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Nietzsche, Friedrich
1:25
(In »Everything is religion«)
But let us now return to our initial question: does God exist? We are talking here about the God of Christianity that Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced dead as early as the 19th century. The atheist Dennett answers both yes and no to this question. What does not exist is the supernatural, omniscient and all-seeing God of which the Bible speaks, the God that created our world and everything else, and who sent his only son to our Earth for him to die a sacrificial death on the cross and thereby, in a transaction which in many ways is utterly unclear, purchase our liberation from our dreadful sins (that God himself thus takes no responsibility for despite the fact that he apparently created us as the wretched sinners that we are). At least this is what Dennett says, with reference to, among other things, the worthlessness of the “evidence” for God. Take for example Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument, according to which God quite simply has to exist by logical necessity since God by definition is above all else, which means that God cannot lack existence, since this unthinkable scenario would make God incomplete and in at least one important respect inferior to all that indisputably does own existence, such as that saucepan on the stove containing the stew. And according to our accepted idea of God, God must then be above all else, in particular saucepans.
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.
Since it is Kant’s philosophical contributions that pave the way for the death of humanism and the individual, it is scarcely wrong to regard Kant as the last humanist. When Hegel and Nietzsche arrived on the scene in the 19th century, the anti-humanist revolution was already in full swing. With Nietzsche and his concept of The Death of God – which Michel Foucault half a century later finally accomplishes by also proclaiming The Death of Man – nothing whatsoever remains any longer of the humanist paradigm. Hegel’s religiosity is found in Atheos while we place Nietzsche’s spirituality with Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.
After Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s revolution, rationalism, blind faith in man’s ability to solve all the mysteries of life through his reasoning, had to be replaced by transrationalism, a rationality that realises its own limitations as an intersubjective discourse within the phenomenology that mankind is reduced to (see The Global Empire). For rationalism is based on a logical ‘optical’ illusion: within itself rationality is consistent and looks convincing. However, the problem is that when rationality is viewed from outside, it falls down completely since it is not founded on anything that in itself is rational, it is based only on blind faith and nothing else. Kant’s problem is that he wanted to place rationality above reason, but he never succeeded in stating logically how this would be possible. Kantian rationalism is thus not founded on anything other than Kant’s own highly personal, autistic temperament. Blaise Pascal argues for a transrationalist epistemology as early as the 17th century, long before Kant, but it was not until the American and European pragmatists at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century that transrationalism acquired its formulation in detail.
It is from Zoroastrianism that Kant gets the idea that existence is basically a correlation between thinking (Mazda) and being (Ahura), even if Kant sees Mazda and Ahura as eternalised constants instead of the intra-active variables that Zoroaster used in his proto-syntheology. If we use the network-dynamic terminology of the 2000s, we would express this as Kant opening the door to interactivity through his correlationalism, which Nietzsche later consummates through his relativism. But with Zoroaster there is not just one constantly moving activity between different phenomena, but rather the phenomena are also in constant motion around themselves. This is why we speak of Zoroaster’s building blocks as intra-acting variables in contrast to Kant’s and Nietzsche’s interactive constants. Intra-activity is the historical radicalisation of interactivity, and relationalism is correspondingly the historical radicalisation of relativism.
When Friedrich Nietzsche, as far back as Thus spoke Zarathustra and beyond, establishes and announces the death of God in the latter half of the 19th century, it also means death to the idea of the availability of objective truth. This is because objective truth as an idea is entirely dependent on a metaphysical constant, the primary gaze before which the true object arises. But if this primary gaze does not exist, if the metaphysical god beyond time and space does not exist, the whole foundation for the fixation of the object also falls apart. The phenomena start to dance in increasingly complex patterns of interdependencies, and with the beginning of that dance, the possibility of an objectively attainable, valid truth about the phenomena disappears. There is no longer an authority that issues certificates of authenticity. There is no longer anyone who serves as the object’s universal apprehender of truth. All truths become contingent upon the relative position of the postulator of the truth, which subsequently means that all truths become subjective.
Even before Nietzsche, Kant shows that reality as it is and perceived by no one, the noumenal, by definition is inaccessible to the human being, who instead has to put up with the noumenal’s reproduction as the object in a world view that consists exclusively of subjectively experienced phenomena. Thus the object is subjective, mediated by our unreliable senses, and not the least bit objective per se. After Kant, all forms of objectivism are impossible for anyone reflecting philosophically on the matter – the ‘objectivists’ of the 20th century, such as Ayn Rand, devote themselves exclusively to a kind of autistic vulgar-philosophy without any understanding of the Kantian revolution – and this notion is replaced by various forms of subjectivism, and thereby also various forms of relativism. Moreover, Nietzsche successfully demonstrates that truths not only must be subjective, they are also influenced by the subject that produces them. By psychologising the observer and thus turning this figure into a mobile body instead of a fixed soul, Nietzsche completes the Kantian revolution.
Thanks to the arrival of the law, the Fall of Man gets a clear narrative, the temporal and therefore supremely human Fall from grace is the absolutely worst imaginable crime against the eternal and therefore divine law. So where is God and wherein lies God’s essence, if not in the will to administer justice and enforce submission by means of the law? The law has proven such a powerful metaphor that even after Nietzsche announces the death of God in the late 19th century, physics continues its manic search for God’s law in nature, as if the law as God was still very much alive. The explanation for this is that the preordained and compelling law has exercised its magic on humans so extensively and for so long that humans can only imagine a Universe without the law’s existence with the greatest difficulty. Enjoyment without pleasure drives the determinist world view. Note that this process continues without human law being able to have any equivalent in nature whatsoever. In spite of everything of course, human law functions because the receivers of the decrees, the people, listen to and understand the recited text and shape and calculate their own behaviour based on the current set of rules. People can either allow themselves to be frightened into obeying the decree, integrate it into what Sigmund Freud calls the superego, or allow themselves to be tempted into enjoyment occasioned by a transgression of the decree – to surrender to the libidinal transgression. In any case, it is man’s ability to engage in and become obsessed with the law that makes him its object.
