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Universe
Everything that has existence regarded as one cohesive phenomenon. Used also as a synonym for the Cosmos and the syntheist divinity Pantheos.
1:4
(In »Everything is religion«)
So in fact, this seemingly simple question must be nuanced and made more specific, at least somewhat, in order for us to be able to discuss it in a meaningful way. What the answer will be – and what the question actually means – depends, of course, partly on what we mean by “God”, and partly on what we mean by “exist”. Let us start with the latter, which might perhaps be the most convenient place to start. A beautiful poem, untitled, one of the very last authored by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – the manuscript is dated as November 19, 1935 – reads as follows:
There are sicknesses worse than any sickness;
There are pains that don’t ache, not even in the soul,
And yet they’re more painful than those that do.
There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us...
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls...
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.
Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
(Translation: Richard Zenith. From Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Books 2006.)
In the poem several assertions are made; assertions about the texture of existence. The poem states that things are this way and that way. There are sicknesses that are worse than any sickness and therefore are also something other than sickness (although they are, nonetheless, sicknesses), and the anxieties from dreams are more real than those that afflict us in what we call life or reality (which means that the concepts “dream” and “reality” must be challenged), and so on. Sicknesses, anxieties, a hint of elusive hopes and a significant measure of resignation. If we were to attempt to identify some sort of all-encompassing feature of Pessoa’s poem, we might perhaps agree that it encapsulates a frame of mind, even an acquired outlook on life. And that this frame of mind and this outlook are coloured by an increasingly lucid sadness.
There are sicknesses worse than any sickness;
There are pains that don’t ache, not even in the soul,
And yet they’re more painful than those that do.
There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us...
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls...
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.
Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
(Translation: Richard Zenith. From Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Books 2006.)
In the poem several assertions are made; assertions about the texture of existence. The poem states that things are this way and that way. There are sicknesses that are worse than any sickness and therefore are also something other than sickness (although they are, nonetheless, sicknesses), and the anxieties from dreams are more real than those that afflict us in what we call life or reality (which means that the concepts “dream” and “reality” must be challenged), and so on. Sicknesses, anxieties, a hint of elusive hopes and a significant measure of resignation. If we were to attempt to identify some sort of all-encompassing feature of Pessoa’s poem, we might perhaps agree that it encapsulates a frame of mind, even an acquired outlook on life. And that this frame of mind and this outlook are coloured by an increasingly lucid sadness.
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.
1:26
(In »Everything is religion«)
This argument runs, as can be seen, in a tight little circle, and Dennett is not impressed. According to the same logic, everything that is said to be perfect and complete also must exist, and this is of course not something we can accept. And if this applies only to God, it is hardly the kind of logic to write home about. Nor does the cosmological argument – according to which everything must have a cause and everything that is created must have a creator, and that this creator is what we call God – appear particularly convincing on closer inspection. The idea here is that the causative link cannot stretch back in all eternity: this appears unreasonable. But if God in some way has created himself out of nothing and has no underlying cause, what is actually stopping the Universe itself from having created itself out of nothing? As we know nowadays, there is absolutely nothing to preclude this. What we know about the Universe actually indicates precisely that it did create itself out of what through ignorance we used to think of as nothing, but which instead turns out to be very much something.
This requirement of a – conscious or subconscious – underlying metaphysics as a platform for all philosophical argumentation means that all speculation must start from an occasionally declared but at times concealed theological assumption. The two main alternatives that crystallise out from Antiquity and onwards are laid bare in the antagonism that arises between the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, where Plato launches the dualist tradition, which prizes cosmos over chaos, the idea over matter, and also foreshadows thinkers such as Paul, Saint Augustine, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and among contemporary thinkers Alain Badiou; while Aristotle represents the monist tradition, where chaos precedes cosmos and matter is primal in relation to the idea, and foreshadows thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. Dualism postulates that the idea itself is divine and as such separate from the worldly, and thereby secondary, matter; while monism postulates that the One, that which binds together everything in the Universe, and within which all difference is comprised of discrete attributes within one and the same substance, is the divine. Of course equivalent conflicts can be found in the history of ideas outside Europe. A clear and illustrative example is the Chinese antagonism between the followers of the dualist Confucius and the monist Lao Tzu.
It is important here to make a distinction between religion and theism, that is, faith in the existence of one or more gods. Since most people throughout history have believed that gods in various guises actually exist, it is totally plausible that most of the metaphysical systems that have been developed have also been theist: monotheistic systems are based on a faith in only one god, while polytheistic systems are based on a faith in many gods coexisting in parallel and more or less peacefully. Pantheistic systems, on the other hand, presuppose that the Universe and God in one way or another are one and the same thing, while what we now call syntheistic systems assume that all gods are necessary, human constructs; historically determined projections on existence that engender supra-objects that are shaped by and adapted to the social situation.
In addition, there are also many widespread religions that are atheist, that is, they devote no energy at all to theist questions. Taoism in China and Jainism in India are well-known examples. Even many forms of Buddhism, such as Zen in Japan and Chan in China, lack a belief in God. Brahmanism in India and Zoroastrianism in Central Asia both lack active deities – while it is true that they are pantheist, they are centred on human rather than divine religious activity, which means that even these religions in practice are atheist. Insofar as God exists, if anything this entity is present through its absence, and accordingly these religions are deist. Note that syntheism is fully compatible with both pantheism (God is created by Man, as a sacralising projection onto the Universe) and atheism (God has not created the world, in all likelihood does not exist today in any philosophically interesting sense, but is fully possible in the future, in particular if the idea is regarded as a human invention).
Thus, Descartes considers himself to have established an original subject, to which he connects a corresponding object. With this as an indisputable axiom, he reckons that he can quickly think into existence more and create more subjects and objects. However, a faith – a faith by its nature is subjective as well as arbitrary and transient – is not the same thing as a truth. A truth is assumed, by definition, to be objectively verifiable, proven by examination and valid for all time. What we are forced to accept, whether we like it or not, is that the foundation of ideas of both the self and the world is always a more or less cohesive faith and never pure knowledge. We believe ourselves to be practising science when the subject observes the Universe. We know that we are practising religion when the subject experiences that the Universe is peering back at the subject. But actually, neither the inner subjects nor the outer objects that we believe that we are perceiving, and which we use as building blocks when constructing our image of the world – our paradigm – exist.
Our subconscious is constantly driven by the idea that there is someone else out there in an inaccessible dimension outside our physical universe who sees and knows all and senses the meaning of all the toil and pain we go through in our short lives. This also applies to the most entrenched atheists. Even if the atheist’s consciousness does not believe in the great Other, his or her subconscious refuses to accept that this great Other does not exist. Even in the most die-hard atheist, little thoughts and behaviours constantly float up to a conscious level in daily life; thoughts and behaviours that remind us that the real, the subconscious depth under the conscious surface, will never accept the absence of the great Other. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls all of these sudden, revealing outbursts sinthomes. The sinthome is quite simply the event or behaviour that does not fit with the individual’s current fantasy of his or her ideas of self and the world. Thus, the sinthome is also the event or the behaviour around which the human being is forced to construct new, altered ideas of self and the world when the old fantasies collapse. The sinthome is the deepest truth about oneself that a human being can be aware of.
We humans are not only powerfully attracted to anthropocentrism: a slightly grotesque tendency to constantly exaggerate our own position, power and importance in the Universe; a grandiose overestimation of ourselves that we have grappled with, without respite, throughout history. Unfortunately, the problem is even more serious than this. Our personal individuation – as individuals, our demarcation from the social flock – is namely actually dependent on a process that we term internarcissism: it is through constantly seeking validation of our own identity with other people, other beings of our own species – who accordingly find themselves in exactly the same existential dilemma as ourselves – that for a fleeting moment we can experience ourselves as happily liberated from our narcissistic prison, the pathological self-centeredness that is our constant companion.
It is hardly tone-deaf atheism that inspires us most. Rather it is Spinoza’s pantheism that is philosophically consummated through a further development of syntheism. God is no longer only the final idealisation of Spinoza’s pantheism, God as the subject of the Universe; rather, God acts as humanly produced idealisations even on other planes, among which the Internet as a theological realisation is a typical example in our time. If divinities both can and should be created through idealisations necessary for survival – why then, like Spinoza, settle for Pantheos, the Universe, as the only god? In particular since the Internet actually has its own agenda, controls us rather than lets us control it and, to put it bluntly, is beginning to assume divine proportions. Moreover, there is a long list of idealisations available to the syntheologists to develop into divinities in order to then make themselves into their memetic host organisms and preachers and thereby contribute to their dissemination. In this book, we are concerned with the four most basic idealisations from the world of metaphysics: the void, the Universe, the difference and the utopia.
