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Philosophy
The art of creating new concepts with the purpose of understanding the world better.
1:6
(In »Everything is religion«)
And we may take this one step further: Does art exist? Most people do not question that a whole host of physically tangible objects that purport to be art actually exist, although there are many who would energetically deny the unique experience of art that others testify to more or less loquaciously and eloquently. This concept of art actually being an organised hoax, orchestrated for the purpose of enriching all those who participate in this racket while making them appear to be extremely high-minded, is a philistine concept, deeply rooted and difficult to address. Where people do not participate in the social contract they do not quite understand what it is all about, and consequently assume that it must be some sort of fraud. Someone is fooling you and all the others are either pretending that everything is as it should be, or are allowing themselves to be convinced without being able to see through the hoax. This applies, by the way, to a large degree also to philosophy which, outside certain protected reserves, is considered a rather dubious activity. Maybe it does not exist either.
1:10
(In »Everything is religion«)
The problem with this kind of language philosophy desperado is namely that your existence becomes rather boring and lonely amid the saucepans. At the same time one should stress in this context that this “being” definitely does not constitute a guarantee of quality, and that the cosmic vacuum we call “nothing” in everyday parlance has proven to be anything but empty in the classical sense. It is in fact out of this apparent “nothing” that the Universe has been created, which the cosmologist and physicist Lawrence Krauss argues convincingly for in his book entitled just that: A Universe from Nothing. That something exists in an ontic sense is, in other words, not very remarkable. So do E. coli bacteria, and in large numbers, too. While being the only thing that assuredly does not exist, “nothing” is something that even physics barely wants to acknowledge nowadays.
Note that philosophy is religion according to the definition we are now putting forward. It follows from this that religion can also be philosophy. In this context, it is important to understand that reality is not quite as real as we are biologically and socially programmed to believe. While philosophy tries to come as close to the truth as possible in life’s chaos of information, religion transforms this information and formulates its own particular truth based on this approximation. When truth is thus regarded as an active endeavour, by definition philosophy should be regarded as truth, while religion is philosophical truth manifested in practice. Syntheology constantly returns to this concept of truth as an act. The passion for activism is the very foundation of syntheist ethics.
Philosophy is founded on metaphysics, and metaphysics in turn is founded on theology. However solid the logic in a world view may seem, its logic is nonetheless based on a metaphysical assumption that is a functional but blind faith and definitely not any form of knowing. Under the primitivism of hunting and gathering, the tribe’s presumed primordial father and mother constituted the theological foundation for the collective’s ancestor worship. Primordial fathers are definitely not just any people at all, since unlike all others they lack parents – accordingly they must be a form of primitive god with extraordinary power. Under feudalism, God took over the role of the metaphysical foundation. God is the common primordial father of all tribes, the primordial father of primordial fathers. In this way, the particular stories of small tribes are bound up with the universal stories concerning human beings of larger regions and the forces that wreak havoc in their lifeworld. Monotheism is born.
With the Cartesian revolution in the 17th century, the metaphysics of individualism arrived on the scene, with Man gradually replacing God as the theological foundation, even if this revolutionary change was kept hidden as far as possible in order to avoid outbursts of ecclesiastical rage. God is thus not dead to start with; God has only gone to bed and fallen asleep. But ultimately, what role does His potential presence play when His creation is perfect anyway? The main thing for the individualists is that God has become superfluous, which enables the individual to slowly but surely take His place. It soon became evident that humanism fitted perfectly as the religion for the new capitalist and industrialist paradigm, and society clung to humanism and its individualist and atomist ideal right up until the late 20th century, when the network society emerged with full force and the idea of the network as the new metaphysical foundation caught on. Syntheism is the metaphysics of the Internet age. A shift is necessary because the philosophy of every paradigm must have its own blind but nonetheless relevant faith as a basic axiom. The masters of informationalism – the netocrats – quite simply perceive the network as the most striking metaphor for the necessary metaphysical foundation of the paradigm.
Beyond the ongoing paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism (see The Netocrats) we need a new metaphysics, a new religion, a new common arena for collective spirituality in the Internet age. Without a credible metaphysics – no philosophy and no meaning either. Man is the meaning-generating animal constantly scanning his environment for patterns that indicate and keep confirming various causative links that engender a feeling of security. And if we do not find any such patterns, we don’t hesitate to quite simply invent them. With a utopia on the horizon, we give our lives a direction and a context. God is another name for utopia, and utopia is another name for God.
The philosophical discipline that deals with, compiles, compares and makes us aware of our existential stories is metaphysics: the branch of philosophy concerning our pictures of ourselves and of the world which are fundamental to our personalities and the collective. To be a metaphysician is to formulate and articulate the largely unarticulated ideas of the self and the world and thereafter propose changes in these that render them more relevant and productive for the agent in question. If physics deals with everything that can be measured and transformed into mathematics, metaphysics is preoccupied with precisely all the important things that cannot be measured nor transformed into mathematics. Metaphysics thus comprises everything within ontology, phenomenology and epistemology which cannot be converted into numbers.
It is important to have clear this fundamental understanding of the historical terms of the production of metaphysics when we are confronted by the fact that no less than three dramatic revolutions exploded concurrently at the start of the third millennium. These three interactive and synergistic revolutions are the Internetisation of planet Earth, the relationalist revolution that is moving from physics to philosophy, and the chemical liberation within physiology. Taken together, these three epoch-making developments laid the foundation for a new superparadigm in the history of humanity. Power structures, the world view and the view of humanity were radically and fundamentally changed all at once in one of the most dramatic social upheavals humanity has ever seen.
Nothing ever happens twice, since every moment is completely unique and the relationships that surround a phenomenon at a specific moment are constantly in a state of flux, and they will not either ever reappear in the same configuration again. In the enmity within philosophy that has existed between mobilists and totalists ever since disciples of the mobilist Heraclitus clashed with the totalist Plato’s adherents in Ancient Greece in the 5th century BC, it is now Heraclitus’ successors who appear to be our contemporaries. The results from experimental metaphysics that are based on the ideas of Niels Bohr indisputably place themselves on the side of mobilist relationalism. Plato’s world of ideas is nowhere to be found outside of his own neurotic fantasies. Thus the universal laws that Kant, Newton and Einstein presume to be primary in relation to the Universe’s physical existence do not exist either. In reality, habits that resemble laws arise in and with the Universe and physics. There is quite simply no mysterious set of rules built into physics before its genesis, since no external prehistoric builder of such laws exists.
Religion can be summed up as various practices carried out by people in search of meaning in their lives. This is so, no matter whether the religion in question takes that meaning as preordained, as something revealed, or as something that is to be sought and created within the framework of religion. Building a credible religion is primarily about long-term thinking and enormous patience. It is the only intellectual discourse that does not allow itself to become the object of tendentiousness. Religion can never be a fashion. Regardless of whether religion is theist, atheist or syntheist, it is of the utmost importance that it is kept separate from the secular. Politics goes deeper than markets, but religion goes deeper than politics. And theology invariably rests deep down underneath philosophy.
Feudalism is the second paradigm, which starts from the emergence of written language and is characterised by permanent settlements, land ownership, agriculture and the domestication of livestock. Society’s focus lies on the domestication of animals and plants and a low-intensity class struggle between the aristocrats and the peasants. Written language was invented and started to develop as early as more than 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, after which it arose in three other places (Egypt, the Indus Valley and China) roughly simultaneously and independently of each another. But it exploded in use over the entire Eurasian landmass during the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age (Achsenzeit in German) between 800 and 200 B.C. The Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek cultures flourished during the Axial Age, since for the first time it became possible to build empires (an order from the administrative centre of the empire could be expected to arrive un-garbled and be implemented as intended out in the provinces), and it was at this time the world was also blessed with the first formalised world religions – for example Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism and Judaism – and the first documented philosophy. It might be added that additional advanced civilisations in for example Italy, Ethiopia and Peru developed soon thereafter.
Just like all epoch-making ideas, syntheism arrives in history right when philosophy has run aground between a traditionalism (in this case theism) and a cynicism (in this case atheism). Only through perfecting the individualist paradigm can mankind grasp its terrible consequences, and then, and only then, the door to the syntheist possibility swings open. It is only syntheism that can liberate atheism from its logical curse: its inheritance from theism’s negative attitude towards immanent life. Only by going from atheism to syntheism can we open the way for a genuinely sensual and thereby also spiritual understanding of the immanence. Atheism robs the human being of her access to the holy and the divine by first sharing theism’s conviction that the holy and the divine must be synonymous with the transcendental, and then murdering the transcendental and thus reducing the human being to a cold and indifferent immanence, which is axiomatic for atheism. What syntheism does is that it picks up mankind in precisely the immanence where atheism has abandoned him and makes him apprehend the immanent as the truly holy and divine without any nostalgic longing for transcendentalism at all. Through syntheism’s deepening of the very premises of atheism, atheist cynicism becomes syntheist affirmation.
