, while Pantheos and Entheos are primarily extrovert or expansive concepts. If we express this relation phenomenologically, we say that an eternalism apprehends a mobilism – it is when Atheos is applied to Pantheos that Pantheos emerges as the One: a mobilism that is augmented in the next step and then switches back to an eternalism. It is for example when Entheos is applied to Syntheos that the agent finds its place within the phenomenon and syntheist activism takes shape as the truth as an act.
The syntheological pyramid can be traced back to Zoroaster and his work Gathas, which he authored as early as 3,700 years ago. According to Zoroaster, Ahura (being personified) is generated by the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos, while Mazda (the mind personified) is generated by the next level, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos. If the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos has a name of its own, it is Ahura; if the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos has a name of its own, it is Mazda. When Zoroaster proclaims his universal religion, interestingly enough he calls it mazdayasna (love of the mind) and not ahurayasna (love of being). This explains why we refer to him as the first protosyntheist. Zoroaster prioritises the god that the human being creates, Mazda, over the god that creates himself independent of Man, Ahura, while also uniting them under the name Ahura Mazda, being that includes consciousness. According to Zoroaster, Man is an internal agent within the Universe as a phenomenon and not some kind of external, alien accident in relation to the rest of existence, as in the Abrahamic religions and their philosophical offspring.
Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos do not receive their enormous potency as some kind of long-lived giant beings from parallel universes, like antiquity’s or Hinduism’s worlds of divinities, but as dramatically useful metaphors for the structure of existence (from Atheos to Pantheos) and the place of consciousness and scope for action within this structure (from Entheos to Syntheos). Therefore the syntheist divinities are immanent, finite and mortal, rather than transcendent, eternal and immortal, like traditional gods. Mortal creatures in a finite universe can only create mortal and finite divinities. The immortal god, created by mortal creatures, is an absurdity, a self-contradiction in a Derridean sense. Therefore, in the name of consistency, syntheology stops at mortal gods. Here it is worth recalling Blaise Pascal’s pragmatic concept Deus Absconditus from the 17th century: it is quite correct to say that syntheism stops at gods that reveal themselves only to those who seek gods, but avoids the gaze of all those who would rather avoid gods.
Atheos means the god that does not exist in Greek. Atheos is the god of the void or the black hole, the zero position of existence, the existential rather than the physical nothingness, and simultaneously the origin of everything and the engine of all identities from which the subject arises and gets its driving force. The void is namely an anthropocentric illusion. There is no actual void in the Universe; what appears to be empty space is full of physical activity. So the actual space in the void thus has a substance. However, everything beautiful and meaningful in our existence arises out of mental voids. When we are going to define why we love someone or something, exactly what we de facto love in the person or thing in question will invariably evade our description. The reason is that it is precisely Atheos, the void, the unknown, the utopian in the person or thing that we love, which we love and which becomes all the more desirable since it never allows itself to be captured or even articulated exhaustively. Atheos is Hegel’s god, and the syntheists celebrate him at midwinter, which is followed by the Athea quarter. Midwinter is the celebration of the Universe’s existential necessity, the celebration of the origin of life and existence.
Pantheos is the Universe as the divine. Because there is something rather than nothing – there is after all a life, a world – this something is equivalent to God: the Universe is God. If God exists, God must be the Universe. It would be pointless for an existing God to be separate from the Universe, since God does not have any need whatsoever to be a soul of any kind, separated from a body. The Universe is in fact characterised by expanding bounty, not by a struggle over insufficient resources, like life on Earth, which means that God never has to be manipulated away from an infirm body of limited durability in order to live on somewhere else, liberated from this body. Consequently God is immanent rather than transcendent, and physics is not some substandard representation or copy of divine mathematics, which totalist thinkers from Plato during antiquity to Alain Badiou in our own era are constantly drawn to believe. God is physics and physics is God. Mathematics is merely the human being’s approximatic tool for trying to catch up to, describe and thus understand God. Pantheos is infinite multiplicity beyond infinite multiplicity, the multiplicity of multiplicities as the One. Pantheos is Spinoza’s god, and the syntheists celebrate him at midsummer, which is followed by the Panthea quarter.
Entheos means the God from within in Greek. And our inside is fundamentally split, for we are dividuals and not individuals and thus tangible evidence ourselves of the irreducible multiplicity of existence. Therefore Entheos is the difference as a divinity, and since difference piled on difference becomes a duration of differences, we are also speaking here of the god of time. Entheos is quite simply the historical differentiation as divinity, simply because the lapse of time is and must be a constant repetition of ever so small differences and not an eternal repetition of the same. Aside from being the divinity of difference and duration, Entheos is also the divinity of contingency, oscillation, plurality, transcendence, ecstasy, melancholy, transformation and emergence. Entheos is the borderland between Atheos and Pantheos, that which sets the dialectics between Atheos and Pantheos in motion, the medium through which Atheos and Pantheos communicate with each other. Entheos is the very relation between Atheos and Pantheos set in motion, but also the constant, high-octane oscillation within both Atheos and Pantheos. Entheos is the syntheist agent’s god and the common name for, and oscillation between, Taoism’s yin and yang.
Here it is important to understand that time is probably the most mysterious concept within both philosophy and physics. Even if totalist-oriented philosophers such as Plato and scientists such as Einstein in some strange way were to be proven correct in that time is an illusion, they still do not succeed in thinking of the world without a metatime within which this illusory time is presumed to exist. Even if Einsteinian mathematics succeeds in magically tinkering with time by turning it into an extra dimension in connection with space, and thereby, for example, forcing it to move backwards as well as forwards, there is no proof whatsoever that any such time as an extra dimension in connection with space actually exists in physical reality. Nobody has yet succeeded in turning the uncompromising arrow of time, which inexorably moves from the past into the future through a now which is in constant motion (at the very moment that you speak the word now it has been supplanted by yet another now and has therefore advanced to become a then). This explains why duration stubbornly bounces back as a metatime every time the Platonists try to convert it into an illusion. It is quite simply impossible to get past time, and already with time as god, Entheos thus is necessary in syntheology.
Entheos is also the divinity we encounter when we experience what Sigmund Freud calls the oceanic feeling. To devote oneself to Entheos is to worship the brain’s and the body’s ability to carry out mental voyages and to emotionally experience the sacred, to allow oneself to be transcended into a new and qualitatively different subject. Entheos is therefore also the divinity of the sublime and of art. Syntheistic transcendence is entirely a subjective experience; it thus has nothing to do with any Platonist dualism or Kantian transcendentalism. Syntheistic transcendence takes place in a completely immanent world, just as the eternalisations of perception are housed within an otherwise completely mobilist world. Entheos is driven by the desire towards immanent change and the search for transcendental intensity; it is the divinity that we encounter in the psychedelic experience, which personifies the entheogenic worlds. Entheos is not just Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s divinity, but also the god of Heraclitus and Lao Tzu, and is celebrated at the spring equinox, which is the syntheist calendar’s new year. The Spring equinox represents the celebration of the enormous and irreducible multiplicity of life and thereby also the celebration of our own human dividuality.
