Back to index
Intensity
Within physics the measure of the concentration of energy within a given, delimited area. In relationalist physics, intensity replaces the old substance as the yardstick of everything; in social relationalist sociology attentional intensity replaces the old growth of the economy as the yardstick of everything; in syntheist ethics ecstatic intensity in the infinite now replaces all the old maxims for the existential experience and the memory from the infinite now is the fundamental identity-generating reference through life. See, by way of comparison, relationalism and relationalism.html">social relationalism.
1:15
(In »Everything is religion«)
But when it comes to the extent of these types of crimes, most particularly in the present era, although there are Hindus making war on Muslims with great energy in India for example, the Abrahamites occupy an unchallenged position of prominence. Militant Islamists terrorise other Muslims along with the rest of us with an intensity that affects all of our lives and communities: how we travel and move across national boundaries, whom we choose to trust and interact with, what we dare to write and publish, and what we allow ourselves to say in public. A significant measure of self-censorship is exercised in both Islamic countries and in the West because of an unbridled fear of the physical attacks of religious fundamentalists. What one can and must ask oneself in this context is, however, what the causative links actually are, and to what extent these religions as such are culpable in the exercise of violence and the atrocities that are carried out in the name of various gods.
Theological anarchism is described exhaustively by the British philosopher Simon Critchley in his book The Faith of The Faithless, and it is of course completely synonymous with syntheism. And syntheism maintains that, precisely because everything of value is transient, unique, finite and mortal, it seeks existentiality and intensity. Thus, syntheism is the religion of immanence and multiple finitudes, and the radical opposite of the Abrahamic religions’ worship – contemptuous of reality – of another transcendental world and singular eternity. For how could anything at all enjoy its existence and be maximised in its existence, if it were not simultaneously aware of its own finality and limitation in the physical realm?
The will to exist is not only a by-product of human eagerness to survive, funnily enough it is the Universe’s own raison d’etre in relation to itself. Just as much as mankind, the Universe is a product of Darwinian evolution, where continuing and expanding existence constantly accrues to the phenomenon that happens to be best adapted to the current situation, while competing phenomena disappear. This means that the Internet age’s syntheistic metaphysics focuses on survival and not on immortality. Syntheism entails a worship of this intensity and of indeterminist existence rather than a death worship and determinist illusion. The Platonic cult of death, from the ancient Greeks via Christianity to Newton’s and Einstein’s fixed, atomist world views, loses all its credibility.
Feudalism is the second paradigm, which starts from the emergence of written language and is characterised by permanent settlements, land ownership, agriculture and the domestication of livestock. Society’s focus lies on the domestication of animals and plants and a low-intensity class struggle between the aristocrats and the peasants. Written language was invented and started to develop as early as more than 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, after which it arose in three other places (Egypt, the Indus Valley and China) roughly simultaneously and independently of each another. But it exploded in use over the entire Eurasian landmass during the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age (Achsenzeit in German) between 800 and 200 B.C. The Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek cultures flourished during the Axial Age, since for the first time it became possible to build empires (an order from the administrative centre of the empire could be expected to arrive un-garbled and be implemented as intended out in the provinces), and it was at this time the world was also blessed with the first formalised world religions – for example Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism and Judaism – and the first documented philosophy. It might be added that additional advanced civilisations in for example Italy, Ethiopia and Peru developed soon thereafter.
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.
The Zoroastrian revolution is clearly seen in ancient Iranian architecture. Both sacrificial alters and burial sites disappear when Zoroaster’s theological broom sweeps clean across the Central Asian highlands. Because there are no longer any tyrannical gods to placate, and bodies no longer need to be embalmed or in any other way prepared for the afterlife in eternity, but are instead recycled in a natural way, for example, as food for vultures. The Zoroastrians build ascetically bare temples, painted in white, where the community gather around the atash bahram, the eternally burning flame in the centre of the temple, the symbol of the infinite expansion and ecstatic intensity of the cosmos. That Zoroastrianism as early as 3,700 years ago was practising such seemingly modern ideas as ecological sustainability, radical gender equality, collective ownership of resources and tolerance of deviant human character traits, is quite consistent if one takes Zoroaster’s ideology as a starting point.
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.