The conflict over the metaphysics behind physics – clearly illustrated in Albert Einstein’s and Niels Bohr’s passionate correspondence from the mid-1930s – finally gets its resolution through experimental metaphysics, also called the second quantum revolution; a long list of complicated scientific experiments from the 1980s onwards, the results of which have had dramatic consequences for metaphysics. The results of this development strengthen Bohr’s position considerably in the above-mentioned conflict, which is why both Newtonian and Einsteinian metaphysics with their requirements of timeless, universal laws seem increasingly passé. Bohr’s indeterministic relationalism overshadows Einstein’s deterministic relativism. The constant of physics is time, not space. Time is not an illusory dimension of space, but highly real. Mathematics does not precede the Universe: mathematics is never anything more than an idealised approximation in hindsight of constantly dynamic Nature, an arbitrary and anthropocentric eternalisation of a genuinely mobilist reality (see The Global Empire).
This results in agential realism defeating atomist individualism as the foundation of metaphysics. The network is not only a useful metaphor for understanding social relationships; the Universe is basically one large physical network in itself, where all phenomena, beside the fact that they themselves constitute constantly higher complexities of constantly lower sublevels, are universally entangled with each other. The entanglements are thus the fundamental, not the illusory, objects. Nothing occurs independently of something else. The result is a physics and a universe of fields, probabilities, energies and relationships, without any preordained laws or discrete objects. Thus all support for Kant’s fantasy of the holy object localised in a law-bound, determinist universe disappears. Kant, Newton and Einstein: all of them now appear to have been left behind. Time is real and the future is open and totally controllable.
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.
As if this revolutionary advance were not enough, Bohrian quantum physics also shows that the Universe is an existential necessity: some kind of non-existence has never been an alternative. Regardless of whether a universe within a multiverse is born out of a virtual fluctuation, or, for example, out of a black hole, it nevertheless always arises sooner or later in quantum physics’ active void. Similar but never identical events then occur again and again. A perfectly balanced Universe in terms of energy can expand indefinitely as long as the positive energy from its matter is counterbalanced by exactly the same amount of negative energy from gravity, as is precisely the case in our 93 billion light-years wide universe. There is simply no lack of basic resources within physics, in contrast to the limited assets that constantly constitute the framework for all activity on planet Earth, which is in every respect limited.
In relationalist physics, the existence of the Universe is far more than a possibility, it is in fact a necessity. And with this necessity there is no longer any other metaphysical alternative than pantheism. The existence of the Universe is not an external by-product, it is de facto internal inside and comes from the essence of the Universe. The Universe exhibits a will to exist that emerges from out of the very foundation of physics. This means that the Universe has a clear existential substance, however bizarre and alien this highly non-human will to exist may seem. The Universe definitely has no consciousness in the way that we humans have, or even anything that we could speak of as any kind of cosmic equivalent to human consciousness. The Universe needs no awareness, but it is definitively something and it does many different things. For the simple reason that nothing else would be physically possible.
Accordingly, the entire basis of classical atheism disappears. Existence is no mistake. The existence of existence is wondrous in its indeterminist necessity rather than in any kind of supposed determinist randomness. A non-existence in the sense of a balance without energies – the only non-existence that physics can even contemplate – is the only really bizarre and impossible probability in this context. Everything in the Universe, including its seemingly enormous void, is boiling with a constant, intense, virtual activity. Its imagined non-existence is, like its (at some time in the future anticipated) cessation, nothing other than anthropocentric fantasies with a metaphorical origin in mankind’s own intrusive thoughts around our own mortality and impermanence. However, this human mortality has in fact nothing at all to do with the world of physics.
The will to exist is not only a by-product of human eagerness to survive, funnily enough it is the Universe’s own raison d’etre in relation to itself. Just as much as mankind, the Universe is a product of Darwinian evolution, where continuing and expanding existence constantly accrues to the phenomenon that happens to be best adapted to the current situation, while competing phenomena disappear. This means that the Internet age’s syntheistic metaphysics focuses on survival and not on immortality. Syntheism entails a worship of this intensity and of indeterminist existence rather than a death worship and determinist illusion. The Platonic cult of death, from the ancient Greeks via Christianity to Newton’s and Einstein’s fixed, atomist world views, loses all its credibility.
Totalist thinking cannot deflect attacks from the mobilist alternative, its constantly questioning shadow, where Leibniz’s time-bound and open world view defeats Kant’s timeless and closed world view. Pragmatism triumphs over idealism. The law loses its overwhelming, metaphorical power. Laws are created by humans in order to control otherwise chaotic societies, in order to impose power from above and benefit social masochism at the expense of creative freedom. But in nature there have never been any preordained laws. The regularity that science finds in nature is nothing other than similarities within the framework for the preordained conditions between different processes. But there are no preordained laws that nature must subject itself to in the same way that slaves are expected to yield to their masters. There is nothing timeless and predetermined outside our contingent and open universe. The law has exercised a magical power over people’s world views ever since it arose in a theology that was functional at the dawn of civilisations, but it now stands exposed as an empty myth.
By building a maximally functional hierarchy of literate soldiers – even the cannon-fodder at the front lines were educated before waging war in Napoleon’s army – with himself in the function as God’s all-seeing eye at the very top of the hierarchy, Napoleon created a fascinating killing machine of a kind never beheld before. Subsequently, all the institutions of industrialism were built in the 19th century with Napoleon’s army as a shining example: the nation state and all its bureaucrats, the company and its factories, the police, the prison, the school, the hospital, the colony on the other side of the ocean: organisationally they are all direct copies of Napoleon’s feared and admired army. According to Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, history is a kind of perfect machine that grinds away in a completely deterministic manner without the smallest departure from preordained laws and rules. Newton’s idea of the Universe as a (by God) wound-up clock that ticks on forever inspired both Napoleon’s organisational architecture and Hegel’s historicism.
Syntheism however makes use of paganism’s community-building properties and its pantheistic search for an existentially transcendental experience. It forms an emotionally engaged relationship with the Universe. Syntheism ought to be compared to art instead, which under late capitalism – after previously having investigated everything else in life – was partly reduced to an investigation of itself, a metaphenomenon. Ultimately, art is merely about pure reflexivity. Likewise, syntheism is the end of religion’s historical voyage where, after having investigated everything else in life and having sought the sacred everywhere except in itself, religion finally finds its home. Syntheism, too, is also an expression of a pure reflexivity. Syntheism is the metareligion, the religion of the philosophers, the religion about and of religion per se.
Syntheos is the personification of the world, which gives it its value. Through this value, the dividual and the interactive subcultures get their values. Without a value for the world, the dividual and the interactive subcultures cannot have any values either. Syntheism borrows its fundamental value from the fact that there is something rather than nothing, as Martin Heidegger expresses it, and that this something rather than nothing is the basis of life. Syntheism is based on maintaining and maximising the dynamics of existence. The place in time–space where dynamics is maximised is called the event, and this event is syntheism’s metaphysical engine. It takes place all the time and at all levels in the syntheist, indeterminist world view. Every moment in time and every point in space accommodates an enormous number of potential events. Indeterminism also means that no effect is reducible solely to the causes that engender it; the effect might very well be a uniquely situation-dependent excess in relation to its causes. We express this as the Universe generating a steady stream of emergences.
The Abrahamic God is by necessity split. The Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek bases his critique of Christianity on this logical necessity: If God really knew everything about us and was never in a state of ignorance at all concerning our thinking and our actions, both we and God would plunge straight down into psychosis. The splitting of God’s being is necessary for the cohesiveness of the world view. Without the split between the all-knowing and the naively ignorant, neither God nor the faithful can have any experience of being subjects. This split God is however not the God that appears when the spiritual syntheist bears witness to her religious experience. Here, the Universe as God differs radically from the Abrahamic God. The Universe really knows – and can tell whoever is willing to listen – everything about the past, but it knows absolutely nothing of its unknown future. And nor does anyone else either.
Nevertheless, the Universe remains totally indifferent to our story. And it is this very indifference that keeps the psychosis at bay. The only thing that would be even worse than the Universe – as is now the case – being all-knowing and at the same time indifferent, would be if the Universe were all-knowing and actually had an opinion and an intention. What happens instead in the syntheistic religious experience is that the necessary split does not happen within God, as is the case within Abrahamism and atheist humanism, but rather the necessary split arises between the Universe and one’s fellow man, who subsequently take care of their respective metaphysical protagonist roles. While Pantheos is manifested in the Universe, Syntheos is manifested in one’s fellow man. Syntheism is therefore not just something more than atheism as deepened or atheism.html">radical atheism, it is also something more than pantheism as deepened or radical pantheism.