Meillassoux argues that the only possible way out of classical atheism’s deadlock is to embrace syntheism’s idea of a philosophical and immanent divinity rather than a theological and transcendental one in the traditional sense. He advocates the thesis that the constant contingency that characterises existence must be regarded as the logical opening for a possible future God based on the idea of justice instead of the idea of amorality. Meillassoux’s syntheist divinity – he calls his philosophy a divinology rather than a theology – lacks the Abrahamic God’s bond to the amoral chaos that the logic of moralism demands. Meillassoux thus treats traditional religion’s passions in a way that radically differs from classical atheism: it is the utopia and not the fall of Man in classical religion that must be won back. And winning back the utopia and turning it into an immanent divinity is, with contemporary physics’ revolutionary advances, quite plausible. Meillassoux’s God, as a synonym for the utopia, is of course syntheism’s Syntheos.
Meillassoux constructs an alternative that the failed, atheist project in itself cannot produce: existence is eternally contingent and thereby full of potential hope. Classic atheism is namely based on the faulty assumption that existence is controlled by chance when in actual fact it is controlled by contingency. It is contingency which, through the advances of contemporary physics – in its capacity as the metaphysical constant of physics – unites philosophy and religion in a new holy conjunction beyond the narrow horizon of deadlocked atheism. By deepening atheism and developing it to its logical conclusion, we implement the dialectical shift over to syntheism. Syntheism is atheism.html">radical atheism.
The syntheist ambition can hardly be formulated more clearly. In the conflict between the traditional roles of the philosopher and the priest – where Meillassoux of course takes the philosopher’s side – the atheist is reduced to little more than a deeply irritating, passive observer. Where the atheist lets the priest keep religion as his monopoly, Meillassoux responds with the words: God is much too serious a subject to be left to the priests. Transcendentalism must be rejected quite unsentimentally in order to leave room for a religion that loves, worships and believes in the immanence and its enormous potential. Only philosophy can carry out this necessary action. For Meillassoux, the demystification of existence, the striving for deconstruction – classical atheism’s big project – has namely reached the end of the road. Deconstruction appears to be only paralysing for mankind, making him incapable of conceiving of the utopia, and thereby also incapable of formulating the vision, and in this way cultivating hope for the future. Meillassoux turns this upside down and argues that the real blasphemy and idolatry must be to insist on a transcendental god in the contemporary world. According to Meillassoux, God is to be placed in the future and be completely immanent. Like all utopias, Meillassoux’s God is virtual rather than potential; neither possible nor impossible, but contingent and thereby beyond any kind of probability calculation.
Here syntheist thinking refers back to Zoroaster’s philosophical revolution in the Iranian highlands 3,700 years ago. Meillassoux gets inspiration from Gilles Deleuze, while Deleuze gets inspiration from Henri Bergson. Bergson in turn takes his inspiration from Baruch Spinoza, and Spinoza, for his part, was educated by Moroccan Sufis, who in turn relayed the legacy of Zoroaster’s immanent philosophy – the pantheistic branch of Sufism should be regarded as Zoroastrian philosophy hidden under the Islamic flag – the original divinology if any. Zoroaster’s concept of a coming Saoshyant denotes a utopian character created by mankind or rather by the future itself, that is, something quite different from Judaism’s and Christianity’s Messiah as a saviour sent by a god who has failed to complete his own creation in a satisfactory way. Since syntheism takes its starting point in Zoroaster, this means that in relation to its precedent Christianity, syntheism must be seen as historically and logically consummated Christianity, a kind of monistic and immanent Christianity that accepts both the Father’s and the Son’s death and which welcomes the divine manifestation through the Holy Ghost as their replacement. God springs from the meeting between the faithful and nowhere else. The Holy Ghost, without the Father and the Son, thus becomes merely the name for syntheism’s Syntheos.
Note how Zoroaster’s divinity exists independently of the human being and that it does not need her in order to be supplied with its self-glorification. Zoroaster sees no point whatsoever in sitting and romancing narcissistic gods when existence in itself already offers the divine on a silver platter in the form of nature (Pantheos), only to then let the divine be manifested in one’s fellow man as the Saoshyant (Syntheos). As a consequence of his ambition to make the community the divine, Zoroaster even eschews the construction of reclusive and monastic cultures and other chosen alienation within Zoroastrianism. The community is sacred in its capacity as Mazda’s incarnation; according to Zoroaster all people must be accorded a place within the congregation. Zoroaster is quite simply the first thinker for whom fellowship between human beings is more important and above all more divine than the glorious power of the great Other, localised in a distant past or above the clouds. Or to take the word religion literally: Zoroaster not only invents the concept of philosophy (Mazdayasna) a millennium ahead of his most proximate followers Anaximander and Heraclitus in Greece; he also invents religion in its literal sense, as that which restores the intimate ties between people.
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.
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.
However, the problem is that the phenomenal and indisputable utility of mathematics in the most diverse of contexts has blinded humanity repeatedly throughout history and tricked humans into making the most fatal mistakes. The subconscious attraction in Plato’s dualist philosophy – when it becomes widely accepted in ancient Greece in the 4th century B.C. – probably lies to a large extent in Plato’s religious aspirations, and it is of course also these that later make Platonism Judaism’s perfect partner when they together constitute the two main ingredients in the aggressively dualist Christianity. Paul is the Greek Jew, the hybrid between Moses and Plato; Pauline Christianity is ancient Egypt’s cosmological dualism, resurrected through the reunification of its Judaic and Greek branches (comparable to ancient Iran’s cosmological monism in Zoroaster, represented by Heraclitus among the Greeks).
This means that physical reality, according to Plato, is merely a chimera: a world of shades populated by imitations of secondary quality. The real reality is instead the pure and elevated world of ideas, accessible only to those philosophers who think along the lines that Plato himself designates. Here, or course, the chaos and impermanence of the physical world does not prevail; rather, everything is regulated by mathematics’ preordained and eternally valid laws. As a predictable consequence of this, Plato also advocates philosophy’s enlightened despotism as the most desirable form of government. He has no sympathy for the Athenians’ democratic and thus intersubjective experimental work. Without insight into and understanding of what is true, the ruling collective can only lead the state astray.
Syntheism is the exact opposite of Comte’s sociology as religion. In syntheism it is science that gives birth to philosophy and philosophy that gives birth to syntheology. Religion is dependent on and builds on science, not the other way around. But then syntheism is also, if we borrow McGilchrist’s metaphors for a while yet, the result of the right cerebral hemisphere’s constant search for an applicable holism. It is only through setting these eternalisations in motion and in relation to each other, through remobilising and thereby making her existence sacred, that mankind produces and experiences meaning in life and is able to alleviate alienation. It is only when the human being becomes an agent that her life gets a meaning. Adding a holistic perspective to life thus in itself constitutes making the world religious: recreating (an idea of) a context, a (basis for) fellowship. Regarding everything that exists as an endless multitude of expressions of and for one and the same substance, the One, is syntheism’s innermost core.
Mobilist thinking experiences a veritable golden age in Greece during the early Axial Age. The influence from Zoroastrian Iran is considerable. Heraclitus, Greece’s own Zoroaster, lays the foundation for both philosophy.html">process philosophy and paradoxism. He gives priority to sight (mobilism) over hearing (eternalism) among the human senses and direct experience over indirect interpretation. And while he is at it, Heraclitus also creates dialectics; he argues that creativity only can develop and grow where a clear opposition to the prevailing order reigns. Homer’s myths and Aeschylus’ classic drama revolve around holistically thinking people who live in a monist universe, and these ancient texts bear witness to a protosyntheist world view. It is during this period that Thales, the father of the natural sciences, produces the first syntheist tweet in history: All things are full of gods.
Even though Bentham himself does not even seem capable of understanding that his bizarre ultrautilitarianism is a physical impossibility – what can never be formulated in advance, for example human utility, can of course never be measured in advance either – the Panopticon is an exceptionally interesting metaphor for Bentham’s own and his many followers’ autistic fantasies about their own castrated and isolated subjects as the self-evident centre of the Universe. It is hard to imagine a clearer example of how the psychotic reversal from impotence to autocracy constitutes the necessary dialectics for generating the Cartesian fantasy. What we see is a battle over who is the most autistic out of the two most autistic thinkers in the history of philosophy. Through his utilitarianism, if possible Bentham makes himself even more Cartesian than René Descartes himself. But thereby also even more alienated and alienating. The Panopticon exposes utilitarianism’s view of humanity, the concept reflects Bentham’s total lack of trust in his fellow humans and also in himself. The legacy from Bentham has given us what is possibly alienation’s clearest contemporary symbol, the paranoid surveillance camera.
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.
