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Metaphysics
Originally the philosophical studies of that which transcends physical reality, is comprised of the disciplines ontology, cosmology and epistemology within philosophy. Bard & Söderqvist also use the concept metaphysics as the top emergence in the hierarchy fictives, fictions, ideologies and metaphysics, in the sense of conscious or subconscious metaideological memeplexes. The concept of metaphysics is here synonymous with both religion and world view.
Philosophy is founded on metaphysics, and metaphysics in turn is founded on theology. However solid the logic in a world view may seem, its logic is nonetheless based on a metaphysical assumption that is a functional but blind faith and definitely not any form of knowing. Under the primitivism of hunting and gathering, the tribe’s presumed primordial father and mother constituted the theological foundation for the collective’s ancestor worship. Primordial fathers are definitely not just any people at all, since unlike all others they lack parents – accordingly they must be a form of primitive god with extraordinary power. Under feudalism, God took over the role of the metaphysical foundation. God is the common primordial father of all tribes, the primordial father of primordial fathers. In this way, the particular stories of small tribes are bound up with the universal stories concerning human beings of larger regions and the forces that wreak havoc in their lifeworld. Monotheism is born.
With the Cartesian revolution in the 17th century, the metaphysics of individualism arrived on the scene, with Man gradually replacing God as the theological foundation, even if this revolutionary change was kept hidden as far as possible in order to avoid outbursts of ecclesiastical rage. God is thus not dead to start with; God has only gone to bed and fallen asleep. But ultimately, what role does His potential presence play when His creation is perfect anyway? The main thing for the individualists is that God has become superfluous, which enables the individual to slowly but surely take His place. It soon became evident that humanism fitted perfectly as the religion for the new capitalist and industrialist paradigm, and society clung to humanism and its individualist and atomist ideal right up until the late 20th century, when the network society emerged with full force and the idea of the network as the new metaphysical foundation caught on. Syntheism is the metaphysics of the Internet age. A shift is necessary because the philosophy of every paradigm must have its own blind but nonetheless relevant faith as a basic axiom. The masters of informationalism – the netocrats – quite simply perceive the network as the most striking metaphor for the necessary metaphysical foundation of the paradigm.
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.
Beyond the ongoing paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism (see The Netocrats) we need a new metaphysics, a new religion, a new common arena for collective spirituality in the Internet age. Without a credible metaphysics – no philosophy and no meaning either. Man is the meaning-generating animal constantly scanning his environment for patterns that indicate and keep confirming various causative links that engender a feeling of security. And if we do not find any such patterns, we don’t hesitate to quite simply invent them. With a utopia on the horizon, we give our lives a direction and a context. God is another name for utopia, and utopia is another name for God.
The philosophical discipline that deals with, compiles, compares and makes us aware of our existential stories is metaphysics: the branch of philosophy concerning our pictures of ourselves and of the world which are fundamental to our personalities and the collective. To be a metaphysician is to formulate and articulate the largely unarticulated ideas of the self and the world and thereafter propose changes in these that render them more relevant and productive for the agent in question. If physics deals with everything that can be measured and transformed into mathematics, metaphysics is preoccupied with precisely all the important things that cannot be measured nor transformed into mathematics. Metaphysics thus comprises everything within ontology, phenomenology and epistemology which cannot be converted into numbers.
History shows that people cannot live without metaphysical explanatory models. Therefore, human history is predominantly a history of metaphysics. The existential experience is in itself metaphysical. At the same time as we experience ourselves as something emergent, something more than the molecules in our bodies; as something inside, over and above, or beyond the physical body; we have removed ourselves and our experience as subjects from the world of physiology to the world of metaphysics. All human beings and societies constantly produce enormous amounts of metaphysics. The question is not whether metaphysics has any place in our lives or not, but rather whether the metaphysics in question is relevant or irrelevant for the conditions that prevail in the society in question. There is every reason to fear a considerable lag, particularly when the rapid development of technology is driving social change at a hectic pace. And so the question is: Is the generally embraced metaphysics capable of reflecting the current paradigm? Does it provide people with the requisite instruments to take charge of their own lives, or does it leave people helpless by rendering them incapable of creating comprehensible causative links and credible meaning?
Because there is in fact considerable power attached to controlling the production of metaphysics. Whoever exercises a decisive influence over the former will also sooner or later be able to control the society in question in important respects. Therefore, it is especially important to investigate whether metaphysics is conscious or only subconscious. What metaphysics succeeds in communicating subconsciously is in fact the most powerful thing of all. Metaphysics is fundamentally a narrative of who has, or rather ought to have, the power in any given society and why. The figure who is emphasised in the metaphysical narrative, who according to the narrative brings together the world into a comprehensible cosmos rather than a threatening chaos in order to the benefit of all the others, is also the person who is entrusted with the real power by the narrative’s devotees in any given society – the person who is assigned the role as the great Other.
To a considerable extent, metaphysics is in fact the story of power and of who is to exercise it. We can see how this fact applies to the troika of the monarch, the aristocrat and the priest under the feudal paradigm, and it is repeated in the same way for the troika of the politician, the entrepreneur and the university professor under the capitalist paradigm. When all is said and done, metaphysics will always be about power, and it will always use the prevailing symbolic, economic and truth-producing power in these three main roles in the paradigm’s narratives. Because the storytellers work in the service of the prevailing holders of power, their prime task is to depict the prevailing holders of power in a glorified light, to incorporate them into a tailor-made story and thus treat the prevailing power structure as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The storytellers incorporate all of this adeptly, at every possible turn, into the collective subconscious for the greatest possible effect. There is a considerable measure of circular argumentation in this scheme of things, but this only makes it even more impenetrable. Only the most eccentric deviants doubt the latent ideology of a social order, which by definition is inaccessible to rational criticism since it is built into the very perspective through which a society contemplates its history and development.
Because of this dramatic efficacy, metaphysical storytelling is not random, but of the highest priority for those in power. It can only be consigned to the person who is best suited to be the truth producer of the prevailing paradigm and who thereby also has the strongest incentive to preserve the status quo. Responsibility for metaphysics falls to either an already powerful institution in the society, such as the Church in relation to the monarchy and the aristocracy under feudalism. Otherwise a new institutional elite is constructed to formulate the new, emerging paradigm’s conception of the world – naturally at the expense of the old paradigm – such as when the universities expanded and acquired enormous power under capitalism, because the university formulated the individualism and the atomism that the bourgeoisie used in order to sweep away the Churches’ monotheist explanatory models and to take power from the aristocracy. Without popes we would never have seen any kings, and without university professors the world would never have beheld any industrialists either. The cardinals dined on pheasant with the nobility, and the academics eat steak with the entrepreneurs for good reason. They divide up and balance the power in the prevailing paradigm between themselves.
It is important to have clear this fundamental understanding of the historical terms of the production of metaphysics when we are confronted by the fact that no less than three dramatic revolutions exploded concurrently at the start of the third millennium. These three interactive and synergistic revolutions are the Internetisation of planet Earth, the relationalist revolution that is moving from physics to philosophy, and the chemical liberation within physiology. Taken together, these three epoch-making developments laid the foundation for a new superparadigm in the history of humanity. Power structures, the world view and the view of humanity were radically and fundamentally changed all at once in one of the most dramatic social upheavals humanity has ever seen.
Since syntheism is the metaphysics that, so to speak, is already built into interactive technologies, it has already invented itself. The Internet has gone from being a virtual god to becoming plainly a potential god, all in accordance with the radically new meaning that Quentin Meillassoux gives the concept of God, as something belonging to the future rather than the past. Syntheism is the religion that the Internet created. The dedicated political struggle for a free and open Internet is based on the blind faith that the network has a sacred potential for humanity. The Internet is thereby transformed from a technological into a theological phenomenon. The Internet is the God of the new age, and furthermore extremely appropriate for an age characterised by an unlimited faith in the possibilities of creativity. Thus, the Internet is a god that even those who regard themselves as atheists can devote themselves to. Syntheologically, we express this state of affairs as that the Internet is a manifestation of Syntheos, the new god that we humans are creating rather than the old god which, according to our ancestors, is said to have created us once upon a time in a distant past.
The burgeoning netocracy, the elite that is succeeding the bourgeoisie in the new paradigm being driven by digitisation and interactivity, obviously represented a special interest group when it initially marketed the anarcho-libertarian ideology as the metaphysics of the Internet age. If truth is an act, and if truth will set us free, it follows that if the Internet is allowed to be free, it will also set us free. There is here of course an ill-concealed intention to use noble motives as a pretext for the seizure of power. The netocracy is thus acting in exactly the same way that the feudal aristocracy did when it embraced monotheism, and in the same way as the capitalist bourgeoisie did when it embraced humanism. These specific metaphysics developed as the dominant stories – and they worked! – during their respective paradigms, for the very reason that they appointed the emerging social classes as the social theatre’s new protagonists.