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.
When Einstein proves that time is relative, he also proves that time elapses more quickly or slowly depending on the local context, but this does not change the fact that it still and always travels in one and the same direction through the Universe. Within syntheology one is careful to distinguish between time as a physical phenomenon and duration as the existential experience of the direction of the arrow of time. In any case, Entheos is the divinity of both time and duration, since time and duration present the clearest evidence that the difference is the foundation of identity production. We can talk about the arrow of time, duration, history – we find many names for the things we love – but what we are actually talking about is a recurring feedback loop with infinitesimally but – thanks to their identity-dislocating function – extremely significant changes for every cycle that occurs. Entheos is quite simply the name of the constant repetition of the difference itself, that which Nietzsche and Deleuze call the eternal return of the same.
Entheos is also the divinity we encounter when we experience what Sigmund Freud calls the oceanic feeling. To devote oneself to Entheos is to worship the brain’s and the body’s ability to carry out mental voyages and to emotionally experience the sacred, to allow oneself to be transcended into a new and qualitatively different subject. Entheos is therefore also the divinity of the sublime and of art. Syntheistic transcendence is entirely a subjective experience; it thus has nothing to do with any Platonist dualism or Kantian transcendentalism. Syntheistic transcendence takes place in a completely immanent world, just as the eternalisations of perception are housed within an otherwise completely mobilist world. Entheos is driven by the desire towards immanent change and the search for transcendental intensity; it is the divinity that we encounter in the psychedelic experience, which personifies the entheogenic worlds. Entheos is not just Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s divinity, but also the god of Heraclitus and Lao Tzu, and is celebrated at the spring equinox, which is the syntheist calendar’s new year. The Spring equinox represents the celebration of the enormous and irreducible multiplicity of life and thereby also the celebration of our own human dividuality.
The existential experience places the subject in the world of psychology, and psychology is embedded in eternalism and in itself has nothing to do with the mobilist reality outside the mind. The human mind and its peculiarities primarily belong in empirical psychology and not in the world of ontology. Syntheism regards them as creative attributes of their divinities, rather than as philosophical foundations. Subjectivity is thus a subconscious by-product of an external movement rather than a conscious construction in a stagnant mind. It is, as the existentialist Martin Heidegger would say, the activity in the lifeworld and not the passivity in the mind that gives the subject its essence. The syntheistic agent thus arises in the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos. Syntheism is thus supremely a proud heir of existentialism from its founder Sören Kierkegaard via Nietzsche to Heidegger. The syntheist agent’s existential experience is definitely a Dasein in the Heideggerian sense.
It represented a major and significant step for philosophy when Friedrich Nietzsche prised it halfway away from correlationism to relationalism; Nietzschean relativism entails a radical departure from the Kantian version of correlationism. There is no longer any fixed relationship between a stable subject and a moving object to use as a starting point. There are only a host of diffuse objects – the human being as an animal body rather than as a rational consciousness is one of these – and the relations between these objects are in constant motion. Relativism is a consequence of there being no fixed point of departure in existence. Without a divine centre – and Nietzsche proclaims, as we know, that God is dead – the position of the first object in a network is completely dependent on the other object’s position, and the second object’s position in the network is in turn completely dependent on the third object’s position, which in turn is dependent on both the first, the second and a fourth object for its position. And so on ad infinitum. Which ultimately involves all objects in the Universe in a kind of massive, abstract, impenetrable spreading out of everything with everything else in constant motion.
If Nietzsche is the godfather of relativism within philosophy, Einstein is relativism’s executive producer and the scientist who consummates relativism in the natural sciences. In an absurdly large universe with an absurd quantity of discrete objects, according to Einstein it is ultimately impossible to establish an objectively valid position for any of the objects at all. All positions in space–time are relative. But it is still a world that consists of discrete objects; their ontological status is not questioned by Nietzsche or Einstein – just the possibility of establishing a valuation. Therefore, the problem with relativism is that it maintains Kant’s rigid division between the subject and the object as an ontological foundation. While Kant’s static construction is set in motion, it is however relativized – everything gets its value only from its relative position – but the correlation between the subject and the object per se is never questioned. Within the confines of relativism, if anything the relationship between the subject and the object is more or less impossible to define precisely, since it appears to concern a kind of insurmountable problem connected to the measuring itself. But that the correlation is still there, and that it is ontologically essential, is established beyond all doubt.
Nietzsche’s ontology opens the way for enormous creativity. It is, for example, a gold mine for Einstein’s relativistic physics. According to both Nietzsche and Einstein, the angle from which the subject observes existence determines absolutely everything. Only in this special perspective can a truth appear, and that truth is of course, like the subject itself, highly temporary and in practice invalid as soon as the moment in question has passed and the conditions have changed. Therefore we speak of the relativist world view as subjectivist rather than objectivist. What remains is only the subject’s own highly private and temporary truth, impossible to convey other than in a more or less desperate attempt at communication through art or poetry, always doomed to be twisted and distorted in the process, always doomed to age and be weeded out as constantly new information arrives.
Nietzschean and Einsteinian relativism is still however a correlationism. The objects are presumed to correlate to each other as noumena rather than as phenomena. Nietzsche still presumes that the objects have a form of essence, that they are internally stable. Einstein makes the corresponding observation within physics with his beloved atoms (he refuses to accept the ontological victory of magical quantum physics over classical physics). According to the relativists, the instability is entirely external. Even if the epistemological correlation between thinking and knowing proposed by Kant is shattered, Nietzsche and Einstein keep the ontological correlation between subject and object. They still live in a world over which Kant casts his imposing shadow. Syntheism, on the other hand, moves on from relativism to its dialectical intensification: relationalism.
