Back to index
Kant, Immanuel
This requirement of a – conscious or subconscious – underlying metaphysics as a platform for all philosophical argumentation means that all speculation must start from an occasionally declared but at times concealed theological assumption. The two main alternatives that crystallise out from Antiquity and onwards are laid bare in the antagonism that arises between the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, where Plato launches the dualist tradition, which prizes cosmos over chaos, the idea over matter, and also foreshadows thinkers such as Paul, Saint Augustine, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and among contemporary thinkers Alain Badiou; while Aristotle represents the monist tradition, where chaos precedes cosmos and matter is primal in relation to the idea, and foreshadows thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. Dualism postulates that the idea itself is divine and as such separate from the worldly, and thereby secondary, matter; while monism postulates that the One, that which binds together everything in the Universe, and within which all difference is comprised of discrete attributes within one and the same substance, is the divine. Of course equivalent conflicts can be found in the history of ideas outside Europe. A clear and illustrative example is the Chinese antagonism between the followers of the dualist Confucius and the monist Lao Tzu.
This results in agential realism defeating atomist individualism as the foundation of metaphysics. The network is not only a useful metaphor for understanding social relationships; the Universe is basically one large physical network in itself, where all phenomena, beside the fact that they themselves constitute constantly higher complexities of constantly lower sublevels, are universally entangled with each other. The entanglements are thus the fundamental, not the illusory, objects. Nothing occurs independently of something else. The result is a physics and a universe of fields, probabilities, energies and relationships, without any preordained laws or discrete objects. Thus all support for Kant’s fantasy of the holy object localised in a law-bound, determinist universe disappears. Kant, Newton and Einstein: all of them now appear to have been left behind. Time is real and the future is open and totally controllable.
Nothing ever happens twice, since every moment is completely unique and the relationships that surround a phenomenon at a specific moment are constantly in a state of flux, and they will not either ever reappear in the same configuration again. In the enmity within philosophy that has existed between mobilists and totalists ever since disciples of the mobilist Heraclitus clashed with the totalist Plato’s adherents in Ancient Greece in the 5th century BC, it is now Heraclitus’ successors who appear to be our contemporaries. The results from experimental metaphysics that are based on the ideas of Niels Bohr indisputably place themselves on the side of mobilist relationalism. Plato’s world of ideas is nowhere to be found outside of his own neurotic fantasies. Thus the universal laws that Kant, Newton and Einstein presume to be primary in relation to the Universe’s physical existence do not exist either. In reality, habits that resemble laws arise in and with the Universe and physics. There is quite simply no mysterious set of rules built into physics before its genesis, since no external prehistoric builder of such laws exists.
Totalist thinking cannot deflect attacks from the mobilist alternative, its constantly questioning shadow, where Leibniz’s time-bound and open world view defeats Kant’s timeless and closed world view. Pragmatism triumphs over idealism. The law loses its overwhelming, metaphorical power. Laws are created by humans in order to control otherwise chaotic societies, in order to impose power from above and benefit social masochism at the expense of creative freedom. But in nature there have never been any preordained laws. The regularity that science finds in nature is nothing other than similarities within the framework for the preordained conditions between different processes. But there are no preordained laws that nature must subject itself to in the same way that slaves are expected to yield to their masters. There is nothing timeless and predetermined outside our contingent and open universe. The law has exercised a magical power over people’s world views ever since it arose in a theology that was functional at the dawn of civilisations, but it now stands exposed as an empty myth.
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.
After Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s revolution, rationalism, blind faith in man’s ability to solve all the mysteries of life through his reasoning, had to be replaced by transrationalism, a rationality that realises its own limitations as an intersubjective discourse within the phenomenology that mankind is reduced to (see The Global Empire). For rationalism is based on a logical ‘optical’ illusion: within itself rationality is consistent and looks convincing. However, the problem is that when rationality is viewed from outside, it falls down completely since it is not founded on anything that in itself is rational, it is based only on blind faith and nothing else. Kant’s problem is that he wanted to place rationality above reason, but he never succeeded in stating logically how this would be possible. Kantian rationalism is thus not founded on anything other than Kant’s own highly personal, autistic temperament. Blaise Pascal argues for a transrationalist epistemology as early as the 17th century, long before Kant, but it was not until the American and European pragmatists at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century that transrationalism acquired its formulation in detail.
Bodies are real. And reason defeats rationality, since reason is based on the body while rationality lacks a foundation outside its own tautological loops. No thoughts exist separate from the body. Every thought is drenched in and impossible to distinguish from the chemicals and hormones that at the time in question are infesting the body in which the thought is being thought and where the words are being articulated. Reason is represented by a highly real, active actor, while rationality is represented only by a highly illusory, passive observer. This insight reduces the individual, Descarte’s and Kant’s transcendental subject, to the object of its own dominance and colonisation. The result is the chain of psychotic reactions that are fundamental to the Cartesian subject.
The discrepancy between the observer and the actor leads to paralysis. This paralysis is experienced by the subject as impotence. This impotence is in turn transformed into a forceful reaction of denial to its opposite: omnipotence. And the omnipotence triggers a whole host of compensatory fixations and behaviours in order to keep the Cartesian subject’s fundamental lie alive. It was no coincidence that Kant’s followers in 19th century Europe embarked on colonisation campaigns around the world. And who is the clearest Kantian, the most devoted individual, if not Napoleon, the organisational forefather of modernist society? What you cannot find within yourself as an individual, you attempt with compensatory zeal to find out in the world instead, even if the entire world ends up in flames because of your futile search.
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.
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.
Through the essential but subtle shift from the Cartesian subject focus to the Newtonian object fixation in Kant’s transcendentalism, individualism is extended into capitalism. And with the march of capitalism across the world, there also followed the markedly superstitious belief in the invisible hand as an eternal guarantor of never-ending growth. Exactly how naive this notion really is has now dawned on thinking people across the world as the crises-ridden nation states, one after another, drift away towards the precipice while impotent politicians and bureaucrats sit in fruitless meetings dreaming of a dramatic increase in growth that never eventuates. The Western welfare state, which is based on precisely such institutionalised wishful thinking about strong and continuous growth, is looking more and more like a cynical pyramid scheme. Future generations are welcomed with gigantic debts and badly eroded benefits. Not to mention the escalating environmental problems that arise as a result of capitalism’s intemperate, ruthless exploitation of the planet.
The university is individualism’s truth producer and this institution’s most important role is to moderate enjoyment among citizens. However, it continuously fails in its task, since enjoyment is only maximised in transgression, and transgression presupposes a host of prohibitions against crossing the boundaries for the taboos that the Church was much more adept at producing than the university. In this context, the university is reduced to the paltry imperative of identifying and subsequently maximising the individual’s enjoyment. Therefore, individualism’s complicated relationship with enjoyment is characterised by a fundamental envy of religion. In the 20th century, individualism was developed by the universities into cultural relativism, Kantianism’s ideological waste dump and its logical endpoint, where all that remains are unfounded solipsistic credos, the quality of which, because of a growing political hypersensitivity, it is forbidden to compare. This qualifies cultural relativism as syntheism’s ideological arch-enemy at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism.