All of these four concepts relate to the search for the sublime as equivalent to the deepest pursuit of religion. The quest for the religious experience is the quest for a life intensity which is so strong that it bridges the gap from the moment to eternity – what syntheology calls the infinite now. Atheos motivates and drives the religious impulse, Entheos is the impulse in itself, Pantheos is its horizon and Syntheos is the moment when the impulse reaches its target and religion is realised as pure religion. Metaphors borrowed from the diachronic world of quantum physics shed light on the process: Atheos is the wave and Pantheos is the particle. Entheos is the relation between them, the movement between; on the one hand the perfect wave where no particle exists any longer, and on the other hand the perfect particle where no wave exists any longer. Syntheos is this entire complex seen as a cohesive unit, as a single phenomenon. It is through the presence and realisation of Syntheos that the phenomenon becomes an active agent.
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.
If geometrogenesis proves to be the best theory for describing the origin of the Universe, then it is likely to have no less than dramatic consequences, to put it mildly, for philosophy, too. To start with, the Universe can no longer be a kind of Heideggerian accident in a metaphysical sense; the theory does not provide scope for any cosmological accidentalism of the type that the static theories of the Universe’s origin de facto assume. All forms of accidentalism are of course inevitably based on myths of stasis, equilibrium and isolation as normal states. But this is not what physical reality looks like. It is, as so often the case in history, the metaphor of death that plays too large a part in the collective fantasies of human beings for us to be able to understand how physical reality is constructed. From the Garden of Eden to the great silence before, for example, the genesis of physics, life or consciousness: again and again the fantasising returns to the same eternal worship of stasis, equilibrium and isolation, a fantasising that ultimately can result in only one thing: a suddenly emergent, vital chaos that disturbs and interrupts the mortal order, that is, the decisive anomaly that means that the dreamed-of paradise is lost. However, cosmological accidentalism seldom or never has any relevance whatsoever in physical reality. The Universe is not human. In fact, the normal state of the Universe is vitality and intensity, not death and extinction.
At the dawn of the Internet age, hardly surprisingly, we were inundated by innovative relationalist philosophy. The culture critic Steven Shaviro is inspired by Whitehead’s pragmatic world of prehensions and nexi in his book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics. He does not refrain from also investigating such philosophically controversial concepts as vitalism, animism and panpsychism in his work. In her book Vibrant Matter the Deleuzian eco-philosopher Jane Bennett champions the argument that it is time once and for all to abandon the anthropomorphic fixation with the axiomatic special status that life constantly has in the world of philosophy, and instead replace vitalism connected to life with a vitalism based on intensity in physics as a unifying factor. Bennett constructs a world of constantly vibrating bodies rather than isolated things as the eternalised forms of processes, but her bodies are both human and non-human, living and non-living, where it is precisely the vitality of the bodies and nothing else that is allowed to take centre stage.
The eternalist world view exists because the human being needs it: physics on the other hand manages splendidly without eternalism in our mobilist Universe. The perception process transforms the mobilist field into an eternalised thing. The abstract thing thus does not exist in an ontic sense, it must instead be understood as a kind of concrete field. Evolution has conveniently developed perception into a highly efficient information prioritisation mechanism, rather than into the ontological truth producer that Kantian rationalism in its superstitiousness desires it to be. It is thus the perception that freezes the concrete field in space–time and decodes it as a delimited fictive. The key word here is intensity. A phenomenon is mainly a kind of noumenal intensity. The higher the activity and complexity within a concrete field, the higher the intensity. The physicists Julian Barbour and Lee Smolin have defined complexity in a physical sense as multiplicity. The greater the difference within a subsystem, the greater the variation. Self-organised systems organise energy flows as feedback loops, for both positive and negative feedback. Thereafter it is simply a case of multiplying the variation by the activity in order to be able to calculated the intensity of the phenomenon in question.
Syntheism regards the antagonism between desire and drive as equivalent to the existential experience itself, and its syntheological equivalent is of course the oscillation between Pantheos and Atheos. Riding the intensity at the centre of the oscillation is to be merged with Entheos; building utopias of other worlds in other times with other human beings based on the current position is to create Syntheos. Here, it is important to understand that desire is specific to Man and her consciousness. Desire is a by-product of language and belongs to culture. The drive, on the other hand, belongs to nature and literally drives everything outside of Man’s consciousness. Although the subconscious is structured so that it really wants to die, and although the subconscious is therefore an engine of the drive.html">death drive, consciousness fights to the end for survival in the struggle with irrevocable death.