As the roof above the Atheos-Pantheos-Entheos triangle, Syntheos binds the other three divinities together and completes the syntheological pyramid. From the triangle Atheos, Pantheos and Entheos, three lines strive upwards and are merged in a point that is Syntheos, which thereby holds the entire structure together and gives it its name. Syntheos is the divinity of the collective, humanity, the future, creativity, dreams, aspirations, visions and utopias. All gods that have ever been invented are illustrations of one and the same god, namely the need for a personified, cohesive component in order for the world to appear as the One, a meaningful whole. A human being without desires is a dead human being. In the same way, a society without a utopia is a dead society. Syntheism therefore maintains that it is not the content of the utopia but the utopia in itself that is the divine. According to the speculative logic of the syntheist, the need for the divine is divine in itself. The Greek word for the creating god is Syntheos, from which syntheism gets its name. God is no longer a patriarchal creator of worlds from the past or a longed-for saviour on a white steed, but the de facto name of the collective utopia of the collective itself in the future.
This means that the cosmos no longer appears as a cold and indifferent machinery grinding away, but instead as an holistic divinity filled with meaning – Pantheos. The arrival of this Pantheos in turn opens the way for a new appreciation of the creativity that emanates from the void of its predecessor, Atheos, the non-god, which is the origin of all subjectivity processes. For while Pantheos resides in consciousness, Atheos rules in the subconscious. This is completely in line with what Lacan says: the subject is created in and belongs to the subconscious. Therefore Lacan also speaks of the barred subject, that is, the subject’s inability to know its own origin, and how this very impossibility is constitutive of the subject itself. It is the uncompromisingly barred Atheos that is the source of the subject. Note how the four concepts in the syntheological pyramid are completely dependent on and include each other. Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos all reside within Atheos. Atheos, Entheos and Syntheos are all housed within Pantheos. Atheos, Pantheos and Syntheos all reside within Entheos. Atheos, Pantheos and Syntheos are all housed within Syntheos. If Christianity is based on God as a trinity, syntheism is instead based on God as a quadrinity.
Syntheism presupposes both a religious atheism and a subjective pantheism. It is important to distinguish between on the one hand a subjective and on the other hand an objective pantheism. Subjective pantheism is an active choice to see the fact that there is something rather than nothing as the foundation for the holy. The truth is an act. Through this decision, the Universe and its history are put on a par with the divine. That which exists is made into something holy. However, objective pantheism requires a blind and indisputable conviction that the Universe actually is God. But this position is of no interest to syntheism. In order for pantheism to be woven together first with atheism and then with entheism – in order to lead on to syntheism – in fact requires that it is strictly subjective. We find no signs that the Universe regards itself as divine – it displays no signs whatsoever of having a consciousness of its own that can produce a religious conviction similar to that of humans – and if this were the case, the syntheist premise would collapse. The four divinities in the syntheological pyramid are in fact all created by ourselves for ourselves, as named projections of existence; they are all syntheist, so too are Atheos, Pantheos and Entheos.
It is important to distinguish between classical atheism and syntheist atheism. Classical atheism not only maintains that God does not exist, it also presumes that God cannot exist. Syntheist atheism, on the other hand, maintains that God might well exist, partly as a divinity placed and created in the future (syn-theos), partly also as a constantly present productive void (a-theos) in space–time that supplies the cosmos (pan-theos) and its conscious inhabitants with subjectivity in an indeterministic process of constant change (en-theos). The reason for this is that existence expresses itself unremittingly, and quite regardless of whether or not there is an internarcissistic, human participant present in the process.
While classic atheism zeroes in on the one god after the other in its dedicated ambition to deconstruct and empty these of content – there is thus no cohesive, classical atheism, which means that classical atheism can only exist in the plural, where every orientation has a specific god in its sights – syntheist atheism is based on something that actually exists already: Atheos, the non-god, or the void per se, and it focuses on the enormous productivity of this void – from quantum fluctuations to subjectivity processes. Where classical atheism is merely reactive – always awaiting new theist innovations to attack and thus being dependent on the gods it so eagerly denies – syntheist atheism is active and thereby offers an existential substance which classical atheism lacks. The syntheistic atheist builds cathedrals to celebrate her conviction and the collectively edified fellowship, while the classical atheist on her part just has to make do with sitting on the side-lines, paralysed by a religion-envy that must be kept secret. Classical atheism is instead the little temperance movement of the territory of spirituality and outlook on life, forever doomed to miss out on all the fun parties.
This requires however that there be only one possible course of events for every set of given premises. And above all, this requires that the laws of the Universe precede the Universe itself. Including the necessary law of the law’s own existence, that is, the metalaw. If we are to take determinism seriously, we are thus mercilessly cast back into the arms of the pre-atheist god: the patriarchal creator, dualistically distinct from the rest of the Universe. And with him also follows his necessary creator, and this creator’s creator, backwards in a chain in all infinity. But no such pre-atheist god exists, as we know. The future is thereby not closed and illusory in the way that determinism both suggests and requires. Rather, it is the case that if the Universe were not open to the future, and thus indeterministic, it could never exist either. It is not just a matter of exactly the same premises in physics being able to yield more than one result, as Bohr points out. It is in fact the case that these very premises must be aleatoric in order to even be able to exist as premises at all.
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.
It represented a major and significant step for philosophy when Friedrich Nietzsche prised it halfway away from correlationism to relationalism; Nietzschean relativism entails a radical departure from the Kantian version of correlationism. There is no longer any fixed relationship between a stable subject and a moving object to use as a starting point. There are only a host of diffuse objects – the human being as an animal body rather than as a rational consciousness is one of these – and the relations between these objects are in constant motion. Relativism is a consequence of there being no fixed point of departure in existence. Without a divine centre – and Nietzsche proclaims, as we know, that God is dead – the position of the first object in a network is completely dependent on the other object’s position, and the second object’s position in the network is in turn completely dependent on the third object’s position, which in turn is dependent on both the first, the second and a fourth object for its position. And so on ad infinitum. Which ultimately involves all objects in the Universe in a kind of massive, abstract, impenetrable spreading out of everything with everything else in constant motion.
If relativism is philosophy.html">process philosophy’s introductory stage, then relationalism is its consummation. And as philosophy.html">process philosophy’s theological extension, syntheism is the process religion par excellence. Syntheism not only distances itself from dualist totalism; it also rejects the recurring death worship that is closely connected with the totalist ideologies, that is, the anthropocentric and internarcissistic deification of the human being’s own existential effacement. It is our own mortality that makes us obsessed by nothingness and tricks us into regarding it as a reasonable ontological alternative. This is why as widely diverse thinkers as the Buddha, St Augustine and Meister Eckhart are fascinated by the god of negative theology. In various ways they are looking for the possibility to deify the moment of human death, turning death into God. And out of the reverse perspective, the desire is instead to make life and its intensity into the divine foundation for positive theology, whose more or less syntheist proponents include Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze.