It is from Zoroastrianism that Kant gets the idea that existence is basically a correlation between thinking (Mazda) and being (Ahura), even if Kant sees Mazda and Ahura as eternalised constants instead of the intra-active variables that Zoroaster used in his proto-syntheology. If we use the network-dynamic terminology of the 2000s, we would express this as Kant opening the door to interactivity through his correlationalism, which Nietzsche later consummates through his relativism. But with Zoroaster there is not just one constantly moving activity between different phenomena, but rather the phenomena are also in constant motion around themselves. This is why we speak of Zoroaster’s building blocks as intra-acting variables in contrast to Kant’s and Nietzsche’s interactive constants. Intra-activity is the historical radicalisation of interactivity, and relationalism is correspondingly the historical radicalisation of relativism.
Even before Nietzsche, Kant shows that reality as it is and perceived by no one, the noumenal, by definition is inaccessible to the human being, who instead has to put up with the noumenal’s reproduction as the object in a world view that consists exclusively of subjectively experienced phenomena. Thus the object is subjective, mediated by our unreliable senses, and not the least bit objective per se. After Kant, all forms of objectivism are impossible for anyone reflecting philosophically on the matter – the ‘objectivists’ of the 20th century, such as Ayn Rand, devote themselves exclusively to a kind of autistic vulgar-philosophy without any understanding of the Kantian revolution – and this notion is replaced by various forms of subjectivism, and thereby also various forms of relativism. Moreover, Nietzsche successfully demonstrates that truths not only must be subjective, they are also influenced by the subject that produces them. By psychologising the observer and thus turning this figure into a mobile body instead of a fixed soul, Nietzsche completes the Kantian revolution.
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas launches intersubjectivity as the highest truth that humans can aspire to after Kant has shifted objective reality to where it is hopelessly out of reach. According to Habermas, the absence of this objectivity can only be confronted and militated against by an extensive plurality of subjective voices. Habermas imagines that intersubjectivity is negotiated between actors on an equal footing in the public sphere, which is both laborious and time-consuming, but which in the end nonetheless yields a satisfactory result, due to lots of subjective positions confronting and interacting with each other. To take one example, the credibility of science is based on the conviction that intersubjective truth can be fished out through the process referred to as peer review. No position gains recognition if it is not first sanctioned by a collective consisting of formally educated experts; and contrariwise: if a text contains an abundance of footnotes, it is considered academically true, or at least trustworthy.
Badiou however argues that mathematics modifies Habermas’ premises; with the aid of mathematics, we can go beyond intersubjectivity and achieve an objectivity that Kant does not understand. The wide acceptance of the quantum physics paradigm within the sciences – and its subsequent dramatic effects on philosophy, for example through the effect that Niels Bohr’s ideas have on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy, and vice versa – in spite of its initially highly counter-intuitive claims, proves that this is the case. Badiou argues that thanks to the progress of mathematics, ontology can at last leave representationalism, correlationalism and even relativism behind, only to thereafter take the decisive leap over to relationalism. The Kantian paradigm would thus be passé and objectivity would again be possible.
Just like syntheism, as a whole transrationalism and its basic condition can be viewed as both a logical deduction and a historical conclusion. There is no rational foundation per se for naturally limited human rationality to ever have the capacity to comprehend everything in a constantly expanding universe. Plato’s and Kant’s variants of rationality get caught in their own trap; they are both per se founded on a blind faith and not on any kind of rationality. Humanity has repeatedly surrendered itself to rationalism as a social ideology, but the results are frightening. Sooner or later, rationalism – in spite of considerable achievements in civilisation – invariably degenerates into totalitarian utilitarianism. Therefore Plato is quite correct in claiming that a consistently practised rationalism must develop into a dictatorship. Anything else is impossible.
Hegel is unique, not least because he remains de facto outside the regularly recurring dichotomy between totalism and mobilism in the history of philosophy. Instead he concentrates on drawing innovative conclusions from the revolution within the history of ideas that his predecessors have begun – primarily Newton within physics and later Kant within philosophy – by moving philosophy from the external, physical world to the internal world of the mind. There Hegel resolutely builds a complete theory about how the mind views itself, as a mind. Thus he makes himself into an eternalist, without, in the manner of a Kant, thereby resorting to totalist fantasies. Hegel’s point of departure is that if the noumenal reality that surrounds Man still remains impossible to reach (which Kant maintains), and if it makes itself apparent in a way that, in the best case, can only be measured (which Newton does), philosophers should hand over external reality to the natural sciences and instead concentrate on the most important aspects of what science cannot tell us anything valuable about, namely the human mind’s conception of and obsession with itself.
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.
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.
It is in mathematics rather than in our senses that we find the opening to the new realism, which, while being a model-dependent realism, is nonetheless a realism in the sense that our senses achieve an authentic contact with our environment. In a defence of the mathematical revolution that Georg Cantor initiated, with the launch of transfinite cardinals in 1904 Cantor’s colleague Ernst Zermelo proves the existence of an actual but indeterminist infinite. Thereby the door is left wide open to model-dependent realism, beyond naive realism, which of course Kant dismisses by insisting on a necessary, radical separation between the phenomenal and the noumenal. In syntheology, the Kantian precipice is replaced by the oscillation between an Entheos in escalating expansion and a Syntheos of creative pleasure that arises in the playing in earnest with a ceremonial quest for understanding in the explosive multiplicity of Entheos. To live in Syntheos is to enjoy the philosophical creation and redesign of models of fleeting reality in a never-ending flow.
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 Nietzsche is the godfather of relativism within philosophy, Einstein is relativism’s executive producer and the scientist who consummates relativism in the natural sciences. In an absurdly large universe with an absurd quantity of discrete objects, according to Einstein it is ultimately impossible to establish an objectively valid position for any of the objects at all. All positions in space–time are relative. But it is still a world that consists of discrete objects; their ontological status is not questioned by Nietzsche or Einstein – just the possibility of establishing a valuation. Therefore, the problem with relativism is that it maintains Kant’s rigid division between the subject and the object as an ontological foundation. While Kant’s static construction is set in motion, it is however relativized – everything gets its value only from its relative position – but the correlation between the subject and the object per se is never questioned. Within the confines of relativism, if anything the relationship between the subject and the object is more or less impossible to define precisely, since it appears to concern a kind of insurmountable problem connected to the measuring itself. But that the correlation is still there, and that it is ontologically essential, is established beyond all doubt.
Nietzschean and Einsteinian relativism is still however a correlationism. The objects are presumed to correlate to each other as noumena rather than as phenomena. Nietzsche still presumes that the objects have a form of essence, that they are internally stable. Einstein makes the corresponding observation within physics with his beloved atoms (he refuses to accept the ontological victory of magical quantum physics over classical physics). According to the relativists, the instability is entirely external. Even if the epistemological correlation between thinking and knowing proposed by Kant is shattered, Nietzsche and Einstein keep the ontological correlation between subject and object. They still live in a world over which Kant casts his imposing shadow. Syntheism, on the other hand, moves on from relativism to its dialectical intensification: relationalism.