Hegel is unique, not least because he remains de facto outside the regularly recurring dichotomy between totalism and mobilism in the history of philosophy. Instead he concentrates on drawing innovative conclusions from the revolution within the history of ideas that his predecessors have begun – primarily Newton within physics and later Kant within philosophy – by moving philosophy from the external, physical world to the internal world of the mind. There Hegel resolutely builds a complete theory about how the mind views itself, as a mind. Thus he makes himself into an eternalist, without, in the manner of a Kant, thereby resorting to totalist fantasies. Hegel’s point of departure is that if the noumenal reality that surrounds Man still remains impossible to reach (which Kant maintains), and if it makes itself apparent in a way that, in the best case, can only be measured (which Newton does), philosophers should hand over external reality to the natural sciences and instead concentrate on the most important aspects of what science cannot tell us anything valuable about, namely the human mind’s conception of and obsession with itself.
From the preordained conclusion that, in the final analysis, the mind strives to be able to think itself as itself, Hegel sets in motion one of the most original and most innovative projects in the history of philosophy. How does the mind arrive at the thought about itself as itself before itself, if the only possibility to do so is to pass through an endlessly long historical, tautological loop? And correspondingly: If the mind is free to form its own opinion of itself independently of all conceivable external influences, in that case what religion – credible to itself – would this mind invent and develop? After an extremely long and roundabout but unremittingly exciting journey, Hegel arrives at his final destination, Atheos, the god that does not exist, the god of emptiness. The history of the mind begins in any case with emptiness; non-existence not only predates existence but according to Hegel is also its engine – and then not in any kind of physical sense. The Universe starts with a something; there is no nothingness before somethingness in physics, except as always with Hegel in just the mental sense. For this reason he lands exactly there.
These well-considered choices of names are of course open to discussion in this ironic polytheism for no end of time; the four syntheological concepts were created in a participatory and intersubjective process in a syntheist online forum and, in good netocratic spirit, lack an original dividual author. The movement has thus agreed as a collective on these names together. But these supraphenomena are highly real and together with Friedrich von Schelling’s powerful foundation work and Martin Heidegger’s magnificent extension work constitute the groundwork within advanced metaphysics. And both extension and interior design work is still ongoing. American philosopher Robert Corrington, for example, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, constructs a system around what he calls the four infinities. Atheos corresponds to the sustaining infinite in Corrington’s metaphysics, Pantheos is another name for the actual infinite, Entheos corresponds to what Corrington calls the prospective infinite, and Syntheos is another name for the open infinite. The Irish philosopher William Desmond constructs a similar system in his book God and The Between around the three transcendences: Atheos is here the name of the interior potentiality (T1), Pantheos is the name of the exterior actuality (T2) and Entheos is the name of transcendence as transcendence per se (T3). The only reason that Desmond does not use a fourth component in his metaphysics is that he chooses to completely avoid the future as a theme; otherwise Syntheos would be obvious as Desmond’s T4.
Here it is important to understand that time is probably the most mysterious concept within both philosophy and physics. Even if totalist-oriented philosophers such as Plato and scientists such as Einstein in some strange way were to be proven correct in that time is an illusion, they still do not succeed in thinking of the world without a metatime within which this illusory time is presumed to exist. Even if Einsteinian mathematics succeeds in magically tinkering with time by turning it into an extra dimension in connection with space, and thereby, for example, forcing it to move backwards as well as forwards, there is no proof whatsoever that any such time as an extra dimension in connection with space actually exists in physical reality. Nobody has yet succeeded in turning the uncompromising arrow of time, which inexorably moves from the past into the future through a now which is in constant motion (at the very moment that you speak the word now it has been supplanted by yet another now and has therefore advanced to become a then). This explains why duration stubbornly bounces back as a metatime every time the Platonists try to convert it into an illusion. It is quite simply impossible to get past time, and already with time as god, Entheos thus is necessary in syntheology.
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.
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.
Therefore syntheism finds ideological allies among mobilist philosophers such as Lao Tzu, Leibniz, Hume, Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson and George Herbert Mead. All of these thinkers are veritable gold mines for syntheology. To take just one example: Heidegger and Deleuze shift the phenomenological focus to the oscillation between Pantheos (becoming) and Atheos (being). Heidegger calls this relational phenomenon finite transcendence, while Deleuze discusses the same thing under the concept of psychic individuation. And it is precisely finite transcendence and psychic individuation that makes possible the transition from philosophy.html">process philosophy to process religion. What then is process religion in practice, if not the collective name for immanent spiritual experiences?
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.
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.
The historical problem of philosophy is that it has focused strongly on direct connections between phenomena, and thereby has been forced into extreme theoretical constructs about either direct connections or no connections at all, when the overwhelming majority of all connections in actual fact are indirect. It is through this ubiquitous indirectness that everything is interconnected with everything else. It can be difficult to apprehend quantum physical phenomena in the macro-domains that we usually associate with classical physics, but the phenomena repeat themselves there nonetheless, if you only observe them attentively enough. All physics is thus in the final analysis essentially quantum physics, which means that even metaphysics must be concordant with quantum physics. If this constant complementarity is not taken into account, we can say goodbye to both intellectual respectability and the contact with physical reality for good. If, on the other hand, complementarity is factored into the calculation, an objectively speaking far more correct world view opens up, more so than anything humanity has ever experienced before. This doesn’t exactly lend itself to reducing credibility.
In Karen Barad’s radically universocentric onto-epistemology, we abandon the dividual identity and shift our focus to the Universe itself. Inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy and in particular with support from Bohr’s quantum physics, Barad completely pulverises transcendental correlationism which had dominated Western thinking since Kant. By pitting Bohr’s ontic principle of determinism against Heisenberg’s epistemic uncertainty principle, Barad opens the way for agential realism, a relationalist philosophy driven by a radical pathos for a completely new kind of potential objectivity. As for Bohr before her, the renowned waves and particles of quantum physics are only abstractions for Barad. The most important thing is not that the waves and particles are contradictory but that they are complementary. This is what is called Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle. Phenomenologically we express this by saying that the wave is a mobilist phenomenon, while the particle is an eternalist phenomenon.
Baradian phenomenology is based on a constantly ongoing intra-activity within phenomena rather than an inter-activity between various distinct subjects and objects. Every individual phenomenon is both a fundamental building block in existence and concurrently intra-acting, filled with internal activity in all directions. Barad wants to kill off Kantian representationalism and its fixation with the patriarchal reflection. Representationalism is an obvious by-product of Cartesianism. Representations have constantly been prioritised at the expense of what they are presupposed to represent. By instead building first from Foucault’s and later also Latour’s and Butler’s post-structuralist ideas of performativism, we open the way for a philosophy that shifts its focus to direct engagement in material reality. All phenomena are constantly affected by the performativity of their environment. Large quantitative differences in performativity create phenomena with radically different properties.
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 Universe obviously needs no preceding divinity in order to exist. There is no need for any religion whatsoever when existence is in a state of constant expansion. However, the moment we move from becoming to being, the theological perspective becomes necessary. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism requires a syntheological accompaniment. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos in itself gives rise to the metaphysical impulse. We express this by maintaining that being requires God. We see this movement with Hegel when he transports himself from Atheos to Pantheos and sees the World Spirit (Welt Geist) being born out of this movement. But the same thing also occurs with Deleuze when he moves from Entheos towards Syntheos and sees the plane of immanence being born out of this movement. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos is in itself the original sacralisation of existence, the birth of metaphysics. Through the process of eternalisation, chaotic existence is transformed into a single coherent substance, what the mobilist philosophers call the One. And the One is of course the name of immanence philosophy and process theology for God.
Secondly, Brassier confuses quantity with quality. Even if quantitatively speaking pain were more prevalent than pleasure in existence – which definitely can be questioned: pain and pleasure are, to start with, often each other’s complements in various multidimensional experiences rather than each other’s opposites – it does not mean that the pain is qualitatively more important and thereby more identity-generating than pleasure. Here syntheism contributes something that Brassier overlooks in his philosophy, namely the spiritual experience. What characterises the spiritual experience is above all its production of infinity in the present, which means that it transcends the quantitative, places quality before quantity, and thereby enables the existential and thereby ethical prioritisation of life and pleasure over death and pain. The infinite now defeats drawn-out and maybe even life-long suffering, not just in the moment when it is experienced concretely, but even more as the identity-producing memory which generates ethical substance; something that arises only afterwards in the processing and integration of the event into the life fantasy, where it lives on as a constantly identity-generating abstraction.
A few really profound spiritual experiences may suffice, or even just one, in order to motivate a syntheist believer to endure and soldier on in a life replete with toil and set-backs. The syntheist philosopher Robert Corrington sets up this qualitative spiritual ideal as intense ecstasy against its opposite, drawn-out melancholy, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy. Here the memory function of consciousness plays a central role. We need not return to life’s greatest intensities all the time in order to recall them, but thanks to memory we can return to, and in this way reuse, life’s greatest and most valuable intensities as creators of existential meaning. And it is of course precisely in the form of memories, and not as direct experiences, that emotional intensities give life its meaning. As experiences per se the most powerful intensities are almost unbearable in their extension; constantly being in an ecstatic climax must be regarded as a form of psychotic madness rather than perfect pleasure of life.
