Ressentiment

4:21 (In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

Evolution is quite simply such a strong and captivating metaphor for many of the 19th century’s intellectuals that they very much want to make it the fundamental ethical principle, as if it were the task of the righteous in some bizarre way to speed up a history whose development is of course anyway preordained according to their own determinist conviction. For Marx, the Communist revolution of the proletariat, for example, is a deed that he must command his readers and disciples to carry out, in spite of the fact that, according to his own view, it will take place anyway because of the historical necessity that he himself and Friedrich Engels describe in their writings. In a similar manner, Comte regards his social evolutionism as so perfect that strangely enough he wants to turn it into a secular religion. Social evolutionary ideas continue to thrive in Europe up until the mass murders of Nazism and Stalinism around the mid-20th century. Then, if not before, the danger of arguing for a militant ethics based on a vulgar natural determinism and driven by alienation’s ressentiment rather than by religion’s search for benevolent dialogue with one’s fellow man, becomes manifest. In this way the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century are the dark flip side of the Enlightenment. Rationalism without consciousness of its own fundamental blind faith is, as Habermas’ gurus Horkheimer and Adorno show in Dialectic of Enlightenment, literally lethal for humanity.

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.

6:16 (In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

There is no external god outside the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism. The syntheological concepts of Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos for example are produced within and not outside the dialectic. The fact that nature itself constantly produces new emergences means – as the syntheistic complexity theoretician Stuart Kauffman demonstrates in his book Reinventing The Sacred – that no external god is necessary. The deeper we delve into the relationalist onto-epistemology, the more clearly it generates an ethics of its own in stark contrast to Platonist moralism with its condemnation of movement and change in favour of the eternal being; the perfect and therefore immutable world which does not exist. But relationalist ethics does not maintain some kind of chaos at the expense of the cosmos. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism instead generates entheist ethics. To open oneself up to variability is to affirm the active affirmation. On the other hand, to close oneself off in order to fight variability is to surrender oneself to the reactive ressentiment. Lacan picturesquely describes eternalism as the masculine and mobilism as the feminine pole in the dialectical relation between them. Taoism’s founder Lao Tzu, the entheist philosopher par excellence, of course calls them yin and yang.

9:29 (In »The syntheist agent and her desires and drives«)

Ethics is an intention founded in an identity in relation to the anticipated result of a cause and an effect. It is the anticipated effect of the action that gives it its ethical weight. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas thinks of ethics as an internal, intersubjective process without any requirements whatsoever on external, objective truths. Various conceivable intentions are weighed against various conceivable chains of cause and effect in a kind of civilised dialogue. Regardless of whether we apply ethics to a dividual or a collective, ethics is founded on an attitude. Nietzsche argues that this attitude is either active or reactive. The active attitude seeks an impression, an impact on existence, a confirmation of the agent’s interaction with its surroundings, in order to attain existential affirmation, a realisation of its own substance. Nietzsche calls this attitude the will to power. Against the will to power stands the reactive attitude, the will to submission, obliteration, a production of identity through identification with the victim rather than with the hero. This reactive attitude creates a bitterness towards existence, it produces and is driven by ressentiment, a perverted pleasure – rather than authentic pleasure – based on an escalating narcissistic self-loathing.

9:30 (In »The syntheist agent and her desires and drives«)

The active attitude produces a steady stream of identities, it seeks creative novelty in an active engagement with its environment, it builds an emergent event emanating from the oscillating phenomenon that includes the syntheist agent. On the other hand, the reactive attitude thrives on maintaining distance, through a narcissism turned away from reality, where the energy is used to stimulate ressentiment for the purpose of repudiating the surrounding world, so that the subject can cultivate the belief in itself as an abandoned and isolated object, floating in a state of permanent masochistic enjoyment. Since the slave mentality – dissected by Nietzsche – constantly seeks a minimisation of its own living throughout life in order to be as close to extinction as possible (what Freud calls the drive.html">death drive), it also seeks submission in relation to other agents, because it flees from authentic intimacy for fear of losing the masochistic enjoyment where it has found its existential sense of security. The slave mentality prefers safe totalist suffering over unsafe mobilist pleasure.

