Process religion

6:6 (In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

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.

6:9 (In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

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?

6:10 (In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

Deleuze advocates a Nietzschean affirmation of the eternal return of the same in constantly returning loops of a kind, without substance of their own, with only minute changes for every revolution, which opens the way for the sudden genesis of emergent novelties, for example in the process-philosophical, artistic search for the genuine expression, or in the process-religious, spiritual search for the genuine impression. Therefore, artistic expression and spiritual experience strive towards the syntheist emergence made sacred, through which they can communicate an actual meaning, impart an existential substance, to the syntheist agent’s existence. The conclusion of this train of thought is that the credible spirituality of our time – which is important when syntheism is compared to competing religious and metaphysical alternatives – can only arise within the confines of the immanent process religion. It is not possible to take other religious and metaphysical alternatives seriously as spiritual projects in the Internet age; they cannot be anything other than guilt-driven nostalgia (like holding on to the religion of one’s parents in spite of it having become irrelevant) or nonsensical superstition (such as New Age and other commercial, exoticised posturing masquerading as spirituality).

6:13 (In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

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.

6:27 (In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

Barad’s role-models Michel Foucault and Judith Butler also take a thrashing as she constructs her universocentric onto-epistemology. As post-structuralists, Foucault and Butler are, in Barad’s eyes, still too anthropocentric. Post-structuralism is wedged between Einstein’s Cartesian representationalism and Bohr’s agential realism: it has not gone the whole hog and left Cartesian representationalism behind. Kant’s ghost lives on. Post-structuralism has, to use Barad’s own wording, still not transported itself from antihumanism to posthumanism. Therefore, post-structuralism still in fact dances around the Cartesian subject that it both claims to and believes it has dissolved. Barad does go all the way however and leaves post-structuralism’s antihumanism behind. The Hegelian dialectic between humanism (personified by Descartes) and antihumanism (personified by Nietzsche) is consummated in Barad’s appeal for posthumanism; a parallel movement to the dialectic between theism and atheism, which dissolves into syntheism. It is not just objective reality that returns in a surprising new guise through agential realism. The same thing also applies to theological truth, which returns with full force as syntheist process religion.

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58