The relationalist philosophers Karen Barad, Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux push through and past relativism when, at the start of the 3rd millennium – inspired by pioneers such as the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the physicist Niels Bohr – they construct a speculative materialism that attacks the entire correlationalist paradigm and its fixation with an original subject that correlates with an original object as its ontological foundation. They are quite simply searching for a deeper foundation beyond this premise, which has dominated phenomenology ever since Kant’s heyday. While relativism settles for stating that the relations between the fixed objects are relative – what we call an interactive ontology – the relationalist philosophers maintain that the relations within the phenomena are also mobile in relation to each other – that is, they advocate an intra-acting ontology. There are no discrete objects whatsoever in the Universe. Not even at the minutest micro level. Thus, nor are there any Kantian objects in physical reality, not even any noumenal such; what really exists is merely pure relata, or relations without their own inner substance between and within abstract fields of irreducible multiplicities.
Quantum physics thereby opens the way for a whole new metaphysics, a radical monism connected to an irreducible multiplicity. Kant’s humanist phenomenology no longer has any validity. Starting with Hegel, the way is instead opened for a new phenomenology where the observer always must be included as an actor in every event-constellation, in every individual, fundamental phenomenon. After Hegel’s phenomenological revolution, the Hegelian view of the observer in relation to the observed is fundamental to the field of philosophy.html">process philosophy. Thus, Kantian representationalism and its naive atheism are gradually wiped out in three steps: in the first step by Hegel, in the second step by Nietzsche and in the third step by Bohr. It is with Bohr and his relationalism that we land at the arrival of the Internet age. Ontology, epistemology and even phenomenology are merged into a common relationalist complex. We see how syntheist metaphysics is solidly founded in contemporary physics.
In Karen Barad’s radically universocentric onto-epistemology, we abandon the dividual identity and shift our focus to the Universe itself. Inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy and in particular with support from Bohr’s quantum physics, Barad completely pulverises transcendental correlationism which had dominated Western thinking since Kant. By pitting Bohr’s ontic principle of determinism against Heisenberg’s epistemic uncertainty principle, Barad opens the way for agential realism, a relationalist philosophy driven by a radical pathos for a completely new kind of potential objectivity. As for Bohr before her, the renowned waves and particles of quantum physics are only abstractions for Barad. The most important thing is not that the waves and particles are contradictory but that they are complementary. This is what is called Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle. Phenomenologically we express this by saying that the wave is a mobilist phenomenon, while the particle is an eternalist phenomenon.
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.
The shift from the human to the universal centre is the necessary and correct manoeuvre. In the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos, Barad finds the new divinity that replaces the human being that had been declared dead by her predecessor Foucault, namely the universal subject as a kind of Bohrian supraphenomenon. It is important to point out that the purpose of Barad’s anti-anthropocentrism is not to eliminate the human being from all equations. Instead, it is concerned with giving the human being as agent her onto-epistemologically correct place in the greater phenomena that existence is comprised of, and this occurs only when the Universe is held up as primary and the human subject is reduced to something secondary. The Universe is not some transcendental category in Man’s orientation through existence, which Kant imagines in his autistic phenomenology. The Universe is instead real and expresses itself in and through the many billions of human subjects that it produces among other things, rather than the other way around. The Universe lives, thinks, speaks, creates, feels pleasure and multiplies through us. Nor is this all: through us the Universe dies and leaves room for constantly new phenomena. All this taken together is supreme motivation for naming Barad’s book Meeting The Universe Halfway a syntheist manifesto.
Baradian phenomenology is based on a constantly ongoing intra-activity within phenomena rather than an inter-activity between various distinct subjects and objects. Every individual phenomenon is both a fundamental building block in existence and concurrently intra-acting, filled with internal activity in all directions. Barad wants to kill off Kantian representationalism and its fixation with the patriarchal reflection. Representationalism is an obvious by-product of Cartesianism. Representations have constantly been prioritised at the expense of what they are presupposed to represent. By instead building first from Foucault’s and later also Latour’s and Butler’s post-structuralist ideas of performativism, we open the way for a philosophy that shifts its focus to direct engagement in material reality. All phenomena are constantly affected by the performativity of their environment. Large quantitative differences in performativity create phenomena with radically different properties.
But it is not just Foucault and his successors that inspire Barad. From another of her predecessors, Donna Haraway, she borrows the idea that the diffraction of wave motions is a better metaphor for thinking than reflection. Ontology, epistemology, phenomenology and ethics are all influenced radically and fundamentally by the new universocentric perspective. They all interact in the new onto-epistemology around agential realism. Quantum physics radically breaks away space–time from Newtonian determinism. With this shift it is also necessary to abandon the idea of geometry giving us an authentic picture of reality. It is with the aid of topology rather than through geometry that we can do syntheist metaphysics justice, Barad argues. Neither time nor space exist a priori as transcendental, determined givens, before or outside any phenomena, which is of course what Kant imagines. Time is not a thread of patiently lined-up and evenly dispersed intervals, and space is not an empty container in which matter can be gathered. The role of the engine of metaphysics is shouldered by non-linear network dynamics, which drives the equally non-linear event, rather than the old linear history, which is supposed to drive the equally linear progress. Entheist duration is thus also a dynamic, not a linear, phenomenon.
Barad’s agential realism may to good effect be pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s psychoanalytic version of the transcendental subject; syntheologically it would correspond to Barad’s Pantheos being pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s Atheos. It is historically necessary for Barad to act as a radical mobilist in order to once and for all divest herself of Kantian representationalism and think her way fully through the consequences of the quantum physics revolution. Rather, she therefore operates as a personified oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos. No thinker succeeded in taking mobilism to its furthest extremity before Barad – not even radical mobilists such as Whitehead and Deleuze – in order thereby to create the necessary opposite to eternalist thinking which together enable the syntheological consummation. Thus, Barad thus does not operate in any kind of opposition to Atheos’ two prophets Lacan and Zizek. Rather, she fills the tragically large intellectual void that is the necessary antithesis to their own highly intellectualised void within the syntheological pyramid.
The history of correlationism is introduced with Immanuel Kant’s onto-epistemological project in the 18th century. According to Kant, we can only know what arises in the correlation between thinking and being. But with Kant, and also later with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl for example, there is still a conviction that a factiality exists, that the process includes a thing in itself to relate to. This notion goes by the designation weak correlationism. Later Kant is followed by thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who all ignore this conjectured thing in itself. The Kantian principle of factiality is thus replaced by these authors with the Hegelian, absolute, principle of correlation. This notion is called relativism or strong correlationism.
The decisive break with Kantian correlationism comes with relationalism in Niels Bohr’s physics and philosophy of science in the 1930s. Relationalist ontology is in fact not just interactive, like relativism, but definitely also intra-acting. According to relationalism, every phenomenon in the Universe is unique, since both its external and its internal coordinates are completely unique for every position in space–time. Symmetries exist only in mathematical models, never in physical reality. This means, among other things, that no scientific experiments can ever be repeated in exactly the same way twice. It is hardly surprising that in the 1930s old friends Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein engage in a correspondence that is often frustrating on both sides. Their letters attest to the dramatic scientific paradigm shift from Einsteinian relativism to Bohrian relationalism.
