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Self-love
The ethical self-acceptance of one’s own body and its physiological and mental prerequisites and expressions. Self-love is a logical decision and not an emotional feeling and it has nothing to with narcissism but is rather the complete opposite of narcissism. See, by way of comparison, amor fati.
It is important to understand that Hegel is not talking about some kind of narcissistic self-reflection – which might be easy to believe if we take contemporary Man’s view of the world as a starting point: narcissism is fundamentally a misdirected neurotic compensatory behaviour; even Hegel knows this, long before his disciple Freud. On the contrary he is talking about a self-centredness which if anything is reluctant, but from a historical perspective highly motivated; a logical consequence of the intense, subconscious search for self-love, which drives all metaphysics. It is a phenomenological, not a psychological self-seeking. For Hegel the subject is only found in one place, namely as what tacitly does the asking when the question “Who am I?” is posed. And this it asking the question, he deliberately calls the spirit – as in the Zeitgeist or the Weltgeist (“World Spirit”) – and not the soul, as if it were about some kind of Platonist opposite to the body. For just like Spinoza, Hegel is a monist, not a dualist. It is after having read Spinoza that he utters the familiar saying: “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”
The dark underside explains why, on closer inspection, liberal democracy lacks incentives to defend the free and open Internet, and why if anything it is developing into netocracy’s most aggressive enemy. Because one of liberalism’s basic tenets is, in fact, that individual people – liberalism likes to call them individuals, and not without good reason – are so different from each other that every material form of mutual sympathy is precluded by definition. This is in spite of psychoanalysis teaching that the differences within the divided subject are greater than the differences between people. This has the consequence that if the mythology of liberalism is to be taken seriously, self-love is an impossibility. And without genuine self-love, there is no heroism either. Quite logically and consistently, syntheism’s monist and holistic dividual is therefore the radical opposite of liberalism’s dualist and divided individual.
Instead of Brassier’s organon of extinction, syntheist ethics is based on Zoroaster’s classic axiom: Man’s ethical substance is his thoughts, his words and his actions, and in precisely that order. It is only on the basis of a radical identity creation that ethics finds its mark. And what is this ethical principle founded on if not self-love’s being or non-being? Only the creature who loves herself as she is, from a crassly logical and ethical acceptance of herself, rather than based on any kind of sentimental and unreliable emotional passion, can act in an ethically correct way. And then survival is the ethical beacon, based on the principle of maximisation of existential pleasure – most clearly manifested in the religious ecstatic state that syntheologists call the infinite now – rather than any kind of premature mimicking of an alleged future universal annihilation.
Ego fixation and its engine narcissism are strictly compensatory phenomena. These conditions are driven by fear and ignorance rather than by consciousness and reason. What gets the ego fixation to allow in the spiritual experience is the growth of ethical self-love as the correct way to confront the dramatic subjective experience. Self-love is thus the antipole of banal narcissism. The most common logical error about self-love is otherwise that it should require that one passively waits for an emotion. The background to this is the delusion that all forms of love are feelings and nothing but feelings. But at least self-love is different in comparison with other forms of love in several respects. Partly because it is a logical imperative and not a sought-after effect: there is one relationship in life that you can never opt out of, that you must learn to live with, and that is the relationship with yourself. Partly because self-love is fundamental for all other forms of love – it is the passions’ own Higgs field – love of others and of life gets its power from self-love and not the other way around. On the other hand, narcissism is based on self-contempt and is nothing other than compensatory behaviour on top of this self-contempt – a clear sign of self-love that is deficient.
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.
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.
What is interesting, when we get closer to self-love and self-hatred, is their diametrically opposed logical premises. Contrary to the conventional image of love and hate, where love is presumed to be directed at a thing and hate directed at a nothing, it turns out on closer inspection that quite the opposite is actually the case. Self-love is always directed towards Atheos, the necessary void at the centre of the subject. All love is love for the void in the object of love, but this fact never stands out more clearly than in the very act of love, this truth as an act of blind faith without either substance or emotions, from which all passions then get their driving force. A person who loves does not know more precisely what it is that she loves about her beloved, since what she loves about the beloved is the void in the centre of the love object and the possibility of projecting love onto this object that this void in fact makes possible.
According to syntheism, self-love is truth as an act above all others. Love yourself, without involving any emotions whatsoever, because you have no choice. Just act. Out of this conscious and logically cogent self-love as truth as an act flows love to everything else that exists in an intensely pulsating, creative Universe. The opposite of alienation-enjoying self-hatred could hardly be clearer. But self-love stands firm only in this fundamental conviction: that in essence love is a constitutional act without emotions and from which all other love passions later emerge. And this act in its purest form is self-love; the love of the encounter between the self and the divine where integrity arises. The moment when one’s self-image and world view attain a harmonious reconciliation with each other is the event that the syntheists poetically call the infinite now or the immanent transcendence.
Thereby self-love, as truth as an act, is the obvious foundation for all syntheist rituals and ceremonies. It is the eternally recurring starting point for all spiritual work, whose ultimate purpose is to give the members of the congregation a strong and stable personal integrity without narcissistic elements. Since the self is in constant flux, and since all other emotions are dependent on the act of self-love, the act of self-love must be repeated time after time after time in the syntheist agent’s life. This repetition – this cycle of difference and repetition, as Gilles Deleuze would express the matter – constitutes the Nietzschean core in the syntheistic spiritual life. A look at one’s naked body in the mirror, followed by the decision to unconditionally accept this body as the current expression of Pantheos, as the Universe’s construction for housing the subject and its consciousness and passions, as an object to love merely by virtue of an existential decision, a personal primordial event. “This is what I am, this is the body that houses my many dividual identities and I love this body in order to be able to love myself, in order to thereby be able to love anything at all. Because I identify myself with the will to love.” Truth as an act cannot be expressed any more clearly.
Once the foundation of self-love is laid, the syntheist agent is open and receptive to the process that is called transparency within the community. The purpose of transparentisation is to maximise openness within the congregation, to bring its members closer to each other, to allow intimacy to develop, so that the collective manifestation of Syntheos is realised. Religion is about bringing people together and giving them an emergent, collective identity that is greater than the dividuals separately and greater than the sum of all the dividuals together. This occurs, for example, through the establishment of sharing circles, where the agents bear witness to their innermost thoughts and experiences in front of each other. However it is of the utmost importance that the transparentisation – in the spirit of the French philosopher Michel Foucault – follows the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines) and therefore is carried out from the bottom up rather than from the top down; that is, it is those who are strongest, most powerful, those most established who open themselves up first before the community in a process where everyone shares more and more of their innermost emotions and thoughts for every round of the sharing circle.
From a theological perspective, the syntheist fall occurs when self-love turns into narcissism. Therefore it is necessary for syntheism to steadfastly fight internarcissism. Narcissism is just as present in the self-appointed victim as in the person in power. The syntheist hero instead surrenders herself, unreservedly and anonymously, in a brotherly/sisterly communion with the syntheist community. Beyond this communion, ethics is born in the making of agency: as an agent, within and together with the syntheist congregation, the dividual seeks a strong ethical identity, an existential substance, which is realised when a promise becomes action. According to the amoral but incorruptibly ethical Zoroaster, ethics is a perpetually recurring feedback loop: You are what you think, what you think affects what you say; you are what you say, what you say affects what you do; you are what you do, what you do affects how you think, and so on. Only through identifying himself as a syntheist agent can the dividual enter into and complete the Zoroastrian ethical circle as an intra-acting phenomenon within the syntheist community.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58