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Humanism
The religious conviction that the human being rather than God is the centre of existence, its objective and meaning. This conviction was originally formulated by the French philosopher René Descartes and later consummated ideologically by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. See, by way of comparison, individualism and atomism.
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.
The burgeoning netocracy, the elite that is succeeding the bourgeoisie in the new paradigm being driven by digitisation and interactivity, obviously represented a special interest group when it initially marketed the anarcho-libertarian ideology as the metaphysics of the Internet age. If truth is an act, and if truth will set us free, it follows that if the Internet is allowed to be free, it will also set us free. There is here of course an ill-concealed intention to use noble motives as a pretext for the seizure of power. The netocracy is thus acting in exactly the same way that the feudal aristocracy did when it embraced monotheism, and in the same way as the capitalist bourgeoisie did when it embraced humanism. These specific metaphysics developed as the dominant stories – and they worked! – during their respective paradigms, for the very reason that they appointed the emerging social classes as the social theatre’s new protagonists.
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.
That the consummation of humanism as the socialist project lacks a firm footing in a post-atheist world is the theme driving both Slavoj Zizek’s Less Than Nothing and Simon Critchley’s The Faith of The Faithless as well as Quentin Meillassoux’s L’inexistence divine. The way forward for Zizek, Critchley and Meillassoux therefore is a return to theology; certainly not back to Abrahamic theology, but to theology in its deepest form, as philosophical metaphysics. The problem for Zizek is that his return does not go deeper than to the Enlightenment’s romanticised idea of the bloody revolution as deliverance for everything. However, in contrast to Zizek, Critchley seeks to return to the origin of religion and finds there a mystical anarchism in constant opposition to the patriarchal, ecclesiastical power hierarchies.
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.
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.
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.
Barad’s role-models Michel Foucault and Judith Butler also take a thrashing as she constructs her universocentric onto-epistemology. As post-structuralists, Foucault and Butler are, in Barad’s eyes, still too anthropocentric. Post-structuralism is wedged between Einstein’s Cartesian representationalism and Bohr’s agential realism: it has not gone the whole hog and left Cartesian representationalism behind. Kant’s ghost lives on. Post-structuralism has, to use Barad’s own wording, still not transported itself from antihumanism to posthumanism. Therefore, post-structuralism still in fact dances around the Cartesian subject that it both claims to and believes it has dissolved. Barad does go all the way however and leaves post-structuralism’s antihumanism behind. The Hegelian dialectic between humanism (personified by Descartes) and antihumanism (personified by Nietzsche) is consummated in Barad’s appeal for posthumanism; a parallel movement to the dialectic between theism and atheism, which dissolves into syntheism. It is not just objective reality that returns in a surprising new guise through agential realism. The same thing also applies to theological truth, which returns with full force as syntheist process religion.
It is important to understand that humanism, including all of its political ideologies such as liberalism and socialism, takes meliorism for granted as a basic axiom. However, it is sufficient to study human genetics throughout history in order to be able to determine that empirically meliorism is entirely a myth – a kind of failed post-Christian self-salvation doctrine for humanity – which among other things must be held accountable for all kinds of eugenic human betterment miseries under capitalism. The problem here is that liberal heroism is an impossibility. The liberal can never be a hero, at least not in her capacity as a liberal. This is for the simple reason that liberalism includes rather than excludes the totalitarian tendency in its incessant, utilitarian calculating – if nothing else works to defend its position of power, liberalism de facto has no built-in barriers against the totalitarian ambition within itself – which in turn means that it lacks a functioning immune system against outbursts of totalitarianism.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58