There is no external god outside the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism. The syntheological concepts of Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos for example are produced within and not outside the dialectic. The fact that nature itself constantly produces new emergences means – as the syntheistic complexity theoretician Stuart Kauffman demonstrates in his book Reinventing The Sacred – that no external god is necessary. The deeper we delve into the relationalist onto-epistemology, the more clearly it generates an ethics of its own in stark contrast to Platonist moralism with its condemnation of movement and change in favour of the eternal being; the perfect and therefore immutable world which does not exist. But relationalist ethics does not maintain some kind of chaos at the expense of the cosmos. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism instead generates entheist ethics. To open oneself up to variability is to affirm the active affirmation. On the other hand, to close oneself off in order to fight variability is to surrender oneself to the reactive ressentiment. Lacan picturesquely describes eternalism as the masculine and mobilism as the feminine pole in the dialectical relation between them. Taoism’s founder Lao Tzu, the entheist philosopher par excellence, of course calls them yin and yang.
The 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.
The Nietzschean reaction to this collective fantasy of extinction is of course amor fati, that is, not just the acceptance of, but also the unconditional love of fate. Goodness and evil meet in the present where fate breaks them down and joins them in a neutral history substance that the Nietzschean übermensch loves because it is to be loved as being the only thing that exists in history. Only based on the unconditional acceptance of everything in world history up until now – where one’s own experience as a subject is included to the highest degree – can the syntheist agent create a radically different utopian future beyond the present. For what is the religious impulse and its search for the spiritual experience if not a reason where the human being concentrates herself on herself and her innermost emotional needs and lets intuition lead her past all of life’s excuses that claim that the impossible really is impossible? For this is of course not true: it is precisely when reason takes over from rationality that the impossible becomes possible and Syntheos arrives in the future. It is there and then that the human being can realise his wildest dreams and create God.
What makes Whitehead the first fully-fledged relationalist among the mobilist thinkers, and particularly interesting from a syntheological perspective, is of course that he does not understand the obsession with killing the idea of God which occurs in many of his contemporary philosopher colleagues (in particular Russell, who after a strict upbringing in the High Church British aristocracy hated everything that he associated with religion). According to Whitehead, creativity is namely existence’s innermost essence, and this creativity – which he calls in fact God – permeates every single one of the myriad of current events that unfold throughout the course of history in the Whiteheadian universe. According to Whitehead, to not then use the elastic, cogent and extremely functional concept of God in order to encompass this fundamental creativity – thereby formulating a process theology as much as a philosophy.html">process philosophy – would be tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater for no reason and to no good use whatsoever.
According to Whitehead, God is quite simply not particularly dead, but rather is just dramatically altered by – in turn – dramatically changed conditions. There is no hateful desire in him to slash God’s throat, when the concept actually appears more useful than ever, but in that case precisely as a syntheist tool and nothing else. The parallel with the syntheological formulation of Entheos as the name of the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos is striking. For what is Whitehead’s obsession with creativity as the driving force of existence, if not in fact a deification of the entheist production of difference? Process and Reality is so radically relationalist and theologically creative that the work – in which the origin as Atheos and the events as Pantheos are brought together with creativity as Entheos, and where the result is today’s Universe – deserves to be regarded as the syntheist manifesto par excellence. That the term process theology is coined and used for the first time by one of Whitehead’s disciples, the American theologian Charles Hartshorne, is not the least bit surprising.
Shape dynamics thereby exist in the same sort of duality in relation to the Einsteinian relativity theories as the wave does in relation to the particle. This means that we can say goodbye all at once to the predetermined, the timeless and the eternal space–time in Newton’s and Einstein’s Platonist universe. For what is this four-dimensional block universe if not just yet another failed attempt to recreate the ideal world of Plato – this time not as an opposition between God and Creation, or between the soul and the body, or between the representation and the represented, but instead as an opposition between eternity and time? Einstein’s block universe, with a space–time that moves both backwards and forwards, is yet another flagrant example of a Platonist fantasy which, without any empirical footing at all, acquires a social status as if it were an established physical truth.
The physicist and philosopher Karen Barad champions the radical thesis that all philosophy that is produced prior to the advent of relationalism is all too anthropocentric and thereby misleading. The only way out of this fatalist cul-de-sac is to construct a completely new ontology with the existence of the Universe and not the human being as primary. Phantasmic anthropocentrism must be replaced by realistic universocentrism. The shift from anthropocentric to universocentric metaphysics is equivalent to the shift from Man to the network as a metaphysical centre. God is thus not in fact dead, it is just the human God who could only live under very special circumstances that has left us. The literally inhuman God lives and thrives and is at last being discovered and analysed by us humans. The inhuman God, the Universe as a glittering network, lives and thrives at the centre of the syntheological pyramid: God is a network.
However, it is the eternalistic background that is the real chimera in this context. To take one example, there are of course lots of local subsystems but no isolated systems anywhere in the Universe. This means that all the theories that require the existence of isolated systems collapse sooner or later. As a consequence of this, it is pointless to go further into physics with theory building that is not background-independent, because if they are the least dependent on a fixed eternalised background, these theories do not hold up to closer scrutiny. In fact, the Universe displays no need whatsoever for fixed backgrounds. The eternalist background is merely a fiction, the last remnant of the Abrahamic and Platonist fantasy of the God that precedes the Creation. But such a God of course does not exist, as we know. He died. The Universe does not need the eternalist background any more than it needs God the creator. Whitehead, Bohr, Barad and Smolin understand this, and their predecessor Leibniz understands it much earlier, but it turns out that this is something so extremely hard to accept for Einstein, who both idolises and is intoxicated by mathematics, which explains why from the point of view of the philosophy of science he clings onto relativism and is not able to move on to relationalism.
After all, we live in a mobilist Universe, and thus relationalism is the only possible way forward towards a deeper understanding of existence, however difficult and complicated that path may seem. Pantheos offers no incentive whatsoever in terms of making it simple for us in the way that rationalism in all its forms would like to believe. No incentives whatsoever can exist in a state of bounty, since an incentive by definition requires a scarcity. Rather, physics only becomes more and more complex the more deeply we delve into it. And why would Pantheos want to have it any other way? God apparently loves to play hide-and-seek. The only theory of everything that stands the test of time is therefore the relationalist metalaw which says that eternally valid theories of everything are in principle impossible. When the physicists’ megalomaniac boyhood dreams of the great unified theory of everything thus collapses in the face of the ruthless principle of explanatory closure, this is where the syntheists take over and enthusiastically pick up the only reasonable ethical imperative that remains: Go with the flow!
The principle of explanatory closure is based on the insight that at the end of the day the Universe is a gigantic, unmanageable ontic flow that is expanding at a tremendously high rate. The Universe did not create itself in some kind of unique moment of self-genesis – in the manner that the traditional religions, and up until recently the natural sciences as well, imagined the whole process to have taken place. Rather, it creates and recreates itself all the time in a constantly ongoing process. But all explanatory models of everything require an arbitrarily chosen but nevertheless necessary freeze of this flow, an eternalisation, in order to be possible, or even conceivable. The reason is quite simply that as soon as some individual explanation has been formulated, the world with all its mutable and interacting systems of atoms has already rushed onwards in all directions from the eternalisation in space–time that the explanation requires and claims to interpret and clarify. The Universe thereby constantly evades all of Man’s pathetic attempts at explanatory candour. Everything of this nature by definition lies outside our human capabilities. This means that the only intellectually honest attitude to the Universe is to accept it as a constantly mutable entity that continuously evades us, pantheism’s the One as God, the explanatory closure par excellence.