Beyond value philosophy’s traditional pair of opposites vitalism (Bergson) and antivitalism (Brassier), syntheism instead is based on the concept of pure complexity. It is about a complexity which, like Deleuze’s other differences, precedes the production of identity. It is the pure complexity in network dynamics that gives the agents and phenomena their value, not the other way around. For life is, regarded as just life, really not much of a life to speak of. It is mostly lots of death. Life is always based on an act of self-sacrifice and must therefore be regarded as an isolating breaking off from life itself. As such life is doomed to obsessive repetition of its own act of death. Vitalism only hits the right note when it ceases to deify life as higher in standing than non-life, and instead views life as large-scale, duplicate non-life, as yet another in a long line of pure complexities. For what is life other than a cloned, discrete feedback loop that happens to be able to multiply itself?
The decisive break with Kantian correlationism comes with relationalism in Niels Bohr’s physics and philosophy of science in the 1930s. Relationalist ontology is in fact not just interactive, like relativism, but definitely also intra-acting. According to relationalism, every phenomenon in the Universe is unique, since both its external and its internal coordinates are completely unique for every position in space–time. Symmetries exist only in mathematical models, never in physical reality. This means, among other things, that no scientific experiments can ever be repeated in exactly the same way twice. It is hardly surprising that in the 1930s old friends Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein engage in a correspondence that is often frustrating on both sides. Their letters attest to the dramatic scientific paradigm shift from Einsteinian relativism to Bohrian relationalism.
Kant is thus right about factiality, things might be completely different from how things stand for the moment. But Kant’s rationalism – his blind faith that everything that occurs is subordinate to a divine wisdom, and that his own human ratio is fully sufficient to embrace everything that happens given time – results in his never developing this factiality fully and not drawing the inevitable conclusion. It is thus Kant’s unfounded rationalism which forces him into determinism, not the other way around. Therefore the relationalists must also leave Kant behind and seek other allies in the history of philosophy. The syntheist Quentin Meillassoux finds such an allied thinker in the empiricist David Hume – one of Kant’s strongest rivals in the 18th century – not least for the reason that Hume provides support for the conviction that one and the same material and existential vantage point can give rise to an infinite number of different outcomes. Existence outside the correlation in question is neither stable nor fixed and therefore philosophy cannot in all honesty pretend that this is the case. Hume and Meillassoux are thereby joined in a strong factiality, from which Meillassoux constructs the philosophical school that goes under the name speculative materialism.
Hume and Meillassoux depart from Kant’s troublesome, incorrect determinism and opens up philosophy to the empirically established indeterminism in Bohrian quantum physics. It should be noted here that Leibniz presages relationalism even before Hume does so with his principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz was not only one of the most significant and most original predecessors among the philosophers, but also an innovative and brilliant mathematician. He built a Monadology, a kind of early variant of the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, which precedes Kantian Platonism. Above all, with his credibility within the natural sciences, Leibniz created the most clearly defined mobilist alternative to the contemporaneously developed Newtonian totalism. The metaphysical antagonism between Leibniz and Newton presages the struggle within our own contemporary physics between on the one hand relationalism and its cosmological Darwinism, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more complex; and on the other hand relativism and its fixation with the second law of thermodynamics, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more simplified as it expands and disperses.
The American philosopher Michael Epperson shows in Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead how Whitehead – a favourite disciple of William James, American pragmatism’s other father figure besides Peirce – single-handedly constructs a relationalist rather than a relativist metaphysics in parallel with, and completely independent of, the quantum physics revolution which began to pick up pace during the 1920s. According to Whitehead – whose name was revered among physicists after the publication of his mathematics tome Principia Mathematica in 1913, co-authored with his disciple Bertrand Russell – existence in essence consists of current events and not of atomistic objects. History is thus an endless quantity of events stacked on each other, where an intense and concrete series of mobilist events always precedes the permanent and abstractly eternalised object. Whitehead’s experience events can be described as a kind of Leibnizian monad – but not without windows, as Leibniz imagines the monads, but rather with hosts of windows that are constantly wide-open to the surrounding world.
What makes Whitehead the first fully-fledged relationalist among the mobilist thinkers, and particularly interesting from a syntheological perspective, is of course that he does not understand the obsession with killing the idea of God which occurs in many of his contemporary philosopher colleagues (in particular Russell, who after a strict upbringing in the High Church British aristocracy hated everything that he associated with religion). According to Whitehead, creativity is namely existence’s innermost essence, and this creativity – which he calls in fact God – permeates every single one of the myriad of current events that unfold throughout the course of history in the Whiteheadian universe. According to Whitehead, to not then use the elastic, cogent and extremely functional concept of God in order to encompass this fundamental creativity – thereby formulating a process theology as much as a philosophy.html">process philosophy – would be tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater for no reason and to no good use whatsoever.
If geometrogenesis proves to be the best theory for describing the origin of the Universe, then it is likely to have no less than dramatic consequences, to put it mildly, for philosophy, too. To start with, the Universe can no longer be a kind of Heideggerian accident in a metaphysical sense; the theory does not provide scope for any cosmological accidentalism of the type that the static theories of the Universe’s origin de facto assume. All forms of accidentalism are of course inevitably based on myths of stasis, equilibrium and isolation as normal states. But this is not what physical reality looks like. It is, as so often the case in history, the metaphor of death that plays too large a part in the collective fantasies of human beings for us to be able to understand how physical reality is constructed. From the Garden of Eden to the great silence before, for example, the genesis of physics, life or consciousness: again and again the fantasising returns to the same eternal worship of stasis, equilibrium and isolation, a fantasising that ultimately can result in only one thing: a suddenly emergent, vital chaos that disturbs and interrupts the mortal order, that is, the decisive anomaly that means that the dreamed-of paradise is lost. However, cosmological accidentalism seldom or never has any relevance whatsoever in physical reality. The Universe is not human. In fact, the normal state of the Universe is vitality and intensity, not death and extinction.
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.
At the dawn of the Internet age, hardly surprisingly, we were inundated by innovative relationalist philosophy. The culture critic Steven Shaviro is inspired by Whitehead’s pragmatic world of prehensions and nexi in his book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics. He does not refrain from also investigating such philosophically controversial concepts as vitalism, animism and panpsychism in his work. In her book Vibrant Matter the Deleuzian eco-philosopher Jane Bennett champions the argument that it is time once and for all to abandon the anthropomorphic fixation with the axiomatic special status that life constantly has in the world of philosophy, and instead replace vitalism connected to life with a vitalism based on intensity in physics as a unifying factor. Bennett constructs a world of constantly vibrating bodies rather than isolated things as the eternalised forms of processes, but her bodies are both human and non-human, living and non-living, where it is precisely the vitality of the bodies and nothing else that is allowed to take centre stage.
The correlationists do not seem to understand that stability as a property is independent of all requirements for necessity. Oddly enough Zoroaster realises this difference already in ancient Iran about 1,700 years B.C. when he formulates the concept of haurvatat, a state that contains a kind of sacred perfection and at the same time is constantly in motion and dynamic; haurvatat may well be regarded as a synonym for the syntheist idea of the infinite now. Zoroaster’s genius lies in that he places holiness in the mutable and not in the immutable, which is in total contrast to Platonism and the Abrahamic religions. What brings Zoroaster and the relationalist physicists together is that they all maintain that relatively stable states can arise more or less regularly in an otherwise completely contingent universe. The symmetry that is so passionately desired – from Kant to Einstein, both within philosophy and within physics – is actually the opposite of contingency. Symmetry is eternalist and contingency is mobilist.
However, it is the eternalistic background that is the real chimera in this context. To take one example, there are of course lots of local subsystems but no isolated systems anywhere in the Universe. This means that all the theories that require the existence of isolated systems collapse sooner or later. As a consequence of this, it is pointless to go further into physics with theory building that is not background-independent, because if they are the least dependent on a fixed eternalised background, these theories do not hold up to closer scrutiny. In fact, the Universe displays no need whatsoever for fixed backgrounds. The eternalist background is merely a fiction, the last remnant of the Abrahamic and Platonist fantasy of the God that precedes the Creation. But such a God of course does not exist, as we know. He died. The Universe does not need the eternalist background any more than it needs God the creator. Whitehead, Bohr, Barad and Smolin understand this, and their predecessor Leibniz understands it much earlier, but it turns out that this is something so extremely hard to accept for Einstein, who both idolises and is intoxicated by mathematics, which explains why from the point of view of the philosophy of science he clings onto relativism and is not able to move on to relationalism.
What disturbs the Platonists about relationalism is that the mobilist world view sooner or later must yield to the principle of explanatory closure. The ontic flow must be eternalised in order for it to be converted into words and numbers. The principle of explanatory closure means that eternalisation is unavoidable, but the trick is of course partly to freeze eternalisation where it captures mobilist reality as well as possible, partly to most humbly realise that every eternalisation is only a clumsy digital rounding-off of a much more complex, analogous phenomenon in expansive motion. philosophy.html">Process philosophy, and in the case of syntheism process theology, is therefore the best vaccine against the taxonomic deification of the object. Only a consistently executed philosophy.html">process philosophy can immunise us against totalism’s tempting, simplifying superstitions. Syntheologically we express this as Entheos’ presence preventing us from getting stuck in Atheos or Pantheos per se, and instead continuing to direct our attention towards the real oscillation between them.