If relativism is philosophy.html">process philosophy’s introductory stage, then relationalism is its consummation. And as philosophy.html">process philosophy’s theological extension, syntheism is the process religion par excellence. Syntheism not only distances itself from dualist totalism; it also rejects the recurring death worship that is closely connected with the totalist ideologies, that is, the anthropocentric and internarcissistic deification of the human being’s own existential effacement. It is our own mortality that makes us obsessed by nothingness and tricks us into regarding it as a reasonable ontological alternative. This is why as widely diverse thinkers as the Buddha, St Augustine and Meister Eckhart are fascinated by the god of negative theology. In various ways they are looking for the possibility to deify the moment of human death, turning death into God. And out of the reverse perspective, the desire is instead to make life and its intensity into the divine foundation for positive theology, whose more or less syntheist proponents include Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze.
Deleuze advocates a Nietzschean affirmation of the eternal return of the same in constantly returning loops of a kind, without substance of their own, with only minute changes for every revolution, which opens the way for the sudden genesis of emergent novelties, for example in the process-philosophical, artistic search for the genuine expression, or in the process-religious, spiritual search for the genuine impression. Therefore, artistic expression and spiritual experience strive towards the syntheist emergence made sacred, through which they can communicate an actual meaning, impart an existential substance, to the syntheist agent’s existence. The conclusion of this train of thought is that the credible spirituality of our time – which is important when syntheism is compared to competing religious and metaphysical alternatives – can only arise within the confines of the immanent process religion. It is not possible to take other religious and metaphysical alternatives seriously as spiritual projects in the Internet age; they cannot be anything other than guilt-driven nostalgia (like holding on to the religion of one’s parents in spite of it having become irrelevant) or nonsensical superstition (such as New Age and other commercial, exoticised posturing masquerading as spirituality).
While Deleuze finds process-philosophical dynamite in Nietzsche’s thoughts on the cosmic drive, there is no support for a corresponding syntheist renaissance for Nietzsche’s concept of the cosmic desire, that which Nietzsche calls the will to power, his most famous idea. Nietzsche’s analysis of desire is founded in 19th century Romantic mysticism around power, but does not hold water in relationalist physics. His idea of the will to power as a cosmic struggle for finite resources in a finite universe should rather be viewed as relativism’s most magnificent phantasm. While the will to power can most certainly be used creatively as a social-psychological explanatory model for human behaviour – since we live in a world filled with acute shortages and murderous competition – it would immediately collapse as an ontological basis for a universe that is always expanding and growing in complexity, without the need for any specific will or power over an unfounded, presumed competition within a limited sphere that actually does not even exist. Since the Universe has of course no competition in its cosmological existence, projections onto the Universe that assume a fundamental scarcity-and-competition situation do not hold water either. The Nietzschean will to power is thus a psychological attribute, but hardly a universal phenomenon.
A logical consequence of the pioneering M-theory within physics, which was launched by Edward Witten in the mid-1990s, is that the Multiverse in which our Universe is anticipated to be situated always spontaneously creates something. A multiverse always makes sure that there is something in some form, always. In contrast to the human being, the Universe is not in any real sense mortal. This means that the Universe both is and does many different things, but the Universe wants nothing in itself since it does not need to want anything in order to exist in the way that it does. We must instead regard the will to power as a logical consequence of the state of affairs where that which has been endowed with an installed repression mechanism linked to the drive.html">death drive – a mechanism which makes this something believe that it wants to exist rather than wants to be dissolved – trumps that which is conscious of its death wish as long as we find ourselves within a limited sphere with finite resources. However, there is no need whatsoever for this kind of will to power globally or universally, which is why the concept cannot shoulder nor receive the role as the ontological foundation for existence as a whole. The drive belongs in nature, but desire stems from culture. And it is in nature, not in culture, that we find the ontological foundation for mobilist philosophy. The drive is primary and desire is secondary, as Lacan would have answered his predecessor Nietzsche.
This means that the will to power is not any kind of cosmic drive, as Nietzsche thinks it is, but rather a necessary ethical principle, perfectly adapted to a finite creature on a planet permeated by a struggle for limited resources, a position for action and against reaction in the ethical collision between them. With the will to power as an ethical principle, syntheism is – as a doctrine created by people for people – for affirmation and against ressentiment. However, existence operates as an entity as one big oscillation between Atheos (non-existence) and Pantheos (existence) at all levels, with highs and lows of intense oscillations and oscillating intensities. In this Universe, there is only an enormous multiplicity for its own sake, without any need whatsoever of or opening for any particular will or anything to master and thereby have power over. The Universe has no direction whatsoever of the type that the will to power presupposes. Rather, Nietzschean relativism should be regarded as a particularly advanced precursor to the extended relationalism that Whitehead, Deleuze and their successors constructed in the 20th century – for example through adding Leibniz’ and Spinoza’s more radical protorelationalism to Nietzschean philosophy.html">process philosophy – where syntheism quite simply is the name of the process religion that accompanies the Whiteheadian and Deleuzian philosophy.html">process philosophy.
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.
Barad’s role-models Michel Foucault and Judith Butler also take a thrashing as she constructs her universocentric onto-epistemology. As post-structuralists, Foucault and Butler are, in Barad’s eyes, still too anthropocentric. Post-structuralism is wedged between Einstein’s Cartesian representationalism and Bohr’s agential realism: it has not gone the whole hog and left Cartesian representationalism behind. Kant’s ghost lives on. Post-structuralism has, to use Barad’s own wording, still not transported itself from antihumanism to posthumanism. Therefore, post-structuralism still in fact dances around the Cartesian subject that it both claims to and believes it has dissolved. Barad does go all the way however and leaves post-structuralism’s antihumanism behind. The Hegelian dialectic between humanism (personified by Descartes) and antihumanism (personified by Nietzsche) is consummated in Barad’s appeal for posthumanism; a parallel movement to the dialectic between theism and atheism, which dissolves into syntheism. It is not just objective reality that returns in a surprising new guise through agential realism. The same thing also applies to theological truth, which returns with full force as syntheist process religion.
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.