Note how the relationships between each step, just like when it comes to all forms of relationalist hierarchies, must be understood of course as emergent rather than reductionist. The fiction is not built into the fictives beforehand; it seems to always deliver something extra over and above the fictives in themselves. In the same way, the ideology is not built into the fictions in advance; it always appears as something more and extremely attractive over and above the fictions. And it is precisely these emergent qualities that keep us adamantly embedded in the ideological memeplex in question – every new level adds yet another layer of a kind of compact mysticism to the growing metanarrative, not least in the big step from the seemingly open and therefore creative fictions to the obviously concealed ideology, which brings us to a standstill – which explains why our relationship to the outermost framework of memeplexes, the metaphysical, can never be anything but humbly subservient. Even our relationship to a created syntheist god – a deliberately named projection surface vis-à-vis an indisputably real phenomenon in the surrounding world that we must relate to, that is, fiction par excellence – must subordinate itself to this premise. This is precisely because no memes exist outside memetics, just as no signs exist outside semiotics. Nor are there any fictives – and in turn fictions constructed from these, and in turn ideologies constructed from these – nor are there in turn any credible metaphysical systems deduced from these ideologies that stand outside the current information technology paradigm.
Not surprisingly, the memeplexes of the powers that be and religion throughout history tend to be entangled and therefore also mutually reinforcing. Religion legitimises power, which protects and enriches religion. In many cases, over time the collaboration became so intimate that it was no longer possible to distinguish the one from the other. But this in itself does not constitute a particularly elucidating answer to the question of why these winners in the cultural evolutionary process in particular have developed the way they have done, and why these memeplexes in particular have been as tenacious as they actually have been and have wiped out all the losers. Why God in particular? Why the Bible in particular (for example)? There has hardly been a lack of alternatives, to put it mildly. But the great majority of these were weeded out, ruthlessly. This is, of course, a topic that has not given memetics any peace; it is close to being a whole science in itself.
When the material conditions of a society then change, the function of religion is also changed. The hierarchical complexity that grew in the settled agrarian society demands other and more controlled forms for how the community is manifested. Gradually the music and dancing are regulated. The direct channel to the supernatural is abandoned and is increasingly taken over by a specially educated clergy, while the focus in this communication with the worshipped god is gradually shifted from good fortune in hunting and bountiful harvests here on Earth to eternal happiness among the angels in the afterlife. For a long time, it is the individual and her salvation that is the core activity of religion. The questions change, and therefore religion’s answers also change. The primary task of the church pews is by no means to make the visitors to the service comfortable – and they are not particularly comfortable either anywhere – but quite simply to prevent dancing.
Morality instead concerns a displayed attitude to the arbitrariness of a powerful external judge who might be, for example, God, the nation, the State, the leader, or the law per se, that is, the phantasmic figure that is called the great Other within psychoanalysis. The subject is forced to take a stand in the struggle between good (pleasing the judge) and evil (rebelling against the judge). Morality is thereby an externalised evaluation process. This is on the assumption that the subject who acts needs to be castigated, tamed and made subservient to the powers that be, rather than acting freely from a will of its own. Being moral thus primarily concerns following laws without questioning them. Moralising is attempting to impose one’s own values, in the form of laws or quasi-laws, on others, for example through laws or other regulations. This is in contrast to being ethical, which can best be described as intentions and actions following an inner conviction for the purpose of becoming one with this conviction, without taking account of, for example, prevailing social norms. The purpose of the ethical agent is not to placate any external judge, but to give oneself an ever-so-momentary existential substance, internally for oneself.
Morality also has a rationality, but it is produced from an external subject that is irrational in itself. This dark origin of morality can be summed up under the term the crazy dictator syndrome. In order to be able to maintain the requisite claim on universal validity, morality namely requires as its foundation an abundant libidinal power, that which the Abrahamic religions refer to as the divine omnipotence. The problem is just that power in abundance must logically be viewed as irrational. The dictator in question cannot make himself subservient to any external power, and every form of logic assumed in advance would be precisely such an external power. He must therefore be illogical and irrational, that is, in fact crazy, in order to be able to autocratically dictate the laws and rules of morality. As law, morality thus must apply to everything and everybody, without exception, except precisely the one who creates the morals. God, the nation, the State and the leader – that is, the great Other – need not follow the law. The creator of morality must not in fact follow the law, but must be fundamentally amoral and thereby evil in order for morality to be coherent. The price for morality’s apparent external consistency is thus that it is entirely subject to a single internal amoral source, namely the crazy dictator’s capricious libido.
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.
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.
The future is always open and multiple. History never rests, but always hurries on. Truth and totality remain incompatible. This means that Hegel’s notorious and idiosyncratic totalism – his seemingly megalomaniacal conviction about the historical arrival of absolute knowledge through his own philosophy – is completely correct if we place it and maintain it at the metalevel. But he does not actually plead for totalism per se. Hegel is definitely not a Platonist; rather, he buries totalism at the metalevel, beyond the eternalist subject’s everyday obligations, but as an abrupt historical conclusion to its vain, narcissistic push for omnipotence. Hegel does not care at all about the individual, Descarte’s and Kant’s divine linchpin down there on the system’s basement. Hegel’s God is named Atheos, the holy void, and nothing else.
Statism, faith in the nation state’s necessary supremacy and monopoly on violence, is capitalism’s political supra-ideology. Under statism’s banner, conservatism emerges as a protector of the establishment and its interests; liberalism constitutes a faith in the individual as a rational accumulator of resources in a market governed by a mystical hand which is invisible to the naked eye; while socialism is a blind faith in the political party as a substitute for God. Obviously, the advent of informationalism puts all these ideologies into deep crisis, since it attacks the very foundation for statism by undermining the drawing of borders in an increasingly irrelevant geography, which makes accessible alternative and infinitely much more tempting possibilities in terms of identity creation. In this process, not only is meliorism exposed as a banal myth, it also loses all its power of attraction; the netocratic dividual would much rather experience herself as a constantly ongoing and dynamic event throughout life than as a representative of any kind of slowly developed and predetermined progress. The old ideologies are quite simply plagued by statism’s deterministic view of history, which no longer has any credibility in an indeterministic universe. Therefore the ideological work must be done anew, and in that case all the way up from the theological foundation.