Kant is thus right about factiality, things might be completely different from how things stand for the moment. But Kant’s rationalism – his blind faith that everything that occurs is subordinate to a divine wisdom, and that his own human ratio is fully sufficient to embrace everything that happens given time – results in his never developing this factiality fully and not drawing the inevitable conclusion. It is thus Kant’s unfounded rationalism which forces him into determinism, not the other way around. Therefore the relationalists must also leave Kant behind and seek other allies in the history of philosophy. The syntheist Quentin Meillassoux finds such an allied thinker in the empiricist David Hume – one of Kant’s strongest rivals in the 18th century – not least for the reason that Hume provides support for the conviction that one and the same material and existential vantage point can give rise to an infinite number of different outcomes. Existence outside the correlation in question is neither stable nor fixed and therefore philosophy cannot in all honesty pretend that this is the case. Hume and Meillassoux are thereby joined in a strong factiality, from which Meillassoux constructs the philosophical school that goes under the name speculative materialism.
Hume and Meillassoux depart from Kant’s troublesome, incorrect determinism and opens up philosophy to the empirically established indeterminism in Bohrian quantum physics. It should be noted here that Leibniz presages relationalism even before Hume does so with his principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz was not only one of the most significant and most original predecessors among the philosophers, but also an innovative and brilliant mathematician. He built a Monadology, a kind of early variant of the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, which precedes Kantian Platonism. Above all, with his credibility within the natural sciences, Leibniz created the most clearly defined mobilist alternative to the contemporaneously developed Newtonian totalism. The metaphysical antagonism between Leibniz and Newton presages the struggle within our own contemporary physics between on the one hand relationalism and its cosmological Darwinism, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more complex; and on the other hand relativism and its fixation with the second law of thermodynamics, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more simplified as it expands and disperses.
The difference between correlationism and relationalism is there already in the difference between the concepts relation and relationality. A relation is always fixed, a correlation is even a fixation between two fixed points, primarily a subject and an object. A relationality on the other hand is a state where no fixed objects whatsoever exist, where differences on top of other differences create relations between the differences without any fixed objects ever arising other than in an eternalising observer’s perception process. In correlationism, the relation is external and not in the singular in relation to the fixed objects that, for simplicity’s sake, we assume (not least Kant’s thing in itself). In relationalism however, there are only relations on top of other relations, which in the absence of fixed objects are external and in the plural in relation to what Bohr calls a field and what Whitehead calls a process. Historically speaking, Kant’s correlationism is replaced by Nietzsche’s relativism, after which the development continues to, and is completed by, Bohr’s and Whitehead’s relationalism, where the object is also not consciously ignored any longer, which was the case with Hegel, but is literally dissolved in the mobilist process.
Barad dismantles and disposes of Kant’s noumenon, and thereby she also extremely effectively puts an end to the correlationist paradigm. Her Bohrian phenomenology, based on relations on top of relations and probabilities on top of probabilities, with varying intensities rather than essences at the centre and without fixed physical boundaries, has no need whatsoever of any Kantian noumenon. Barad comes from the world of quantum physics, which of course is governed by concepts such as complementarity, entanglement, chance and non-locality. The principle of precedence disposes of all ideas of eternally valid laws that precede physical reality. Barad’s phenomenon is therefore instead the phenomenon per se described based on physics’ own conditions, rather than from Kant’s blind faith in rationality’s conception of reality being sufficiently exhaustive. And it is precisely therefore that her universocentric rather than anthropocentric ontology is a realism. Every Baradian phenomenon, every assemblage of intensities, has its own genetics and its own memetics as her predecessor Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. It is the current set of genes and memes that we familiarise ourselves with when we get to know the phenomenon. The world cannot be more real than it is with Barad.
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.
Correlationism’s critics often return to the question of ancestrality, where they focus on the subject and the object not being historically equal, if they even exist as entities of their own. Human consciousness or the mind has only existed for a few seconds of planet Earth’s 24-hour history. Existence evidently needs no subjects or consciousnesses in order to exist as a complete existence, and might well be thought to exist without any present subject even in the future. But if correlationism is to be criticised in the right way, it must be from inside its philosophical advances and not from the outside, so that we do not relapse into classical realism. It is then clear that the fundamental problem with correlationism is that Kant does not seem to understand why the thing in itself is unattainable for the human being. Kant imagines that the thing is out of reach of human perception and consciousness since our senses are not sufficiently expanded and flexible to be able to assimilate the thing in its entirety. The senses therefore create a world of representations only.
Kant still speaks of a kind of clearly delimited thing, what he calls a noumenon. The phenomenon is, according to Kant, merely a bad approximation of the – for the Platonist Kant – even more real noumenon. The fact that this noumenon is unattainable is not grounded in the limitations of the senses however, as Kant imagines, but in the fact that all things are in constant motion and change, both intra-actively and interactively, and thereby by definition are not possible to fixate. Kant is the instructive example par excellence of an isolated observer within physics who does not understand that his own entanglement with the thing, which he imagines himself to be observing from the outside, also influences the thing itself. He cannot imagine that his external and neutral observer position is a physical impossibility, and that it is this and nothing else that makes the thing in itself something that is unattainable. Kant is quite simply the Newtonian-Einsteinian mystic who does not quite understand the quantum physical revolution. He does not realise that the observing subject also is world. For what else could it be? If it exists, it is world.
The thing in itself cannot be experienced as an object, since it is de facto not an object, but merely a highly arbitrary eternalisation. It is not the thing in itself but the eternalisation of the thing that must be regarded as the real conjuring trick in Kantian correlationism. Once we understand this, we need no longer accept the Kantian axioms. A new kind of ontological realism at once becomes possible, what Barad calls agential realism and Stephen Hawking names model-dependent realism. The relationalist response to Kant is that the phenomena are fields rather than particles. The fields consist of intensities and probabilities and in fact never have any clear boundaries. For physics per se has no use whatsoever for clear boundaries. The clear boundaries must rather be viewed as an expression of narcissistic wishful thinking in an anthropocentric world view which is wrestling with its lack of processing capacity in relation to the inexhaustible oceans of information in existence. Every time we are forced to hear the clichés about quantum physics being obscure, mysterious and startling – or see how it is accused of being some kind of shallow forgery of reality, a mirage which clearly hides a more intuition-friendly and therefore more real reality, hidden behind some kind of cosmic, mysterious veil – it is Kant’s voice within us and in the prevailing culture that is speaking.
However, it is exactly the other way around: However counter-intuitive quantum physics may appear at first glance, it is de facto real reality, or more correctly, as close as we can ever get to a scientifically verified as well as perceptionally accessible reality. Quantum physics even opens the way to ontological realism – both the agential and the model-dependent – that is, precisely the onto-epistemological accessibility to the surrounding world that Kant believes that he dismisses once and for all through his almost autistic separation of the subject and the object. In fact, reality is the subject and the object entangled into one indivisible phenomenon, without any real separation. Whoever most smoothly manages to upgrade their world view by calibrating their intuition in accordance with this insight also has the most to gain in conjunction with the paradigm shift in question from correlationism to relationalism. And this applies of course to a high degree in the areas of metaphysics and religion.
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.
The correlationists do not seem to understand that stability as a property is independent of all requirements for necessity. Oddly enough Zoroaster realises this difference already in ancient Iran about 1,700 years B.C. when he formulates the concept of haurvatat, a state that contains a kind of sacred perfection and at the same time is constantly in motion and dynamic; haurvatat may well be regarded as a synonym for the syntheist idea of the infinite now. Zoroaster’s genius lies in that he places holiness in the mutable and not in the immutable, which is in total contrast to Platonism and the Abrahamic religions. What brings Zoroaster and the relationalist physicists together is that they all maintain that relatively stable states can arise more or less regularly in an otherwise completely contingent universe. The symmetry that is so passionately desired – from Kant to Einstein, both within philosophy and within physics – is actually the opposite of contingency. Symmetry is eternalist and contingency is mobilist.