It is hardly tone-deaf atheism that inspires us most. Rather it is Spinoza’s pantheism that is philosophically consummated through a further development of syntheism. God is no longer only the final idealisation of Spinoza’s pantheism, God as the subject of the Universe; rather, God acts as humanly produced idealisations even on other planes, among which the Internet as a theological realisation is a typical example in our time. If divinities both can and should be created through idealisations necessary for survival – why then, like Spinoza, settle for Pantheos, the Universe, as the only god? In particular since the Internet actually has its own agenda, controls us rather than lets us control it and, to put it bluntly, is beginning to assume divine proportions. Moreover, there is a long list of idealisations available to the syntheologists to develop into divinities in order to then make themselves into their memetic host organisms and preachers and thereby contribute to their dissemination. In this book, we are concerned with the four most basic idealisations from the world of metaphysics: the void, the Universe, the difference and the utopia.
The conflict over the metaphysics behind physics – clearly illustrated in Albert Einstein’s and Niels Bohr’s passionate correspondence from the mid-1930s – finally gets its resolution through experimental metaphysics, also called the second quantum revolution; a long list of complicated scientific experiments from the 1980s onwards, the results of which have had dramatic consequences for metaphysics. The results of this development strengthen Bohr’s position considerably in the above-mentioned conflict, which is why both Newtonian and Einsteinian metaphysics with their requirements of timeless, universal laws seem increasingly passé. Bohr’s indeterministic relationalism overshadows Einstein’s deterministic relativism. The constant of physics is time, not space. Time is not an illusory dimension of space, but highly real. Mathematics does not precede the Universe: mathematics is never anything more than an idealised approximation in hindsight of constantly dynamic Nature, an arbitrary and anthropocentric eternalisation of a genuinely mobilist reality (see The Global Empire).
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.
The will to exist is not only a by-product of human eagerness to survive, funnily enough it is the Universe’s own raison d’etre in relation to itself. Just as much as mankind, the Universe is a product of Darwinian evolution, where continuing and expanding existence constantly accrues to the phenomenon that happens to be best adapted to the current situation, while competing phenomena disappear. This means that the Internet age’s syntheistic metaphysics focuses on survival and not on immortality. Syntheism entails a worship of this intensity and of indeterminist existence rather than a death worship and determinist illusion. The Platonic cult of death, from the ancient Greeks via Christianity to Newton’s and Einstein’s fixed, atomist world views, loses all its credibility.
The sexual revolution under capitalism was followed by the chemical liberation during informationalism (see The Global Empire). The development of a post-atheist religiosity, which is built around the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborative, syncretist and religio-social practices, and not least by the exploding plethora of entheogenic substances, laid the foundation for a resolution of the conflict between theism and atheism which, in a Hegelian dialectics, has grown into syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. This occurred at the same time as the sexual revolution was rejected when its unavoidable flip side, the hypersexualisation of the individual, was exposed as the underlying engine of capitalist consumption society; the sexual revolution ended up being a straitjacket of the superego where the chemical liberation offered a possible way out.
The modernist social structure was aggressively questioned in the 20th century, first by the Frankfurt School and later by post-structuralism, and collapsed under both external and internal pressure. A philosophical renaissance was begun by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Manuel De Landa, Thomas Metzinger and Karen Barad with The Death of Man as a starting point – which can be compared with how 18th century philosophers launched the project The Death of God – and with this development a fundamental shift from the anthropocentric to the universocentric world view was initiated, which is being realised by the post-structuralists’ heirs in the 3rd millennium, with empirical support from experimental metaphysics.
The syntheistic mission receives its eschatological fuel from the approaching ecological apocalypse, which in itself is an unavoidable consequence of a world without faith in a relevant divinity. Only through a new syntheistic meta-narrative, constructed on the utopian conviction that humanity’s only possible salvation is through its creation of Syntheos, can the ecological apocalypse be avoided. It is not possible to preserve human life on the planet with any amount of politics. For politics is subservient to the capitalist drive.html">death drive – there is no chance of becoming a leading politician without first becoming dependent on the statist-corporativistic power structure – which does its utmost to grind on relentlessly with its ruthless plundering of resources until the planet is uninhabitable and lifeless. The planet can only be saved for continued human life with the aid of a new religion, a metaphysics driven by a utopia concerning a physically functional future for our children and their children.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou divides metaphysics into four disciplines, from which the human being produces the meaning of her existence. These four activities are politics, love, science and art. Metaphysics binds these four disciplines together into a cohesive conception of the world. From the point of view of syntheology, religion then emerges as metaphysics in practice and is therefore reflected in the prevailing ideals of the four activities. Religion is thus the execution of the paradigm’s metaphysical truth, and syntheology is constructed in an intimate interaction with religious practice as the theoretical foundation for other types of ideology production. According to Badiou, it is symptomatic of our meaning-depleted, hyperindividualist existence that precisely the timeless ideals that ought to represent the four disciplines have been set aside by the collective drive.html">death drive, which is riding us humans in an evermore hysterical hunt for absolutely nothing.
Badiou maintains for example that politics should be driven by revolution as an ideal, but instead it is driven nowadays by a kind of administrative micromanagement; politics has become entirely a matter of management. Love should be driven by passion as an ideal, but is instead driven by sexuality. Science ought to be driven by invention as an ideal, but is instead driven by technology. Art ought to be driven by creation as an ideal, but is instead driven by culture. All of these dislocations expose the hypercynical Zeitgeist, which moreover has the ironic audacity to dress itself up as non-ideological. The only way to expose this dense, destructive ideology-building and to overcome its concomitant hypercynicism is to patiently offer a new syntheological metaphysics which can be the inspiration for a new syntheist religion. There are no other credible ways out of our cultural deadlock.
That the consummation of humanism as the socialist project lacks a firm footing in a post-atheist world is the theme driving both Slavoj Zizek’s Less Than Nothing and Simon Critchley’s The Faith of The Faithless as well as Quentin Meillassoux’s L’inexistence divine. The way forward for Zizek, Critchley and Meillassoux therefore is a return to theology; certainly not back to Abrahamic theology, but to theology in its deepest form, as philosophical metaphysics. The problem for Zizek is that his return does not go deeper than to the Enlightenment’s romanticised idea of the bloody revolution as deliverance for everything. However, in contrast to Zizek, Critchley seeks to return to the origin of religion and finds there a mystical anarchism in constant opposition to the patriarchal, ecclesiastical power hierarchies.
For this reason, syntheism necessarily arrives after humanism. Syntheism is the logical response to the crisis of humanism. Man cannot replace God, since man is every bit as much of an illusion as God ever was. The protosyntheist Martin Heidegger and his follower Jacques Derrida wrestle in their work with metaphysics as an idea and claim to be working for the death of all metaphysics. However, they end up instead becoming metaphysicists par excellence, proponents of precisely what we call the eternally postponed end of metaphysics. The more forcefully you try to flee from metaphysics, the more deeply entangled you become in its yarn. So what syntheism does is that it places God, Man and the network next to each other and says: we know that these illusions have never existed in any physical sense. Nonetheless we have learned pragmatically from history that we cannot live without them. A life without the great Other is both a phenomenological and psychological impossibility. These entities are essential for a world view to be coherent. The consequence is that we choose to include the three black holes – God, Man and the network – concurrently in our new world view, as the black holes they actually are, that is, as culturally productive voids.
The dependence of bodies on each other is real. We know that dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin hold people together in a collective that accords pleasure to those in the group, and in this pleasure a meaning arises, produced by and for ourselves. Therefore we have arrived at the historical juncture when theism and atheism must be consummated as dialectical opposites, not through some kind of hybrid, but through us seeing and accepting their historically consummated interconnection as a unit and being able to push this unit aside and go forth in history, into syntheism. Today’s fusion between our historical understanding of the fact that when all is said and done our cohesiveness is what is most holy to us, and the exploding, genuinely new virtual connection between people thanks to the arrival of the Internet, interacts with and is creating the foundation for the new era’s syntheist metaphysics. God (theism) and Man (atheism) are quite simply followed by the network (syntheism) as the fundamental event of metaphysics.
For each and every one of these four information technology complexes has increased the quantity of information available in a given society to a revolutionary extent, which in turn has created entirely new social hierarchies with entirely new parameters for metaphysics and its assumptions and consequences. A pervasive social change means exactly this: not more of the old, but a qualitatively tangible change of an emergent nature. The old feudal Europe plus the printing press meant, after this epoch-making technology had been operating for long enough, not the same old Europe plus an interesting machine, but a completely new Europe that gave birth to industrialism, parliamentarism and the colonisation of the rest of the world. These new metaphysical narratives in turn radically changed both the world view and the human ideal, and thereby the entire power structure.