Syntheism’s community, on the other hand, is open and therefore radically different from the concept of the society. It encourages the creation of living narratives, which the syntheist community can gather around; narratives that bring together many disparate groups and create a powerful hegemonisation. This hegemonisation is the articulation of a common vision for disparate groups and identities. The name of a community is of central value, and the name must include, rather than exclude the outsider. For it is only with the outsider inside the community’s walls that the particular can give life to the universal and the universal can give life to the syntheist utopia. It is to the outsider that the syntheist agent reaches out on the free and open Internet, and it is together with the outsider that the syntheist agent can save the planet from ecological apocalypse. Only thus. It is in the communication and cooperation between outsiders that the Internet displays its historically completely unique potential. On the Internet, we can demonstrate to each other in action that we believe in the same thing and in this way build rock-solid trust, which opens up completely undreamt of possibilities for us to play new, complex non-zero-sum games with in fact outsiders. When push comes to shove, the free and open Internet is a brilliant deification of Syntheos, the created God. The logical conclusion is therefore a given: What happens if the Internet is God? We decide the answer together.
This historical kinship with the Renaissance and Romanticism should not however be misconstrued as syntheism preferring opacity and musings over logic and precision – quite the opposite. To begin with, syntheism is of course a scientistic pragmatism. It even regards the scientific exercise per se as a holy act (one of the Syntheist Movement’s first known manoeuvres was to declare the research facility CERN in Switzerland sacred ground). Or to express the matter syntheologically: To do science is to play hide-and-seek with God. However, all verbal and literary statements and standpoints throughout history must be treated sceptically based on a fallibilism where every statement, no matter how convincingly it is considered to be proven at any particular point in time, remains always open for revision in the future. This is also the essence of science and the only attitude that is productive: a constant re-evaluation and modification of accepted explanatory models. What was true yesterday may be an obvious delusion today, which becomes clear when new facts are on the table. Fallibilism is the pragmatist conviction that even innumerable verifications of a certain standpoint are no guarantee that a future falsification is impossible. As a consequence of this, it is not a given that previously accepted knowledge takes precedence over culture when the two seem to collide. One must namely keep in mind that culture lies deeper in Man than knowledge. We express this by saying that culture embraces knowledge, while knowledge is completely dependent on culture.
There are people who admit that they believe, and there are people that insist that they do not believe in anything at all, but that they definitely know and base all their decision-making on this knowing about which they are sure beyond all doubt. The problem for those that claim to know is that they seldom or never doubt their own existence, in spite of neuroscience teaching us that the ego is an illusion, generated by the brain in order to economise with precious resources and make sense of existence from a composed and artificial but functionally integrated perspective. What takes place within those who know with such certainty is evidently not at all as certain as the knowing itself would have us believe. And without the one, the other of course falls down. This position is called epistemological naivism. The truth is that all people, whether they admit it or not, by necessity are believers. Stubbornly maintaining the fictitious ego is in no way intellectually more honest than, for example, maintaining the existence of a god or a Santa Claus, but something that is taken out of thin air to exactly the same degree, regardless of how much (in this case unreasonable) intuition the believer invokes.
The same thing of course applies to the network, informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea, which does not either exist in any physical sense. The concept does not acquire weight as a consequence of any tangibly physical existence, but as the node that connects the dominant memes of the moment together into a cohesive world view, where this cohesive world view then in turn subsequently accords the node its weight. Naturally this relationalism.html">social relationalism is analogous with how phenomena in relationalist physics acquire weight from the network in question and not the other way around. Without a fictive but nonetheless highly functional node such as God, the ego or the network, the world view does not hang together. And if the world view does not hang together, nothing in existence acquires any meaning or context. Thus we must first of all believe and act in accordance with this faith of ours in order to then be able to know, in exactly the same way that within physics we must first of all weave together a network in order to then be able to give its nodes substance. Relations generate the substance and not the other way around. And even the most fanatical atheists are thus true believers. They just think that they are not.
This means that the ensuing intellectualisation of the preceding emotional experience of necessity must be constructed from an illusion. In fact, there must always be something there inside the actual experience; something that is, in the experience, that which de facto experiences that it experiences it. And, according to an intuitive reasoning that follows closely on the heels of Descartes, this something is the ego. Thus, it is quite reasonable to ask ourselves why people today are afraid of, uncomfortable with, or become quite frankly embarrassed by talking about the idea of God, when they should be every bit as afraid of, or uncomfortable with, or embarrassed by talking about the ego and its existence. Consequently, syntheism also entails a successful resuscitation attempt on the newly pronounced dead ego; it lives on, redefined, and proves useful on the same terms as apply to the idea of God.
Syntheism takes the logic connected to the subject’s pathological origin to its utmost limit. For if it is a pathological necessity for us to consider ourselves as subjects in order to be able to understand ourselves as agents, we must also admit our pathological need to establish phenomenal objects in existence in relation to this subjectivity – our respective subjects as fellow humans are of course each other’s objects to start with – and the optimal object has of course historically speaking always been God. There is thus nothing wrong with or even particularly remarkable about talking about God as an actual phenomenon; not as long as we regard God as a borrowed illusion in the existential equation in the same way and with the same importance as we talk about the ego. God is neither more nor less than the name of the empty backdrop against which the equally empty ego constructs its more or less functional fantasy world filled with fabricated meaning. This is ultimately the way in which we create meaning: we invent it, we create fictions around which we weave meaningful stories, which then form the basis for all human values. There is thus no deeper human activity than play. Even the best science is based on a playful attitude to the mysteries of existence rather than some kind of strict logic. Here we return to transrationalism: Logic follows strictly on from play, not the other way around.
When we say that the network is informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea, this means in fact that we are theologising God’s most recent reincarnation in the form of the network. We are saying that the Internet is God. And when a sufficient number of people adhere to this view it becomes a fact: a truth. It was in precisely this way that the 18th century Enlightenment philosophers turned the individual into God. Neither more nor less. Syntheism quite simply addresses itself to conscious believers who have understood the conditions of the existential theatre and who want to live affirming and complete lives within this credible and intellectually honest framework. We may then, in the best democratic spirit, leave those of our fellow humans who do not understand or do not want to understand the beauty in this project to their superstition, free in peace and quiet to spend their time consuming entertainment and empty enjoyment from the broad and varied offering that is directed precisely at the consumtarian masses. Syntheism is not, nor can it ever be, a religion that forces anyone to do anything. And quite honestly this is connected to the fact that this sort of thought control is almost impossible to administrate in the informationalist plurarchy.
Regardless of whether we introduce divinities or not in syntheist metaphysics, the actual process is finally about taking advantage of metaphysics’ unique opportunity to imagine existence to its utmost limit. To convert metaphysics into theology, to think about God, is thus not a matter of some kind of shallow fantasising about an Old Testament father figure who sits above the clouds and observes his children playing on the face of the Earth with tender or irascible eyes. Instead, theologising metaphysics is thinking one’s way forth to the outermost horizon of the time in which one is living and based on the knowledge and spiritual experiences that one has access to. And then not merely in a physical sense, with God as the concept for the beginning, middle and end of the Universe – in that case we might just as well settle for classical pantheism and not need to develop its completion syntheism – but even more so with God as the name of the surface on which to project the meaning and purpose of everything. In that sense, the concept of God is fundamentally not just the Universe (Pantheos), but also the utopia (Syntheos), the imagined backdrop located in the future – a backdrop that nourishes all of humanity’s dreams and aspirations.