In practice, the overwhelmingly enormous Universe cannot form the divine for us – the Universe is divine for us merely through its enormous size, power and stupendous incomprehensibility; the Universe forces us into submission – but it is rather the consoling, empathic fellow man, that is, the Zoroastrian Saoshyant, who gives God a face and a consciousness. Pantheism is thus just an incomplete form of syntheism. This indisputable fact drives syntheology from pantheism’s incomplete utopia Pantheos to syntheism’s consummate utopia Syntheos. Both Zoroaster and Meillassoux thus maintain that the advent of Syntheos is a necessity for the consummation of the utopia and of history. On its own, Pantheism is insufficient foundation for a religion for human beings.
According to syntheism and syntheist pantheism, there is no Universe to confess to – you cannot confess to a being, however enormous, if this being lacks both senses and interest – but it is rather the Saoshyant, the holy fellow human, who receives your liberating confession, who is converted into the divinity who does not already know. Even Zoroaster in his time understands this central distinction within the divine: he therefore makes a distinction between God-as-being or Ahura, and God-as-thinking-fellow-human or Mazda. Zoroaster himself almost always distinguishes between the concepts of Ahura and Mazda in his work Gathas. The umbrella term Ahura Mazda is only used when his theology for some reason needs a connecting core. And it is Mazda (the mind) and not Ahura (the cosmos) that is prioritised in Zoroastrian theology. This explains why Zoroaster names his remarkably prophetic religion Mazdayasna, love of wisdom – the same term as the Greeks 1,200 years later translate as philosophia – rather than Ahurayasna, love of being. Pantheos is Ahura, but Syntheos is Mazda, and a faithful Zoroastrian – and for that matter a faithful syntheist – is a Mazdayasni (a human being who is primarily faithful to the mind) rather than an Ahurayasni (a human being who is primarily faithful to being).
On the whole, mathematics is a tautological way for people to tell one and the same approximatic history of the world from a host of different perspectives. This is in contrast to an approximate history, which is full of constants, but which for some reason must be regarded as rounded off as a whole, while an approximatic history consists of an infinite series of roundings without any anchoring constant whatsoever, as a stubborn attempt to eternalise a world which in reality is entirely mobilist (which it of course is). However, mathematics is nothing over and above this. For in all its richness, mathematics never does anything other than tell self-referencing and self-validating stories that in the best case might appear to reflect physical reality, but which de facto never can be this reality, and even less so set an example for it, legislate for it or replace it. Therefore, ontologically physics and mathematics must be kept strictly separate. In spite of the fact that many mathematicians and even philosophers have wanted to see mathematics as a language of God, this is unfortunately not true. The Universe is namely an analogue, not a digital, phenomenon.
The human gaze is so libidinally attracted to symmetrical patterns that it fancies that it finds these in nature, in the same way that the human being tautologically formulates them in mathematics. But however appealing such symmetries may be to the human libido, they are unfortunately not to be found in nature, and above all they are never necessary. Nature does not make it easy for itself, quite simply because nature does not need to (or cannot) make it easy for itself in the way that man must (and sometimes even can) maximise his conditions for survival on a planet where the constant lack of food, energy, housing and other resources is a fundamental living condition. The Universe on the whole exists in fact in a state of immeasurable bounty. It is only in a world characterised by scarcity that the genetically conditioned search for symmetries that is typical of mankind arises, as if these symmetries were some kind of metaphysical signs of health.
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.
Thanks to the arrival of the law, the Fall of Man gets a clear narrative, the temporal and therefore supremely human Fall from grace is the absolutely worst imaginable crime against the eternal and therefore divine law. So where is God and wherein lies God’s essence, if not in the will to administer justice and enforce submission by means of the law? The law has proven such a powerful metaphor that even after Nietzsche announces the death of God in the late 19th century, physics continues its manic search for God’s law in nature, as if the law as God was still very much alive. The explanation for this is that the preordained and compelling law has exercised its magic on humans so extensively and for so long that humans can only imagine a Universe without the law’s existence with the greatest difficulty. Enjoyment without pleasure drives the determinist world view. Note that this process continues without human law being able to have any equivalent in nature whatsoever. In spite of everything of course, human law functions because the receivers of the decrees, the people, listen to and understand the recited text and shape and calculate their own behaviour based on the current set of rules. People can either allow themselves to be frightened into obeying the decree, integrate it into what Sigmund Freud calls the superego, or allow themselves to be tempted into enjoyment occasioned by a transgression of the decree – to surrender to the libidinal transgression. In any case, it is man’s ability to engage in and become obsessed with the law that makes him its object.
However, the law is just a metaphor on which we base blind faith in the pre-eminence of the prevailing order. But the metaphor is so strong that even today it colours not just our view of social relationships, but also feeds our recurring conviction that a society without laws must be a society that is rushing head-long towards its own annihilation. The law is such a powerfully charged metaphor that we cannot even look at nature and the Universe without presuming that these operate according to preordained and eternally valid laws. However there is no proof whatsoever of any such laws, and nor should there be. If we really are serious about our conviction that God is dead, we must also draw the conclusion that the legislator is dead. And without the original legislator, the eternal and metaphysical law does not exist either. Were we to carry this line of argument one step further, it would reveal that natural law is to be regarded as an incoherent battery of anthropocentric chicanery without foundation in anything whatsoever, and particularly not in nature.
The syntheist response to rationalism does not entail any flight back to the irrational. It instead continues dialectically to transrationalism: the idea that reasoning first and foremost must embrace the insight of one’s own built-in limitations in relation to one’s environment. Man is a highly limited creature in both time and in space, and moreover completely dependent on the strictly limited quantity of sensory impressions he has the time to assimilate from a rapidly expanding universe where much more information is produced every moment than any active participant, let alone any passive observer, ever has the time to process. Existence is literally rushing away from the human being; it does not lie down obediently, neatly packaged in his narcissistic bosom, ripe for consumption.
Just like syntheism, as a whole transrationalism and its basic condition can be viewed as both a logical deduction and a historical conclusion. There is no rational foundation per se for naturally limited human rationality to ever have the capacity to comprehend everything in a constantly expanding universe. Plato’s and Kant’s variants of rationality get caught in their own trap; they are both per se founded on a blind faith and not on any kind of rationality. Humanity has repeatedly surrendered itself to rationalism as a social ideology, but the results are frightening. Sooner or later, rationalism – in spite of considerable achievements in civilisation – invariably degenerates into totalitarian utilitarianism. Therefore Plato is quite correct in claiming that a consistently practised rationalism must develop into a dictatorship. Anything else is impossible.
Before the arrival of totalism, man apprehends himself as a cohesive whole. There is no need to separate an eternal soul from a corruptible body. Although he is mortal, man is part of a natural cycle where life and death are both natural and necessary, regularly recurring fixed points. Above all, everything hangs together with everything else in a monist universe. Totalism destroys this harmony between mankind and her environment. In conjunction with the mobilist Heraclitus being overshadowed by the totalist Plato as an influential thinker in ancient Greece in the 4th century B.C., we can easily note totalism’s ideological victory, at least temporarily, and from this follows also alienation’s invasion – as rapid as it is destructive – of man’s conception of himself and the world.
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.
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.
The syntheological pyramid starts with a relational interiority with Atheos at the one end, which shifts to a relational exteriority with Pantheos at the other end. In the world of cosmology this even occurs literally: a black hole absorbs, it happens interiorly, while the Universe expands, it happens exteriorly. Exteriority then continues with Entheos, with its explosions of irreducible differences, multitudes and emergences over time, but shifts back to an interiority with Syntheos, as the utopia, the concentrated point or God for all of humanity’s dreams of the future. Atheos and Syntheos are primarily introvert or absorbing concepts, while Pantheos and Entheos are primarily extrovert or expansive concepts. If we express this relation phenomenologically, we say that an eternalism apprehends a mobilism – it is when Atheos is applied to Pantheos that Pantheos emerges as the One: a mobilism that is augmented in the next step and then switches back to an eternalism. It is for example when Entheos is applied to Syntheos that the agent finds its place within the phenomenon and syntheist activism takes shape as the truth as an act.
The syntheological pyramid can be traced back to Zoroaster and his work Gathas, which he authored as early as 3,700 years ago. According to Zoroaster, Ahura (being personified) is generated by the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos, while Mazda (the mind personified) is generated by the next level, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos. If the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos has a name of its own, it is Ahura; if the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos has a name of its own, it is Mazda. When Zoroaster proclaims his universal religion, interestingly enough he calls it mazdayasna (love of the mind) and not ahurayasna (love of being). This explains why we refer to him as the first protosyntheist. Zoroaster prioritises the god that the human being creates, Mazda, over the god that creates himself independent of Man, Ahura, while also uniting them under the name Ahura Mazda, being that includes consciousness. According to Zoroaster, Man is an internal agent within the Universe as a phenomenon and not some kind of external, alien accident in relation to the rest of existence, as in the Abrahamic religions and their philosophical offspring.
Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos do not receive their enormous potency as some kind of long-lived giant beings from parallel universes, like antiquity’s or Hinduism’s worlds of divinities, but as dramatically useful metaphors for the structure of existence (from Atheos to Pantheos) and the place of consciousness and scope for action within this structure (from Entheos to Syntheos). Therefore the syntheist divinities are immanent, finite and mortal, rather than transcendent, eternal and immortal, like traditional gods. Mortal creatures in a finite universe can only create mortal and finite divinities. The immortal god, created by mortal creatures, is an absurdity, a self-contradiction in a Derridean sense. Therefore, in the name of consistency, syntheology stops at mortal gods. Here it is worth recalling Blaise Pascal’s pragmatic concept Deus Absconditus from the 17th century: it is quite correct to say that syntheism stops at gods that reveal themselves only to those who seek gods, but avoids the gaze of all those who would rather avoid gods.
Atheos means the god that does not exist in Greek. Atheos is the god of the void or the black hole, the zero position of existence, the existential rather than the physical nothingness, and simultaneously the origin of everything and the engine of all identities from which the subject arises and gets its driving force. The void is namely an anthropocentric illusion. There is no actual void in the Universe; what appears to be empty space is full of physical activity. So the actual space in the void thus has a substance. However, everything beautiful and meaningful in our existence arises out of mental voids. When we are going to define why we love someone or something, exactly what we de facto love in the person or thing in question will invariably evade our description. The reason is that it is precisely Atheos, the void, the unknown, the utopian in the person or thing that we love, which we love and which becomes all the more desirable since it never allows itself to be captured or even articulated exhaustively. Atheos is Hegel’s god, and the syntheists celebrate him at midwinter, which is followed by the Athea quarter. Midwinter is the celebration of the Universe’s existential necessity, the celebration of the origin of life and existence.
Pantheos is the Universe as the divine. Because there is something rather than nothing – there is after all a life, a world – this something is equivalent to God: the Universe is God. If God exists, God must be the Universe. It would be pointless for an existing God to be separate from the Universe, since God does not have any need whatsoever to be a soul of any kind, separated from a body. The Universe is in fact characterised by expanding bounty, not by a struggle over insufficient resources, like life on Earth, which means that God never has to be manipulated away from an infirm body of limited durability in order to live on somewhere else, liberated from this body. Consequently God is immanent rather than transcendent, and physics is not some substandard representation or copy of divine mathematics, which totalist thinkers from Plato during antiquity to Alain Badiou in our own era are constantly drawn to believe. God is physics and physics is God. Mathematics is merely the human being’s approximatic tool for trying to catch up to, describe and thus understand God. Pantheos is infinite multiplicity beyond infinite multiplicity, the multiplicity of multiplicities as the One. Pantheos is Spinoza’s god, and the syntheists celebrate him at midsummer, which is followed by the Panthea quarter.
When Einstein proves that time is relative, he also proves that time elapses more quickly or slowly depending on the local context, but this does not change the fact that it still and always travels in one and the same direction through the Universe. Within syntheology one is careful to distinguish between time as a physical phenomenon and duration as the existential experience of the direction of the arrow of time. In any case, Entheos is the divinity of both time and duration, since time and duration present the clearest evidence that the difference is the foundation of identity production. We can talk about the arrow of time, duration, history – we find many names for the things we love – but what we are actually talking about is a recurring feedback loop with infinitesimally but – thanks to their identity-dislocating function – extremely significant changes for every cycle that occurs. Entheos is quite simply the name of the constant repetition of the difference itself, that which Nietzsche and Deleuze call the eternal return of the same.
Syntheism presupposes both a religious atheism and a subjective pantheism. It is important to distinguish between on the one hand a subjective and on the other hand an objective pantheism. Subjective pantheism is an active choice to see the fact that there is something rather than nothing as the foundation for the holy. The truth is an act. Through this decision, the Universe and its history are put on a par with the divine. That which exists is made into something holy. However, objective pantheism requires a blind and indisputable conviction that the Universe actually is God. But this position is of no interest to syntheism. In order for pantheism to be woven together first with atheism and then with entheism – in order to lead on to syntheism – in fact requires that it is strictly subjective. We find no signs that the Universe regards itself as divine – it displays no signs whatsoever of having a consciousness of its own that can produce a religious conviction similar to that of humans – and if this were the case, the syntheist premise would collapse. The four divinities in the syntheological pyramid are in fact all created by ourselves for ourselves, as named projections of existence; they are all syntheist, so too are Atheos, Pantheos and Entheos.
According to this, our latest, model-dependent realism the metaphysicists Martin Heidegger and Slavoj Zizek make one and the same mistake when they construct their respective ontologies on the premise that nothingness is just as reasonable an assumption as somethingness. For nothingness has never been a possible or even a conceivable alternative in the world of physics. Zizek thus misinterprets Bohrian quantum physics when he says that the Universe is a mistake (even if the statement naturally, as usual for Zizek, works as a funny and thought-provoking provocation). Existence itself is namely the only sufficiently stable state in the physical world. Non-existence, on the other hand, is an extremely unsteady state and it is precisely for this reason an impossibility in a long-term perspective, since existence itself is constantly being offered such an infinite number of possibilities to be brought to life. Nothingness is thus unstable in itself, and with this instability it necessarily follows that a quantity of universes are produced in it at a torrential rate. Something always exists. Nothingness in principle never exists. And to the extent that it does exist, it is always something in any case.
The recurring mistake is Man’s constant anthropocentric, internarcissistic projection on the terms of existence: it is the absurdities we experience in our own existence that make us regard the Universe as a mysterious coincidence where existence miraculously enough happens to defeat non-existence. This anthropocentrism rests on facts that are irrelevant for the cosmos such as the fact that only one of several million sperm succeeds in fertilising one of millions of eggs in order for ourselves to arise as embryos; or that millions and again millions of possible variants of ourselves die every moment to enable just one of all this infinite number of variants of ourselves to survive, all the way through to all the variants finally perishing when death catches up with everything living within us. But in the world of physics there are no such balances, no trade-offs between something and nothing as probable, equivalent alternatives. The possibilities of somethingness completely crush the probabilities of nothingness through the entheistic oceans of existence, until somethingness becomes the metaphysical foundation of model-dependent realism.
The human mind is the arena for a constant battle between the extremes Atheos (the absorbing subject) and Pantheos (the expanding cosmos), where Atheos represents the drive while Pantheos represents the desire within psychoanalysis. Atheos is the Universe as it apprehends itself, it is the subject’s experience of itself as a subject. In the same way that we must regard ourselves as voids where life seeks meaning through an always unsuccessful but nonetheless always repeated struggle to fill the void with content; in the same way Atheos is the idea of what the Universe sees when the Universe observes itself, from the inside. Pantheos is the Universe that we humans observe and to which we ascribe divinity; it is the Universe as object, observed by a subject (the believing dividual or the community). This means that syntheology emanates from a dialectics between Atheos and Pantheos, it is between these two concepts that we are moving – constantly, restlessly – they are our sacred extremes, midwinter and midsummer in the syntheist calendar, where Entheos is their common product, the fate that we unconditionally love: amor fati.
It is Atheos who drops the event as a bombshell into the metauniverse that beforehand appeared to be balanced. The Universe arises as a minimal but decisive quantum deviation in a metauniverse where something is less than nothing. It should be pointed out in this context that the void is never empty. A nothing in the classical sense does not exist in physics. In its apparent emptiness, a void is also full of pure activity and, as long as the total energy amount is zero, is capable of producing and maintaining any amount of quantitative substance. Existence, life, and consciousness are all examples of magical, incomprehensible, unpredictable emergences that Atheos drops into history. Every event of every kind in the Universe is of course actually incredibly unlikely on closer inspection, but occurs nonetheless only according to the principle that something happens because something must happen sooner or later. Atheos is the engine in syntheism’s Pantheos. What separates Man from other animals is not just that Man is endowed with a consciousness, but that he also has a subconscious. It is the subconscious that spurs mankind on in her quest for the truth event. The quest for the truth event is the focus of the drive.html">death drive. Or as the a-theist Hegel would express the matter: Atheos is constantly on the lookout for itself.
Through Cantor’s revolution in mathematics and Niels Bohr’s in physics, the natural sciences land once and for all in the victory of indeterminism over determinism. But there has always been a cosmological logic that argues for indeterminism. And it is based on the ontically necessary presence of chance. In a determinist universe absolutely nothing can happen by chance, which every friend of order will realise is tautological; determinism means of course that everything is predestined in which case this of course applies without exception, otherwise the position would be untenable, including predestination itself too. Determinism thus argues that if we only know the historical conditions and the physical factors that exist and precede each course of events, we can calculate with absolute certainty how every course of events (and in principle the entire history of the world) will unfold.