But while Dawkins has a markedly reductionist attitude towards memetics – all human expressions can be broken down into their smallest components, individual memes – Blackmore is the first proponent of a relationalist memetics. She points out that a cluster of memes often undergoes an emergence and together these memes form in fact a memeplex, a phenomenon that de facto constitutes something more than just its smallest constituent parts (the various memes). Thereby Blackmore succeeds in doing something which Dawkins and Dennett failed to do: namely, to explain how a society, a culture, a civilisation – the outermost forms of memeplexes – arise, survive and even propagate, based on a strictly memetic explanatory model. Thus, as a memeplex of its own, memetics must be regarded as a memetic replication of semiotics, a discipline in the borderland between philosophy and science whose roots go back to John Locke’s vision of a science of signs which he formulates in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as early as the end of the 17th century.
Semiotics is primarily pragmatic rather than syntactic, not least since Peirce is a relativist and not yet a relationalist. Thus it is still in the individualist paradigm. Semiotics is namely focused on what the sign is presumed to represent – according to Peirce the sign would not be a sign if it did not correspond to and translate some external object into language – while memetics chooses to act regardless of typically Kantian concerns, such as whether external, objective or intersubjective truths really exist, and if so in what way. This means that semiotics presumes that the interpretation of signs in a prevailing society – the discipline that is called hermeneutics within philosophy and exegesis within theology – can be carried out by an independent, external observer: the hermeneuticist. But nothing could be further from the truth. The hermeneuticist is of course also steeped in the prevailing paradigm, and therefore must be primarily regarded as a technological as well as ideological by-product of the same, and not, in some exceedingly diffuse and mysterious way, as its neutral and distanced interpreter. There are indeed no neutral and distanced interpreters, either within physics or sociology; such a position is quite simply both physically and socially impossible.
A meme survives and multiplies by making copies of itself, and thanks to its ability to blend in and appear useful or entertaining for a certain subject in a given situation at a certain point in time. Once again: it has nothing to do with what is true or false. This distinguishes the meme from the sign as a concept. Memetics quite simply constitutes a relationalist radicalisation of semiotics in the same way that Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy is a relationalist radicalisation of Peirce’s and William James’ relativist pragmatism. Through memetics – in particular through the introduction of emergent memeplexes – we shift towards a network-dynamics understanding of culture’s relationship to nature. The individual is no longer needed and has no function in this analysis. The dividual of network dynamics (see The Netocrats) takes over, and as a result of this paradigm shift, Man is taken from the centre of science to a peripheral seat in the grandstand, where he must be content with acting as the passive spectator and at the same time being seized as a storage and transportation vessel subservient to the extremely dynamic evolution of memes. All the work is done by the memes. The anthropocentric impulse and Man’s pride thus gets yet another flick on the nose, which in turn opens the way for universocentric interdependence, which is attendant on network dynamics.
However counter-intuitive this may sound for the syntheist agent, she can only regard herself as a by-product of the ideology coming from the future, and in this Hegelian sense act in a revelatory role and as a supervisor vis-à-vis the now prevailing but rapidly eroding ideology. For it is only in the collision between the ideological paradigms – the history of ideas time after time shows how philosophy virtually explodes with creativity as a direct consequence of a socio-cultural paradigm shift, with Axial Age Greece and India and early Industrialism’s Western Europe and North America as illuminating examples – that speculative philosophy can see through and reveal the illusory qualities of the prevailing ideologies. And there we are at this moment, in informationalism’s infancy, in the midst of a cascade of information flows exploding in all directions, where syntheism is slowly but surely growing as the paradigm’s built-in and necessary metaphysical Higgs field.
In this context it is extremely important to distinguish between psychotherapy’s utilitarian search for happiness in life and psychoanalysis’ existentialist search for the truth about existence. Psychotherapy is a product of psychology, which is a social science. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is a product of philosophy, which means that at its deepest level it is an art form. Psychotherapy is an anthropotechnical project – developed by the capitalist power structure and its nation states and large corporations – which is dedicated to defining patients, that is, deviants from the momentarily prevailing societal norm. The scientists supply these patients with functional diagnoses, filled with an expanding flora of pathologies, which must be treated in order to promote the societal body’s well-being. Historically speaking, and possibly with a measure of cynicism, we can regard the psychotherapist as the capitalist tamer of individuals – a professionalised and commercialised replacement for the shoved-aside, good-old, good friend – whose task it is to adapt the citizen to a closed life-cycle of work, consumption and sleep, by robbing her of all forms of authentic intimacy with other people.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, starts from the vantage point that all people are and must be fundamentally pathological creatures; the human being is, and has never been anything but, homo pathologicus. The very fact that the human being believes that she exists as a subject and that she will live and not die attests to a pathological foundation for consciousness that is as powerful as it is necessary. The pathological subject exists in a dialectical tension between the two contracting parties desire and drive. Western philosophy reflects this dialectic as the history of desire from Spinoza and onwards (materialism), pitted against the history of the drive from Hegel and onwards (idealism). The dialectic is essential for both of these forces to be able to survive. Desire is ultimately an attempt to flee from the drive, and the drive is viewed at the most profound level as an attempt to flee from desire.
One way of clarifying the difference between ethics and morality is to study a typical borderline case. Kant creates his transcendental philosophy in the 18th century in the borderland between monotheistic Christianity and atheistic individualism. On account of the growing German and French bourgeoisie, he carries out the self-imposed task of calculating how Man could replace God as the metaphysical centre of existence. Kant borrows the answer from Descartes and maintains that Man is the Master of existence for the simple reason that he can think. But existence can of course only be experienced by Man, the reason being that it requires a consciousness in order to be able to experience it and only Man thinks consciously. He is thus master of a house that he inhabits all by himself.
Since ethics is a more or less free choice between various alternatives – the more freedom that exists in a context, the more ethics is required – and since Kant has made the subject and object of ethics into one and the same thing, he is forced to reduce his ethics to a tautology. When asked the question why it is right to do the right thing, Kant answers laconically that every action should be carried out as if it were universally valid. In other words, it is right to do what is right for the simple and pointless reason that it is right to do the right thing. And then we have not even touched upon the question of exactly what this automatically executed right thing actually is. The only reasonable reaction to Kant’s tautological imperative comes from his successor Nietzsche, who realises that all notions that value philosophy is able to formulate as the right thing in advance must be rejected. Instead he recasts value philosophy as an anthropological project occupied with what Man is anyway already doing and why. The prescriptive value philosophy of Kant is answered commendably by Nietzsche with a descriptive and interactive enlightenment project. Thereby Kant is reduced to a banal moralist, while Nietzsche stands out as the real ethicist.
The point here is that in the Kantian borderland between two value paradigms, interestingly enough Man has neither the amoral God’s freedom to behave as he pleases, nor any judge left to appease in order to get his points registered in his quest for an anticipated reward in eternity. The consequence is that when Kant desperately tries to build a new ethics on top of the old morality – without any foothold in an amoral god – he reduces his phenomenologically divine human being to an ethically paralysed robot. Thereby moralism returns with full force, but this time as a self-referencing feedback loop, where moralism itself has become its own external judge. Understandably enough it is precisely Kant’s peculiar moral philosophy that the succeeding ethicists Hegel and Nietzsche direct their sharpest criticism towards when it comes to Kantianism; in their eyes Kant is nothing other than a naive nihilist, distressingly unaware of the theocide he has just committed. For this reason, both Hegel and Nietzsche pit their pantheist predecessor Spinoza against the deist Kant, and thereby open the way for affirmative nihilism (see The Global Empire), the creative generation of value out of Atheos.
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.
The discrepancy between Man’s external and internal being, the difference between the human, physical brain and Man’s mental image of his own thinking, has always been a fascinating topic for philosophers; in modern times often dealt with within the borderland between philosophy and neuroscience that is called theory of mind. When we make comparisons, the brain has often drawn the short straw and been considered a relatively simple organ, while the mind has been presumed to be incredibly complex and therefore has often been made into something much greater than the brain, into an external phenomenon, a soul that in some mysterious way transcends the obviously limited body. Research concludes however that the human brain has a degree of complexity that is not far behind the rest of our enormous universe. The brain is actually by far the most complex phenomenon that we have so far found in the Universe. A mere fraction of the brain’s capacity is needed for the mind to work satisfactorily. And what we call the soul, that is, the illusory and fundamentally contradictory feeling of owning and being a soul, is very much just a small internal aspect, rather than a great external agent within this greater phenomenon. On the contrary, it is our thinking that is limited and historically speaking a relatively recent acquisition in this context. The difference between the philosophical phenomena the human being (the creature with a mind) and the animal (the creature without a mind) is actually minimal.
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.