Syntheism is radical and evolved atheism, a philosophical concept that captures the inexhaustible and unattainable in existence that philosophy and theology sooner or later must confront. Not least theology, since traditionally utopianism belongs in the world of theology rather than philosophy. More often than not it has been a matter of a longed-for reconstruction of a lost paradise. Syntheology thus takes theology back from its dull life among the traditional religions and gives it a renewed relevance historically. By leaving its traditional hermeneutic search for a meaning that is externally produced in advance, theology instead gains the central role as the intellectual engine for Man’s internal production of credible and functional utopias. For it can no longer pretend to be occupied with silent and inaccessible gods that do not exist. But theology can aid in building longed-for and credible gods centred in, for example, physics, psychoanalysis and utopianism. Syntheology forces theology to give up its historical fondness for transcendence to instead give structure to the new and growing religious immanence. Classical theology shifts over to syntheology, and when all is said and done, syntheology is a utopology. The question of whether any particular god exists or not syntheologically speaking is completely irrelevant. Such a question of course assumes that we are intimately acquainted with some kind of god who does not exist anyway nor has ever existed, and beforehand at that. The correctly posed syntheological question is instead which god might come to exist, and the answer to this question is always synonymous with the core of the vision that is driving the paradigm in question. The syntheological response runs as follows: Tell me your utopia, and I will tell you what god you are seeking and following.
Syntheism is about deriving and describing new and more relevant explanatory models for existence. This means that it regards the sciences as very much a theological exercise – while the syntheist religion serves as a collective term for the emotionally engaged, social practices that follow from this search. God is the name of the engine behind utopianism, which drives human creativity and adventurousness. This means that if, for some prejudiced reason, we are to deny ourselves the option of including the idea of God in our equations, it also means that we deprive ourselves of the option of producing utopias. We castrate utopianism for no reason whatsoever. Without utopias, no visions, and without visions, no hope. For what reason should we accept such a meagre atheist asceticism?
In spite of the fact that all metaphysics begins, revolves around and ends with Man’s wonder at existence – or if you prefer: nature’s own wonder, embodied by and in Man, at itself – this constantly recurring complexity of emotions remains a mystery to many militant atheists. They stubbornly cling to their own, fragile, subjective experiences – many somewhat fetchingly refer to themselves as humanists, as if they themselves were able to serve God’s utopian purpose with their pious belief in reason – without understanding that all subjective experiences, even their own, merely consist of emotions. Which is not the worst thing in this world, but this fact must be acknowledged and analysed. The relevant response is of course to ask how emotions could have become a historical problem for such an emotional being as Man. They are after all as genuine and real as any other physical phenomena. And they are indisputably inevitable. So why not instead capitulate to these emotions, in order to later investigate what great exploits such an acceptance can inspire?
In Ancient Greece, three different concepts of love are used: metaphysical love (agape), erotic love (eros) and friendship love (philia). The definitive test for love is attraction to the radically other, and this can only arise as agape. In this way, the three loves form not just a triangle but also an inclined plane, sloping from agape down towards the pair philia and eros. In the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza added a fourth concept of love: amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God, a love sprung from an intellectual conviction and recognition of the actual conditions of things, above all in relation to his monist universe where God and Nature are two names for one and the same thing, Deus sive Natura. Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis is first and foremost a radical act of will, which makes it truth as an act par excellence. For he maintains that the ethically desired attraction to the radically other does not start with the emotions we normally associate with love, but as a logically and cogently performed act of duty.
Spinoza’s concept amor dei intellectualis is a predecessor to Nietzsche’s complementary term amor fati, which was coined 200 years later. It is enough to add duration to Spinoza’s love which is dependent on logical dutifulness to the Universe in order to get Nietzsche’s love which is dependent on logical dutifulness to fate. In both cases it is about the same attraction as a truth as an act, where the identity-reflecting decision precedes the emotion. Syntheologically of course we place the universe-fixated Spinoza with Pantheos and the time-fixated Nietzsche with Entheos. That Nietzsche adds the arrow of time to the ethical equation results in amor dei intellectualis and agape being merged as the basis for amor fati. His own world view is of course based on the Abrahamic God’s death, and since it also heralds the death of the individual, the Nietzschean übermensch ends up in a deadlock where everything in history up until now must be loved – both dutifully and without reservation – since no external salvation or other mental relief whatsoever exists. This means that an accepting attitude is not enough: Nietzsche unreasonably maintains that in fact a transcendent love is required for a possible reconciliation with fate. Since the love of fate is logically deduced, a necessity for the ethical substance rather than some kind of freely chosen emotion, only metaphysical love, agape, is suitable for this task. Fate arises and must be loved as truth as an act where the events are fixed in history. Therefore we place amor fati in the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.
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.
What syntheology adds to Brassier’s ultranihilism is that it draws lines from the base constructed around the three basic concepts, up towards the top of the syntheological pyramid. Thereby it adds Man’s emotions and creativity to the world view; and it ironically enough includes Brassier’s own highly libidinous philosophising per se, whose driving force Brassier can never explain based on his limited atheological model. It is about emotions and creativity that a seemingly depressed or malicious Brassier does not experience or attempts to ignore. Syntheos is Man’s highly conscious creation of God, her sense of wonder and confidence vis-à-vis the fundamental triangle of the syntheological pyramid, which she builds on with a logical faith. It is about Man’s vision of a new and different future, the utopia, in relation to her present existential situation, and is constructed on top of her established knowledge of the fundamental nature of existence.
The utopia is the God called Syntheos, and the core of Syntheos is the existential experience of ego-dissolution and uniting with the One, the unit of existence. Here syntheism leaves classical philosophy and steps into the world of theology. For the step from an illusory existential dividuality to a considerably more credible existential oceanity requires that one leaves philosophy as a transcendental totalism in order to proceed to theology as immanent mobilism. Therefore Brassier’s role model François Laruelle describes the speculative totalism of Hegel as the pinnacle of the history of philosophy, since totalism – which Hegel first completes and then also turns around dialectically – at its core is the essence of the philosophical exercise. If this is the case, mobilist thinking must use theology as a weapon in order to change the course of philosophy away from its fixation on extinction. Since it evidently requires a theological dialectical reversal to reintroduce Man’s emotions as the decisive factor – or syntheologically expressed: Syntheos must be added to the metaphysical triangle Atheos–Entheos-Pantheos – mobilist thinking must claim that theology is deeper than philosophy. Thereby syntheology can begin to act as the necessary metamorphosis that saves philosophy from totalism’s wearisome and destructive death wish.