This requires however that there be only one possible course of events for every set of given premises. And above all, this requires that the laws of the Universe precede the Universe itself. Including the necessary law of the law’s own existence, that is, the metalaw. If we are to take determinism seriously, we are thus mercilessly cast back into the arms of the pre-atheist god: the patriarchal creator, dualistically distinct from the rest of the Universe. And with him also follows his necessary creator, and this creator’s creator, backwards in a chain in all infinity. But no such pre-atheist god exists, as we know. The future is thereby not closed and illusory in the way that determinism both suggests and requires. Rather, it is the case that if the Universe were not open to the future, and thus indeterministic, it could never exist either. It is not just a matter of exactly the same premises in physics being able to yield more than one result, as Bohr points out. It is in fact the case that these very premises must be aleatoric in order to even be able to exist as premises at all.
The existence of the Universe per se is indeed no accident, but the fact that the Universe is constituted precisely as it is includes considerable and decisive amounts of chance. Determinism collapses at the same moment that we are confronted with the minutest unpredictability in the history of the Universe. But the history of the Universe is filled with chance, or rather filled with widely differing outcomes that are the results of defined probabilities. Even our specific universe per se represents such an accident. Not aleatorically like existence – that something rather than nothing exists is a necessity rather than an accident – but aleatorically as a detailed phenomenon, that is, as its own specific history. Or as the syntheist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux expresses the matter: “The only thing that is necessary in existence is contingency.” But contingency is then all the more necessary.
Kant’s idea of the mobilist noumenon as primary in relation to the eternalist phenomenon is fundamentally an idea of a transcendent God as a passive observer rather than an immanent God as an active participant in the Universe. Kant quite simply imagines that the noumenon is what God observes when the human being merely sees the phenomenon. But an object can reveal itself in innumerable different guises, of which the phenomenon that human perception generates is only one single phenomenon, and an external, divine observer is not needed either. Instead it is Niels Bohr’s phenomenon, the compact intertwining of the subject and the object, which is the primary starting point in the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, rather than some kind of unattainable Ding an sich in the Kantian sense. A syntheist Ding an sich is quite simply the bringing together of the thousands of varying perspectives that one individual phenomenon invites. For perception does not distort reality, which Kant assumes. Perception merely provides both a necessary and intelligent priority for precisely that which is new and different in the information flow compared to earlier sensory impressions, so that a new and constantly minimally corrected eternalisation can occur in every individual moment (see The Body Machines). The evolutionarily developed balance between transcendental eternalisation and immanent mobility is merely a question of optimising survival possibilities. The information selectivity is quite simply an evolutionarily smart and beneficial phenomenological strategy. But it really says nothing ontologically about existence.
The syntheist world is a world of relations and only relations. Syntheism is a relationalism. It is the syntheological pyramid which constitutes the ontological foundation for all agents in the relationalist universe. The oscillating relation between Atheos and Pantheos, followed by the oscillating relation between Entheos and Syntheos, together form a cohesive, pan-dimensional, vibrating coordinate system: syntheology as a phenomenon. The syntheist symbol – which for example adorns the website syntheism.org – shows Pantheos on top of Atheos as a white ellipsis that represents the Universe on top of a black circle that represents the void, with Entheos as the boundary between them and Syntheos as the complete symbol in itself, drawn by people in whose speculative imagination the most essential relations and intensities in existence have been personified. Syntheists are quite simply people who, once again in history, unabashed, and this time also consciously, create gods.
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.
The relationalist philosophers Karen Barad, Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux push through and past relativism when, at the start of the 3rd millennium – inspired by pioneers such as the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the physicist Niels Bohr – they construct a speculative materialism that attacks the entire correlationalist paradigm and its fixation with an original subject that correlates with an original object as its ontological foundation. They are quite simply searching for a deeper foundation beyond this premise, which has dominated phenomenology ever since Kant’s heyday. While relativism settles for stating that the relations between the fixed objects are relative – what we call an interactive ontology – the relationalist philosophers maintain that the relations within the phenomena are also mobile in relation to each other – that is, they advocate an intra-acting ontology. There are no discrete objects whatsoever in the Universe. Not even at the minutest micro level. Thus, nor are there any Kantian objects in physical reality, not even any noumenal such; what really exists is merely pure relata, or relations without their own inner substance between and within abstract fields of irreducible multiplicities.
A central component in syntheism is how it takes a stand for positive and consequently rejects negative theology. To start with, the repression of the drive.html">death drive has a clear function: according to pantheist ethics we live because the Universe seeks its own existence and its own consciousness through us. As conscious beings we are not only part of the Universe; we human beings also together constitute the Universe’s own consciousness of itself. In syntheological terms, we express this as Pantheos emerging into Syntheos through our truth as an act. But syntheism supports positive theology also because it sees time or Entheos as both a physical and ideological foundation. Death has its place at some point along the arrow of time, but the time for death is not now. The present always belongs to survival in consciousness. Syntheism’s activist ethics can therefore only be constructed out of survival as a propelling principle – not from immortality. Totalist death-worshipping moralism is fundamentally just a form of reactionary masochism.
While Deleuze finds process-philosophical dynamite in Nietzsche’s thoughts on the cosmic drive, there is no support for a corresponding syntheist renaissance for Nietzsche’s concept of the cosmic desire, that which Nietzsche calls the will to power, his most famous idea. Nietzsche’s analysis of desire is founded in 19th century Romantic mysticism around power, but does not hold water in relationalist physics. His idea of the will to power as a cosmic struggle for finite resources in a finite universe should rather be viewed as relativism’s most magnificent phantasm. While the will to power can most certainly be used creatively as a social-psychological explanatory model for human behaviour – since we live in a world filled with acute shortages and murderous competition – it would immediately collapse as an ontological basis for a universe that is always expanding and growing in complexity, without the need for any specific will or power over an unfounded, presumed competition within a limited sphere that actually does not even exist. Since the Universe has of course no competition in its cosmological existence, projections onto the Universe that assume a fundamental scarcity-and-competition situation do not hold water either. The Nietzschean will to power is thus a psychological attribute, but hardly a universal phenomenon.
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.
The current superpositions in quantum physics cause classical physics to break down. The superpositions are namely in clear opposition to the dogmas of classical physics. The difference between the individual substances of atomic physics on the one hand – which coolly interact in isolation – and the wave motions of relationalist physics’ on the other hand – which are literally subsumed in each other in superpositions, as entangled phenomena – is tangible and has dramatic consequences. Not even Werner Heisenberg’s otherwise much discussed epistemic uncertainty principle captures the magnitude of the current revolution. To embrace the depth of the quantum physics revolution requires instead Niels Bohr’s genuinely pioneering ontic principle of indeterminacy. It is not some kind of built-in uncertainty as one would find in a measurement instrument that is most fundamental and revolutionary for this world view, but rather Bohr’s dazzling proof that we live in an indeterministic universe.
Based solely on its enormous usage in thousands and thousands of experiments, quantum mechanics is the most stable and reliable theoretical construct that has ever been tested and used in the history of the sciences. And the relationalist physics that follows in its wake emphatically invalidates Platonian and Newtonian determinism. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce predicts the coming kiss of death to determinism already a few decades before quantum physics becomes widely accepted when he launches the principle of tychism (from the Greek tyché = chance) in the 1890s. Peirce maintains that spontaneity is an inescapable fact of the Universe. After quantum physics becomes widely accepted, philosopher of science Karl Popper points out that Peirce paves the way philosophically for quantum physics’ indeterminism with his pragmatism. The militant indeterminist Daniel Dennett develops Peirce’s tychism in his book Freedom Evolves. Dennett, also inspired by Leibniz and Hume, argues that while the future is open and the world is indeterminist, everything can still have one necessary cause, since a necessary cause is not tied to just one possible effect. According to Dennett, the fact that all events have a cause is not per se a valid argument for determinism.
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.
The shift from the human to the universal centre is the necessary and correct manoeuvre. In the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos, Barad finds the new divinity that replaces the human being that had been declared dead by her predecessor Foucault, namely the universal subject as a kind of Bohrian supraphenomenon. It is important to point out that the purpose of Barad’s anti-anthropocentrism is not to eliminate the human being from all equations. Instead, it is concerned with giving the human being as agent her onto-epistemologically correct place in the greater phenomena that existence is comprised of, and this occurs only when the Universe is held up as primary and the human subject is reduced to something secondary. The Universe is not some transcendental category in Man’s orientation through existence, which Kant imagines in his autistic phenomenology. The Universe is instead real and expresses itself in and through the many billions of human subjects that it produces among other things, rather than the other way around. The Universe lives, thinks, speaks, creates, feels pleasure and multiplies through us. Nor is this all: through us the Universe dies and leaves room for constantly new phenomena. All this taken together is supreme motivation for naming Barad’s book Meeting The Universe Halfway a syntheist manifesto.
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.