Against the idea of the human being as a malleable creature subject to a fate which is paradoxically both unavoidable and his duty to create, syntheism puts forth the ideals of Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze: the human being as an affirmative activist battling against all that which she apprehends as nature’s – or for that matter even culture’s – systematic arbitrariness in the form of imposed rules of play. Rather, according to syntheist ethics it is precisely in the protest against the‘ given conditions of existence and in the human being’s civilizational redirections of history that she makes his imprint as an ethical creature. It is Man’s concrete actions in the battle against nature’s givens which subsequently generates ethical substance, which thus has nothing to do with any personal suitability for subservience. The same obviously applies for every thought of an indeterministic world where the task of ethics would be to call on the human being, against his better judgement, to behave as though he were deterministic after all; a position that can be exemplified by the vulgar and stupid imperative “Follow your nature!”. If existence indeed were deterministic, which it certainly isn’t, this call would be completely superfluous, since there are no alternatives. Nor any ethical problems to contemplate either.
Just like Nietzsche’s creative affirmation, the syntheist conviction is primarily an attitude. Syntheism starts with a will to act rather than with knowledge. It is based on the idea of life as something infinitely valuable. A life that uses itself through constant, creative reshaping and valuing of everything and everybody in the environment cannot even contemplate putting a value on itself. Thus, life in relation to life itself must be infinitely valuable. But the infinite value of life in relation to life itself does not automatically mean that this applies to other life forms as well. The collective debt is fed from the assumption that a life that cannot be saved in turn generates even more collective guilt, for example. This not only drives the collective fantasy – and thereby explains why history is constantly filled with myths of the great Fall of Man and the accompanying calls for salvation – but sooner or later pushes the collective identity towards its self-inflicted extinction.
The Nietzschean reaction to this collective fantasy of extinction is of course amor fati, that is, not just the acceptance of, but also the unconditional love of fate. Goodness and evil meet in the present where fate breaks them down and joins them in a neutral history substance that the Nietzschean übermensch loves because it is to be loved as being the only thing that exists in history. Only based on the unconditional acceptance of everything in world history up until now – where one’s own experience as a subject is included to the highest degree – can the syntheist agent create a radically different utopian future beyond the present. For what is the religious impulse and its search for the spiritual experience if not a reason where the human being concentrates herself on herself and her innermost emotional needs and lets intuition lead her past all of life’s excuses that claim that the impossible really is impossible? For this is of course not true: it is precisely when reason takes over from rationality that the impossible becomes possible and Syntheos arrives in the future. It is there and then that the human being can realise his wildest dreams and create God.
The history of correlationism is introduced with Immanuel Kant’s onto-epistemological project in the 18th century. According to Kant, we can only know what arises in the correlation between thinking and being. But with Kant, and also later with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl for example, there is still a conviction that a factiality exists, that the process includes a thing in itself to relate to. This notion goes by the designation weak correlationism. Later Kant is followed by thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who all ignore this conjectured thing in itself. The Kantian principle of factiality is thus replaced by these authors with the Hegelian, absolute, principle of correlation. This notion is called relativism or strong correlationism.
The difference between correlationism and relationalism is there already in the difference between the concepts relation and relationality. A relation is always fixed, a correlation is even a fixation between two fixed points, primarily a subject and an object. A relationality on the other hand is a state where no fixed objects whatsoever exist, where differences on top of other differences create relations between the differences without any fixed objects ever arising other than in an eternalising observer’s perception process. In correlationism, the relation is external and not in the singular in relation to the fixed objects that, for simplicity’s sake, we assume (not least Kant’s thing in itself). In relationalism however, there are only relations on top of other relations, which in the absence of fixed objects are external and in the plural in relation to what Bohr calls a field and what Whitehead calls a process. Historically speaking, Kant’s correlationism is replaced by Nietzsche’s relativism, after which the development continues to, and is completed by, Bohr’s and Whitehead’s relationalism, where the object is also not consciously ignored any longer, which was the case with Hegel, but is literally dissolved in the mobilist process.
The syntheist agent does not seek contact with the outside world from any kind of passive observer position. Instead she lives as an intra-acting phenomenon, participating interactively, at the centre of the world. Quite simply, no original individuation arises that can be regarded or used as the cornerstone of existence. There is no individuation whatsoever. What arises is a dividuation, and it is a by-product of the current region’s many relations and not the other way around. Syntheism does focus at all on the subject, which it decentralises, but takes the inversion of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum very seriously and therefore shifts the existential focus to agentiality as a phenomenon, an intra-acting concentration of intensities, which is an irreducible multiplicity of identities within a diffuse and mobile field. These identities gather around a truth as an act, namely the subjective experience as the impoverished void Atheos within the rich multiplicity Entheos, located in overwhelming existence Pantheos. The subject’s illusoriness is not externalised however, as relativist critics of Descartes and Kant such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Derrida imagine – these philosophers are quite simply not radical enough in their break with Kantian correlationism –they are instead internalised right from the very beginning. The illusory aspect of the subject, its self-experienced substancelessness, is included as a fundamental and integral part of the subjective experience as such.
Since ethics is a more or less free choice between various alternatives – the more freedom that exists in a context, the more ethics is required – and since Kant has made the subject and object of ethics into one and the same thing, he is forced to reduce his ethics to a tautology. When asked the question why it is right to do the right thing, Kant answers laconically that every action should be carried out as if it were universally valid. In other words, it is right to do what is right for the simple and pointless reason that it is right to do the right thing. And then we have not even touched upon the question of exactly what this automatically executed right thing actually is. The only reasonable reaction to Kant’s tautological imperative comes from his successor Nietzsche, who realises that all notions that value philosophy is able to formulate as the right thing in advance must be rejected. Instead he recasts value philosophy as an anthropological project occupied with what Man is anyway already doing and why. The prescriptive value philosophy of Kant is answered commendably by Nietzsche with a descriptive and interactive enlightenment project. Thereby Kant is reduced to a banal moralist, while Nietzsche stands out as the real ethicist.