Hegel’s role as a magnificently emergent phenomenon in the history of philosophy all of his own is difficult to overestimate. He realises that it is in the oscillation between the experience of an intense being and being convinced of one’s own non-existence that the paradoxist subject resides. Hegel’s transrationalist understanding of the existential experience sounds the death knell for the jewel in rationalism’s crown, the Cartesian subject. Hegel bases his transrationalism on an epistemological necessity: no truth is ever complete in a contingent universe. The stronger an emotional truth experience is, the more clearly it is revealed that it is based upon a kind of mystical, hidden core of epistemic incompleteness that the truth experience intensely tries to conceal precisely through a desperate overemotionality (compare with the fervour of the newly-saved sect member).
The future is always open and multiple. History never rests, but always hurries on. Truth and totality remain incompatible. This means that Hegel’s notorious and idiosyncratic totalism – his seemingly megalomaniacal conviction about the historical arrival of absolute knowledge through his own philosophy – is completely correct if we place it and maintain it at the metalevel. But he does not actually plead for totalism per se. Hegel is definitely not a Platonist; rather, he buries totalism at the metalevel, beyond the eternalist subject’s everyday obligations, but as an abrupt historical conclusion to its vain, narcissistic push for omnipotence. Hegel does not care at all about the individual, Descarte’s and Kant’s divine linchpin down there on the system’s basement. Hegel’s God is named Atheos, the holy void, and nothing else.
This means that if syntheism is to be successful in establishing itself as the metaphysics of the Internet age, it must be constructed on the foundation of an entirely new utopia; an idea that in contrast to individualism in all its forms has credibility in the network society, where the individual is reduced to a curious remnant from a distant past. It must create the hope of the impossible being possible, even for informationalism’s people. Naturally syntheism has no chance of accomplishing this if it were to start from a capitalist perspective, since individualism is just as dead within philosophy as atomism is dead within physics. Syntheism’s utopia must instead be formulated as the consummate network dynamics. And how could a network be consummate, if it were not free and open to the surrounding world and the future in a contingent and relationalist universe?
Syntheist subtractionism must be understood from the actual paradigm shift’s historical possibilities and impossibilities. Paradigm shifts always entail giving the production of the new metaphysics the highest priority, since the one who formulates the new metaphysics also becomes the new paradigm’s truth producer and thereby also one of its most important rulers (such as the clergy under feudalism and the university professors under capitalism). The great new religions and the metaphysical systems are always launched in the transition phases that arise at paradigm shifts. Political activism must therefore often wait for the right point in time in order to have any chance whatsoever of taking off. Critchley’s logic is based on the premise that theology precedes philosophy; it is primary where philosophy is secondary. And philosophy precedes politics; it is secondary and politics tertiary. Theology delves deeper than philosophy, since it engages Man more thoroughly than philosophy can ever do. And philosophy lies deeper than politics, since philosophy is the well from which political activism gets its nourishment. This means that however much we long for a new cohesive political ideology for the Internet age, the creation of the new theological metaphysics and its religious practice must precede the articulation of the corresponding political ideology and activism. Syntheism stands ready when the present system breaks down. But the only possible way forward is to first build a living religion, while waiting for the time to the right for being able to establish and launch the new political ideology.
The American economist Hyman Minsky describes these processes with great accuracy. As the first relationalist economist, he turns to network dynamics in order to find an answer to how bubbles should be managed. Minsky’s answer is that speculation bubbles de facto cannot be or even should be avoided. His advice is rather that many small bubbles that burst often are better to have than just a few that burst seldom but then all the more dramatically and devastatingly. Naturally the dream of an economic equilibrium is yet another variant of the same old Platonist death worship that constantly recurs in the worlds of philosophy, physics and social science. However, the truth is that the economy is also a network-dynamical phenomenon that must be regarded not just as relativist, but relationalist. And it is at the transition from relativism to relationalism that the economy starts to include ecology and all the other factors that sooner or later will influence and interact with everything else of value within the economy. Relationalist economics does not preclude anything that influences dividual or social value creation, particularly factors such as clean air, clean water and the sustainable management of nature’s resources.
Syntheism is radical and evolved atheism, a philosophical concept that captures the inexhaustible and unattainable in existence that philosophy and theology sooner or later must confront. Not least theology, since traditionally utopianism belongs in the world of theology rather than philosophy. More often than not it has been a matter of a longed-for reconstruction of a lost paradise. Syntheology thus takes theology back from its dull life among the traditional religions and gives it a renewed relevance historically. By leaving its traditional hermeneutic search for a meaning that is externally produced in advance, theology instead gains the central role as the intellectual engine for Man’s internal production of credible and functional utopias. For it can no longer pretend to be occupied with silent and inaccessible gods that do not exist. But theology can aid in building longed-for and credible gods centred in, for example, physics, psychoanalysis and utopianism. Syntheology forces theology to give up its historical fondness for transcendence to instead give structure to the new and growing religious immanence. Classical theology shifts over to syntheology, and when all is said and done, syntheology is a utopology. The question of whether any particular god exists or not syntheologically speaking is completely irrelevant. Such a question of course assumes that we are intimately acquainted with some kind of god who does not exist anyway nor has ever existed, and beforehand at that. The correctly posed syntheological question is instead which god might come to exist, and the answer to this question is always synonymous with the core of the vision that is driving the paradigm in question. The syntheological response runs as follows: Tell me your utopia, and I will tell you what god you are seeking and following.
Sooner or later we are confronted by the enormity of existence. To start with, there are enormous distances between us and the things that surround us in everyday life on the one hand; and the smallest components of existence – the vibrating, geometrically multidimensional figures that bind together to form space, time, vacuum and matter – on the other hand. But there are also enormous distances between the small things that surround us and the gigantic multitudes of galaxies in cosmology, the enormous, vibrating voids between them, not to mention the infinite number of possible universes besides our own in a fully conceivable multiverse. The result is the syntheists’ fundamental appreciation of the immensity, intensity and productivity of existence, the theological conviction that the syntheist philosopher Robert Corrington – in his radical reading of the father of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy – calls ecstatic naturalism.
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.
Even relationalist philosophers can fall into the trap of wanting to convert Nature’s behaviour into precisely such an ethical beacon. In his Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier depicts a kind of fascinating Freudian cosmology with the Universe as an entropic giant, dazzled and on his way towards his own extinction – what he calls an organon of extinction. Brassier’s point of departure is that culture has done everything it can to eschew the trauma of extinction. His ambition is instead to construct meaning based on the inevitable annihilation of existence. This Brassier does by attacking both the phenomenological and the hermeneutic branches of Continental philosophy, but also Deleuzian vitalism, which he argues tries to inject all sorts of meaning into existence, as a kind of failed and fundamentally ineffective invocation against the trauma of extinction. Brassier instead bases his ideas on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland and Thomas Metzinger when he makes his appeal for his radical ultranihilism. He points out that the Universe comes out of nothing (syntheism’s Atheos), and his idea of the organon of extinction as a philosophical point of departure – the fact that life can only be experienced against the backdrop of its own inevitable annihilation – according to Brassier is also the condition for thinking existing at all. Syntheologically, we express this by saying that he regards Pantheos and Entheos as merely subordinated aspects of the thoroughly dominating Atheos, where any form of Syntheos is nowhere to be seen at all.
Brassier’s philosophy is indeed firmly anchored in syntheology’s cornerstones Atheos, Entheos and Pantheos (what he misses is the affirmative launching to Syntheos). He is right in saying that this nihilist fundament must be understood as a great historical achievement, a kind of collective intellectual maturation, and not as a regrettable spiritual emergency. But since Brassier’s world is nothing but sublime physics – and he does not, in contrast to Alain Badiou for example, take into consideration Man’s ability to create the truth through an act – he also opens the way for the counter-question of whether his own nihilism means the end of history. And there Brassier has no unequivocal answer. His Freudian cosmology is not even verified within physics. It is sufficient – in the manner of Niels Bohr – to regard time as physics’ real constant, in an indeterministic rather than deterministic universe, in order for Brassier’s drawn-out apocalypse to collapse.
Brassier does in fact understand the trauma of extinction, but he is evidently wrestling with the shock of affirmation which follows from the insight of one’s own mortality. Therefore Nihil Unbound gets stuck in the category protosyntheism. This otherwise so impressive philosophical work, this consummate atheology, remains at a standstill in one of the three bottom corners in the syntheological pyramid, unable to rise towards the top. Brassier claims, which is entirely reasonable, that Atheos is the Universe’s own formidable engine, but he has not started the engine himself nor allowed himself be carried away by the journey within the syntheological pyramid. And the explanation is, as is so often the case concerning philosophical fallacies, psychological. In his quest to stand outside the relationalist universe as a neutral observer, Brassier misses the point that such a psychological alienation for the philosopher is just as impossible as the corresponding physiological alienation for the physicist. Brassier’s inadequacy is that he lacks the oceanic feeling, which is the reward for a genuinely participatory philosophy. Consequently the spiritual work of syntheists strives to attain and then maintain this oceanity.
