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Ontology
The metaphysical studies of being, becoming, existence and reality. Syntheism is based on a philosophy.html">process philosophy ontology. See, by way of comparison, philosophy.html">process philosophy.
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.
Badiou however argues that mathematics modifies Habermas’ premises; with the aid of mathematics, we can go beyond intersubjectivity and achieve an objectivity that Kant does not understand. The wide acceptance of the quantum physics paradigm within the sciences – and its subsequent dramatic effects on philosophy, for example through the effect that Niels Bohr’s ideas have on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy, and vice versa – in spite of its initially highly counter-intuitive claims, proves that this is the case. Badiou argues that thanks to the progress of mathematics, ontology can at last leave representationalism, correlationalism and even relativism behind, only to thereafter take the decisive leap over to relationalism. The Kantian paradigm would thus be passé and objectivity would again be possible.
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.
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.
The relationalist philosophers Karen Barad, Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux push through and past relativism when, at the start of the 3rd millennium – inspired by pioneers such as the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the physicist Niels Bohr – they construct a speculative materialism that attacks the entire correlationalist paradigm and its fixation with an original subject that correlates with an original object as its ontological foundation. They are quite simply searching for a deeper foundation beyond this premise, which has dominated phenomenology ever since Kant’s heyday. While relativism settles for stating that the relations between the fixed objects are relative – what we call an interactive ontology – the relationalist philosophers maintain that the relations within the phenomena are also mobile in relation to each other – that is, they advocate an intra-acting ontology. There are no discrete objects whatsoever in the Universe. Not even at the minutest micro level. Thus, nor are there any Kantian objects in physical reality, not even any noumenal such; what really exists is merely pure relata, or relations without their own inner substance between and within abstract fields of irreducible multiplicities.
Within philosophy.html">process philosophy, ontology and epistemology are intimately intertwined in each other. Being and the movement interact in such a way that the movement can only be transformed into and apprehended as being through an agglutinative onto-epistemology. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism is the onto-epistemology of the Internet age (see The Global Empire). Contingent reality must be frozen in space–time in order for it to be apprehended and decoded; it must be eternalised. The more factors that interact in such a freezing, the more qualitative the eternalisation becomes. The internal eternalisation must then be set in motion anew and is cast back into the external mobilist reality, and not – however tempting this may be to the Platonist impulse – be misinterpreted as a kind of eternal truth about existence. On the whole syntheist onto-epistemology is not well-served by any eternal truths in a Platonist sense; its utopia is imperfect rather than perfect. On the other hand, it is interested in the enormous intellectual advances that can be achieved when the qualities of truth in precisely the relations between different hypotheses are compared. Truth is not eternal, nor is it relativist – even truth is relationalist.
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.
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.
According to Barad, the phenomena arise as intra-acting and agential entanglements. Instrumental measurements expand rather than see through collapsing entanglements. This means that quantum mechanics is really about non-separability, not non-locality. Quantum physical non-locality is not necessarily the same thing as physical non-locality. Agential separability is quite simply an exteriority within and not outside the phenomena. Phenomena are the basic units of both ontology and epistemology, but at the same time intra-acting and above all fundamentally plural. They are irreducible multiplicities which thus do not allow themselves to be reduced to isolated units. Not because this inspires some charming philosophy to contemplate in splendid isolation, but because physics actually functions precisely in this way. Here Barad resembles other philosophers with a strong involvement in the new physics, such as Ian Hacking and Joseph Rouse. Bohr’s realism and objectivism constitute a solid ground on which to build further, since it is solely about factual, material embodiments of theoretical concepts. It is the Universe that speaks through us rather than the other way around in Bohr’s life’s work as a physicist and philosopher. Niels Bohr is the syntheist agent par excellence. And Karen Barad is his prophet.
The Lacanian Zizek often finds himself in dialogue with Deleuze in his books, for example in Organs Without Bodies (where Zizek also pursues an extensive dialogue with – in his opinion – the Deleuzian philosophers Bard and Söderqvist). A perfect example of a Deleuzian hybrid concept is the dark predecessor, which plays a central part in the construction of Deleuze’s dividual subject. The dark predecessor is most simply described as ontology’s own Higgs field. The real is that which prevents the world view from ever becoming coherent or complete. It is because we never can grasp objectivity that subjectivity arises. The subject is born in the same moment as we are confronted with disturbances and questions in relation to our world view and it is these recurring disturbances that keep the subject alive.
The decisive break with Kantian correlationism comes with relationalism in Niels Bohr’s physics and philosophy of science in the 1930s. Relationalist ontology is in fact not just interactive, like relativism, but definitely also intra-acting. According to relationalism, every phenomenon in the Universe is unique, since both its external and its internal coordinates are completely unique for every position in space–time. Symmetries exist only in mathematical models, never in physical reality. This means, among other things, that no scientific experiments can ever be repeated in exactly the same way twice. It is hardly surprising that in the 1930s old friends Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein engage in a correspondence that is often frustrating on both sides. Their letters attest to the dramatic scientific paradigm shift from Einsteinian relativism to Bohrian relationalism.