The French historian Fernand Braudel quite correctly describes the art of writing as the definitive technology. Both the Enlightenment and the Reformation were built on the printing press revolution; they both rest heavily on words and text, which had of course suddenly became available in cheap, mass circulation. The cost of producing a single book fell from tens of thousands of pounds to just a pound or so per copy, converted into today’s money value. Thus the Enlightenment and the Reformation exploited the advantages of the printing press to such an extent that they transform words and text per se into metaphysics. The book, the newspaper and the banknote as well as the later electronic, one-directional printing press derivatives for communicating, namely radio and television, acquire a fetishistic status under capitalism.
The Enlightenment constructs a new humanist mythology in opposition to Feudalism’s monotheism – with the individual as the bourgeoisie’s substitute for the aristocracy’s God – while the Reformation constitutes religion’s backlash against the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion. Here, the hybrid between the God of feudalism and the new individual emerges when the Protestant theologians position the suddenly established direct dialogue between God and the individual at the centre of metaphysics. The Reformation quite simply recasts God as the perfect bourgeois individual, the atomistic God, Jesus. These consequences – fatal for the Catholic Church – of the printing press putting cheap, mass-produced, vernacular editions of the Bible into the hands of the people, were probably not something that Gutenberg, a pious Catholic, could reasonably have conceived of, which once again underlines that every dominant metatechnology plays out its hand regardless of any intentions of its inventor and other serious stakeholders. The Internet is going to do the same.
Paradigm shifts entail dramatic conflicts, since for obvious reasons the prevailing power structure strives to preserve the status quo at any price for the purpose of defending its own privileges against the new, burgeoning elite. Therefore, with both violence and moralising nostalgia, the old power structure tries to keep the society fixed in the old paradigm for as long as humanly possible. That somebody voluntarily gives up the advantages bestowed on them by virtue of their class is a rare occurrence indeed. But the ice floe in the rapids on which civilisation to date has been standing eventually becomes so small that civilisation must migrate to another ice floe. With this sooner or later inevitable jump, the power structure and its writing of history changes radically, because everything must be hastily adapted to the new conditions for survival that are linked to and built into the new ice floe. Therefore it is always the new and not the old rulers – those who have most to gain and absolutely nothing to lose from the altered prioritisations within the new metaphysics – who are the fastest to change ice floes and adapt to the new rules for survival. The new metaphysics forces the pace, and the leap between the ice floes thus accelerates the rate of the shift of power between the elites of the two paradigms.
Every paradigm is accompanied by its own narrative, its own production of truth, circling around an essential starting point for its metaphysics. Each and every one of these narratives in turn contains three components: a cosmology, a romance and a linear history of the formative events in the past of the new paradigm, determined after the fact. As Hegel points out, these components are characterised throughout metahistory by an underlying requirement of necessity. What is metahistorically radically new in the case of syntheism – the metaphysics of the Internet age – is that it is based on contingency rather than necessity as its principle. Syntheism is indeterministic, not deterministic.
Primitivism is the first paradigm; it is based on the revolutionising emergence of spoken language and is characterised by nomadism, hunting, fishing and gathering. Primitivist metaphysics is based on reverence for one’s ancestors and respect for the tribe’s oldest members, since these are the collective’s most reliable and resource-rich knowledge bank, and thus also the key to survival, the engine of primitivist metaphysics. The narrative of nomadism revolves around the concept of history as circular with the regular return of the seasons as its dominant symbol. Existence is not linear, has no direction, time instead runs in recurring cycles; there is no development, everything is instead repeated ad infinitum. To be a human being is to be a member of a tribe, and within the limits of the tribe’s structures, to take responsibility for ensuring that this perpetual repetition is maintained. Strangers constitute competitors for the tribe’s resources, wherefore one either flees from them or beats them to death when one happens upon them. The human being who does not belong to the tribe is therefore not a human being at all, but an animal that can basically be treated as nonchalantly or brutally as one pleases.
Written language, which by this point in time was technically very advanced, was quickly disseminated across the Eurasian landmass. It soon proved to be an extremely efficient instrument of power in the form of keeping accounts and spreading propaganda for its – at least initially – few users and their masters. This is never clearer than when its most important product becomes widely accepted: the magical law. In conjunction with the arrival of the law, a metaphysics was produced in which all forms of social mobility were presented as an anarchical threat to the cohesion of the society, a danger that must be combated. For example, Zoroaster devotes half of his holy scripture Gathas – which was authored orally in Central Asia as early as 1700 BC, to be written down only many generations later – to praising enterprising settlers and condemning irresponsible nomads.
Feudal metaphysics achieved the intended effects by preaching totalism and dualism to enable the unimpeded formulation of eternal truths as the foundation for the law. Steadfastness and obedience are everything, there is no room left for openness or questioning of the prevailing order of any kind. The state is presented as founder, upholder and guarantor of the holy law and all the good values that it claims to represent, in the same way that monotheist religion preaches that God is founder, upholder and guarantor of existence as a whole. Paul is therefore quite right when he builds his Christian theology on the premise that the law is the manifesto of the drive.html">death drive, an assertion of the drive.html">death drive with the aim of restricting and economising with the intensity of life. This becomes all the more clear when the metaphysical ideal of feudalism, the law-abiding citizen, is asserted as a personification of the drive.html">death drive itself.
The law’s external and eternal values are pitted against the internal and arbitrary values of chaos. And the idea follows on from the principle, which says that the values of metaphysics must be external and eternal in order for the narrative to hang together, that mankind must be offered the possibility of becoming one with the law, that mankind should be able to become external and eternal in relation to the internal, mental limitation and physiological transience that she/he experiences existentially every day of the week. The idea of eternal life as the reward for the law-abiding citizen for his/her demonstrated fidelity and reliability throughout life is born, and with this essential prerequisite in place, monotheistic metaphysics, which revolves around the idea of eternity, arrives with full force. Previously every tribe had had its own mythological progenitor, but with monotheism all tribes – since they have begun to trade and communicate with each other whenever this can be more profitable than, each according to his abilities, killing each other – get one and the same progenitor, God. Hinduism in India keeps its local subordinate deities and Catholicism in Europe cultivates its saint myths, but all feudal metaphysics is based on a solid monotheistic foundation where God is the personification of the law. It turns out to be a metaphysical necessity in order for feudal society to be able to maintain its cohesiveness and endure over time.
Capitalism is the third paradigm in the information technology writing of history. It emanates from the multifarious offshoot effects of the printing press and is characterised by the mass media, urbanisation, capital accumulation, mass education, industrialisation, globalisation and a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the workers. The Reformation expresses the definitive deification of the printed word. With this deification, monotheism’s blind faith in the possibilities of the manifestation is replaced by individualism’s blind faith in the potential of the proclamation. Capitalism is the golden age of the printed and mass-distributed ideologies. And since new proclamations can be constructed on top of old proclamations – when yesterday’s objectives in the factory have been attained, they are replaced by today’s new and loftier objectives for tomorrow –a metaphysics evolves out of the magic of the proclamation around progress as an idea. Similar to the way in which eternity is portrayed in monotheistic metaphysics, progress is portrayed in individualist metaphysics – regardless of whether it concerns liberalism’s evolving, individual person, or socialism’s five-year plan, collective society – as the manifestation of the indivisible, as something external and eternal in relation to all of life’s obvious transience.
When the Enlightenment eliminates God as the cohesive factor for metaphysics – either, as the deists do, by anaesthetising Him, or as the atheists do, by killing Him off – the focus is shifted onto the individual, the idea of Man himself as the existential atom and the very cornerstone of existence and the social model. Thus, metaphysics no longer allows any angels who come to prophets to hand down the truth, which is already perfectly formulated by God, from God to Man. Man must instead construct his own metaphysics, and Man reckons that this is best done by deriving the truth directly from his/her own lifeworld, by basing a world view on empirical facts and defending it with logical arguments. However, this ambition requires in itself an unfounded and illogical faith in Man’s innate ability to take in and understand all of life with his limited intellect and imperfect access to information. This blind faith is rationalism – the irrational core of individualist metaphysics that gives the individual divine qualities. The individual is made into a being that suddenly grasps, comprehends and has mastered absolutely everything in her own wishful thinking.