Deleuze prophetically sees how the onrushing Internet age – which he consistently refers to as capitalism with schizophrenia in his key works Anti-Oedipus and Mille plateaux, authored with Felix Guattari – rules out the classical majoritarian claims to power. Baradian relationalism goes a couple of steps further in the same direction. There are no secure majoritarian identities left when we start to apprehend the extent of the quantum physics revolution. All remaining identities, except the Universe itself, are quite simply minoritarian with Barad. In order to produce an identity other than that of the Universe, there needs to be a clear minoritarian difference, which is why only the strongest minoritarian identity can generate what Lacan’s and Zizek’s predecessor Hegel calls the universal singularity.
For in the same way that the axis between Atheos and Pantheos vibrates in the syntheological pyramid, the axis between Entheos and Syntheos vibrates. Entheos represents immanent becoming and difference; Syntheos represents utopian being and identity. As Deleuze points out: Entheos always precedes Syntheos. First Entheos generates the Deleuzian dividual; thereafter Syntheos generates the revolutionary utopia. What is important is that syntheology places transcendence in becoming and not in being. There is no transcendental being within syntheism, which is a radical point of departure from all dualist religions. Transcendental becoming is instead consolidated in a radically monist and relationalist universe. Becoming is primary, but wills itself into being and does this time after time through perception’s creative eternalisations. This will from becoming to being is the movement from Entheos to Syntheos.
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.
But inside the syntheological pyramid, there is also movement from Syntheos in the direction of Atheos. Therefore it is interesting to introduce and study a rigidly atheistic nihilist as an interlocutor to Deleuze’s and Barad’s relationalist metaphysics. The exceptionally learned and colourful Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier in his book Nihil Unbound champions the thesis that Nietzsche and Deleuze guilty of a kind of wishful thinking mistake when they place existential ecstasy before existential anxiety. Like the Buddha, Brassier instead sees anxiety as primary for existence – pain always surpasses pleasure – and he constructs a kind of Freudian cosmology out of the conviction that the empty, blindly repetitious drive is the engine of existence. The focus of Brassier’s negative theology lies in the Universe’s future self-obliteration, which according to him must govern all values and valuations until then. Here he takes his starting point in the human being’s will to nothingness which emerges from the increasingly leaky subconscious and constantly makes itself felt as a theme among the rapidly growing subcultures of the Internet age.
Thirdly, Brassier follows in the post-structuralist Jean-Francois Lyotard’s footsteps and is obsessed with the future death of the stars as a horizon for ethics. But this is based on a misunderstanding of what physics tells us. According to M-theory, universa are incessantly generated in a multiverse that has no limits whatsoever for its possible expansion. Regardless of whether our current universe eventually levels out into an endless and cold, black goo, or if its accelerating expansion is dramatically turned into a compressing contraction – or in any other way is suddenly transformed into a new round of accelerating expansion, as the physicist Roger Penrose suggests in his book Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe – there are no obstacles to the rise of new universa both within and outside our own universe. Physics supplies no such obstacles, and once we have got past the spatial and temporal limitations – which in our intuition we find it so infinitely hard to think ourselves past – the death of the stars disappears as a necessary or even conceivable horizon for ethics.
Brassier has a hard time concealing his contempt for Henri Bergson’s classical vitalism. And physics of course provides no support for life having any kind of peculiar nature or special position in the Universe. Life arises under specific material circumstances, which does not mean that this in itself is some sort of great mystery. What is fascinating is thus not life itself, as classical vitalism maintains, but the enormous complexity and constant generating of even more complexity of existence, as Deleuze assumes in his revised vitalism. Instead of, in the manner of Bergson, anthropocentrically preaching vitalism as a life-affirming religion – with the motto that the more life forms that arise, the better – from the perspective of process theology it is more correct to speak of the enormous and expanding complexity of physics per se. Vitalism can only survive if it is expanded into a universocentric, general doctrine of multiplicity. If we are to speak of a credible vitalism in the wake of the advent of M-theory, then this vitalism must already regard quantum fluctuations in the great void as a kind of life form. And why not?
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.
There are of course no de facto predetermined sets of rules whatsoever in the Universe that precede the phenomena which they, if that were the case, would be designed to regulate, that is, if they existed (which they do not, for in that case their existence would precede existence itself). What in hindsight we may apprehend as laws of nature are nothing but analogous repetitions within one and the same system, given the temporarily prevailing, constantly slightly varying circumstances within the complex in question. Admittedly, there is a universal metalaw which says that there is always an explanation for every given event – an ontological prerequisite that mobilists from the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century to the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce in the 19th century investigate thoroughly – but no eternal laws per se are required in order for any of the virtualities within the phenomenon to be actualised. Like so many times before in the history of science, nature does not care about our human, all too human, metaphors. Physics quite simply does not obey laws in the way that the slave is expected to obey the rules his master dictates.
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 relationalist argument is that although the second law of thermodynamics is applicable within isolated subsystems in the Universe, this does not necessarily mean in turn that it covers the Universe as a coherent whole. Rather it appears to be the other way around: the Universe as a whole exhibits a history with an ever-increasing degree of complexity over time, with a steadily growing amount of information, where the total growing amount of information correlates with the total growing amount of entropy. This means that entropy can increase locally at the expense of information, at the same time as information increases globally at the expense of entropy. And that is de facto what our Universe looks like today. If theory and empirical data do not agree on essential points, it might be a good idea to first of all revise and modify the theory.
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.
According to Whitehead, God is quite simply not particularly dead, but rather is just dramatically altered by – in turn – dramatically changed conditions. There is no hateful desire in him to slash God’s throat, when the concept actually appears more useful than ever, but in that case precisely as a syntheist tool and nothing else. The parallel with the syntheological formulation of Entheos as the name of the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos is striking. For what is Whitehead’s obsession with creativity as the driving force of existence, if not in fact a deification of the entheist production of difference? Process and Reality is so radically relationalist and theologically creative that the work – in which the origin as Atheos and the events as Pantheos are brought together with creativity as Entheos, and where the result is today’s Universe – deserves to be regarded as the syntheist manifesto par excellence. That the term process theology is coined and used for the first time by one of Whitehead’s disciples, the American theologian Charles Hartshorne, is not the least bit surprising.
When in 1992 the relationalist physicist Lee Smolin launches the idea that the Universe operates according to cosmological Darwinism – where the maximisation of black holes in a universe is linked to the maximisation of possibilities for the genesis of life – he refers to Peirce’s and Whitehead’s revolutionary pragmatism. With a simple manoeuvre, Smolin disposes of the recurring problem that haunts the competing physical models, namely that all these models presuppose coordinates for the Universe which means that it is constantly balancing on a kind of existential pinhead in order to be able to exist. With a multitude of possible universa over time, as in Smolin’s model, our Universe’s specific coordinates do not seem particularly remarkable any longer. Of course they appear extremely well-adapted for the genesis of life and the existence of our own species, but then this must reasonably be the case in at least one of the many universa that are presumed to exist, and in that case the one is just a logical consequence of the other. Irrespective of whether Smolin’s speculative cosmological theory of evolution is correct or not, time or Entheos has returned with full force as the bedrock of physics. Peirce, James, Whitehead and the other pragmatists could hardly be more satisfied.
The renaissance of time within physics opens up possibilities of, for example, shape dynamics – a theory that solves many of the old problems of quantum gravity – where time in fact plays the role of the decisive constant. By counting on what are called observable objectives, the shape dynamicists consider themselves able to calculate global time, liberated from the local restrictions of space. It should be added here that even if Einstein proves that time runs at different speeds at various places in the Universe – that time is relative in relation to local conditions – it continues, at least within practical physics rather than within theoretical mathematics, always in one and the same direction: from then via now towards the next now in the future. Einstein’s conception that time can go backwards as well as forwards quite simply does not fit with what we can observe in actual reality; this idea increasingly appears to be a Platonist fantasy without relevance outside mathematism’s tautological trap. Global time is in fact more than just a dimension on top of the three spatial dimensions in space–time; it is above all compatible with relationalism.
Shape dynamics thereby exist in the same sort of duality in relation to the Einsteinian relativity theories as the wave does in relation to the particle. This means that we can say goodbye all at once to the predetermined, the timeless and the eternal space–time in Newton’s and Einstein’s Platonist universe. For what is this four-dimensional block universe if not just yet another failed attempt to recreate the ideal world of Plato – this time not as an opposition between God and Creation, or between the soul and the body, or between the representation and the represented, but instead as an opposition between eternity and time? Einstein’s block universe, with a space–time that moves both backwards and forwards, is yet another flagrant example of a Platonist fantasy which, without any empirical footing at all, acquires a social status as if it were an established physical truth.