The arrow of time acts as an emergent phenomenon of its very own. Outside of mathematics’ tautologies, time and space do not need to have anything whatsoever to do with each other; they are distinctly different phenomena and an honest ontology also treats them in that way: as essentially different. Liberated from eternity, time returns with full force as physics’ most remarkable player, as Zurvan or the personification of the mysterious duration of the ancient Iranians, as Cronus or the irrevocable fate of the Ancient Greeks, or as Entheos, the multiplicity of events that stream out of the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos in the syntheological pyramid. Time is the uniting constant of existence. There is nothing outside duration. Plato, Newton and Einstein have quite simply got it wrong: there is no timelessness in physical reality, no more than there is any actual void. Because of the return of time in the history of ideas, the post-structural obsession with non-linearity also finds itself under great pressure. Linearity returns as a strong cultural metaphor, but in a new and deeper variant, as a deep linearity which relates to global rather than local duration.
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.
Barad dismantles and disposes of Kant’s noumenon, and thereby she also extremely effectively puts an end to the correlationist paradigm. Her Bohrian phenomenology, based on relations on top of relations and probabilities on top of probabilities, with varying intensities rather than essences at the centre and without fixed physical boundaries, has no need whatsoever of any Kantian noumenon. Barad comes from the world of quantum physics, which of course is governed by concepts such as complementarity, entanglement, chance and non-locality. The principle of precedence disposes of all ideas of eternally valid laws that precede physical reality. Barad’s phenomenon is therefore instead the phenomenon per se described based on physics’ own conditions, rather than from Kant’s blind faith in rationality’s conception of reality being sufficiently exhaustive. And it is precisely therefore that her universocentric rather than anthropocentric ontology is a realism. Every Baradian phenomenon, every assemblage of intensities, has its own genetics and its own memetics as her predecessor Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. It is the current set of genes and memes that we familiarise ourselves with when we get to know the phenomenon. The world cannot be more real than it is with Barad.
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.
The most intimate of relations remind us that everything essential in life starts with two and not one. One is nothing: the attraction always starts with two. And as the definitive truth event, attraction is in focus for mysticism. Zoroaster already understood and talked of this already with his concept asha in ancient Iran, followed by Heraclitus, who consummates the idea with his concept anchibasie in ancient Greece. Interestingly enough, both concepts are ambiguous: they can be translated as both to be present and to be close to being (not to be confused with late capitalism’s obsession with all kinds of pseudo-Buddhist mindfulness). Because two is the minimum in syntheist ontology – nothing can ever be just a one, other than the One, the Universe as a whole itself – a closer association with the object cannot either be a point of departure for the ontology. Instead this must be based on the actual relation between at least two, from the existential being in the division between them. Thereby asha and anchibasie, brilliantly, have not just ontological and epistemological but also ethical consequences. To live, understand and act correctly is to constantly remain as close to the states asha or anchibasie as possible.
We arrive at asha and anchibasie at the same moment that we let their meaning pass from being-external observing to being-internal participation. From this point of departure in syntheist mysticism, of necessity we land in fact in relationalist ethics. No other philosopher either before or after Heraclitus – with the possible exception of its predecessor and source of inspiration Zoroaster – has been so close to defining metaphysical truth with such precision. For it is precisely in its intense closeness to the truth event – rather than in some kind of absorption into the event – that the metaphysical truth is manifested, in its constantly failing yet necessary attempt to unite the at least two at the core of the ontology. We express this by saying that through all the thousands and thousands of truths we constantly produce, we find the primordial eternalisation as the defining truth as an act for our existential substance, as the primal act for us as creative truth machines.
Mathematics is actually just advanced, idealistic addition. If you take something and then add something else to this thing, all in all the whole obviously expands. It becomes something more. From this unavoidable fact, the first mathematicians draw the conclusion that 1 plus 1 might possibly be 2, and then go on to build the entire science of mathematics from this axiomatic assumption. The problem is however that this line of reasoning only works in theory, which means that it is only applicable to mathematics itself. And why is that? Because in nature the second 1 is never identical to the first 1. In nature there are never two absolutely identical objects to symmetrically add or exchange for each other. Nature is not only analogue but also fundamentally asymmetrical in all directions. There are never two of anything at all – phenomena in existence not only have fluid boundaries but are also completely unique, which has the consequence that all our generalisations, however epistemologically necessary they might be, can never be more exact than arbitrary approximations. Syntheologically we express this as Entheos being ontologically in the same class with Atheos and Pantheos – or to express the matter more poetically: two is the first sum for the fundamental difference within the One, and it is in the capacity of this scientific axiom that multiplicity is the foundation of ontology.