According to Kant and his followers, rationalism is a necessary linchpin in individualist mythology. Individualism requires blind faith in Man’s own thinking – given time and necessity – being able to understand and solve all the world’s riddles and problems. While rationalism does accept that the individual is not omnipotent today, for the individual is evidently a mortal being, but with the individual’s omnipotence – since she actually is a latent god – according to rationalism, the solution to the problem can only be a matter of time. From the early 19th century onwards, individualist metaphysics becomes as conveniently as it is effectively self-fulfilling: individualism is proclaimed from the universities, and at the same universities, professors and researchers are also organised as individuals, encased in increasingly specialised subject area atoms, where they devote their days to quoting one another within closed coteries under the pretext that they are engaging in some sort of objectively true knowledge production. And as long as one stays within the mythology of individualist metaphysics – and why wouldn’t you, if you are part of the elite that reap the full rewards of it – it is hard to see the individualised human being in relation to the atomised world in any other way. The external signals that interfere with the generally held mythology are of course immediately removed by the system itself.
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.
Syntheism can be described as one long showdown with all the ideologies that are based on the historical case. Religion and metaphysics were developed under feudalism from being a cohesive and community-generating world view into becoming a well-honed tool for power and control. The monotheistic religions demand submission; the word is suddenly an order rather than a promise. Sin is basically a revolt against God, a questioning of the divine arbitrariness that is the very foundation of the Abrahamic religions. In practice, the Asian religions accomplish the same thing through making sinful behaviour function as the driver for desperate reincarnation rather than invoking hellish damnation. However syntheism in no way entails a return to paganism, but instead a dialectical further development. The real return to paganism at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism is instead the bewildering hodgepodge of naive ideas and quasi-religious nonsense that go under the label New Age, the phenomenon that, not without reason, syntheologians dismiss as theological cultural relativism.
The difference between Zoroastrianism’s intentionalism and Islam’s consequentialism is clarified in the syncretistic meeting between them in the Sufi hybrid religion. Instead of a god that does not already know, the Sufi master must step in and assume the role as the one who does not already know and who nevertheless still decides everything after the disciple’s fetishistic submission. Islam is therefore most clearly and precisely described as the theory of blindly obeying the one who does not already know, if for no other reason than for the exemplary value that Islam attaches to submission itself. This makes Islam the perfect religion for feudalist society, and in this very capacity it is the fastest and most furiously expanding metaphysics thus far in history. This is not to say that Islam is logically coherent. Memetic success has of course nothing to do with either truth or logical coherence, at least not in any other sense than the strictly Darwinian. However, we understand why Sufism, in its capacity as a permanent state of armistice between intentionalism and consequentialism, developed into the ironic religion par excellence; a doctrine that can only be expressed through flowing paradoxical poetry but which never lends itself – to the great vexation of Islamist fundamentalists; they all hate Sufism – to any kind of solid dogmatic fundamentalism.
Obviously the Zoroastrian revolution is illustrated with perfect clarity in Jesus’s reformation of Judaism into that which later became Christianity, where the law is replaced by the intention as the driving force in the Judeo-Christian theology and the values shift from the moralising to the ethical perspective (notwithstanding that Paul later frantically tries to drive Christianity back to Judaic moralism.) Just as self-evidently, Paul and St Augustine import the concept of the Holy Ghost from Zoroastrianism in order to complete the Trinity of Christian metaphysics. Which in turn explains why the Holy Ghost is the only component of the Christian Trinity that survives within syntheology (where Syntheos is the Holy Ghost without the Father and the Son).
Syntheism is the Hegelian synthesis of the deadlocked dichotomy between theism and atheism. When we left theism for atheism, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We became anti-religion rather than anti-theism. But having lived through the atheist paradigm and having come out on the other side, we are ready for the syntheist paradigm with its grasp of the human being’s constant and basic need for a functional metaphysics. Syntheism stands out as the only credible metaphysical system for the intellectual human being of the third millennium. Which means that the only alternative to syntheism is to settle for a subconscious and tacit metaphysics, and such a metaphysics can of course be as ill-considered and destructive as anything, since by definition it is not conscious and thus hardly very sensible either. And how intelligent does this alternative, on closer inspection, appear to be?
So where then does relationalist metaphysics find its historical allies? It is, for example, more correct to say that syntheism strives towards a new Renaissance rather than towards a new Enlightenment. British philosopher Iain McGilchrist with his tome The Master and his Emissary builds a veritably syntheist manifesto around this basic idea. According to McGilchrist, the history of ideas is a struggle between the human being’s two cerebral hemispheres for the power and the glory. If the right hemisphere – which is holistically oriented and seeks wholeness in its eternalisations – is allowed to rule, or at least to dominate, it produces mobilist, emotionally driven and culturally explorative epochs such as the Renaissance and Romanticism. The left hemisphere – which prefers to eternalise the world as if it consisted of a series of isolated components without a context – instead produces totalist, logo-centric and culturally closed epochs such as the Enlightenment and Modernism.
With the advent of the law, there is an explosion of what the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls the anthropotechnics, that is, attempts by the human being to domesticate not only plants and animals, but also to develop techniques to curb and tame herself. From the arrival of the law and onwards, anthropotechnics and its concomitant asceticism dominate human life. In an age obsessed with the successful and wealth-generating domestication of plants and animals in the building of civilisation – made possible by and organised through written language – Platonist totalism functions perfectly as the feudalist metaphysics for the masses. As long as reductionism is considered to be natural and beyond all question, totalism maintains its hold on metaphysics. It is not until Leibniz launches his mobilist monadology in the 17th century that totalism starts being questioned.
In the situation that thus arises, metaphysics itself is the only way to balance the variants of the law. Metaphysics is namely the opposite of the law. Without metaphysics’ constant production of hope, visions, utopias and alternative worlds, the human being would never be able to think of any alternative to the law’s libidinal security. A society without metaphysics immediately and without resistance submits to the totalitarian law. It cannot even imagine any alternative. Consequently, physicists ought to stop talking about laws at all. In relationalist physics there are no longer any eternal laws, but merely a multitude of open and contingent processes. The presumed laws can be changed, they even must be changed over time – not least when new emergences suddenly arise, and they constantly do – and then these laws are of course no longer eternal laws that dictate in detail all imaginable events in advance, but are simply probable courses of events in specific, spatio-temporal contexts.
After philosophy and science have killed off the Abrahamic gods – a process which, in the mid-19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche sums up in the idea of the death of God – syntheism, the metaphysics of the Internet age, poses the question of which potential divinities remain, and which have been added for informationalist Man to tinker with. It is of course the case that where knowledge is passive, faith is active. At best, knowledge can never be anything other than the truth about that which has transpired, while faith understands itself as the truth about that which is to come. Reason cannot stand on only one of these two legs, or it will plunge into either neurotic rationality or psychotic obsession, for both are necessary mainstays in a reason that is functional. As it turns out, there are a host of divinities that the informationalist human being can believe in, or rather already does believe in. Let us start by revisiting Nietzsche’s two magnificent predecessors Hegel and Spinoza for inspiration.
It is important to understand that Hegel is not talking about some kind of narcissistic self-reflection – which might be easy to believe if we take contemporary Man’s view of the world as a starting point: narcissism is fundamentally a misdirected neurotic compensatory behaviour; even Hegel knows this, long before his disciple Freud. On the contrary he is talking about a self-centredness which if anything is reluctant, but from a historical perspective highly motivated; a logical consequence of the intense, subconscious search for self-love, which drives all metaphysics. It is a phenomenological, not a psychological self-seeking. For Hegel the subject is only found in one place, namely as what tacitly does the asking when the question “Who am I?” is posed. And this it asking the question, he deliberately calls the spirit – as in the Zeitgeist or the Weltgeist (“World Spirit”) – and not the soul, as if it were about some kind of Platonist opposite to the body. For just like Spinoza, Hegel is a monist, not a dualist. It is after having read Spinoza that he utters the familiar saying: “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”
These well-considered choices of names are of course open to discussion in this ironic polytheism for no end of time; the four syntheological concepts were created in a participatory and intersubjective process in a syntheist online forum and, in good netocratic spirit, lack an original dividual author. The movement has thus agreed as a collective on these names together. But these supraphenomena are highly real and together with Friedrich von Schelling’s powerful foundation work and Martin Heidegger’s magnificent extension work constitute the groundwork within advanced metaphysics. And both extension and interior design work is still ongoing. American philosopher Robert Corrington, for example, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, constructs a system around what he calls the four infinities. Atheos corresponds to the sustaining infinite in Corrington’s metaphysics, Pantheos is another name for the actual infinite, Entheos corresponds to what Corrington calls the prospective infinite, and Syntheos is another name for the open infinite. The Irish philosopher William Desmond constructs a similar system in his book God and The Between around the three transcendences: Atheos is here the name of the interior potentiality (T1), Pantheos is the name of the exterior actuality (T2) and Entheos is the name of transcendence as transcendence per se (T3). The only reason that Desmond does not use a fourth component in his metaphysics is that he chooses to completely avoid the future as a theme; otherwise Syntheos would be obvious as Desmond’s T4.