Syntheist ethics is based on this state of affairs. At the same time that the syntheist agent understands the terror of eternal life, right up until the moment of death she still seeks the continued dividuation in survival as desire’s conscious response to the drive’s subconscious longing for dissolution in constantly new phenomena. Therefore – as the syntheist philosopher Martin Hägglund shows in his book atheism.html">Radical Atheism – survival is the cornerstone in syntheist ethics, while immortality, because of its infantile premises, does not belong in the syntheist utopia at all. There is a logic in wanting to live longer, deeper and more intensely. But there is no logic whatsoever in trying to prolong something forever, since immortality robs that which is to be prolonged of all its meaning. To wish for immortality is the same as wishing away desire, and without desire the whole point of wanting to exist as a human being disappears. And then there is not either any reason to survive. We express this as the drive.html">death drive being the compulsion to return to the inorganic – which expresses itself as a constant striving to minimise, avoid and defer life’s intensity – while desire is the will to prolong and maximise the expression of the organic in the infinite now.
If we use Iain McGilchrist’s division between the role of the cerebral hemispheres in The Divided Brain metaphorically, the left hemisphere thus constitutes a centre of eternalism, subjectification, objectification, mathematisation, individuality, hierarchisation and logical cogency. If left to its own devices, or if allowed to dominate too much, it leans towards neurosis, and remains at a distance and acts indirectly vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is the centre of mobilism, motion, change, holism, dividuality, diversity and intuition. If left alone or allowed to dominate, it leans towards psychosis, and it remains engaged and acts directly vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The left hemisphere is thus the centre of the drive.html">death drive, and its transcendental philosophers champion immortality as a principle, which means that the present life that we are actually living should be ignored and should just be gone through and stoically endured, since its intensity can be postponed in all eternity anyway. Correspondingly, the right hemisphere is the centre of the libido, and its immanent philosophers fight for survival as a principle, where the actual life that we are actually living is to be lived with the greatest possible passion and intensity, since it gets its subliminal quality precisely from its transience.
The hypercynical state is namely due to the fact that the prevailing ideological paradigm is no longer in step with its surrounding material reality. Rather, the lack of utopianism and the abundance of dystopianism is the final proof of the prevailing paradigm having reached the end of the road and lost all remaining remnants of relevance. The central dilemma is quite simply not the surrounding material reality – even if it constantly produces a never-ending stream of problems to manage – but the prevailing ideological drought. What is needed is a new metaphysical story that is more relevant for the new age than the old one, where the dystopia is replaced by a credible utopia that includes the prevention of the dystopia becoming a reality. It is in fact not enough to just paint a picture of a powerful dystopia and moralise about all who are making it real with their opinions and behaviours. Because in the subconscious, the human being is ultimately driven by the drive.html">death drive and the masochistic enjoyment of arranging one’s own extinction. According to this logic, eco-moralism is accelerating and affirming the ecological dystopia rather than preventing or mitigating against it, which eco-moralism believes and claims that it wants to do. The dystopia must instead be used as a lever in order to achieve an open and contingent landscape of creativity and intensity, directed towards the future and the syntheist utopia.
Sooner or later we are confronted by the enormity of existence. To start with, there are enormous distances between us and the things that surround us in everyday life on the one hand; and the smallest components of existence – the vibrating, geometrically multidimensional figures that bind together to form space, time, vacuum and matter – on the other hand. But there are also enormous distances between the small things that surround us and the gigantic multitudes of galaxies in cosmology, the enormous, vibrating voids between them, not to mention the infinite number of possible universes besides our own in a fully conceivable multiverse. The result is the syntheists’ fundamental appreciation of the immensity, intensity and productivity of existence, the theological conviction that the syntheist philosopher Robert Corrington – in his radical reading of the father of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy – calls ecstatic naturalism.