The utopia is the God called Syntheos, and the core of Syntheos is the existential experience of ego-dissolution and uniting with the One, the unit of existence. Here syntheism leaves classical philosophy and steps into the world of theology. For the step from an illusory existential dividuality to a considerably more credible existential oceanity requires that one leaves philosophy as a transcendental totalism in order to proceed to theology as immanent mobilism. Therefore Brassier’s role model François Laruelle describes the speculative totalism of Hegel as the pinnacle of the history of philosophy, since totalism – which Hegel first completes and then also turns around dialectically – at its core is the essence of the philosophical exercise. If this is the case, mobilist thinking must use theology as a weapon in order to change the course of philosophy away from its fixation on extinction. Since it evidently requires a theological dialectical reversal to reintroduce Man’s emotions as the decisive factor – or syntheologically expressed: Syntheos must be added to the metaphysical triangle Atheos–Entheos-Pantheos – mobilist thinking must claim that theology is deeper than philosophy. Thereby syntheology can begin to act as the necessary metamorphosis that saves philosophy from totalism’s wearisome and destructive death wish.
Mobilist thinking has always factored in the emotions of beings; totalist thinking is instead based on a picture of beings as frozen objects. It is only when we consider Man as a disengaged external observer of existence, Kant’s fantasy, or as a disengaged isolated near-world without an authentic relationship to the surrounding world, Hegel’s fantasy, that we can accept that totalism displays any intellectual honesty whatsoever. On the other hand, for example Heidegger’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s emotionally motivated and theological search for an engaged presence requires a correct overall picture of Man’s life-world, syntheology’s saving and concluding addition. Through the addition of Syntheos the syntheological pyramid is humanised. Only in this way can philosophy save its integrity from Laruelle’s anti-philosophical attacks and win a separate role from the otherwise all-embracing physics. Thanks to the constantly emotionally engaged human being’s actual presence, both in the world and in philosophy, syntheology’s last step is historically necessary. Oceanity is not just a wonderfully liberating feeling, a sweeping emotional experience, it is also the necessary antithesis of cynical isolationism, the necessary logical antithesis of individualism, the only way for thinking to dissolve and once and for all leave the philosophical prison of the dishonest Cartesian theatre.
For it is Man’s emotional engagement that is needed in philosophy and theology, not his internarcissistic and anthropocentric projections on his environment. But neither the void, Atheos, nor nature, Pantheos, offers us any safe haven. We do relate to and allow ourselves to be fascinated by the void and nature, but we do not on that account have to follow their contingent whims at all. We can only create our religious home together with other dedicated believers through an affirmative cultural expression rather than through an ingratiating imitation of nature. For life is not a long drawn-out destructive death; life is instead a passionate, creative dying. Only through its mortality can the subject, Atheos, be experienced in its fundamental, creative emptiness. To live is therefore to live in the direction of death and the subject is that within the agent that is constantly dying. Life is a becoming: only death supplies the being. Syntheologically, we express this by saying that only through dying can God become God for God’s self. By reconnecting Man to this historical origin, this meta-theological fundamental prerequisite, syntheism brings Man back to his rightful place in existence, and in the safest possible company, surrounded by his own most beautiful invention: the created and therefore by definition mortal God’s religion.
The academic establishment’s monopoly on critical thinking – which is already regrettable in itself, since it effectively shuts out life-giving impulses from outside – has placed thinking in a vicious circle of interpretations of interpretations: a collective, somnambulist movement towards a vegetative passivity without any critical questioning whatsoever or any social activism directed towards the statist-corporatist complex that controls late capitalist society as a whole. This relationship is illustrated by the fact that research is conducted on old philosophy rather than any new critical thinking being created. The question we must ask ourselves is why, under late capitalism, the academic world should be better at thinking critically – critical of precisely the system that, by definition, it is an integral and moreover fundamental part of – than other old and in the same sense corrupt institutions in history. This would be like us expecting the Catholic Church during the 18th century to create the Enlightenment and kill God. One does not tend to bite the hand that feeds one, at least not deliberately and consistently.
Since an outwardly directed criticism would imperil today’s comfortable status quo and force undesirable changes, all energy is instead directed inwardly. Research takes over philosophy. And one thing we learn from history is that corrupt, clerical elites in every era have devoted considerable resources to the interpreting of signs and numerology. In the light of this, our age’s academic obsession with hermeneutics appears to be completely according to the programme and logical in terms of self-interest. Therefore the new netocratic elite must establish new and independent institutions – filled with knowledgeable and innovative netocratic thinkers or eternalists (see The Netocrats), without connections to nation states or big capitalist corporations – in order to get informationalist truth production started. This must occur unconditionally outside of the academic world, which cannot very well welcome and promote these new and free institutions without condemning itself.
In his work, Badiou in particular discusses the theological revolution that is introduced with Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. The reason why Cantor’s calculations are called transfinite is that with them he proves that a greater cardinality (a measure of the size of a quantity) is always possible. Mathematics can very well provide a number for the totality, but never totalise the number per se. Cantor quite simply proves that mathematics is always open, and then, according to Badiou, there is no reason that physics also could be open either. Cantor’s transfinite mathematics thereby pulls the rug out from under the totalist tradition within philosophy and theology, and at the same time, it confirms the mobilist tradition’s sudden upper hand under informationalism. Zoroaster and Heraclitus all at once appear considerably more contemporary and clear-sighted than Paul and Plato.
Badiou maintains that every universal singularly is open vis-à-vis the future and remains constantly unfinished. It is not concerned with our mortality or general fragility. He sums up universality as the faithful construction of an infinite, generic multiplicity where the multiplicity must be primary since the One is merely a verbal illusion (that is, the One is the eternalised fictive par excellence, if we use a syntheological vocabulary). Multiplicity is merely a linguistic singular; any singular outside the irreducible plurality does not exist. Every universality is exceptional, has its origin in a single emergence, is assembled step by step, is the consequence of an existential decision, generates an ethical subject and is based on a becoming in an active truth and not on any specific knowledge. Badiou argues that philosophy obviously comprises the art of analysing, but above all is the art of articulating universalities. The truth event arises, according to him, ex nihilio. To begin with, this event is invisible rather than obviously identifiable where and when it occurs. It is not possible to predict or trace based on the circumstances around the situation where it occurs. Instead the truth event gets its status from the faithful subsequently, and its general acceptance is determined by the strength and perseverance of the faithful, their loyalty. It is quite simply the faithful who must make the event true; it can only get its status as a singularity by means of an aesthetic retrospectivity.
To philosophise is to metathink, and what Jacques Lacan calls the real and what Badiou calls the unnamable is philosophy’s eternal variability, its own built-in impossibility, its genesis that consistently avoids transitioning into a becoming. Here Badiou stubbornly opposes Gilles Deleuze’s process philosophical foundation: where Deleuze in following Spinoza states that multiplicity is identical with the One, that multiplicity is univocal, Badiou argues that multiplicity is undefinable. He accuses Deleuze of building a lovely constructivism that relies entirely on intuition, while he himself relies only on the stringency of mathematics. Against this Spinozist and Deleuzian multiplicity of the One (Entheos through Pantheos) he posits the multiplicity of emptiness (Entheos through Atheos), an emptiness that is a non non-being. Only in this ontological equation of multiplicity and emptiness does Badiou see the possibility of correctly reflecting the nature of multiplicity. It is only when somebody gets the energy from Atheos to formulate the truth that the truth becomes an event.
Here mathematics distinguishes itself clearly from language, and here there is thus an opening of the door to the noumenal, the door that Kant believes he has closed. However, Meillassoux ends up in a return to the Paulinist dream of merging the Jewish religion with Greek philosophy and its main current, Platonism. This is apparent in his resistance to the pagan circularity, which for many syntheists is what drives the connection back to previous monist civilisations before the growth and spread of Abrahamic, dualist monotheism. Meillassoux has a fondness for referring to Paul, while other syntheists find a compact monism within quantum physics on which to build their world view and argue that anything else would be dishonest. When other syntheists welcome God per se as Syntheos rather than God as some kind of specific property – God’s attribute is for them as secondary as the attributes of a beloved human being – he challenges us with his God as justice.
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.
In accordance with the reasoning above, if we regard atheism as an emergent phenomenon in relation to theism, the fundamental dismissal of the concept of God no longer appears as such – that is, that which gives the position its name – as its most important theological achievement. No, atheism’s most substantial achievement is its summation of all sorts of theist positions as a uniform and cohesive alternative to repudiate, that is, atheism’s dialectical construction of theism as an idea. Seen as an emergent phenomenon in relation to atheism, as the historical and intellectual intensification of atheism, syntheism in turn is a metareligion, a faith that its practitioners unabashedly practice as a pure religion in itself. Thereby it also confirms and supports all other art forms’ freedom to act from the metaperspective: art as art for art’s sake, literature as literature for literature’s sake, philosophy as philosophy for philosophy’s sake, and so on. And therefore syntheism instinctively rejects all of individualism’s calculations of utility. What syntheism seeks instead are the place and the time for itself as an event. This event is manifested within love, art, science, politics and religion: syntheology’s five generic categories.