It is important to point out that syntheism sees the world itself as fundamentally mobilist, and not as eternalist. Faith in the world itself as eternalist belongs within totalism, the trap that we strive to avoid at all costs. Like interiority and territorialisation, eternalism must be limited to phenomenology. Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos are creative eternalisations of the void, the cosmos, the difference and the utopia. It is as fundamental and powerful eternalisations that we use them for constructing a functional, relevant and, in the deepest sense of the word, credible metaphysics for the Internet age. Since they are ontological eternalisations, we do not need to look for them and demonstrate their external ontic existence in nature in relation to us humans; the crews of the space stations are never ever going to find our gods above the clouds. All four of them are figments of the brain of some kind, but highly consciously created and creative such.
There are grounds for declaring that syntheism can and should be regarded as ‘New Age’ for the thinking man. The critically thinking Man, one should then add. For with a blind faith built into the core of the construction, syntheism would never hold up logically. The truth is of course that syntheism is anything but ‘New Age’. It is a construction on top of modern physics and after the atheist revolution, without in any way therefore opposing the preceding advances in the natural science and metaphysics – but rather by deepening these further. While New Age at best must be regarded as a kind of postmodern laissez-faire laughing stock, full of folly, an anti-intellectual mishmash of superstition, nonsense and general fear of conflict in sundry variants – as well as a variety of old ideas that are trivialised and commercialised so strongly that they become meaningless, an unsystematic recycling of worthless thinking from times gone by – syntheism is instead the logically deduced metaphysics for a new era. For real.
In the next step of the subjectivity process, the dividual, divided subject takes shapes as Entheos, and the collective, assembled subject takes shape as Syntheos. Here, it is Entheos that assumes the role of mobilism and Syntheos that takes eternalism’s role within the dialectics between mobilism and eternalism. It is, for example, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos that vibrates through Deleuze’s classic work Différence et Répétition. Entheos stands for the differences and Syntheos stands for the generalities in Deleuzian metaphysics. The second oscillation in the syntheological pyramid arises between these two poles. The first oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos revolves around the One, which expresses itself as a single cohesive substance with an endless quantity of attributes. The second oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos however lacks the One as a cohesive point of departure, since the multiplicity in question which takes its starting point in Entheos is irreducible.
It should be added that experimental metaphysics from the 1980s onwards actually proves that the syntheist onto-epistemology is not merely a perceptional phenomenon; it is not perception alone that makes eternalisation necessary and possible. Even physics itself creates eternalisations and mobilisations. Quantum physics starts from wave motions, and when several monochrome wave movements interact and generate a superposition, something near-miraculous appears. The superposition between the wave motions displays clear differences even beyond the obvious interference in each of the individual wave motions; the more monochrome wave motions added to the wave package in question, the more clearly it is localised in space–time. Ultimately, already in physics itself a clear phenomenon becomes apparent: add an infinite number of wave motions and the position is determinised; there are no longer any wavelengths left to speak of, and a particle appears, locked in space. The more fixed the localisation in space, the weaker the wavelength; the stronger the wavelength appears, the more the phenomenon spreads itself out in space. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism is thereby not merely an onto-epistemological complex; the oscillation evidently has an exact equivalent in the complementarity between wave and particle in experimental metaphysics.
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.
The historical problem of philosophy is that it has focused strongly on direct connections between phenomena, and thereby has been forced into extreme theoretical constructs about either direct connections or no connections at all, when the overwhelming majority of all connections in actual fact are indirect. It is through this ubiquitous indirectness that everything is interconnected with everything else. It can be difficult to apprehend quantum physical phenomena in the macro-domains that we usually associate with classical physics, but the phenomena repeat themselves there nonetheless, if you only observe them attentively enough. All physics is thus in the final analysis essentially quantum physics, which means that even metaphysics must be concordant with quantum physics. If this constant complementarity is not taken into account, we can say goodbye to both intellectual respectability and the contact with physical reality for good. If, on the other hand, complementarity is factored into the calculation, an objectively speaking far more correct world view opens up, more so than anything humanity has ever experienced before. This doesn’t exactly lend itself to reducing credibility.
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.
Deleuze’s metaphysics otherwise constitutes an excellent transition between Baradian relationalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Deleuze places the difference before the identity: according to him identity is generated out of the difference, rather than the other way around. Deleuze thereby precedes Barad’s relationalism. At the same time, Deleuze devotes considerable amounts of work to constructing a new concept of the subject in the wake of the Lacanian revolution within psychoanalysis. He seeks a kind of downright ecstatic but still immanent state which he calls transcendent rather than transcendental. This leads him to the invention of the dividual, the schizoid subject, which has since become the human ideal of the attentionalist netocracy in the Internet age (quite irrespective of whether it was Deleuze’s intention or not in the 1970s to create such a future instrument of power).
The Universe obviously needs no preceding divinity in order to exist. There is no need for any religion whatsoever when existence is in a state of constant expansion. However, the moment we move from becoming to being, the theological perspective becomes necessary. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism requires a syntheological accompaniment. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos in itself gives rise to the metaphysical impulse. We express this by maintaining that being requires God. We see this movement with Hegel when he transports himself from Atheos to Pantheos and sees the World Spirit (Welt Geist) being born out of this movement. But the same thing also occurs with Deleuze when he moves from Entheos towards Syntheos and sees the plane of immanence being born out of this movement. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos is in itself the original sacralisation of existence, the birth of metaphysics. Through the process of eternalisation, chaotic existence is transformed into a single coherent substance, what the mobilist philosophers call the One. And the One is of course the name of immanence philosophy and process theology for God.
But inside the syntheological pyramid, there is also movement from Syntheos in the direction of Atheos. Therefore it is interesting to introduce and study a rigidly atheistic nihilist as an interlocutor to Deleuze’s and Barad’s relationalist metaphysics. The exceptionally learned and colourful Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier in his book Nihil Unbound champions the thesis that Nietzsche and Deleuze guilty of a kind of wishful thinking mistake when they place existential ecstasy before existential anxiety. Like the Buddha, Brassier instead sees anxiety as primary for existence – pain always surpasses pleasure – and he constructs a kind of Freudian cosmology out of the conviction that the empty, blindly repetitious drive is the engine of existence. The focus of Brassier’s negative theology lies in the Universe’s future self-obliteration, which according to him must govern all values and valuations until then. Here he takes his starting point in the human being’s will to nothingness which emerges from the increasingly leaky subconscious and constantly makes itself felt as a theme among the rapidly growing subcultures of the Internet age.
The foundation for philosophical relationalism is laid by the American pragmatists at the end of the 19th century, clearly exemplified by Peirce’s familiar quotation “law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.”. He argues that the laws of nature ought reasonably to be subject to evolution in the same degree as everything else in existence and that therefore they can never be predetermined. It is simply a matter of the cause of the effect preceding the effect, and this does not in itself require an eternal law. Peirce actually goes so far as to say that if we presume that time is an actual constant, the behavioural patterns of nature by necessity must sooner or later change over time. After Peirce’s revolutionary contributions, philosophical relationalism is clearly placed within pragmatist metaphysics. And it is also within pragmatism that it is developed in full when the British-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, in parallel with the Bohrian revolution in physics, publishes his manifesto Process and Reality in 1929.
The American philosopher Michael Epperson shows in Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead how Whitehead – a favourite disciple of William James, American pragmatism’s other father figure besides Peirce – single-handedly constructs a relationalist rather than a relativist metaphysics in parallel with, and completely independent of, the quantum physics revolution which began to pick up pace during the 1920s. According to Whitehead – whose name was revered among physicists after the publication of his mathematics tome Principia Mathematica in 1913, co-authored with his disciple Bertrand Russell – existence in essence consists of current events and not of atomistic objects. History is thus an endless quantity of events stacked on each other, where an intense and concrete series of mobilist events always precedes the permanent and abstractly eternalised object. Whitehead’s experience events can be described as a kind of Leibnizian monad – but not without windows, as Leibniz imagines the monads, but rather with hosts of windows that are constantly wide-open to the surrounding world.