It looks seductively elegant in mathematics when time is added to the three space dimensions and space–time arises. However, there is no scientific proof outside mathematics that time is some kind of space; rather it is strictly speaking only the mathematical elegance that makes it tempting to believe that this is the case. Even if a phenomenon actually can be registered in space, and even if space can be mathematically expanded by a temporal dimension – which attractively enough enables the construction of a more complex geometry in order to describe various phenomena in even greater detail – there is still nothing that indicates that time really is a fourth dimension of space, ontologically rather than just mathematically. For example, we can travel both up and down and forwards and backwards in space (in relation to an arbitrarily chosen or imagined point). But even if we are travelling forwards in time at various speeds at various places in space, which Einstein proves that we can do, we are invariably still only moving in one single direction along the arrow of time. There is no evidence that anything anywhere in the Universe actually can travel backwards in time. Varying speeds do not automatically imply different directions.
In the world of physics, the concept of eternalism is used as a designation for the conviction that all points on the line of time are ontologically as real as each other. All moments that have ever existed or ever will exist are regarded as radically equal from an ontological perspective. The opposite view, that only the present is real, is called presentism. Note how the concepts correlate with the phenomenological pair of opposites eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire). Physical eternalism is the conviction we end up in if we allow phenomenological eternalism – with its radically equal fictives, since no fixation of the chaos of existence can be more fixed than any other – to run amok because we have forgotten to place it ontologically within mobilism. These radically equal, frozen fictives in space–time are mistaken for being reality itself instead of the chaos of existence from which we produce them. Obviously, Plato, Newton and Einstein are all physical eternalists, and they are such for the very reason that they overestimate the possibilities that phenomenological eternalism offers in what actually is an ontologically mobilist universe.
According to the myth that we live in a block universe, which follows from the Einsteinian revolution, the Universe and history are regarded as united in eternally frozen four-dimensional space–time. Time must be an illusion then, in its capacity as an ontic flow, if it is regarded as the fourth space dimension. There is no evidence whatsoever for this view of time being physically correct, yet it is precisely this that Einstein maintains when the idea of time as illusion becomes widely accepted in conjunction with his theories of relativity gaining adherents. That time is made into a kind of fourth spatial dimension – and thereby is transformed into a kind of mathematically, and doubtlessly also existentially, tempting expansion of existence – seems historically speaking not to have any deeper cause than a purely subjective arbitrariness. It mainly revolves around physics suddenly becoming a little more playful as a mathematical exercise in model construction. The thing is though, that if time in principle is regarded as a kind of space, there is not much difference between the ticking of a clock and a measuring tape placed on a stretch of road. The ticking of the clock becomes a smooth way of measuring the distance between two points, which according to the accompanying physical eternalism fittingly enough is ontologically just as real.
The idea that all of existence and its history is reduced in this way to a limited and handy little box, a block universe, must have enchanted the physicists. This is understandable. And philosophically speaking, the myth that we live in a block universe is of course an expression of the phenomenological eternalism without the necessary dialectic with mobilism, if possible an even more radicalised version of Plato’s dualism – where Einstein actually advocates a totalist monism rather than Plato’s totalist dualism. But surely it must be the case that not just the arrow of time but all the motion and changes in the history of the Universe must be illusory in Einstein’s block universe. Duration is of course the very foundation for all motion and change per se – which explains why Entheos is the divinity of time, motion, difference and creativity in syntheology. But Einstein really does everything in his power to revive Parmenides’ absurd conception from Ancient Greece that there is no real change in physical reality, that everything is one and the same and that difference and change therefore have no ontological validity.
Syntheologically, we express this as Einstein in practice doing everything he can to kill off Entheos, the divinity of process theology, and he must then in the name of consistency also try to kill off Atheos and Syntheos while he is at it. But Einstein never succeeds anywhere in proving any phenomenon in existence that moves backwards in time. However relativist time is, the arrow of time survives the block universe’s mythological attack and strengthens in fact its Zurvanite and Chronist magic. Time has still only one direction: forwards. Entheos keeps the syntheological pyramid in motion and is travelling with determination onwards to Syntheos. Physical eternalism and the Einsteinian block universe are, in fact, impossible to combine with quantum physics’ most basic axiom: Niels Bohr’s principle of indeterminacy. A block universe requires a compact determinism – without real time there is no real change – the future is by necessity as fixed in advance as the past is frozen in history. However, this is an absolute impossibility according to Bohr and his relationalist followers, since physics according to the principle of indeterminacy is incomplete, and that fact in itself is incompatible with a block universe where everything, without the least exception, invariably has already happened.
We return to the decisive difference between Einsteinian relativism and Bohrian relationalism. Einstein convincingly proves in his special theory of relativity that classical time is in fact relativist. Clocks with similar properties run at varying speeds in various places in the Universe depending on the varying local circumstances. However, this does not mean that time somewhere in the Universe suddenly runs backwards. Above all it does not mean that time is slower in one place than in another place per se, since such a comparison requires a kind of divine external timekeeping to which both clocks are compared, and any divinely external timekeeping of this kind does not exist anywhere else than possibly in our anthropocentric, internarcissistic fantasies. Moreover, the theory of relativity will not allow this either, which means that even Einstein himself momentarily seems to have had difficulty in drawing the correct conclusions from his own model.
With the advent of relationalist physics – for example in the form of loop quantum gravity and shape dynamics – we gain access to a new concept that is a logical consequence of all local times moving in the same direction, but this does not make it possible for us to compare them via divinely external meta-timekeeping. This is global time, which is best described as the aggregate internal duration for the Universe as a whole, without any external observer. Global time indeed comprises everything and everybody in the Universe, but without it ever being able to be localised, and thereby without it ever being measurable, since any kind of measuring of something that cannot be located requires some kind of mysteriously arisen observer position outside the Universe (one cannot be both inside and outside the Universe at once, not without being some kind of Platonist, dualist magician). The specific conditions that influence global time do of course by definition only exist globally when our whole entangled Universe without exception is included in the temporal equation, and never locally in any distinct region of, or even less so, outside the Universe. Global time thereby differs radically from classical metatime as a concept. It is both a universal and at the same time monist duration; a meme, quite plausible to physics, but which seems to pass by the otherwise so revolutionarily inclined Einstein, without leaving any deep impression.
However, within relationalist physics it is a central insight that the behavioural patterns of the Universe can look completely different at a global or local level. The point is thus that all the clocks in Einstein’s thought experiment only display local time. What Einstein therefore misses – since he has no concept of the deepening that a shift from relativism to relationalism entails – is that beyond his beloved, local clocks global time is still both possible and plausible. The problem for Einstein is that if global time really exists, it immediately kills his most beloved fetish: his determinist block universe. Moreover, all this occurs without us catching the slightest glimpse of any global clock since such a cosmological and quantum physical, relationalist timekeeping cannot exist outside the Universe whose time it is supposed to measure. Presumably it is precisely here that laboratory-fixated Einstein loses the plot. Without his beloved measuring instruments, as he despondently confesses to Bohr, he is of course completely at a loss in the face of quantum physics, which is bewildering to him. According to relationalist physics, the Universe itself has a duration of its own, which for that very reason cannot be measured by an external, extra-universal observer, which is exactly what an ordinary, classic clock would be. So it is about time without a clock, an ontic flow without any measuring instrument. And it is exactly here that Einstein pigheadedly says thanks and goodbye to Bohr and refuses to be involved any longer.
The Bohrian revolution means that it is time and not space that is the really fundamental mystery within physics. Thus, we would do well to ignore Einstein’s spatiocentrism in order to instead move on with Peirce’s and Smolin’s proposal to construct a tempocentric world view. A more interesting alternative to Einstein’s failed attempt to domesticate time and convert it into a kind of extra dimension of space would be to do precisely the opposite: to regard space as three extra dimensions on top of time. Loop quantum gravity does exactly this when it quantifies Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to the theory of loop quantum gravity, space is no longer void or fixed, but must rather be regarded as an elastic phenomenon subject to network dynamics. The new metaphors of informationalism are quite simply so powerful that even physics goes through a fundamental change with the starting point in the idea of network dynamics. In the new relationalist physics even the Universe itself is a phenomenon of network dynamics.
A consequence of this is that space might have had completely different characteristics in previous historical stages than it has today. For example, it might have had many times more dimensions than today’s three under the extreme heat that prevailed during the Universe’s very earliest phase of genesis. This opens the way for the idea that both the expansion of cosmic space and today’s three dimensions of space can be regarded as by-products of a dramatic cooling down of initially incredibly hot, compressed, network-dynamical primordial space. Such a network-dynamics way of viewing the genesis of the Universe is called geometrogenesis. In its initial phase, multidimensional space is a maximally entangled pure geometry (it is pure in the sense that its nodes completely lack substance). But for every phase transition ever-more entanglements are dissolved, which means that space expands and is gradually cooled down. As a kind of compensation for the incrementally decreasing interconnections with each other in an expanding and cooled universe, the nodes receive the substance we associate with them today, and space thereby acquires its weight.