Syntheology is in turn the intensification of syntheism that is enabled when it sees itself as a truth as an act and focuses on one single wisely chosen eternalisation, in order to intensify the thinking based on this fundamental point. It is precisely this we mean when we say that correctly practised theology enables an intensification of philosophy. Syntheology’s well-chosen eternalisation is neither God nor the Individual, as in the previous paradigms, but religion per se as the network before all others in the informationalist society. The term religion – in its original significance as a social phenomenon that connects people with each other – is in fact synonymous with the term network. This means that syntheism is the metareligion that binds together humanity through practising a truth that sees the network – that is, religion per se – as sacred. Syntheology thus realises what has always been the innermost dream of a religion for religion’s sake.
The will to know is Man’s instinctive reaction to the trauma of extinction, his almost exorcistic attempt to expel this existential tormentor. At a deep level, the philosopher must realise that he is already dead; philosophy is not an affirmation of nor a justification for anything, but rather just one more by-product of the drive in its eternally revolving repetition of the same. But this does not prevent the will to know, the game of hide-and-seek with Pantheos, at some point from achieving a result that can influence the expression of the drive. The clearest example of such an effect of the will to know is technological development. Technology is what has developed most dramatically during the course of history; the development that has had the most far-reaching consequences, and is more a kind of ironic by-product with its origin in the incessant ravages of the drive. Technology quite simply changes the rules of the game in the social arena in a way that is, to say the least, radical. This is precisely what the books in the Futurica Trilogy are about. Now we are taking that argument one step further, and moreover in a new direction.
Syntheism’s sacred locales might just as well be dance floors on Saturday evenings as quiet rooms of contemplation on Sunday afternoons. Periods of unbridled carnival celebrations could be alternated to advantage with periods of meditation, yoga, fasting or quite simply just silence and concentration. The four quarters in the syntheist calendar – Athea, the three months after Atheos (winter solstice), Enthea after Entheos (spring equinox), Panthea, the three months after Pantheos (summer solstice) and Synthea after Syntheos (autumn equinox) – open up possibilities of celebrating a host of different festivals and commemorative days, coupled with specific rituals and ceremonies. But the question is where the inspiration and guidance for the development of these rituals and ceremonies is sourced from. Traditionally, philosophy and theology have of course had that specific role. But at the dawn of the Internet age, these disciplines are in deep crisis. In fact, they have not even succeeded in predicting the arrival of the Internet age, the netocracy or syntheism, and now that these are established facts, both philosophy and theology are having difficulties in formulating relevant questions, never mind any credible answers. These disciplines are helplessly stuck in the past, fixated on increasingly irrelevant social antagonisms, unable to see and reflect on the utopian potential of the future.
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.
During the 20th century, academic philosophy is instead reduced to a stuffy, self-referencing loop. Like an old castrated monster, it behaves as though interactivity, the new physics and chemical liberation do not exist, nor can exist either. So why has philosophy got stuck in the suffocating grip of hermeneutics? How did it come to be impacted by postmodern paralysis? The answer can, once again, be found in the academic marginalisation of philosophy that occurred during the 20th century. From having been a dialogue between independent agents, between politically and artistically driven activists, philosophy was transformed during the 20th century into a politically controlled and socially castrated activity. Philosophy became a business exclusively practised at universities and on academic terms, and thereby creativity was weakened within the discipline, with some extremely rare but consequently also so much more important exceptions, for example psychoanalysis and pragmatism, which in principle also evolved precisely because they had access to their very own institutions.
The question is how it was imagined that philosophy would be treated in an intra-academic environment in the first place, controlled by the statist-corporativist establishment. Since it must then, of course, adapt itself in the service of the establishment, all that then remains for philosophy is to either produce material for a dreary, never-ending recycling of footnote-heavy formulaic language and a reactive, ruminating retelling without receivers anywhere outside their own institutions; or to flare up into career-strategic attacks on the same historical material, but without having one’s own arrow of time directed forwards towards a potential utopia. Philosophical creativity is replaced by a kind of hermeneutic, presumed scholarliness. Based on this wider historical perspective, deconstruction during the second half of the 20th century is no triumph at all for philosophy; in the best case it is merely the least detrimental by-product from a century that, for the philosophical discipline, is to be regarded as substantially lost.
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.
Only in the 1990s does criticism begin to stir, and it is of course the rapid growth of the Internet and experimental metaphysics that open up the possibility of clearing a path out of postmodernist alienation. Historically and for obvious reasons, constructive criticism with the purpose of opening the way for expansive, creative thinking has always come from the outside. What academic philosophy has dismissed as an impossibility – the growth of a new metaphysics for the new Internet age, and thereby the construction of a new social theory of everything – is of course de facto made possible by the interactive conversations that are going on with frenetic intensity in extra-academic, virtual spaces. The netocrats are undermining the universities’ monopoly on metaphysical truth production in the same way that the universities once undermined and razed the Church’s monopoly on the same. The use of a constantly expanding Wikipedia is exploding while national encyclopaedias in fancy bindings are gathering an increasing amount of dust in bookshelves that nobody ever visits. History repeats itself when a new information-technology paradigm enables the growth of a new structure for truth production right under the very noses of the old, tired and corrupt elite, who are unable to intervene even if they had had the energy to do so, since the material conditions – and thereby the rules of the Darwinian punishment and reward system in the surrounding culture – have been fundamentally altered.
In spite of the fact that the Internet revolution is fundamentally and radically changing the conditions for human identity production and at the same time is directing a lethal attack on the capitalist power structure, initially it passed by relatively unnoticed: the capitalist entrepreneurs kept believing for a long time that the Internet revolution merely translated into an increased revenue flow which strengthened their position without resulting in any tangible problems. Because the philosophers are in fact still sitting in the academic chairs and are obediently serving the outgoing capitalist paradigm without any tangible desire or ability for radical questioning or ideological adventurousness. Giants such as Martin Heidegger have of course already established nostalgically that technology as such is evil. The striking parallel is naturally with how the clergy were left sitting inside church buildings vegetating in their internarcissistic, self-congratulatory homage to each other while the universities in the name of science expanded from the 17th century onwards, and in time took over truth production in society. Consequently, the philosophical innovative thinking that actually arises during the 20th century comes more or less entirely from alternative environments far out in the periphery in relation to academic philosophy, where Jacques Lacan’s pioneering psychoanalytical school, which arises in a medical research environment, stands out as the singular most significant philosophical contribution of the 20th century.
Nowhere is philosophy’s tragic academicisation as evident as in the servile acceptance of the discipline’s own specialisation. Instead of taking some form of responsibility and attacking, or at least problematising, the fragmentation of the social arena that the academic and the professional hyperspecialisation of the 20th century gives rise to, philosophy heedlessly contributes to precisely this triumph of fragmentation by prostrating itself for this development and letting itself be split into lots of small, limited subject areas without any overarching critical discourse. Philosophy surrenders masochistically to hyperspecialisation, internalises it and produces texts that both embody and uncritically celebrate the fragmentation per se. This is most apparent in academic philosophy’s escalating demonisation of metaphysics and its metanarratives under late capitalism.
However impressive, such a flow of specialism cannot however hide the glaring absence of a penetrating and visionary generalism. A multitude of loud-mouthed, self-satisfied voices – who have absolutely no consideration for nor show any understanding of multiplicity as the One – cannot of course produce any more meaningful narrative than the tragic internarcissism which is hypercapitalism’s response to all issues in contemporary society. The result of this process of decline is the self-absorbed game by analytical philosophy of a kind of ‘pick-up sticks’ with the terms, and postmodernism’s endless dissecting of the older generations’ narratives about mankind and the world. The very attempt to create a new, cohesive metanarrative is branded as a mortal sin within philosophical discourse. Instead, everything is reduced to a regression of sign interpretation without end: philosophy is finally completely paralysed and is thrust into the hyperhermeneutical state. For this reason, syntheism’s serious attempt to create a new, credible metanarrative for the Internet age is a highly conscious, logical negation of the entire academic-philosophy paradigm. Philosophy returns to the essentials in the form of syntheology, instructed by independent, critical thinkers based on the interests of the burgeoning netocracy, where the logical follow-up question is what political expressions will grow out of the syntheological discourse.
If it was already built into the hyperhermeneutical state that it would come down to an intellectually sterilising banning of all metanarratives, how can syntheology respond to the glaring need for the return of utopianism? In order to understand at all how philosophical discourse is politicised, we must start by studying how political philosophy developed during the individualist and atomist paradigm. Capitalism is the constant carnival. The allure of the pay cheque is strictly limited, however. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink shows how an increased salary increases productivity only when it comes to boring, monotonous tasks similar to those that were carried out by industrial workers in the factories of the 19th century in Europe. However, productivity in late capitalism’s knowledge-intensive jobs has no positive correlation with increased salary; the case is rather the reverse. Autonomy, having a vision, professional pride and social identity are the most important factors for maintaining and preferably even elevating the motivation and productivity of workers – not a fat pay cheque.
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.
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