The physicist and philosopher Karen Barad champions the radical thesis that all philosophy that is produced prior to the advent of relationalism is all too anthropocentric and thereby misleading. The only way out of this fatalist cul-de-sac is to construct a completely new ontology with the existence of the Universe and not the human being as primary. Phantasmic anthropocentrism must be replaced by realistic universocentrism. The shift from anthropocentric to universocentric metaphysics is equivalent to the shift from Man to the network as a metaphysical centre. God is thus not in fact dead, it is just the human God who could only live under very special circumstances that has left us. The literally inhuman God lives and thrives and is at last being discovered and analysed by us humans. The inhuman God, the Universe as a glittering network, lives and thrives at the centre of the syntheological pyramid: God is a network.
However, it is 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.
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.
In his book Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature the syntheist philosopher Leon Niemoczynski constructs what he calls a speculative naturalism which takes its starting point in the idea that nature generously enough offers us lots of possibilities for insight into its infinitely productive, vibrating foundation, which he identifies as natura naturans. Niemoczynski brings back Peirce’s own favourites from times gone by, Spinoza and Schelling, to American pragmatism, and then flavours the hybrid with the 3rd millennium’s European anti-correlationism into one of the sharpest contributions so far to syntheist discourse. In the oscillation between Schelling’s Atheos and Spinoza’s Pantheos, what Niemoczynski himself describes as a naturalist panentheism arises, which is immediately recognizable from the foundation of the syntheological pyramid.
If we conceive of a relationalist version of semiotics and memetics, in the same way as a relationalist version of the natural sciences, it must be based on a deep understanding of the largest unit and then build downwards towards the smallest, instead of the classical reductionist obsession of semiotics and memetics with the little sign or the little meme, which is presumed to explain everything that goes on higher up in the hierarchy. According to the writing of the history from the point of view of information technology, the necessary point of departure is that Man is the constant and technology is the variable. For Man, this means that technology drives a paradigm (see The Futurica Trilogy), a plane that sooner or later has its structure studied and explained by a metaphysics that is already initially logically built-in but tacit, and is only formulated and engineered after the fact. Metaphysics then shapes the conditions for the ideology that is tied to the paradigm, the sign-interpreting narrative that prepares you for choosing, the narrative about why things necessarily are the way they are. The ideology in turn consists of large, sluggish blocks called fictions – consciously created narratives about current people and their relationships to the world around them, in contrast to the necessarily subconscious ideology – where the nimble and smallest components of fictions are called fictives (see The Global Empire), a kind of network-dynamics cousin to the signs of semiotics and the memes of memetics, and accordingly also the fundamental component in the paradigm hierarchy.
This means that if syntheism is to be successful in establishing itself as the metaphysics of the Internet age, it must be constructed on the foundation of an entirely new utopia; an idea that in contrast to individualism in all its forms has credibility in the network society, where the individual is reduced to a curious remnant from a distant past. It must create the hope of the impossible being possible, even for informationalism’s people. Naturally syntheism has no chance of accomplishing this if it were to start from a capitalist perspective, since individualism is just as dead within philosophy as atomism is dead within physics. Syntheism’s utopia must instead be formulated as the consummate network dynamics. And how could a network be consummate, if it were not free and open to the surrounding world and the future in a contingent and relationalist universe?
In order for syntheism to be able to defeat the statist-corporatist establishment and its dysfunctional, apocalyptic and hypercynical metaphysics, syntheists – as the American philosopher Terence McKenna prophetically claims in a speech at the University of California in Berkeley as early as 1984, eight years before the World Wide Web saw the light of day – must have free and unlimited access to its keenest weapon, the free and open Internet. McKenna argues that the free and open Internet quite simply is humanity’s only chance to save the planet for human life by enabling a longed-for and long-needed counterweight to the eschatological drive which is built into capitalism. For this reason, the first action of the syntheist theory of everything is to unite late capitalism’s two new political mass movements, environmentalism and the digital integrity movement, under one and the same roof. It is hardly a coincidence that these two movements are arising in the same places in the world – namely in Northern Europe and along the coasts of North American – since it is in these places that the expansion of the Internet is most powerful, psychedelic experimentation most extensive, and thus the insight into the planet’s vulnerability is being disseminated most rapidly and is gaining first a foothold. These two movements are, quite simply, two sides of the same metaphysical coin, and it is syntheism that is the coin itself.
This explains why it is the netocracy that is driving the transparentisation of the old power structure by defending the free and open Internet – and as a consequence is seeing old nation states and major corporations lose their unmotivated and ethically objectionable upper hand in terms of power – while the old bourgeoisie moralise against the freedom and equality on the Internet and frenetically try to control and domesticate the Net in order to be able to thereby defend their own positions of power with the aid of their information advantage. This is the 3rd millennium’s great political conflict, and as the Internet age’s built-in metaphysics there is hardly any doubt about which side syntheism chooses to stand on. The world needs more, not fewer, whistleblowers, and the frenzy with which they are hounded, bad-mouthed and punished is a clear indication of the statist-corporatist establishment’s understanding of the value of what is at stake.
But if environmentalism is the most powerful reaction directed towards the old paradigm’s destructive drive.html">death drive, it is only with the fight for the free and open Internet that we observe the growth of a political ideology that is grounded in the new paradigm’s utopian possibilities rather than in the old paradigm’s dystopian variants. In its capacity as a negation of capitalism, environmentalism is a parallel to atheism in the history of metaphysics. The digital integrity movement on the other hand is a dialectic negation of the negation, and is thereby to be regarded as a parallel movement to syntheism. Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party and one of the digital integrity movement’s foremost pioneers, pinpoints the relationships of the movements to each other in his book Swarmwise. Environmentalism is driven by the conviction that nature’s resources are finite rather than inexhaustible, which capitalist mythology constantly assumes. At the same time, argues Falkvinge, the Pirate movement is based on the axiom that culture and knowledge that is shared without friction between people in a society where information sharing no longer incurs any surplus cost, is an infinite rather than a finite resource for the future.
The dystopia concerns itself with the finite, utopianism focuses on the infinite. Accordingly, the fight for the free and open Internet is the answer to what must be done; it is the engine that drives the new utopia rather than the brake that hinders the old dystopia. What we are talking about here is far more than just parallel phenomena in the market for the shaping public opinion: syntheism is de facto the name of the digital integrity movement’s underlying metaphysics. This explains why the fight for the free and open Internet is the central political struggle in the 21st century. All other important political conflicts that play out during, and contribute to giving colour to, informationalism’s growth, are completely dependent on how this conflict unfolds. It concerns far more than the growing netocracy’s striving to ignore the ruling bourgeoisie, which has controlled the world since the paradigm of the printing press gained broad acceptance. Beyond the fight for the free and open Internet, the approaching ecological apocalypse is rearing its ugly head: a potential catastrophe that capitalism is responsible for and at the same time evidently lacks the ability to prevent.
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.
Syntheist subtractionism must be understood from the actual paradigm shift’s historical possibilities and impossibilities. Paradigm shifts always entail giving the production of the new metaphysics the highest priority, since the one who formulates the new metaphysics also becomes the new paradigm’s truth producer and thereby also one of its most important rulers (such as the clergy under feudalism and the university professors under capitalism). The great new religions and the metaphysical systems are always launched in the transition phases that arise at paradigm shifts. Political activism must therefore often wait for the right point in time in order to have any chance whatsoever of taking off. Critchley’s logic is based on the premise that theology precedes philosophy; it is primary where philosophy is secondary. And philosophy precedes politics; it is secondary and politics tertiary. Theology delves deeper than philosophy, since it engages Man more thoroughly than philosophy can ever do. And philosophy lies deeper than politics, since philosophy is the well from which political activism gets its nourishment. This means that however much we long for a new cohesive political ideology for the Internet age, the creation of the new theological metaphysics and its religious practice must precede the articulation of the corresponding political ideology and activism. Syntheism stands ready when the present system breaks down. But the only possible way forward is to first build a living religion, while waiting for the time to the right for being able to establish and launch the new political ideology.
By reason of this, the existentially necessary metaphysics seems rather to be disengaged from the physics that is every bit as inevitable. Without thereby succumbing to any kind of dualism, even in a monist world we are reduced to this duality, but it is our human senses and their phenomenological information processing that compels this, not some external, ontological property of existence. This means that there is a transrational wisdom in this metaphysical madness. To put it plainly, it is actually impossible to think ourselves past the ego experience. A world without subjects is a logical impossibility, since however illusory or artificial the ego is in the equation of life, the ego remains the basis for the entire existential experience. It is simply necessary for Man to be a pathological creature, to so to speak consciously fool himself, in order to be able to achieve the existential experience at all. And when we finally do choose to accept the ego that we have just revealed to be an illusory trick, we also get access to all the dazzling metaphysics. We believe consciously against our better judgement, and this we do wisely.