The original dividuation arises through an organic contraction. We can call this condition primitive subjectivity, in contrast to the organism’s primitive objectification of its environment. From primitive subjectivity, the organisms later develop into the thinking and feeling human being of our time with his language and his consciousness. The ideas are dialectical in nature, the intensities are aesthetic in nature. The existential experience is best described as an oscillation between these two poles. The more eternalist the syntheist agent is, the more mobilist the phenomenon becomes, and vice versa. The subject is produced by the perception in order to give the semiotic flow its context and meaning. But if the subject were not there, if it were not produced, both we ourselves and existence would remain irreducible multiplicities piled on top of each other without context or meaning. But without any form of personification, no unit arises. Without personification, a chaos can never be understood as a cosmos. Whether one later, like the classical mystics, claims that God ought to remain nameless in order to maintain God’s illusory personification, or as the syntheists say that the illusoriness should be affirmed openly, so that personifications can be infinitely produced as long as they are creatively and explanatorily motivated – syntheology starts with four, deeply rooted in the history of metaphysics – is rather a matter of preference. However the syntheists are happy to let this issue be decided in a future comparison of the creative effect of these positions. Up until then, the transrationalist question to the believer is: What standpoint do you choose to identify with and follow as your truth as an act in particular?
For it is Man’s emotional engagement that is needed in philosophy and theology, not his internarcissistic and anthropocentric projections on his environment. But neither the void, Atheos, nor nature, Pantheos, offers us any safe haven. We do relate to and allow ourselves to be fascinated by the void and nature, but we do not on that account have to follow their contingent whims at all. We can only create our religious home together with other dedicated believers through an affirmative cultural expression rather than through an ingratiating imitation of nature. For life is not a long drawn-out destructive death; life is instead a passionate, creative dying. Only through its mortality can the subject, Atheos, be experienced in its fundamental, creative emptiness. To live is therefore to live in the direction of death and the subject is that within the agent that is constantly dying. Life is a becoming: only death supplies the being. Syntheologically, we express this by saying that only through dying can God become God for God’s self. By reconnecting Man to this historical origin, this meta-theological fundamental prerequisite, syntheism brings Man back to his rightful place in existence, and in the safest possible company, surrounded by his own most beautiful invention: the created and therefore by definition mortal God’s religion.
An event is a spectacular occurrence, a revolution is a spectacular event, and a singularity is a spectacular revolution. Events of various importance take place several times per year, genuine revolutions only once or twice per millennium. Singularities are easily counted, from an anthropocentric perspective we can only be said to have gone through three singularities: the commencement of the Universe, the genesis of life and the birth of consciousness. The question is whether we can imagine such a fourth singularity. For syntheism however the answer is clear. The fourth singularity must be God’s entry into history. For whatever it is that would be able to match the weight of the emergent genesis of existence, of life and of consciousness earlier in history, for the people of today it must have the same weight as if God suddenly appeared. Whatever it is that is hiding beyond the fourth dimension, its right and only name is God. Thereby the interesting question is what the arrival of God might be and what forms it might assume.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou, one of Jacques Lacan’s most well-known successors, starting with his work Being and Event, constructs a complete philosophical system based on the informationalist event as the deepest truth about Man’s existence. The biological, mental, and social structures that characterise Man are empirically verifiable generalities, and as such are of course contingent. The truths we produce and know of are dependent on this contingency, which summarises them all. Being is not everything to Man, as the totalist philosophers imagine. Thinking can very well be constructed with its starting point in ontology’s constant inconsistency instead of using the fictive being as the basis. However, Badiou argues that the universal is independent on the contingency. Every singularity in itself consists of an infinitely internal chaos, but through the singularity’s internalisation of this chaos, a kind of encircling stability is created around the chaos which makes the universal’s identity possible. From a geometric perspective, we can express this by saying that it is the stable ring around what is transient and chaotic that is the actual singularity; a stable universe around chaotic matter, a stable life around a chaotic biology, a stable consciousness around a chaotic hodgepodge of thoughts, followed by God as a kind of stable ring around a chaotic future.
The academic establishment’s monopoly on critical thinking – which is already regrettable in itself, since it effectively shuts out life-giving impulses from outside – has placed thinking in a vicious circle of interpretations of interpretations: a collective, somnambulist movement towards a vegetative passivity without any critical questioning whatsoever or any social activism directed towards the statist-corporatist complex that controls late capitalist society as a whole. This relationship is illustrated by the fact that research is conducted on old philosophy rather than any new critical thinking being created. The question we must ask ourselves is why, under late capitalism, the academic world should be better at thinking critically – critical of precisely the system that, by definition, it is an integral and moreover fundamental part of – than other old and in the same sense corrupt institutions in history. This would be like us expecting the Catholic Church during the 18th century to create the Enlightenment and kill God. One does not tend to bite the hand that feeds one, at least not deliberately and consistently.
The theological consequence of Cantor’s transfinite number series is that they confirm and formalise the dogma of negative theology: God is the nothingness! Beyond all multiplicities there lies a solid and overwhelming emptiness. And what name does this Badiouian, ontological emptiness go under if not Atheos, the engine of the multiplicities and existence within syntheology? Whether one then like Badiou decides to regard Cantor’s mathematical revolution as the final proof that the Abrahamic God does not exist, as atheism thought through to its ultimate conclusion; or like Cantor himself one throws Entheos into the game and chooses as a point of departure that the transfinitude in itself is God – a thought that gets strong support from the American syntheist Leon Niemoczynski for example – in the syntheological, always pragmatist sense, it does not matter at all. What is important, according to both Badiou and Niemoczynski, is to accept and to act based on the ethical decision through the power from the unnamable, which is the foundation of and constitutes the decision itself as such. The foundation is always called Atheos, as F W J Schelling would express it.
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.
Convention says that death frightens us with all the pain, sorrow, loneliness, powerlessness and mystery with which it is associated. But even if the pain, sorrow and loneliness are factored out, the fascination still remains the same. Thus the powerlessness and mystery remain. In other words, death frightens us by how it reveals our powerlessness and lack of knowledge. It humiliates us all, not least those of us who have had power and social status during our lifetimes. It strips us of anthropocentric internarcissism. But death also reveals our existential banality, our entirely non-existent significance for the Universe. And what frightens us most of all is how death reveals our own lack of significance for the divine, that is, for Pantheos. At the deepest level, the Christian lie is that each and every one of us means something to God, that we are actually a desirable lot and cherished jewels for a god who thus has nothing better to do than to sit and coddle us and the likes of us (literally) in all eternity, like a dead robot god surrounded by dead rag dolls.
Meillassoux argues that the first singularity is the genesis of existence per se, the second singularity occurs at the genesis of life and the third singularity occurs at the genesis of thinking. He then takes a giant leap into the future and argues that in a contingent world a fourth revolution of the same importance is both possible, likely and above all desirable, and then in true syntheist spirit he casts God in the role of the fourth, and for mankind the final, step. We write in true syntheist spirit, not just because Syntheos is the created God placed in the future, but also because Meillassoux declares that his concept of God is to be understood based on the dogma that a belief in God’s existence does not entail that one believes in God, but that one believes in existence. There is in Meillassoux, as in all syntheists, no way around or out of the theological project. Metaphysics is not a choice, but an absolute necessity that everything else is fundamentally dependent upon.
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.