We can therefore completely refrain from building even more constructions using the isolated objects that Kant uses as building blocks in his outdated metaphysics. But this does not mean that we are relativists. For relativism does not move sufficiently far away from individualism and atomism; it should rather be regarded as an inconsistent half-measure in the development from an understanding of existence as an atomist world full of discrete objects to the understanding of existence as a relationalist world consisting of irreducible multiplicities and endless relations. Even relativism must be dialectically developed into relationalism. There are no things whatsoever to relate between, which relativism requires; there are only relata that in turn always are relata to other relata, and so on ad infinitum.
According to syntheist metaphysics, relations therefore must be what is ontologically primary. This also means that the ontology in a fundamental sense precedes the phenomenology, since external existence, among other things according to the principle of ancestrality, always precedes the internal observation. The intra-acting phenomena are in themselves as relational as the interactive relations between them. Objects do not arise independently only to be later evaluated in relation to other objects, which is what post-Kantian relativism claims. Syntheist phenomena are not stable objects at all filled with heavy essences, but extremely mobile and fluid phenomena in constant interaction both within themselves and with everything else in their environment, and often also far away from this environment, such as in the case of quantum teleportation.
We are forced to abandon the old Cartesian internarcissism in order to construct a universocentric interdependism instead. And based on a universocentric interdependism, society or the social must be a primary emergence, that is, we apply the One in a Spinozist sense to the social under the name Syntheos, in the same way that we already apply the One to the universal under the name Pantheos. What is essential here is that the social as a whole thereby precedes the Kantian relation between the subject and the object instead of the other way around, just as the Universe on the whole precedes all kinds of atomist constructions within physics. In addition, interdependism must be relationalist and not relativist; the mutual dependence of the agents applies at all levels in the hierarchy, and thus also within the phenomena themselves.
Syntheist ethics is thus sociorelationalist and not cultural relativist, based on the original Zoroastrian understanding that intention, decision and interaction sooner or later coincide and together form the only possible ethical substance of both the individual human being and the collective civilisation. This means that the principle of explanatory closure not only kills Kant’s rationalist idea that Man is born with the natural ability to understand rather than simply subordinate himself to the world in its entirety; even Kant’s rationalist idea of Man being able to understand himself as a being within his own lifeworld is dead. The solid, closed and primary individual is replaced by the divided, open and secondary dividual as the human ideal. This means that the conceited idea that our thoughts and words belong to ourselves, that we can identify ourselves with what we think and say without connecting this to body, action and environment – as though what we are thinking and saying were originally created by and exclusive to ourselves – is dead. We will never have any sustainable identity as the inventors of these ideas, but on the other hand as their potential thoroughfares and interim receptacles.
Semiotics is primarily pragmatic rather than syntactic, not least since Peirce is a relativist and not yet a relationalist. Thus it is still in the individualist paradigm. Semiotics is namely focused on what the sign is presumed to represent – according to Peirce the sign would not be a sign if it did not correspond to and translate some external object into language – while memetics chooses to act regardless of typically Kantian concerns, such as whether external, objective or intersubjective truths really exist, and if so in what way. This means that semiotics presumes that the interpretation of signs in a prevailing society – the discipline that is called hermeneutics within philosophy and exegesis within theology – can be carried out by an independent, external observer: the hermeneuticist. But nothing could be further from the truth. The hermeneuticist is of course also steeped in the prevailing paradigm, and therefore must be primarily regarded as a technological as well as ideological by-product of the same, and not, in some exceedingly diffuse and mysterious way, as its neutral and distanced interpreter. There are indeed no neutral and distanced interpreters, either within physics or sociology; such a position is quite simply both physically and socially impossible.
As physics migrates to informationalism and thereby becoming relationalist, a new view of humanity and a new world view are becoming apparent. Metaphysical individualism is dead; it disappears along with physical atomism, since these constitute two sides of the same outdated coin. Both stem from Kant’s onto-epistemology from the second half of the 18th century, which in turn is based on Descartes’ classic proposition “Cogito, ergo sum”, where the subjective experience is the only indisputable thing in existence and therefore constitutes the point of departure for all assertions about anything at all. This axiomatic subject then relates to other objects, which in the same way as the subject and its Cartesian theatrical stage is construed first as noumenal and then as phenomenal, indivisible entities with solid substances, that is, as individuals and atoms.
But since syntheism, when it investigates the world, finds neither individuals nor atoms, it becomes necessary to break with the individualist-atomist paradigm in order to connect instead to the metaphysical alternative that actually has support in the sciences’ observations of the world, that is, network dynamics and its attendant relationalism.html">social relationalism. Just like in relationalist physics, there are only relations on top of other relations and probabilities on top of other probabilities even within psychology and sociology, and these relations and probabilities do not stop at the externally interactive: they are very much also internally intra-acting. First there is the network, then there is the node and only thereafter does the subjective experience arise. What applies here is thus an inverted procedure compared to Descartes’ and Kant’s narcissistic fantasy of the genesis of the subject and its position in the Universe: “I am, therefore I think.” Man himself is a phenomenon of network dynamics, localised within other network-dynamical phenomena. But when she also becomes conscious of this, he can start to act as something far more than merely a relationalist subject, namely as the syntheist agent, syntheism’s ethical human ideal.
The human being’s self-experience is of course as relationalist as everything else in existence. According to relationalist phenomenology, the human subject arises, if anything, as a kind of minoritarian by-product of a larger majoritarian phenomenon, where the majoritarian phenomenon that transcends the subject’s self-experience is its agent. It is thus not the case that separate souls sit and wait to be mounted inside shiny new bodies in some kind of creation factory – which Descartes’ and Kant’s dualism requires – but the self-experience is instead a highly efficient but nevertheless illusory by-product of the body’s many other doings – the borrowed component, taken out of empty nothingness, which means that the human equation suddenly seems to achieve an acceptable solution for itself. The self-experience is quite simply the logical end point where the subject process ties together for itself. Thus it does not come first, as Descartes and Kant presume, but rather last, so that the void that ties together all divided components within the dividual so that it can experience itself as a phantasmic unit and as a whole. All this thus takes place within the agent, the transient subject that cannot in any way precede or exist outside the basic agency. The body, the congregation and the society can all be agents, but without an agent that houses this subjectivity, it cannot exist at all.
Thus, the conditions for the development of consciousness are not either in any way universal, but rather highly contingent and bound to a very specific, spatio-temporal situation. The Kantian transcendental subject must be replaced by the syntheist immanent subject. And the syntheist immanent subject has no need whatsoever of any kind of correlationalism, in either the weak Kantian or the strong relativist sense. In a radically relationalist universe the need for correlationalism disappears. Thus, the syntheist immanent subject does not arise in opposition to the phenomenon but instead is an integral part of the same. The subject is best described as the phenomenon’s agentiality.