The point here is that in the Kantian borderland between two value paradigms, interestingly enough Man has neither the amoral God’s freedom to behave as he pleases, nor any judge left to appease in order to get his points registered in his quest for an anticipated reward in eternity. The consequence is that when Kant desperately tries to build a new ethics on top of the old morality – without any foothold in an amoral god – he reduces his phenomenologically divine human being to an ethically paralysed robot. Thereby moralism returns with full force, but this time as a self-referencing feedback loop, where moralism itself has become its own external judge. Understandably enough it is precisely Kant’s peculiar moral philosophy that the succeeding ethicists Hegel and Nietzsche direct their sharpest criticism towards when it comes to Kantianism; in their eyes Kant is nothing other than a naive nihilist, distressingly unaware of the theocide he has just committed. For this reason, both Hegel and Nietzsche pit their pantheist predecessor Spinoza against the deist Kant, and thereby open the way for affirmative nihilism (see The Global Empire), the creative generation of value out of Atheos.
Ethics is an intention founded in an identity in relation to the anticipated result of a cause and an effect. It is the anticipated effect of the action that gives it its ethical weight. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas thinks of ethics as an internal, intersubjective process without any requirements whatsoever on external, objective truths. Various conceivable intentions are weighed against various conceivable chains of cause and effect in a kind of civilised dialogue. Regardless of whether we apply ethics to a dividual or a collective, ethics is founded on an attitude. Nietzsche argues that this attitude is either active or reactive. The active attitude seeks an impression, an impact on existence, a confirmation of the agent’s interaction with its surroundings, in order to attain existential affirmation, a realisation of its own substance. Nietzsche calls this attitude the will to power. Against the will to power stands the reactive attitude, the will to submission, obliteration, a production of identity through identification with the victim rather than with the hero. This reactive attitude creates a bitterness towards existence, it produces and is driven by ressentiment, a perverted pleasure – rather than authentic pleasure – based on an escalating narcissistic self-loathing.
The active attitude produces a steady stream of identities, it seeks creative novelty in an active engagement with its environment, it builds an emergent event emanating from the oscillating phenomenon that includes the syntheist agent. On the other hand, the reactive attitude thrives on maintaining distance, through a narcissism turned away from reality, where the energy is used to stimulate ressentiment for the purpose of repudiating the surrounding world, so that the subject can cultivate the belief in itself as an abandoned and isolated object, floating in a state of permanent masochistic enjoyment. Since the slave mentality – dissected by Nietzsche – constantly seeks a minimisation of its own living throughout life in order to be as close to extinction as possible (what Freud calls the drive.html">death drive), it also seeks submission in relation to other agents, because it flees from authentic intimacy for fear of losing the masochistic enjoyment where it has found its existential sense of security. The slave mentality prefers safe totalist suffering over unsafe mobilist pleasure.
This deep-seated and serious mental masochism should of course not be confused with playful sexual sadomasochism, which has nothing at all to do with any kind of ressentiment. However, there is in all masochism a desire to engage in play-acting, to pretend intimacy when the sadomasochistic act in reality aims to maximise and maintain the distance to the other, which, for example, explains the strong connection between sexual sadomasochism and polyamorousness. This play-acting in the public sphere becomes an (often fully conscious) protection against intimacy in the private sphere in the same way that the connection to many in practice is the same as the connection to no one at all. To the extent syntheism is a doctrine of salvation, it is thus about salvation from this masochistic enjoyment and towards the affirmation of authentic intimacy, completely independent of sexual practices. It is about making the syntheist agent and her desires and drives into an existential hero instead of a pathetic victim. In other words, the syntheist agent is identical with the Nietzschean übermensch.
Nietzsche’s idea-archaeology project leads to a powerful recognition of nature’s enormous rather than Man’s minimal power over both the elements and the mind. With Nietzsche, Nature has of course not only the last word about itself, it is also Nature that acts through Man regardless of what this subject, as with Kant, imagines about itself. What would the subject be otherwise, if not in fact a portion of Nature? This means that Nietzsche transposes ethics into an open issue of what culture is possible on top of such a dominating and framing Nature. It is thus in culture that we find the affirmative in Nietzsche’s affirmative nihilism: a cultural concept that Nietzsche transforms, in a pioneering way, from Nature’s opposite into an emergent phenomenon arising out of otherwise indifferent Nature. According to Nietzsche, culture is nothing other than an engaged extension of Nature – or as we express the matter in The Futurica Trilogy: Culture is Nature 2.0. Only by bravely attempting to build culture on top of Nature, rather than to just yield to Nature, can Man procure an ethical substance.
In Ecce Homo Nietzsche tells of how he allows himself to be inspired to develop the idea of ethics as the agential identity of Zoroaster, history’s first great ethicist. Through recasting the Iranian author of Gathas as the protagonist in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche reconnects with the pagan, non-linear circle rather than with the monotheistic linear road to doomsday as the foundation of ethics – all in accordance with Zoroaster’s words of wisdom “I am my thoughts, my thoughts govern my words, I am my words, my words govern my actions, I am my actions, and my actions govern my thoughts”. Where the radical aspect lies of course is in the minimal contingency that is added for every new revolution in the ethical feedback loop, the minimal difference that every morning makes the world a completely new world that is expanding along the arrow of time. Zoroaster’s and Nietzsche’s syntheological divinity is of course called Entheos.
The ethical consequence of the Nietzschean revolution is that the subject – which hovers in the minimal space between the current event and the next thought – must contemplate the ongoing identity-producing cycle, which de facto is the subject’s engine, in order to be able to shape the next thought as a free choice, a choice whose freedom means that the accomplishment of the intention rewards the subject with ethical substance. Nietzsche’s ethics is thus founded on a syntheist contemplation, which is followed by concrete action that is consistent with the contemplation. It is precisely this human being, she who consistently completes the necessary cycle of ethics to its inexorable end, that Nietzsche terms the übermensch, and it in on her that he pins his hopes when it comes to culture. It is hard to get further away from Kant’s morality robot paralysed in value philosophy than this.
So if desire is based in the organism’s existential pleasure, in what Nietzsche calls the will to power, then the drive at the deepest level according to Freud is the drive.html">death drive, the longing for the extinction of painful life and merging into the non-organic. The Freudian drive can be linked to the metaphorical usage of the cerebral hemispheres’ roles in human psychology, a psychology which, according to Nietzsche, shapes all human thought. There is no external philosophy outside Man’s own world; all philosophy is created by and for Man. Thus, philosophy is always very much influenced by psychology. Both the philosopher and the philosopher’s readers participate in the philosophising with their emotions fully switched on. There is no philosophy without emotions, without a strong psychological component.