According to relationalism, as the Swedish philosopher of religion Matz Hammarström claims, an intra-acting interdependence between Man and his environment always prevails. Or to put the matter phenomenologically: there is no real boundary between Man’s near-world and his surrounding world. All phenomena that Man is confronted with already include himself ontologically. Then even epistemology, and ultimately also ethics, must submit to this fact. Knowledge of one’s surrounding world cannot be attained without the human being herself being an integral part of the object of this knowledge, the relationalist phenomenon, whose participation must be constantly discounted in every eternalised calculation. It is here that Plato and his mathematics depart radically from mobilist thinking. For Plato, the duality that mathematics offers is a fundamental given for ontology, but existence contains no such dualities outside the world of mathematics. Phenomena can be diachronic in relation to each other, but that in itself does not mean that they are dual, which mathematics beguiles us to believe. Two phenomena can arise concurrently or in the same area, but never both at the same time. And conversely: if two things occur either at different points in time or in different places, they are thereby automatically always different phenomena.
Eternalism distinguishes itself from totalism inasmuch as it does not adduce any kind of ontological status or pretend to be primary and external in relation to mobilist reality. Instead it is strictly phenomenological. The father of pragmatism Peirce emphasises mobilism’s primary ontological status precisely by calling it firstness; consequently he confers a status on eternalism denoted as secondness and in closing refers to the dialectic between them (that is, when phenomenology returns to mobilism after a digression via eternalism) as thirdness. Thus as secondness, eternalism has no Platonist ambitions at all. It instead apprehends itself as a brilliant, perceptive response to the massive semiotic flow from an immanent and contingent universe (Peirce is not very surprisingly also the father of semiotics). Eternalism is thereby very much in fact a transcendence as an activity, exactly what Heidegger would like to see, and as such it manages all of totalism’s hobbyhorses excellently without totalism being able to sneak in the back door and once again try to attack mobilist ontology.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou, one of Jacques Lacan’s most well-known successors, starting with his work Being and Event, constructs a complete philosophical system based on the informationalist event as the deepest truth about Man’s existence. The biological, mental, and social structures that characterise Man are empirically verifiable generalities, and as such are of course contingent. The truths we produce and know of are dependent on this contingency, which summarises them all. Being is not everything to Man, as the totalist philosophers imagine. Thinking can very well be constructed with its starting point in ontology’s constant inconsistency instead of using the fictive being as the basis. However, Badiou argues that the universal is independent on the contingency. Every singularity in itself consists of an infinitely internal chaos, but through the singularity’s internalisation of this chaos, a kind of encircling stability is created around the chaos which makes the universal’s identity possible. From a geometric perspective, we can express this by saying that it is the stable ring around what is transient and chaotic that is the actual singularity; a stable universe around chaotic matter, a stable life around a chaotic biology, a stable consciousness around a chaotic hodgepodge of thoughts, followed by God as a kind of stable ring around a chaotic future.
In the second part of the Futurica Trilogy, The Global Empire, we describe in detail how the perceptive eternalisation of the mobilist chaos of existence is necessary in order for us to be able to act, while mobilism is eternalism’s always present, demonic shadow. In that sense, ontology is the secondary eternalisation of the primary mobilism, the presentation of the unpresentable as a schematic model, the objectification of the emptiness of the void. This perception transforms the multiplicity into functional fictives; models that the mind must be allowed to tinker with in order to be able to mobilise an overview and organise a meaningful and relevant activity at all. Badiou puts the eternalisation of the phenomenon on an equal footing with the mathematisation of existence. Infinity takes precedence over finitude, ontology is the same thing as mathematics. He then continues to the need for the situation, Badiou’s concept for the structured presentation of the multiplicity, a kind of consolidating theatrical performance of sundry fictives. Only in the right situation is the truth event possible, argues Badiou. He is inspired here by both St Paul and Vladimir Lenin: for these thinkers, the timing is not just a matter of strategic necessity: it also has a significant ethical dimension. Waiting for the right moment for the action faithful to the truth is an important component in Badiou’s ethics: the timing is a central aspect of the loyalty itself.
Philosophy does not live up at all to its enormous potential during the 20th century. The most important reason for this is its academic marginalisation. Philosophy ceases to be a living, all-encompassing art form that is carried out by independent, risk-taking free thinkers who scrutinise society from its undefined margins. It is instead turned into a self-perpetuating and self-referencing academic activity and a system-affirming meal ticket among numerous others, with long and footnote-heavy repetitions and backward-looking references as its main activity. Thus, philosophy is no longer in dialogue with either other disciplines or society outside of academia. Neither Georg Cantor’s new mathematics nor Niels Bohr’s new physics have any impact worth mentioning within philosophy until after informationalism becomes widely accepted at the turn of the millennium, despite these two revolutions materially shaking up the world view of thinking people in the 20th century and shifting the mainstays of both ontology and phenomenology. The new relationalist ideas do of course pull the rug out from under the entire correlationist paradigm which has been regarded as axiomatic and unassailable ever since Kant presented his texts. But embarrassingly enough, philosophers are the last ones to understand and analyse this earth-shattering paradigm shift.
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.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58