Regardless of whether we introduce divinities or not in syntheist metaphysics, the actual process is finally about taking advantage of metaphysics’ unique opportunity to imagine existence to its utmost limit. To convert metaphysics into theology, to think about God, is thus not a matter of some kind of shallow fantasising about an Old Testament father figure who sits above the clouds and observes his children playing on the face of the Earth with tender or irascible eyes. Instead, theologising metaphysics is thinking one’s way forth to the outermost horizon of the time in which one is living and based on the knowledge and spiritual experiences that one has access to. And then not merely in a physical sense, with God as the concept for the beginning, middle and end of the Universe – in that case we might just as well settle for classical pantheism and not need to develop its completion syntheism – but even more so with God as the name of the surface on which to project the meaning and purpose of everything. In that sense, the concept of God is fundamentally not just the Universe (Pantheos), but also the utopia (Syntheos), the imagined backdrop located in the future – a backdrop that nourishes all of humanity’s dreams and aspirations.
In spite of the fact that all metaphysics begins, revolves around and ends with Man’s wonder at existence – or if you prefer: nature’s own wonder, embodied by and in Man, at itself – this constantly recurring complexity of emotions remains a mystery to many militant atheists. They stubbornly cling to their own, fragile, subjective experiences – many somewhat fetchingly refer to themselves as humanists, as if they themselves were able to serve God’s utopian purpose with their pious belief in reason – without understanding that all subjective experiences, even their own, merely consist of emotions. Which is not the worst thing in this world, but this fact must be acknowledged and analysed. The relevant response is of course to ask how emotions could have become a historical problem for such an emotional being as Man. They are after all as genuine and real as any other physical phenomena. And they are indisputably inevitable. So why not instead capitulate to these emotions, in order to later investigate what great exploits such an acceptance can inspire?
The original dividuation arises through an organic contraction. We can call this condition primitive subjectivity, in contrast to the organism’s primitive objectification of its environment. From primitive subjectivity, the organisms later develop into the thinking and feeling human being of our time with his language and his consciousness. The ideas are dialectical in nature, the intensities are aesthetic in nature. The existential experience is best described as an oscillation between these two poles. The more eternalist the syntheist agent is, the more mobilist the phenomenon becomes, and vice versa. The subject is produced by the perception in order to give the semiotic flow its context and meaning. But if the subject were not there, if it were not produced, both we ourselves and existence would remain irreducible multiplicities piled on top of each other without context or meaning. But without any form of personification, no unit arises. Without personification, a chaos can never be understood as a cosmos. Whether one later, like the classical mystics, claims that God ought to remain nameless in order to maintain God’s illusory personification, or as the syntheists say that the illusoriness should be affirmed openly, so that personifications can be infinitely produced as long as they are creatively and explanatorily motivated – syntheology starts with four, deeply rooted in the history of metaphysics – is rather a matter of preference. However the syntheists are happy to let this issue be decided in a future comparison of the creative effect of these positions. Up until then, the transrationalist question to the believer is: What standpoint do you choose to identify with and follow as your truth as an act in particular?
Relativist metaphysics attacks the classical idea of truth. There is nothing strange about that. Throughout history we see time after time how yesterday’s established truth is phased out to be replaced by a new and soon equally established, alternative truth. The intensity in this process increases when the new elite takes over a society in conjunction with a paradigm shift and prioritises completely different ideals from those of the displaced elite. Relativist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michael Foucault confront these historical shifts with a pragmatist attitude to truth production: truths are produced first and foremost by the prevailing power structure for the purpose of confirming and consolidating the power of the powerful. Nor is there anything strange in that; the opposite would be extremely remarkable. A truth can only become and remain a truth as long as it stays within the sociocultural paradigm that is embraced by society, which means that various and conflicting truths are pitted against each other during every transitional phase. The truths are therefore always relative. They should and must be able to endure constant criticism. When they no longer hold their own against this criticism in the light of new information, they must be phased out and replaced.
However, relationalist metaphysics takes this Nietzschean and Foucauldian critical thinking about truth production one step further. Quite simply, according to relationalism, relativism does not go far enough in its criticism of an antiquated and useless idea of truth. A new metatruth is required for the Internet age. It is correct that the prevailing power structure strives to produce the truth that confirms and solidifies its position. But regardless of this, a new truth may have a higher informational content and a stronger empirical demonstrability than an old one, that is, aside from its greater relevance and usability for a new power structure. According to this view, it may thus climb higher in a hierarchy of produced truth and de facto be closer to an imagined, but in fact in terms of its formulation, inaccessible reality well-founded in physically indisputable facts, by constituting an emergence in relation to the old version of truth.
Since relationalism drives the new physics, it is hardly surprising that the metaphysics of the Internet age – from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze via Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek – revolves around and is driven by the notion of the emergent event. Interactivity produces a class structure with the netocracy as the upper class and the consumtariat as the lower class. While the consumtariat is relatively uniform – consumtarians are of course defined by what they are not rather than what they actually are – the netocracy can be divided into three distinct categories. The first of these is the netocratic pioneers; the second category is the netocratic aspirationists who copy the pioneers at an early stage and successfully, and if possible milk an even greater surplus value out of their creativity than the pioneers do: imitation is the mother of survival. The third category of netocrats is the experimentalists, who, while they initially fail in copying the pioneers and who are rather too late to copy the aspirationists, for precisely this reason they are forced to and subsequently succeed in inventing their own original solutions, which motivate their position within the netocracy. The consumtarians meanwhile have their plate full passively chewing the nonsensical content, the calming and soporific entertainment that is produced in various trashy networks with no status whatsoever.
Never before has the ethical imperative of the truth as an act been clearer. What then follows in a Badiouian scenario is that the activism that emanates from the three unnamable names Atheos, Entheos and Pantheos builds the stable foundation for Syntheos, the formalisation and realisation of the utopia. Since syntheism’s mobilist universe is both contingent and indeterministic, obviously Syntheos cannot be realised through the historical objective’s mystical, eschatological arrival, in keeping with what Marxism and the Abrahamic religions so imaginatively preach. Syntheos is instead realised through a focused but nomadic, creative activism in a capricious, contingent universe, driven by the hope of the impossible suddenly appearing and being realised as the fourth singularity – an idea which is consummated by being theologised by Badiou’s declared syntheist disciple Quentin Meillassoux. The lesson from both Badiou and Levinas is that life-long devotion to truth as an act is the innermost existentialist substance of metaphysics.
Meillassoux argues that the first singularity is the genesis of existence per se, the second singularity occurs at the genesis of life and the third singularity occurs at the genesis of thinking. He then takes a giant leap into the future and argues that in a contingent world a fourth revolution of the same importance is both possible, likely and above all desirable, and then in true syntheist spirit he casts God in the role of the fourth, and for mankind the final, step. We write in true syntheist spirit, not just because Syntheos is the created God placed in the future, but also because Meillassoux declares that his concept of God is to be understood based on the dogma that a belief in God’s existence does not entail that one believes in God, but that one believes in existence. There is in Meillassoux, as in all syntheists, no way around or out of the theological project. Metaphysics is not a choice, but an absolute necessity that everything else is fundamentally dependent upon.
For Zizek, revolutionism is even necessary on an ontological level. Just like his role model Lenin, Zizek claims that revisionism – the step-by-step transition to the Communist society – is impossible, since every step in the revisionist process salvages too much of what is reprehensible in the pre-revolutionary society, things that only the revolution can wipe out. Therefore the revolution is both desirable and necessary, and therefore, according to Zizek, it is the only authentic event. A radically immanent interpretation of the concept of revolution would however reply that both the bloody demonstrations on the streets and the realisations of a far-off personified justice – to the extent that they take place at all – actually are only marginal expressions among many others of the real, underlying revolution. This revolution is instead always a long drawn-out process, precisely a step-by-step but at the same time non-linear revision which starts with a revolutionary change of the material conditions (for example the Internet’s emergence as the manifestation of Syntheos), followed by a revolutionary change in social practices (syntheism’s high-tech participatory culture), which in turn is followed by a revolutionary change in intersubjective metaphysics (syntheism’s subtraction, monastisation and psychedelic practices), which only thereafter can lead to the longed-for social event (the syntheist utopia, the syntheological pyramid’s completion), where the power structure hopefully can be adjusted, more or less dramatically, in order to liberate the new paradigm’s creative potential.
Badious’ and Zizek’s hero Hegel would be the first to criticise their bloody boys’ room dreams as typical examples of shallow internarcissism. For Hegel, history is merely a long metahistory of constant re-writings of history, where an obsessive narrative production is a consistently failing but nonetheless necessary adaptation to an uncontrollable immanent flow. The revolution and the event must therefore be separated from each other. The revolution occurs in secret and its radicalness can only be attributed to it retroactively. The event assumes its dramatic and transforming consequences only a long time afterwards. As an example we might mention that Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press around 1450. But the French Revolution was not launched until 1789. So there is a gap of all of 339 years between the immanent and transcendent revolutions in this case. And which of these we build our metaphysics on unfortunately has a decisive significance for where we will later arrive.