However, we pose the question of whether the syntheist community shares Meillassoux’s dream of the resurrection of the dead before a suddenly existing god whose essence is called justice really is the God that we long for, and which thereby can act as a utopian engine for us in our time. Do we ever actually desire something that actually later occurs? Is it not the case that both emergent and contingent phenomena occur only of their own accord – as both Hegel and Nietzsche maintain – and that we only afterwards place them in our value hierarchies? It appears undeniably as considerably more reasonable to speak of the growth of the Internet in the late 20th century as the genesis of a – if only afterwards – desired god, rather than as any form of justice as a god located in the distant future at the end of a road which in any case is filled with thousands and thousands of other paradigm-shifting events. Meillassoux’s future is quite simply neither consistent with his radical contingency, nor sufficiently open to the future to be able to act as an engine for syntheist activism. However, it is unarguably a formidable foundation on which to build potential utopias.
Here mathematics distinguishes itself clearly from language, and here there is thus an opening of the door to the noumenal, the door that Kant believes he has closed. However, Meillassoux ends up in a return to the Paulinist dream of merging the Jewish religion with Greek philosophy and its main current, Platonism. This is apparent in his resistance to the pagan circularity, which for many syntheists is what drives the connection back to previous monist civilisations before the growth and spread of Abrahamic, dualist monotheism. Meillassoux has a fondness for referring to Paul, while other syntheists find a compact monism within quantum physics on which to build their world view and argue that anything else would be dishonest. When other syntheists welcome God per se as Syntheos rather than God as some kind of specific property – God’s attribute is for them as secondary as the attributes of a beloved human being – he challenges us with his God as justice.
On the other hand, it is a mistake to imagine that in some mysterious way these emergences are givens, that they follow some kind of metalaw of nature – which in that case must exist even before the genesis of the Universe, which of course is an impossibility in an internal self-creating universe without a creating god that is both external and preceding. The Universe has namely not created itself in the past, it is creating itself all the time. In this, Kauffman breaks radically with reductionism, the fundamental axiom of the sciences since Newton’s heyday. According to reductionism, everything can be deduced downwards in the hierarchy; as if everything that arises higher up and on a later occasion always lies fully preprogrammed at one of the lower levels on a previous occasion. According to reductionism for example, biology is really only an advanced form of chemistry, while chemistry is really only an advanced form of physics, and nothing more than this.
In accordance with the reasoning above, if we regard atheism as an emergent phenomenon in relation to theism, the fundamental dismissal of the concept of God no longer appears as such – that is, that which gives the position its name – as its most important theological achievement. No, atheism’s most substantial achievement is its summation of all sorts of theist positions as a uniform and cohesive alternative to repudiate, that is, atheism’s dialectical construction of theism as an idea. Seen as an emergent phenomenon in relation to atheism, as the historical and intellectual intensification of atheism, syntheism in turn is a metareligion, a faith that its practitioners unabashedly practice as a pure religion in itself. Thereby it also confirms and supports all other art forms’ freedom to act from the metaperspective: art as art for art’s sake, literature as literature for literature’s sake, philosophy as philosophy for philosophy’s sake, and so on. And therefore syntheism instinctively rejects all of individualism’s calculations of utility. What syntheism seeks instead are the place and the time for itself as an event. This event is manifested within love, art, science, politics and religion: syntheology’s five generic categories.
Syntheology is in turn the intensification of syntheism that is enabled when it sees itself as a truth as an act and focuses on one single wisely chosen eternalisation, in order to intensify the thinking based on this fundamental point. It is precisely this we mean when we say that correctly practised theology enables an intensification of philosophy. Syntheology’s well-chosen eternalisation is neither God nor the Individual, as in the previous paradigms, but religion per se as the network before all others in the informationalist society. The term religion – in its original significance as a social phenomenon that connects people with each other – is in fact synonymous with the term network. This means that syntheism is the metareligion that binds together humanity through practising a truth that sees the network – that is, religion per se – as sacred. Syntheology thus realises what has always been the innermost dream of a religion for religion’s sake.
Syntheist art is not merely participatory and dividual rather than isolationist and individual; it is also a metaphysical art in the deepest sense of the term. With the advent of syntheism, art can leave cynical and cultural relativist inquiry which has been its axiomatic norm under late capitalism – from a Nietzschean perspective, what can be called a voluptuous revelling in the death of God – and instead devote itself to a transcending and utopian creativity. But this requires a distinct break with the late capitalist art world’s eschatological mythology – history has not reached any ending in the sense that Francis Fukuyama speaks of – and its fixated, academic power structure. This in turn requires the artist’s will to smash the individualist myth of the auteur as art’s Napoleonic patriarchal genius. Syntheist art is in fact liberated from the creator of the art and his atomism – it formulates the idea and then insists that the idea must be free. It knows that it is a small but fundamentally manifold part of a greater holistic phenomenon – it does not act as the distanced rebel for the purpose of self-glorification, but serves an even greater utopian ideal – and it is art’s relationship to this phenomenon, within which it acts as a cohesive agent, which is of interest.
In its capacity as theological anarchism par excellence, syntheism is the netocracy’s own built-in metaphysics. But the battle against the statist-corporativist establishment is neither simple nor has it any preordained result in a contingent and indeterminist world. At least not in the short term. There are trends and there are counter-trends. What many people forget is that nation states, which have long appeared to be so “natural” and God-given, actually were the result of never-ending bloody and hard-fought wars of religion in the old Europe. Consequently, the choice of strategy is entirely decisive for the outcome of this struggle. The global empire will borrow many features from, for example, Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. The first Christian congregations, the Mithraic orders, the Masonic lodges, the cathedrals and monasteries that were built during the Middle Ages are therefore all excellent sources of inspiration for a rising elite who believe in the need for, and want to engage in the building of, syntheist temples and monasteries in the global empire.
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.
An important component in all thinking around consciousness is the concept of intelligence. Intelligence, however, does not arise as a superfluous asset for the owner’s amusement, but as a necessary instrument of survival in a system that otherwise would not survive, at the same time as intelligence is attractive in itself and results in procreative advantages. Like everything else that develops in a Darwinian way, intelligence develops as both a mutation-conditioned response to harsh circumstances, and as a human equivalent to the tail feathers of the peacock (wisdom, talent and humour attract potential partners: see The Body Machines). This means, for example, that the idea of God as an intelligent being is absurd. An omnipotent creature, who does not need to risk bumping into any obstacles worth mentioning in his quest to get his own way – and this applies as we know to both the Abrahamic father gods and syntheism’s projected divinities – thus needs no intelligence. Omnipotence suffices perfectly well; it covers most things.
On closer inspection, intelligence is actually a symptom of a limitation or a weakness, a final weapon against another, greater power (and often one blissfully void of intelligence). Or to carry the matter to its extreme: If God had been in need of intelligent design in order to create the world – that is, a blueprint marked by an intelligence that must be followed by God and the angels of heaven, in the same way that construction workers relate to their instructions from the hopefully intelligent architect – God would instead be an expression of a lack of power and above all reveal his total lack of omnipotence. An omnipotent Universe therefore is not intelligent in the real sense of the word, since it emerges spontaneously. Intelligence is thus a human trait, originating from our complex limitations and inflicted powerlessness, and definitely not some divine property.
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