9:31 (In »The syntheist agent and her desires and drives«)

This deep-seated and serious mental masochism should of course not be confused with playful sexual sadomasochism, which has nothing at all to do with any kind of ressentiment. However, there is in all masochism a desire to engage in play-acting, to pretend intimacy when the sadomasochistic act in reality aims to maximise and maintain the distance to the other, which, for example, explains the strong connection between sexual sadomasochism and polyamorousness. This play-acting in the public sphere becomes an (often fully conscious) protection against intimacy in the private sphere in the same way that the connection to many in practice is the same as the connection to no one at all. To the extent syntheism is a doctrine of salvation, it is thus about salvation from this masochistic enjoyment and towards the affirmation of authentic intimacy, completely independent of sexual practices. It is about making the syntheist agent and her desires and drives into an existential hero instead of a pathetic victim. In other words, the syntheist agent is identical with the Nietzschean übermensch.

13:19 (In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

Self-love is naturally no guarantee for the genesis of any other love. On the other hand, the person who genuinely loves herself in the capacity of a syntheist agent within an intra-acting phenomenon has the ability to also love the rest of the world outside the subjective experience. World view and self-image are two sides of the same coin, the one being dialectically dependent on the other for its existence. This also applies of course to the relationship to one’s own reflection. Therefore self-love is both a mental and physiological necessity for being able to love at all, including amor fati, the logically and ethically conditioned love of world history up until now. She who lacks self-love, who hates or is indifferent towards herself, is unquestionably unable to love anything else whatsoever. Moreover, she who hates herself must shift that hate onto some other person or some other object in order to be able to experience her existence without constantly being reminded of the hated self. However, the self-hating human being cannot love at all. Therefore she transfers this self-hatred onto the existential dissolution into ressentiment – bitterness against existence as a whole. This expresses itself as the idea that things could and should be different than they are, which they cannot and therefore are not going to be, which in turn can be experienced as comfortable by the self-hater who, without any doubt or reservations, can settle in permanently in his ressentiment.

13:20 (In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

This ressentiment expresses itself as blind submission to and worship of various external phenomena. The reason for this is that worship is a form of passion that does not require any love whatsoever; worshipping is driven by impulsive ruthlessness while loving is driven by long-term benevolence. Passionate but ruthless fascism is the self-hate ideology par excellence. When it comes to emotions, ressentiment can be every bit as passionate as love. It can create a dependence on more and be experienced as every bit as existentially satisfying as love. The American shopaholic in the department store, as well as the unscrupulous Nazi camp commandant and the Islamic fundamentalist who detonates bombs among innocent civilians, are extremely passionate beings, but their glowing passions stem from self-hatred, not from self-love. These are passions that seek destruction and an intense enjoyment, rather than love’s search for playfulness and gratifying pleasure. It’s about a twisted hatred which, just like all other forms of hatred, stems from constitutional self-hatred.

13:31 (In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

This would mean that if syntheism were to be linked to the Renaissance and Romanticism, melancholy is also the key to syntheist art. Which of course also applies in the reverse direction: for art, syntheism is the only possible way away from individualistic isolationism towards the holism of network dynamics. But it also requires an artist who builds her work on participatory pleasure instead of narcissistic enjoyment. The artistic auteur is thus yet another Napoleonic ideal that must die in the informationalist society. The reason is that syntheist art is created by an artistic dividual who believes in the community’s utopian possibilities, rather than by an artistic individual who revels in a ressentiment vis-à-vis her own time. And this must also occur without the art ever being allowed to fall into the trap of rationalist banality and lose its magic. Art must be constantly founded on and return to Atheos.

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