The foundation for this transrationalism – the conviction that rationality only functions within those areas where it is possible, and that critical thinking must be fully conscious of and discount this limitation in its world view – is laid with the Renaissance and Romanticism to then be consummated with syntheism. This means that syntheism’s connection to its previous sister epochs is cultural rather than epistemological. In addition, there is a strongly pragmatist connection: We humans are our actions just as much as we are our thoughts. To be a syntheist is to act based on one’s richest knowledge of the state of existence, but it is above all to always dare to act, and then draw valuable conclusions from this truth as an act. Or to personify syntheist activism: its heart does not get its nourishment from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s rationalist idealism, but from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Romantic pragmatism. We act with an open, contingent and indeterministic future as the backdrop; a backdrop that we can know a lot about, but never everything, before we act. And in this situation, we honestly have no more reliable resource to use than intuitive reason, the ideal of the Renaissance and Romanticism.
The problem with both the Enlightenment and Modernism is their common overconfidence in their own scientific and artistic potential. The near-autistic conventionality in both their logical and their aesthetic premises – always this love of mathematics, minimalism and formalism – lead to both an overconfidence in their own rationality and, sooner or later (which as we know applies to all kinds of Platonism), to a totalitarianism and an overconfidence in (seemingly logical) authorities. With a belief in there being only one eternal truth about our complex existence, and that this truth is attainable for the rationally reasoning person, it is horribly likely for someone to feel called upon to invoke this truth and appoint himself its guardian and interpreter. Dictators consequently tend to have a predilection for invoking the Enlightenment and/or Modernism in particular as the raison d’être for their own positions of power. While sound pragmatic scepticism, that is, empiricism, comes from Romanticism’s reaction against the Enlightenment, from David Hume via Hegel to Nietzsche – it is hardly the Enlightenment’s own product. And if there was a need for intelligent Romanticism in order to parry inflated Enlightenment in the 19th century, there remains the same need at the transition from statist Modernism to globalist syntheism in our time.
When classical atheism is placed alongside holistic syntheism, the latter suddenly stands out as a conservative, autistic perpetual loop that has got stuck and just repeats phrases that are increasingly pointless. While syntheism represents what Nietzsche calls and celebrates as the Dionysian drive, atheism gets stuck in its retrospective opposite, the Apollonian drive. This is not to say that the Apollonian drive is illegitimate: it is no more illegitimate than the left hemisphere (if we once again allow ourselves to borrow metaphorically the human cerebral hemispheres’ apparent peculiarities). But it cannot act unimpeded without a fatal imbalance arising. Atheos must be placed in relation to Entheos, Pantheos and above all Syntheos. The Apollonian drive that Atheos displays in isolation must be made subservient to the Dionysian drive in the other parts of the syntheological pyramid. In the same way that the eternalising left cerebral hemisphere, which divides up and freezes events in separate fragments, must interact with the mobilising right cerebral hemisphere and its holistic perspective in order for the human being’s self-image and world view to be complete.
Spinoza’s concept amor dei intellectualis is a predecessor to Nietzsche’s complementary term amor fati, which was coined 200 years later. It is enough to add duration to Spinoza’s love which is dependent on logical dutifulness to the Universe in order to get Nietzsche’s love which is dependent on logical dutifulness to fate. In both cases it is about the same attraction as a truth as an act, where the identity-reflecting decision precedes the emotion. Syntheologically of course we place the universe-fixated Spinoza with Pantheos and the time-fixated Nietzsche with Entheos. That Nietzsche adds the arrow of time to the ethical equation results in amor dei intellectualis and agape being merged as the basis for amor fati. His own world view is of course based on the Abrahamic God’s death, and since it also heralds the death of the individual, the Nietzschean übermensch ends up in a deadlock where everything in history up until now must be loved – both dutifully and without reservation – since no external salvation or other mental relief whatsoever exists. This means that an accepting attitude is not enough: Nietzsche unreasonably maintains that in fact a transcendent love is required for a possible reconciliation with fate. Since the love of fate is logically deduced, a necessity for the ethical substance rather than some kind of freely chosen emotion, only metaphysical love, agape, is suitable for this task. Fate arises and must be loved as truth as an act where the events are fixed in history. Therefore we place amor fati in the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.
This is abundantly clear to the protosyntheists Zoroaster, Heraclitus and their Chinese counterpart Lao Tzu as early as a few thousand years before their devoted successors Nietzsche and Heidegger complete their thinking. And as for Heidegger, he of course constructs his entire ethics of presence from anchibasie – this concept is the very key to his existentialist objective, Gelassenheit, or spiritual liberation. For syntheism asha and anchibasie are not just inspiring concepts from the infancy of philosophy but also the basis for its existentialism. The search for closeness to the truth and the will to presence in the truth’s inner division – caused by its constant oscillation and the impossibility of ever being eternalised outside the fantasy world of Man – means that the core of syntheistic mysticism already existed with Zoroaster and Heraclitus. Asha and anchibasie are not just the fundamentals of syntheist onto-epistemology – we cannot in any way make use of the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism without assuming them – but are also the ethical substance in syntheist mysticism.
Syntheism embraces an ethics of survival as a counterweight to immortality’s moralism, which is characteristic of the dualist philosophies’ outlooks on life. The Platonist obsession with immortality and perfection attests to its hostility vis-à-vis existence and life, a phobia of change that at its deepest level is a death worship. From syntheism’s Nietzschean perspective, Plato and his dualist heirs therefore stand out as the prophets of the death wish. Syntheism instead celebrates the eternalisation of the decisive moment, the manifestation of the One in the irreducible multiplicity, as the infinite now. All values and valuations must then be based on the infinite now as the event horizon. Eternity in time and infinity in space are not extensions of some kind in Platonist space–time of some kind, but poetically titled compact concentrations of passionate presence, as Heideggerian-inspired nodes in Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism. Eternity in time and infinity in space can only meet in the infinite now, in temporality’s minimised freezing, rather than in some kind of maximised extension. We are thus not eternal creatures because we are immortal, but because we can think and experience eternity as a logical as well as an emotional representation of the infinite, focused to the current moment. Which in turn means that the syntheist transcendence is localised inside rather than outside the immanence.