A dynamic system is regarded as ergodic if its behavioural patterns on average over time concur with its behavioural patterns on average in space. Scientists are fond of ergodic systems since they are relatively simple to turn into mathematics – they are of course, seen as totalities, comfortable constants rather than messy variables – and thereby even relatively simple to use as building blocks. However we do not live in an ergodic universe, which reductionism persistently insists that we do. In fact, nothing occurs in the same way twice, every event is instead completely unique, every apparently identical repetition takes place in a completely new, specific context. Kauffman even claims that without the reductionist illusion, the metaphysical premise for classical atheism also falls down. The insight that we live in a non-ergodic universe must quite simply have dramatic consequences for metaphysics too. An anti-reductionist explanatory model is required that replaces the reductionist model. Existence is enormously much more complicated, the future is enormously much more open and harder to predict, and the Universe is enormously much more active than the reductionist illusion has led us to believe.
Kauffman points out that above all the Universe is characterised by an enormous, constant creativity – it is quite simply capable, in a pantheist spirit, of constantly giving rise to completely new phenomena with completely new laws and rules, right down to their metaphysical foundations. Therefore Kauffman draws the conclusion that the presence of emergences calls upon us to create a new religion – or to use his own parlance: he encourages us to allow a new religion to emerge from our consciousness – once the insight of the central roles of the emergence and self-organisation in relationist physics become widely accepted with full force in informationalist metaphysics. Decades of extensive complexity-theory studies have made Kauffman a convinced and almost militant syntheist. His book’s title Reinventing The Sacred says it all.
In this, the syntheist family plays a central role. The Latin word familia can be found in every Indo-European language. This reveals that the concept of family has an extremely strong significance for human well-being, even if its detailed content has been altered throughout history. The family consists of those people who are closest to us, regardless of whether these are our biological relatives or not. This means that a living religion can hardly exist without a clear idea of the family, nor a sustainable idea of the family without a supporting metaphysics. In true relationalist spirit, the syntheist community’s members are called agents. An agent can be anything from a dividual member in a human body to a complete congregation consisting of many separate dividuals. On the other hand, the self-appointed victim and his concomitant victim mentality has no place within syntheism, since the victim seeks isolation from and independence vis-à-vis all external forces and therefore constantly looks for scapegoats and excuses when confronted with immanent reality, that is, the exact opposite of syntheism’s human-created gods and its quest for the sacred connection. The syntheist metaphysics around the family and the family’s agents is of course based on Syntheos, the divine manifested as the community between people.
The sought-after sexual liberation under capitalism if anything gets its follow-up in the chemical liberation (for a more exhaustive treatment, see The Global Empire) under attentionalism. The development of a post-atheist religiosity founded on the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborating syncretistic, religio-social practices, and not least the explosive flora of entheogenic substances, lays the foundation for a dissolution of the conflict between theism and atheism; a conflict that, in a Hegelian dialectical process, transitions into a synthesis in the form of syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. At the same time, sexual liberation is displaced when its underbelly, the hypersexualisation of the individual, is exposed as the capitalist consumption society’s underlying engine: sexualism ultimately became a straitjacket of the superego where chemical liberation offers the only possible way out. We do not lose liberated sexuality by returning to some kind of asceticism or abstinence with old-school religious overtones. We only gain access to means and ceremonies that finally enable us to start domesticating and mastering liberated sexuality to our long-term advantage. Indirect desire at last has the chance to balance the direct, vacuous, repetitive drive.
In its capacity as theological anarchism par excellence, syntheism is the netocracy’s own built-in metaphysics. But the battle against the statist-corporativist establishment is neither simple nor has it any preordained result in a contingent and indeterminist world. At least not in the short term. There are trends and there are counter-trends. What many people forget is that nation states, which have long appeared to be so “natural” and God-given, actually were the result of never-ending bloody and hard-fought wars of religion in the old Europe. Consequently, the choice of strategy is entirely decisive for the outcome of this struggle. The global empire will borrow many features from, for example, Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. The first Christian congregations, the Mithraic orders, the Masonic lodges, the cathedrals and monasteries that were built during the Middle Ages are therefore all excellent sources of inspiration for a rising elite who believe in the need for, and want to engage in the building of, syntheist temples and monasteries in the global empire.
Only in the 1990s does criticism begin to stir, and it is of course the rapid growth of the Internet and experimental metaphysics that open up the possibility of clearing a path out of postmodernist alienation. Historically and for obvious reasons, constructive criticism with the purpose of opening the way for expansive, creative thinking has always come from the outside. What academic philosophy has dismissed as an impossibility – the growth of a new metaphysics for the new Internet age, and thereby the construction of a new social theory of everything – is of course de facto made possible by the interactive conversations that are going on with frenetic intensity in extra-academic, virtual spaces. The netocrats are undermining the universities’ monopoly on metaphysical truth production in the same way that the universities once undermined and razed the Church’s monopoly on the same. The use of a constantly expanding Wikipedia is exploding while national encyclopaedias in fancy bindings are gathering an increasing amount of dust in bookshelves that nobody ever visits. History repeats itself when a new information-technology paradigm enables the growth of a new structure for truth production right under the very noses of the old, tired and corrupt elite, who are unable to intervene even if they had had the energy to do so, since the material conditions – and thereby the rules of the Darwinian punishment and reward system in the surrounding culture – have been fundamentally altered.
Nowhere is philosophy’s tragic academicisation as evident as in the servile acceptance of the discipline’s own specialisation. Instead of taking some form of responsibility and attacking, or at least problematising, the fragmentation of the social arena that the academic and the professional hyperspecialisation of the 20th century gives rise to, philosophy heedlessly contributes to precisely this triumph of fragmentation by prostrating itself for this development and letting itself be split into lots of small, limited subject areas without any overarching critical discourse. Philosophy surrenders masochistically to hyperspecialisation, internalises it and produces texts that both embody and uncritically celebrate the fragmentation per se. This is most apparent in academic philosophy’s escalating demonisation of metaphysics and its metanarratives under late capitalism.
The ethics of interactivity can and should be pitted against the hypersubjectivist ethics of the last great individualist ethicist, the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, the other has lost all substance and has become an empty goal for the survival of ethics at all. With an almost psychotic conviction, Levinas claims that ethics is the primary philosophy, that it precedes and dictates ontology, epistemology and metaphysics. Justice is the promise to remember the victims of the past and the quest to act justly in the future. Levinas pursues his ethical fundamentalism by reducing the other to merely a face, in the presence of which Levinas claims to experience a blind existential love of almost biblical proportions.
If Emmanuel Levinas is an Abrahamic atheist, the French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida is an atheist syntheist. When we move from Levinas to Derrida, we are moving from the Messianic as immortality to the Messianic as survival, as the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund insightfully includes in his pioneering reading of Derrida in his book atheism.html">Radical Atheism. The promise is always a promise against a backdrop of an open future and can therefore always be broken; it is part of the nature of the promise. This threat is already built into the promise from the start. Even the strongest will to include will therefore always exclude someone, which sets the political in constant motion, which in turn puts democracy into a state of constant reassessment. There are quite simply no objectively valid hierarchies between people. If people are special because they are strong, then it follows from this that some people are stronger than others. If 1 exists, 2 also exists, and 2 is greater than 1. Thus the ethical objective value must be 0 in order for us to attain equality. The problem is that, ever since the widespread acceptance of feudalism, Man has built hierarchies in order to maximise power for the fortunate and for the sake of its aggregated effect. Hierarchies blossom in the worlds of transcendental metaphysicists. It is only through breaking with transcendentalisation and introducing an immanent metaphysics that we can achieve a genuinely egalitarian society. Syntheism is radical egalitarianism par excellence.
Individualist metaphysics is based on a hierarchisation of different phenomenal states. For the individual to be able to be positioned – anthropocentrically and internarcissistically – as the ruler at the centre of existence, a mythology must be constructed around the individual as the crowning achievement of creation. The steps up to this status as the crowning achievement of creation are however lined with different existences of gradually ascending value. Furthest down are the minerals, above them the plants, above them the animals, and then at the very top, Man. The first difference between the minerals and the plants requires a fundamental metaphysical mythology, namely the narrative of life as sacred. The second difference between the plants and the animals requires an additional metaphysical mythology, namely the narrative of the body as sacred. The third difference between the animals and Man requires yet another additional mythology, namely the narrative of consciousness as sacred, or the soul as we used to call it.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58