The syntheist agent does not seek contact with the outside world from any kind of passive observer position. Instead she lives as an intra-acting phenomenon, participating interactively, at the centre of the world. Quite simply, no original individuation arises that can be regarded or used as the cornerstone of existence. There is no individuation whatsoever. What arises is a dividuation, and it is a by-product of the current region’s many relations and not the other way around. Syntheism does focus at all on the subject, which it decentralises, but takes the inversion of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum very seriously and therefore shifts the existential focus to agentiality as a phenomenon, an intra-acting concentration of intensities, which is an irreducible multiplicity of identities within a diffuse and mobile field. These identities gather around a truth as an act, namely the subjective experience as the impoverished void Atheos within the rich multiplicity Entheos, located in overwhelming existence Pantheos. The subject’s illusoriness is not externalised however, as relativist critics of Descartes and Kant such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Derrida imagine – these philosophers are quite simply not radical enough in their break with Kantian correlationism –they are instead internalised right from the very beginning. The illusory aspect of the subject, its self-experienced substancelessness, is included as a fundamental and integral part of the subjective experience as such.
Among the old authorities, it is the godfather of German Romanticism Hegel who really displays an understanding of the genesis of the subject, which is apparent when he becomes the first to construct a subject theory using the concept of Atheos as his point of departure. According to Hegel, the subject is not just fundamentally empty and developed as a kind of tragic response to unanswered existential questions – it is moreover a highly temporary and local eternalisation complex without any relevance whatsoever outside of itself. There is, to express the matter in Kantian terms, nothing universal outside the subject that it can transcend into. If, for example, we were to amuse ourselves by condensing the Hegelian and relationalist subject experience into three words, then the concepts emptiness, diminutiveness and transience fit just perfectly.
Individualism’s misleading anthropomorphisation of consciousness leads straight towards an impossible dead end. But it is not merely Kantian correlationism that must be discarded in conjunction with the necessary massive clean-out associated with the transition to relationalism. This also applies, to take one example, to all Eastern or New Age-related ideas of some kind of cosmic consciousness. The Universe not only lacks a brain to be conscious with: the Universe has de facto no incentive to acquire a consciousness, since consciousness is only produced in order to cover up the failings that are specific to the life situations of human beings. Not only is Man the only animal that talks – and thereby also thinks in the abstract – he is also the only animal who develops this ability in order to be able to survive at all. Language is developed as a Darwinian response to the human being’s evolutionary shortcomings. To speak and think is just the human being’s way of compensating for her own physical weakness and the evolutionary advantages of other animal species.
Morality implies a gloomy seriousness, while ethics implies a playful abundance. Note how the pair of opposites good versus evil implies moral decadence, which must be rectified by being offered a reward, or the threat of punishment. On the other hand, the ethical pair of opposites right versus wrong implies a search for and strengthening of the inner identity, quite irrespective of the outcome of the course of events in question. Note that we are speaking of an inner ethical identity that is created through the intention and is strengthened through action: it is definitely not about some kind of essence that is already at hand in the way that Descartes and Kant imagine the moral subject. The syntheist agent thus does not see ethics as arising from any kind of individual identity, but as a truth as an act that provides the tangible void in the centre of the subject with a sincerely longed-for attribute, however short-lived.
One way of clarifying the difference between ethics and morality is to study a typical borderline case. Kant creates his transcendental philosophy in the 18th century in the borderland between monotheistic Christianity and atheistic individualism. On account of the growing German and French bourgeoisie, he carries out the self-imposed task of calculating how Man could replace God as the metaphysical centre of existence. Kant borrows the answer from Descartes and maintains that Man is the Master of existence for the simple reason that he can think. But existence can of course only be experienced by Man, the reason being that it requires a consciousness in order to be able to experience it and only Man thinks consciously. He is thus master of a house that he inhabits all by himself.
Since ethics is a more or less free choice between various alternatives – the more freedom that exists in a context, the more ethics is required – and since Kant has made the subject and object of ethics into one and the same thing, he is forced to reduce his ethics to a tautology. When asked the question why it is right to do the right thing, Kant answers laconically that every action should be carried out as if it were universally valid. In other words, it is right to do what is right for the simple and pointless reason that it is right to do the right thing. And then we have not even touched upon the question of exactly what this automatically executed right thing actually is. The only reasonable reaction to Kant’s tautological imperative comes from his successor Nietzsche, who realises that all notions that value philosophy is able to formulate as the right thing in advance must be rejected. Instead he recasts value philosophy as an anthropological project occupied with what Man is anyway already doing and why. The prescriptive value philosophy of Kant is answered commendably by Nietzsche with a descriptive and interactive enlightenment project. Thereby Kant is reduced to a banal moralist, while Nietzsche stands out as the real ethicist.
The point here is that in the Kantian borderland between two value paradigms, interestingly enough Man has neither the amoral God’s freedom to behave as he pleases, nor any judge left to appease in order to get his points registered in his quest for an anticipated reward in eternity. The consequence is that when Kant desperately tries to build a new ethics on top of the old morality – without any foothold in an amoral god – he reduces his phenomenologically divine human being to an ethically paralysed robot. Thereby moralism returns with full force, but this time as a self-referencing feedback loop, where moralism itself has become its own external judge. Understandably enough it is precisely Kant’s peculiar moral philosophy that the succeeding ethicists Hegel and Nietzsche direct their sharpest criticism towards when it comes to Kantianism; in their eyes Kant is nothing other than a naive nihilist, distressingly unaware of the theocide he has just committed. For this reason, both Hegel and Nietzsche pit their pantheist predecessor Spinoza against the deist Kant, and thereby open the way for affirmative nihilism (see The Global Empire), the creative generation of value out of Atheos.
Nietzsche’s idea-archaeology project leads to a powerful recognition of nature’s enormous rather than Man’s minimal power over both the elements and the mind. With Nietzsche, Nature has of course not only the last word about itself, it is also Nature that acts through Man regardless of what this subject, as with Kant, imagines about itself. What would the subject be otherwise, if not in fact a portion of Nature? This means that Nietzsche transposes ethics into an open issue of what culture is possible on top of such a dominating and framing Nature. It is thus in culture that we find the affirmative in Nietzsche’s affirmative nihilism: a cultural concept that Nietzsche transforms, in a pioneering way, from Nature’s opposite into an emergent phenomenon arising out of otherwise indifferent Nature. According to Nietzsche, culture is nothing other than an engaged extension of Nature – or as we express the matter in The Futurica Trilogy: Culture is Nature 2.0. Only by bravely attempting to build culture on top of Nature, rather than to just yield to Nature, can Man procure an ethical substance.
The ethical consequence of the Nietzschean revolution is that the subject – which hovers in the minimal space between the current event and the next thought – must contemplate the ongoing identity-producing cycle, which de facto is the subject’s engine, in order to be able to shape the next thought as a free choice, a choice whose freedom means that the accomplishment of the intention rewards the subject with ethical substance. Nietzsche’s ethics is thus founded on a syntheist contemplation, which is followed by concrete action that is consistent with the contemplation. It is precisely this human being, she who consistently completes the necessary cycle of ethics to its inexorable end, that Nietzsche terms the übermensch, and it in on her that he pins his hopes when it comes to culture. It is hard to get further away from Kant’s morality robot paralysed in value philosophy than this.