Love and mysticism in the infinite now constitute the very nucleus of the ethics of survival. Here, an alternative to all forms of moralism based on the preconceived state of things appears. That valuations that are loosely founded in the state of things being able to motivate a kind of “the future should be more of the same as now” as an ethical beacon, is not something that has any logical robustness. That nature appears to act in a certain way in a certain given situation of course does not mean that Man must have nature’s mechanisms as an ethical beacon. While amor fati is a dutiful love to the closed past, the imperative does not include the open future; rather, it implies a contradictory encouragement to break with everything that has been, that is, to expand rather than minimise the spatio-temporal multiplicity, as the arch-Nietzschean Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. Thus to act ethically is at least as often about violating nature, participating in and driving the cultural and civilisational process, as it is about following it. Nature is not any kind of Abrahamic god and neither is truth an ethical guiding principle.
The syntheist response to Brassier’s radical nihilism is of course that it gets stuck half way in syntheist dialectics, in a kind of permanent masochistic enjoyment under Atheos, without completing the pyramidal thought movement via Pantheos to the affirmative oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos, where the four corners of the syntheological pyramid are radically equal. Brassier’s role model Nietzsche of course never based his affirmative nihilism in his otherwise beautifully failed concept of the will to power. Nietzsche’s affirmativeness can instead only be achieved through a fully conscious existential act of truth, where the act produces the truth, which in turn produces the Übermensch. There is thus considerably more of Nietzsche’s postnihilist affirmativeness in his role model Badiou’s existentialism than Brassier seems to understand. It is also therefore that Brassier’s otherwise impressive nihilist reasoning – except that it is based on a probably incorrect although particularly interesting reading of modern cosmology – lands only half way in syntheist dialectics.
Nietzsche, the father of European nihilism, interestingly enough goes in the opposite direction compared to Brassier and instead argues for an ethics based on resistance to nature’s doings. He pits culture against nature and finds the heart of the übermensch in a kind of aesthetics of resistance – but not without first confronting Man with his deep animalistic nature – an ethical turnaround that is investigated and applied to perfection by his French successor Georges Bataille among others who, with his extensive atheological project in the 1950s in turn is one of Lacan’s and obviously also syntheism’s foremost sources of inspiration. According to Nietzsche and Bataille, it is precisely by opposing the natural – by surviving rather than conforming – that Man gets his own ethical substance. So if the Universe really is on the road to a final death and extinction, a Nietzschean response to this state of affairs might be to defend survival against extinction as a norm through every thought, every word, every act. Thereby Nietzsche with his wealth of tragic heroes is the ethicist of survival par excellence. He pits the principle of maximisation of existential pleasure against Brassier’s ambition to speed up and put into effect the death-wishing masochism of the subconscious.
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.
However, we pose the question of whether the syntheist community shares Meillassoux’s dream of the resurrection of the dead before a suddenly existing god whose essence is called justice really is the God that we long for, and which thereby can act as a utopian engine for us in our time. Do we ever actually desire something that actually later occurs? Is it not the case that both emergent and contingent phenomena occur only of their own accord – as both Hegel and Nietzsche maintain – and that we only afterwards place them in our value hierarchies? It appears undeniably as considerably more reasonable to speak of the growth of the Internet in the late 20th century as the genesis of a – if only afterwards – desired god, rather than as any form of justice as a god located in the distant future at the end of a road which in any case is filled with thousands and thousands of other paradigm-shifting events. Meillassoux’s future is quite simply neither consistent with his radical contingency, nor sufficiently open to the future to be able to act as an engine for syntheist activism. However, it is unarguably a formidable foundation on which to build potential utopias.
The sciences demand logical intelligence. The arts demand intuitive intelligence. Philosophy however requires both of these. Therefore philosophy is a narrow discipline as regards production, consumption and talent in general. Philosophical works are understandably not your typical bestsellers. But of course this does not make philosophy any less important. Philosophy heralds the advances that later reach both the sciences and the arts. Without a Nietzsche, there would never be an Einstein or a Picasso either. The time would not be ripe, as they say; there would be no resonance, no receptive environment that makes Einstein precisely an Einstein and Picasso precisely a Picasso.
Thereby self-love, as truth as an act, is the obvious foundation for all syntheist rituals and ceremonies. It is the eternally recurring starting point for all spiritual work, whose ultimate purpose is to give the members of the congregation a strong and stable personal integrity without narcissistic elements. Since the self is in constant flux, and since all other emotions are dependent on the act of self-love, the act of self-love must be repeated time after time after time in the syntheist agent’s life. This repetition – this cycle of difference and repetition, as Gilles Deleuze would express the matter – constitutes the Nietzschean core in the syntheistic spiritual life. A look at one’s naked body in the mirror, followed by the decision to unconditionally accept this body as the current expression of Pantheos, as the Universe’s construction for housing the subject and its consciousness and passions, as an object to love merely by virtue of an existential decision, a personal primordial event. “This is what I am, this is the body that houses my many dividual identities and I love this body in order to be able to love myself, in order to thereby be able to love anything at all. Because I identify myself with the will to love.” Truth as an act cannot be expressed any more clearly.
The obligation to love fate under all circumstances, Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s ethical ideal amor fati, is a central concept in syntheism. The Universe is indifferent to our human cares and woes, does not give our species preferential treatment over someone or something else, accords no special status whatsoever to anyone or anything in relation to anyone or anything else. We can only forgive ourselves for our shortcomings as human beings precisely because we are human beings, not heroes. And in this self-forgiveness, the now plays a central part. Since, according to Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s imperative, we are duty-bound to love all of history up until now – partly because it is the only history there is, partly because it is something that at any rate we cannot do anything about – we are also duty-bound to love our own life story up until now. And in this imposed love there also lies self-forgiveness as a logical obligation and not as a longed-for emotion. Syntheists create rituals in order to constantly return to the necessary self-forgiveness, including collective rituals to support the journey towards the insight of self-forgiveness, and then not least rituals that question and combat the enjoyment that is connected with self-hatred, the moralistic opposite of ethical self-forgiveness. There is in fact no place for self-hatred and its enjoyment within syntheist spiritual work.