Relativist metaphysics attacks the classical idea of truth. There is nothing strange about that. Throughout history we see time after time how yesterday’s established truth is phased out to be replaced by a new and soon equally established, alternative truth. The intensity in this process increases when the new elite takes over a society in conjunction with a paradigm shift and prioritises completely different ideals from those of the displaced elite. Relativist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michael Foucault confront these historical shifts with a pragmatist attitude to truth production: truths are produced first and foremost by the prevailing power structure for the purpose of confirming and consolidating the power of the powerful. Nor is there anything strange in that; the opposite would be extremely remarkable. A truth can only become and remain a truth as long as it stays within the sociocultural paradigm that is embraced by society, which means that various and conflicting truths are pitted against each other during every transitional phase. The truths are therefore always relative. They should and must be able to endure constant criticism. When they no longer hold their own against this criticism in the light of new information, they must be phased out and replaced.
We return to syntheism as the social theory of everything, and of course it accommodates both the Deleuzian and the Badiouian variants of pathos. Deleuze’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Pantheos, while Badiou’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Atheos. Deleuze is the pantheological prophet, Badiou is the prophet of atheology, and entheology is the oscillation between these two antipoles; a movement that is completed through the addition of Syntheos to the syntheological pyramid. In the midst of this earth-shattering oscillation, Deleuze and Badiou, the event’s two prophets above all others, are in agreement that what is most important for the syntheist is the decision to enter at least one of the temples that is devoted to either Pantheos or Atheos and engage in its activities, while the ethically reprehensible thing to do is to remain passively outside. Both these temples are needed as foundations. Both these temples fill us with wonder and produce spiritual truth. Deleuze’s pantheology moves in the direction of Entheos, Badiou’s atheology reaches out towards Syntheos. It is pantheology that makes us appreciate the existential intensity of existence, to further develop pantheism into entheism, while it is atheology that drives us to long for the fulfilment of the utopia and which makes us consummate atheism via its deepening in syntheism.
So what then is the fundamental event – the event through which all other events are reflected – if not death? A longing for immortality – even if it is highly present in both Badiou and Meillassoux – is initially nothing other than a longing for death as death, in contrast to the will to survival as a longing for life as life. Only from its finality can anything at all gain a meaning, only through its transience can life be worth living. Without mortality, life and existence lose all intensity. The will to survival therefore oscillates between three poles: first a seeking of existential intensity, thereafter a desire for the prolongation of life in order to maximise this seeking. However, this seeking and this desire can only take place by virtue of the third pole’s guarantee of life’s indisputable finiteness. This guarantee of obliteration is thus in itself the third pole. In its full extent, eternity in the Abrahamic sense is namely an idea as unbearable as Hell itself, while life in its strongest intensity of the experience of here and now, seen against the backdrop of its transience as the infinite now – the syntheist event par excellence – is the holiest thing that exists. Thus consciousness always operates on the basis of death as the ultimate guarantor of the very will to life. To live is to die. But not at precisely this moment. Later.
The internalised police in turn generates the internarcissistic culture that drives late capitalism’s ultra-commercialised quest for identity and often expresses itself through an extremely tedious obsession with so-called self-fulfilment. The hypersexualised human being possesses and above all continuously changes more or less colourful shells, where weariness with the self and the presumed ability of these shells to attract booty in the form of high status, and affirmation in the form of a desired partner, determines the growing intensity in their constant changeovers. When we arrive at the historical tipping point where the dominant hyper-Cartesians are constantly chasing identities for their insatiable and immeasurable internarcissism, no obstacles remain for sexuality’s takeover of the public sphere. Under severe pressure from myths – concerning the metaphysical potential of sexual desire, and concerning the free market’s ability to satisfy eternally craving human desire – late capitalist society is hypersexualised. But it is precisely here, in exposing the sexualist ideology, that the door to syntheism and its genuine, and also sexual, liberation is opened.
Only in the 1990s does criticism begin to stir, and it is of course the rapid growth of the Internet and experimental metaphysics that open up the possibility of clearing a path out of postmodernist alienation. Historically and for obvious reasons, constructive criticism with the purpose of opening the way for expansive, creative thinking has always come from the outside. What academic philosophy has dismissed as an impossibility – the growth of a new metaphysics for the new Internet age, and thereby the construction of a new social theory of everything – is of course de facto made possible by the interactive conversations that are going on with frenetic intensity in extra-academic, virtual spaces. The netocrats are undermining the universities’ monopoly on metaphysical truth production in the same way that the universities once undermined and razed the Church’s monopoly on the same. The use of a constantly expanding Wikipedia is exploding while national encyclopaedias in fancy bindings are gathering an increasing amount of dust in bookshelves that nobody ever visits. History repeats itself when a new information-technology paradigm enables the growth of a new structure for truth production right under the very noses of the old, tired and corrupt elite, who are unable to intervene even if they had had the energy to do so, since the material conditions – and thereby the rules of the Darwinian punishment and reward system in the surrounding culture – have been fundamentally altered.