It is Hegel who digs the Cartesian subject’s grave. His logic is a redoubled contingency. His rationality is a redoubled irrationality. Hegel’s most brilliant insight lies in that thinking starts and ends with paradox and inconsistency. Thinking is nothing other than a production of problems; it is only activated at all when it is confronted with enigmas. Hegel’s stroke of genius is the insight that knowledge reaches its absolute limit, is transformed into what Hegel dramatically calls absolute knowledge, just when it understands and acknowledges its own built-in limitations. Hegel thereby pokes holes in rationalism; the blind faith in the scope of human logic as the foundation for epistemology, which his predecessors Spinoza and Kant cultivate and celebrate. Hegel instead opens the door to transrationalism, the idea that Man’s thinking is founded on his conditions for survival and based on an extremely narrow perspective, as a contingent phenomenon without any chance of being able to embrace and comprehend in advance the enormity of existence.
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.
We thus live in an age that lacks a credible utopia, but that at the same time is coloured by a doomsday narrative that is every bit as powerful as it is threatening in the political discourse. Environmental issues are constantly on the agenda, as is the collective guilty conscience because these issues are constantly being down-prioritised by politicians who instead give priority to short-term measures on hip-pocket issues, measures that might perhaps yield the odd job opportunity but that also damage or preclude the necessary improvements in the environment. The growing plurarchy in a society where everyone talks at cross purposes, and increasingly vociferously focuses on pseudo-issues, evokes a paralysing state of hypercynicism (see The Netocrats). At the same time it is at precisely chaotic points in history of this type that new metaphysical systems are established – with Pauline Christianity in the crumbling Roman Empire and Kantian individualism in conjunction with the French Revolution as two very clear examples – and there is no reason to believe that our age should be any different in this respect.
All political ideologies under the capitalist paradigm are fundamentally individualistic. Conservatism maintains that the authentic individual has existed, but that she has unfortunately been lost and must be restored by a return to the past. Anarchism maintains that the individual is the purpose and meaning of existence and that the influence of politics must be minimised in order to liberate the individual’s spontaneous and innate capacity for self-realisation. Liberalism is anarchism’s older and more pragmatic relative, and it differs from anarchism by maintaining that the individual’s self-realisation is metaphysically connected to ownership of the Kantian object. The liberal fantasy thus distinguishes itself from the anarchist fantasy through its special fixation on requiring that all assets must be owned by one or a few specific individuals in order to be ennobled into ever-more complex atoms and reduce liberalism’s metaphysical reward, growth. Therefore, in contrast to the anarchist, the liberal maintains that the law and the State are needed in order to protect all the belongings that are the object of individuals’ fetishism. Socialism also claims to fight for the individual’s self-realisation, but it sees the conservative class system as the obstacle to this utopia, where the upper class’s control over society’s most important resources and its refusal to share power and wealth must be rectified. What distinguishes democratic socialism from the revolutionary variety is how one answers the question of what is the most efficient and at the same time most ethically correct route to the common objective: that the working class lay their hands on the abundance of the upper class, which in turn means that one achieves the classless society. This is the objective that socialists of all stripes share: the individual’s self-realisation and liberation from the shackles of the class system through the ultimate triumph of communism.
The catastrophic meliorist utopias of the 20th century – Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism – finally force the philosophers to wake up and realise meliorism’s responsibility for the totalitarian delusions about human nature and its possibilities. From the Frankfurt School in the 1930s onwards, criticism is first of all voiced against the myth of progress and thereafter ever more strongly against the entire, worshipped project of the Enlightenment, from Kant and onwards. Syntheist metaphysics consistently breaks with the meliorist fantasy. Progress as a driving notion is a capitalist myth just as much as eternity as a driving notion is a feudal myth. According to the syntheist approach, no objectively valid progress exists. Objectively speaking, there is only change for change’s own sake and, from the beginnings of permanent settlements and onwards, history is mainly to be regarded as a contingent, growing information-technology complex and nothing else. The number of memes that surround us has indeed exploded and reached a scale that is impossible to survey, just as their speed of circulation has escalated beyond all limits and our own ideation in most cases, but our genes in principle have not changed at all. The differences in Man’s lifeworld are thus only external and quantitative, rather than internal and qualitative, as the progress myth claims.
The current rewriting of history enables the individualist epoch to be viewed with new, more critical eyes. For example, capitalism is exposed as the tyranny of numerical slavery par excellence. The deeper we delve into its exploitative nature, both ideologically and historically, the more clearly capitalism’s obsessive fixation with finally being able to mathematise all human thoughts and activities into a sum of dollars, a number of votes or a series of orgasms, emerges. No one illustrates this better than the American economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker, who in his work reduces all human activities to a kind of constantly ongoing rational calculation of utility. His work is about a consummate capitalist logic that takes Becker all the way into people’s bedrooms and places of worship – according to him, even an act of sexual intercourse is nothing other than a calculated, selfish utilitarian venture worked out in advance. What Becker thereby reveals about the seat of his own ideology is how rationalism, individualism, utilitarianism and – in all cases calculating and profit-maximising – capitalism really are one and the same ideology. Becker quite simply takes the Kantian paradigm and its isolated, compulsively colonising, patriarchal subject to the end of the road. And there he finds nothing other than an eternally empty calculator, grinding away.
Heraclitus is the first person in history who seriously both realises and formulates this. His universe is vertical and sees context as primary. Parmenides responds with a universe that is horizontal and sees sequences as primary. It is not the degree of truth of these statements themselves that determines which of these branches dominates the philosophical arena, but how well they match and adapt to the prevailing power structures. It is thus nothing other than the usefulness of Parmenides’ world view to the feudalist and capitalist elites that gives it its dominant status, right up until Whitehead’s and Bohr’s relationalism arrives when, after all this time, Heraclitus is proven right – at least for the time being. The Enlightenment’s three celebrated civilisational mainstays – the individual, the atom and capital – and the primordial forms of Kant’s subject and object, have their roots with Parmenides. At the same time as the network-dynamical revolution pulls the rug out from under the feet of individualism and atomism as well as capitalism, and thereby from Parmenides’ entire legacy.
Brassier’s dramatic achievements are that he attacks Kantian correlationism based on the assumption that thinking does not exist in relation to being, as Kant claims, but in relation to non-being. Only there does the possibility open up for a philosophical way forward, and it is relationalist. But even if his cosmology were to be physically correct – syntheist physicists such as Lee Smolin and Roger Penrose definitely do not agree with him – this does not entail that conscious people themselves need to behave as repetitive organons of some kind, replete with naked death drives (even if the elder Jacques Lacan toys with the same idea). Expressed in a Lacanian manner, Brassier thus constructs a kind of theology of the subconscious as an ethical guiding principle, but he attaches it to the same shaky place as 19th century socio-biologists did – when they lay the foundations for, among other things, 20th century Nazism – namely in the masochistic will to submit to, follow and amplify nature in exactly the same way that, on scientifically extremely shaky grounds, it is already assumed to be.