Syntheist art is not merely participatory and dividual rather than isolationist and individual; it is also a metaphysical art in the deepest sense of the term. With the advent of syntheism, art can leave cynical and cultural relativist inquiry which has been its axiomatic norm under late capitalism – from a Nietzschean perspective, what can be called a voluptuous revelling in the death of God – and instead devote itself to a transcending and utopian creativity. But this requires a distinct break with the late capitalist art world’s eschatological mythology – history has not reached any ending in the sense that Francis Fukuyama speaks of – and its fixated, academic power structure. This in turn requires the artist’s will to smash the individualist myth of the auteur as art’s Napoleonic patriarchal genius. Syntheist art is in fact liberated from the creator of the art and his atomism – it formulates the idea and then insists that the idea must be free. It knows that it is a small but fundamentally manifold part of a greater holistic phenomenon – it does not act as the distanced rebel for the purpose of self-glorification, but serves an even greater utopian ideal – and it is art’s relationship to this phenomenon, within which it acts as a cohesive agent, which is of interest.
Just like all establishment-controlled and competition-shy monopolies, the academic world is extremely poor at rewarding genuine creativity; it is however tailor-made to question and dismantle philosophical discourse as such in absurdum and ad infinitum, which it does with full force through its highly-specialised ethics missions and the many vulgar-Nietzschean projects that dominated cultural studies at universities in the second half of the 20th century. The problem is that the philosophical institutions obviously never turn deconstruction onto those who really need it, namely the philosophical institutions themselves. In order to once again become relevant, philosophy must therefore leave the academic world’s corrupting security and seriously question the prevailing ideological structure. Even at the price of thereby burning their own pay cheques. This is what is required if philosophy’s interests as a discipline are to take precedence over the interests of the philosopher as a career-driven individual. Only then can philosophy recapture a faith in utopia. It must start by interacting with society and dealing with the issues of the time. It must become relevant.
The values and valuations of informationalism stem from what we call the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines). The network-dynamical effects must be the basis of the production of the values and valuations in a network society, where everything from physics and biology to artistic creation and religious practice is characterised by the obsession with intra-acting phenomena, and not least by their relations with each other. This is a world where everything is always at least two, as Friedrich Nietzsche expresses the matter, and often many times more than that. An agency for change in such a world is an extremely complex phenomenon in itself: multi-polar, multi-dimensional, multi-dependent and in all directions entangled with its environment. In a relationist society in a relationalist world, ethics must first be interactive and later also intra-acting.
The sacralisation in question can be strengthened to advantage through the sharing of LSD, mescaline, MDMA, psilocybin or any other of many conceivable fraternisation chemicals in a sacred ceremony. Already in his The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes how the narcotic experience constitutes the re-establishment of the Dionysian world view, the joining of Man with Nature, the religious experience of existence as a whole. Nietzsche’s vision of the spiritual possibilities of narcotics is fulfilled at a rapid pace during the 20th century: Albert Hoffman synthesises LSD for the first time in 1938 and later recounts his dramatic spiritual experiences under the influence of the drug; Aldous Huxley writes extensively about his own religious experience of mescaline in 1953; while Alexander Shulgin synthesises MDMA, uses it with his close friends, and recounts their spiritual experiences of it in 1976.
Both nature and the creative arsenal of Man himself are full of these entheogens – the term was coined by the historian Carl Ruck, as a more factual replacement for the erroneous term hallucinogens, and it is of course derived from syntheism’s Entheos, the god within ourselves – which have always been used for spiritual purposes. This was the case despite many nation states, on the pretext of the most bizarre and prejudiced excuses, assiduously trying to stop the use of entheogens in what must be regarded as the current paradigm shift’s most obvious form of bourgeois religious persecution of the emerging netocracy’s metaphysical lifestyle choice. It is from this radical equality, in this literally syntheist procedure, that the ethics of interactivity is born and developed – not in Levinas’ sentimental and anti-Nietzschean self-sacrificing romanticism.
However, beyond the ethics of interactivity a landscape opens up for a pure syntheist ethics. It is an ethics where human actions can occur without any imagined observer, where the other as a target disappears from the equation. The Nietzschean übermensch does whatever should be done merely because it should be done and without any ulterior motive whatsoever. We can describe this as an ethical vacuum state. It is a case of a metaethics; a constantly ongoing investigative study of how the syntheist agent is changed by acting this way or that way. The artist that bases her whole creativity on her own desire and nowhere else is an early example of a syntheist ethicist. But there is really nothing to prevent all human behaviour in the syntheist utopia from taking as its point of departure such an ethics of intra-acting rather than an ethics of interactivity – because the ethics of intra-acting follows logically from the development of the syntheist agent as a human ideal.
philosophy.html">Process philosophy is fundamentally descriptive rather than prescriptive. Nietzsche builds a genealogy, Foucault compiles an archaeology, Derrida calls his method deconstruction, we ourselves describe our own work in previous volumes as a meteorology since we – as do the weather forecasters – study the future as a gigantic information complex that is difficult to grasp as a whole. The background to philosophy.html">process philosophy’s descriptive methods is that Nietzsche sees through his predecessor Kant when he traces an even deeper will to fabricate behind the latter’s stated will to truth. Nietzsche does not see any other possibility at all for the writing of history than fabrication, even among philosophers. The difference thus does not lie in a will to fabricate pitted against a will to truth, but rather in the varying level of quality of different attempts at fabrication. All truths are a kind of myth, but all myths are not equally functional in the recurring confrontation with existence around us. Some myths are truer than others, which can and must be tested in the interaction with the surrounding world.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58