Syntheism opens the way for an ethics of interactivity, based on the entangled, outstretched phenomenon’s quest for its own survival, its will to intensity and expansion. It is not in ethics and what the subject feels for the other that the primary arises. The primary is instead the existence of the Universe and how this existence manifests itself for itself by setting people in motion towards and with each other. Levinas’ individualistic infatuation is replaced by the manifestation of Syntheos in the encounter between people. This encounter does not get its existential substance via a certain emotion or a holy sacrifice in only one direction between two subjects isolated from each other, as Levinas imagines it, but in a conscious joint act between two equal agents – at once both entangled and autonomous – who realise that, through an act of will, they actually can and therefore choose to let agape into the relationship between them, who thus choose to sacralise the encounter and the joint action. Syntheos quite simply arises when love between people is established as a joint truth as an act.
Note that outside the anthropocentric fantasy, this entire mythological construction is in a worthless limbo. It is only within the capitalist fantasy, which revolves around the centrality of the individual and the substantiality of the atom and the insurmountable gap between them, that these mythological assertions can be distorted into categorical axioms. The sacralisations of life, the body and consciousness are by-products of the massive internarcissism; the collective self-glorification, which in turn is a consequence of fully implemented alienation. The truth is, however, that life, the body and consciousness are emergent phenomena in an open and contingent universe; phenomena that are characterised by constantly higher degrees of complexity, rather than by any form of sacredness. That which one can relate to in a deeper sense is not these three anthropocentric projections in themselves, but the common underlying variable; the constantly higher intensities of the current emergences. To a syntheist, concepts such as life, body or consciousness are not fundamental; rather, these must be regarded as secondary and precisely as anthropocentric projections onto the rich, creative ability of the Universe to produce hosts of different intensities. And it is the intensity that is sacred. The name of the intensity is Entheos.
Postmodernism is dominated by fear of conflict and its ideology, cultural relativism. In the furious animosity towards fixed values, cultural relativism still fixes a value in itself, namely the fixed value per se that all values are flexible. Thereby it immediately falls on its own sword (see The Body Machines). Cultural relativism is replaced in the information chaos of the Internet society by the search for qualitative intensities. All assertions are not as equally true or false. An assertion is strengthened intersubjectively and is accorded scientific credibility if it can be verified. It quite simply has a higher truth intensity than an unfounded fabrication. The energetic atheist Christopher Hitchens is quite right when he writes that what can be asserted without any evidence whatsoever also can be dismissed without evidence. The question is whether this truth intensity is a specific intensity (as though truth were a special spectrum within the intensity from the beginning), or a pure intensity (as though the intensity precedes the truth and the truth is derived temporarily from the intensity in its entirety as an ethical act). Is there any kind of objectively valid hierarchy between the various spectra within the intensity, or should the intensity be understood exactly as it is in its entirety?
Let us go to the history of philosophical vitalism in order to seek an answer. The difference between the individualist and the dividualist paradigms could not be any clearer than the difference that exists between the otherwise closely-related French philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson’s classical vitalism steadfastly sticks to the idea of the sacredness of life as an ontological foundation. For Deleuze however, the celebration of life becomes yet another banal anthropocentrism in a Cartesian universe that has been closed off and anaesthetised for no good reason. Instead, he sees the active intensity itself as the Universe’s fundamental expression for its existence in relation to itself. Deleuze’s pantheist rather than anthropocentric vitalism therefore remain – in the narrative about the Universe’s magnificent capacity for creativity and multiplicity – as much with the marvellous in quantum physics and cosmology as with the marvellous in plants and animals. Therefore it seems quite reasonable that Karen Barad’s, Manuel De Landa’s and Robert Corrington’s intensity-fixated variants of relationalism start from Deleuzian rather than Bergsonian vitalism. It is nature and not what is most closely related to Man that is the vital, and nature is vital in itself based on its own intensity. Therefore Deleuze, Barad and De Landa are naturalist philosophers. The self-confessed syntheist Corrington even calls his philosophical orientation ecstatic naturalism.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58