Mobilist thinking has always factored in the emotions of beings; totalist thinking is instead based on a picture of beings as frozen objects. It is only when we consider Man as a disengaged external observer of existence, Kant’s fantasy, or as a disengaged isolated near-world without an authentic relationship to the surrounding world, Hegel’s fantasy, that we can accept that totalism displays any intellectual honesty whatsoever. On the other hand, for example Heidegger’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s emotionally motivated and theological search for an engaged presence requires a correct overall picture of Man’s life-world, syntheology’s saving and concluding addition. Through the addition of Syntheos the syntheological pyramid is humanised. Only in this way can philosophy save its integrity from Laruelle’s anti-philosophical attacks and win a separate role from the otherwise all-embracing physics. Thanks to the constantly emotionally engaged human being’s actual presence, both in the world and in philosophy, syntheology’s last step is historically necessary. Oceanity is not just a wonderfully liberating feeling, a sweeping emotional experience, it is also the necessary antithesis of cynical isolationism, the necessary logical antithesis of individualism, the only way for thinking to dissolve and once and for all leave the philosophical prison of the dishonest Cartesian theatre.
Heidegger attempts to change transcendence from within. He argues that transcendence acquires a new, credible role if it can be understood as an internal human activity and not as an external separate domain that Man tries to achieve and conquer, that is, as a transcendental psychology rather than a Kantian phenomenology. Heidegger’s search can be compared with the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire). Without eternalism, perception would end up in a complete psychosis. While without mobilism we would end up in an equally complete neurosis, since everything would then be transformed into a single gigantic, incalculable mess without any distinction or limitation whatsoever. Eternalism is the expression of transcendence, mobilism is the expression of immanence, in a Heideggerian sense. And both are just as necessary, and moreover in a dialectical relationship to each other, in order for Man to be able to construct a functional world view to be de facto present in.
The singularity is defined by the fact that it overthrows the prevailing rules of the game, it begins a new era, it sends out a powerful shock wave through the ethical subject, which is changed so radically that we must speak of a kind of rebirth. Note that the truth event is always internal, it occurs from the inside out rather than from the outside in. It can thus not be forced by some external power that invades the phenomenon in some mysterious way. This means that, for example, military interventions and incoming meteorites are never events in this specific sense. This is where Badiou’s ethical imperative breaks radically with Kant’s moral imperative. According to Kant, Man becomes an authentic individual by carrying out his duty. According to Badiou, it is instead a necessity to oppose the external norm, vis-à-vis the accepted duty. According to Badiou, it is this opposition to the norm and not the fulfilment of duty that is the condition for living subjectivity. The singularity is a cultural and not a natural phenomenon. Badiou’s ethical imperative entails that Man becomes an authentic dividual by opposing the prevailing norm and fighting for a new world order with an eye to the syntheist utopia.
If the truth is an act that generates an event, the genuine event creates a new truth. The truth event is followed by a decision that is followed by a loyalty vis-à-vis the decision about the truth. Aside from this there is no truth beyond the event. Here Badiou breaks radically with Karl Popper’s obsession with verification as the guarantor of truth. Badiou argues that verifications take decades to construct and that the proponents of truth wisely enough never wait for the verification before they act on the basis of the truth. He thus defends an active truth concept vis-à-vis Popper’s extremely reactive truth concept. He then divides up the development of the truth event into four phases which we go through, both as dividual truth actors and as an historical collective.
1. The revelation of the truth event.
2. The denial of the event as the truth.
3. The repression of the event as truth.
4. The resurrection the truth as the event.
But what happens to rationalism’s idea of truth as the correct assertion about existence? Like all other forms of transrationalism from Hegel onwards, syntheism does not deny that such a deepest truth about existence actually exists. But the enormous complexity in such a deepest truth, and the insufficiency of language and thought when it comes to even getting close to it, makes it unattainable. However not in the Kantian sense – where the noumenal object ends up outside our horizon because the phenomenal object gets in the way – but instead as a considerably more radical consequence of transfinite mathematics.
1. The revelation of the truth event.
2. The denial of the event as the truth.
3. The repression of the event as truth.
4. The resurrection the truth as the event.
But what happens to rationalism’s idea of truth as the correct assertion about existence? Like all other forms of transrationalism from Hegel onwards, syntheism does not deny that such a deepest truth about existence actually exists. But the enormous complexity in such a deepest truth, and the insufficiency of language and thought when it comes to even getting close to it, makes it unattainable. However not in the Kantian sense – where the noumenal object ends up outside our horizon because the phenomenal object gets in the way – but instead as a considerably more radical consequence of transfinite mathematics.
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.
However much Meillassoux, Badiou and Zizek emphasise the immanent in their longed-for, utopian events, they all finally end up in a strong and culture-specific transcendentalisation of their imagined visions. In the spirit of Kant, the subject is still free from the object and tries to tame the object according to its own limited and above all closed fantasy in relation to the future. For Meillassoux, the utopia is the arrival of justice as a future divinity, but exactly what this justice consists of – and how it is related to Man’s, until now necessary, focus on survival within a decisive existential experience of finality – this Meillassoux never succeeds in answering. It is therefore sometimes tempting to call him our time’s version of the beautiful soul in Hegel’s sarcastic sense, since Meillassoux likes to use fancy concepts that however lack a clear anchoring in modern Man’s immanent reality. Meanwhile Badiou and Zizek mix the boys’ room’s fascination with war toys and violent video games with a romantic passion for macho tyrants and bloody revolutions, such as the 1960s’ student protests in Europe. From this nostalgically coloured hybrid, they squeeze out the event as yet another bloody revolution.
Philosophy does not live up at all to its enormous potential during the 20th century. The most important reason for this is its academic marginalisation. Philosophy ceases to be a living, all-encompassing art form that is carried out by independent, risk-taking free thinkers who scrutinise society from its undefined margins. It is instead turned into a self-perpetuating and self-referencing academic activity and a system-affirming meal ticket among numerous others, with long and footnote-heavy repetitions and backward-looking references as its main activity. Thus, philosophy is no longer in dialogue with either other disciplines or society outside of academia. Neither Georg Cantor’s new mathematics nor Niels Bohr’s new physics have any impact worth mentioning within philosophy until after informationalism becomes widely accepted at the turn of the millennium, despite these two revolutions materially shaking up the world view of thinking people in the 20th century and shifting the mainstays of both ontology and phenomenology. The new relationalist ideas do of course pull the rug out from under the entire correlationist paradigm which has been regarded as axiomatic and unassailable ever since Kant presented his texts. But embarrassingly enough, philosophers are the last ones to understand and analyse this earth-shattering paradigm shift.
philosophy.html">Process philosophy is fundamentally descriptive rather than prescriptive. Nietzsche builds a genealogy, Foucault compiles an archaeology, Derrida calls his method deconstruction, we ourselves describe our own work in previous volumes as a meteorology since we – as do the weather forecasters – study the future as a gigantic information complex that is difficult to grasp as a whole. The background to philosophy.html">process philosophy’s descriptive methods is that Nietzsche sees through his predecessor Kant when he traces an even deeper will to fabricate behind the latter’s stated will to truth. Nietzsche does not see any other possibility at all for the writing of history than fabrication, even among philosophers. The difference thus does not lie in a will to fabricate pitted against a will to truth, but rather in the varying level of quality of different attempts at fabrication. All truths are a kind of myth, but all myths are not equally functional in the recurring confrontation with existence around us. Some myths are truer than others, which can and must be tested in the interaction with the surrounding world.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58