Global time already exists when all nodes in the Universe are connected to each other; a condition that interestingly enough admits the existence of a global time within the Universe but at the same time admits a lack of any vestige of space and thereby also all forms of local time. The clocks would stand still if they had anywhere to be and if there was anyone who could read them. An energy loss causes the nodes to start letting go of each other, and the Big Bang is a fact. What is interesting here is how a radically relationalist idea such as geometrogenesis requires global time as an axiom to be able to exist. Local times in Einsteinian relativism arise only when geometrogenesis kicks in; when the nodes loosen their grip on each other and the Universe has cooled; this is when space arises and expands. And with the expansion of space, a speed limit within the Universe also arises, namely at the speed of light – note that we are dealing with yet another law that only applies within our present Universe; cosmic space as a whole needs no upper speed limit: the cosmic inflation in the Universe’s childhood, which both the standard model and geometrogenesis require, expands much faster than light for example – which in turn gives rise to the local subsystems that characterise the universe that Einstein analyses in our time. And what does Einstein find in these local subsystems, if not those beloved clocks of his?
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.
The eternalist world view exists because the human being needs it: physics on the other hand manages splendidly without eternalism in our mobilist Universe. The perception process transforms the mobilist field into an eternalised thing. The abstract thing thus does not exist in an ontic sense, it must instead be understood as a kind of concrete field. Evolution has conveniently developed perception into a highly efficient information prioritisation mechanism, rather than into the ontological truth producer that Kantian rationalism in its superstitiousness desires it to be. It is thus the perception that freezes the concrete field in space–time and decodes it as a delimited fictive. The key word here is intensity. A phenomenon is mainly a kind of noumenal intensity. The higher the activity and complexity within a concrete field, the higher the intensity. The physicists Julian Barbour and Lee Smolin have defined complexity in a physical sense as multiplicity. The greater the difference within a subsystem, the greater the variation. Self-organised systems organise energy flows as feedback loops, for both positive and negative feedback. Thereafter it is simply a case of multiplying the variation by the activity in order to be able to calculated the intensity of the phenomenon in question.
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.
There is of course an ongoing oscillating dialectics between eternalism and mobilism in the human mind, but the truth and reality beyond Man’s perceptional fantasy world is fundamentally mobilist. The Universe is thus contingent and not symmetrical. Stability and necessity have nothing whatsoever to do with each other: connecting them logically is to let oneself be hypnotised by an eternalist illusion. That existence on a fundamental level is transfinite does not mean that it cannot produce temporarily stable states. Quite the opposite: temporary stabilities in complex systems can be every bit as common as explosive changes. They are however, just like the explosions, always temporary. Since everything influences everything else in a mobile and contingent universe, everything will sooner or later change and transition into completely new emergent states. And what is this if not the physical realisation of Zoroaster’s ethical ideal of haurvatat?
In his book Time Reborn Lee Smolin draws attention to the recurring dilemma, that scientists constantly assume that ontologically speaking existence is both mobilist and eternalist. But as we have seen that is not at all the case. Existence per se is only mobilist. Eternalism is something that our senses and our consciousness produces, but it has nothing to do with the world outside our senses and our consciousness; crassly speaking eternalism is just a phenomenological by-product. This relationalist position results in the wave (mobilism) having priority over the particle (eternalism); they are thus not ontologically equal in merit, for the wave is primary in relation to the particle, which is secondary. And yet science is constantly tempted to fall into the trap which entails assuming there is an eternalist background to the Universe, either through the mistake of mixing eternalism into mobilist physics, or, which is even worse, through assuming that eternalism is the real reality, while our mobilist Universe in that case must be a chimera. Both Newton and Einstein are Platonists who get stuck in this trap, and the same goes, for example, for the majority of contemporary string theoreticians.
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.
We can express this as though the relation between on the one hand Entheos and on the other hand the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos links back to Spinoza’s classical division between natura naturans (active nature) and natura naturata (passive nature) in the monist universe, which is a productive division within the One, the pantheistic deity. Entheos is quite simply the name of nature’s own built-in activism, its constant quest for change, its enormous production of differences and multitudes; while Pantheos is the name of nature as a gigantic and historically speaking passive object where the differences and the multitudes dwell before Entheos’ gaze (with Atheos as the hidden but necessary underside of Pantheos). The Spinozist relation between natura naturans and natura naturata thus has a syntheological equivalent in the relation between Pantheos and Entheos.
At the same moment that the eternalisation is carried out, as Heraclitus points out, existence has already changed and moved somewhere else in history. The Platonists are of course disturbed by the epistemological impossibility of de facto knowing and discerning a mobilist world when their evidently clumsy eternalisations are the only way to gain contact with physical reality. They flock around the fetishistic dream of gaining direct access to an existence that constantly eludes them. When the relationalists then claim that existence is radically contingent, that the future is open, that all apparently durable laws can be altered at any time; then we can of course, and unfortunately, write off all attempts to achieve a sustainable universal theory of everything for physics. For it is precisely this fetish that the relationalist deprives the Platonist of; the desire to experience and rule the world as it is can never be fulfilled in any way. It is both physically and in principle impossible to catch the world in a constantly expanding universe with the magical arrow of time as a given constant. This is the meaning of the principle of explanatory closure.
The problem is just that the conditions of scarcity that the human being has endured on planet Earth for several million years have no equivalent in the Universe whatsoever. The Universe is one gigantic expansion, where there is no scarcity of resources of any kind. The Universe is 93 billion light years wide. And it is finite but limitless. An eye that over innumerable generations has been evolutionarily honed for hunting, gathering and reproduction has no benefit whatsoever from its natural, intuitive aesthetics when it comes to understanding the Universe, which may be regarded as a latter-day occupation. Here the eye is groping in a cosmic darkness which it really does not understand. Thereby, the whole idea that aesthetics, which has finite resources as its starting point would have any applicability whatsoever to a cosmos that is characterised by enormous bounty, falls down. Rather, time after time, throughout history, physics has proven to be even more confusing, even more complex, even more bizarre, than the human being with her narrow, anthropocentric imagination has been able to even begin to imagine in advance. On further reflection, Plato’s neurotic minimalism is to be regarded as the worst possible guide through modern physics.
After all, we live in a mobilist Universe, and thus relationalism is the only possible way forward towards a deeper understanding of existence, however difficult and complicated that path may seem. Pantheos offers no incentive whatsoever in terms of making it simple for us in the way that rationalism in all its forms would like to believe. No incentives whatsoever can exist in a state of bounty, since an incentive by definition requires a scarcity. Rather, physics only becomes more and more complex the more deeply we delve into it. And why would Pantheos want to have it any other way? God apparently loves to play hide-and-seek. The only theory of everything that stands the test of time is therefore the relationalist metalaw which says that eternally valid theories of everything are in principle impossible. When the physicists’ megalomaniac boyhood dreams of the great unified theory of everything thus collapses in the face of the ruthless principle of explanatory closure, this is where the syntheists take over and enthusiastically pick up the only reasonable ethical imperative that remains: Go with the flow!
We live in a relationalist universe. It is not relativist, and it is definitely not dualist, in either a Platonist or in any other sense. Which leads to complications when we humans, with our limited perspective – for understandable reasons, a strictly anthropocentric one – and our expedient but extremely selective and elucidating perception apparatus, are going to form a picture of the world and everything that transpires in our environment. What we see and apprehend is a world filled with clearly delimited things: chairs, tables, and pots and pans that are either standing on the stove or inside cupboards, if they are not lying around somewhere cluttering up where they really have no place being. But these clear delimitations constitute a mixture of wishful thinking and simplifications that are dictated by functionality. We must be able to orient ourselves and act in order to survive. In reality, the world consists of more or less impermanent and fuzzily delimited phenomena, where it is the system’s organisation that determines their function and properties to an infinitely greater extent than the phenomena in themselves. These systems are changing all the time and are in incessant and infinitely complex interaction with all other systems, which also keep changing all the time. This means that the constant conflict between form and matter is illusory. Form is matter, matter is form. There is no conflict between the one and the other. The world is a whole thing, but it never stays the same from one moment to the next.
The principle of explanatory closure is based on the insight that at the end of the day the Universe is a gigantic, unmanageable ontic flow that is expanding at a tremendously high rate. The Universe did not create itself in some kind of unique moment of self-genesis – in the manner that the traditional religions, and up until recently the natural sciences as well, imagined the whole process to have taken place. Rather, it creates and recreates itself all the time in a constantly ongoing process. But all explanatory models of everything require an arbitrarily chosen but nevertheless necessary freeze of this flow, an eternalisation, in order to be possible, or even conceivable. The reason is quite simply that as soon as some individual explanation has been formulated, the world with all its mutable and interacting systems of atoms has already rushed onwards in all directions from the eternalisation in space–time that the explanation requires and claims to interpret and clarify. The Universe thereby constantly evades all of Man’s pathetic attempts at explanatory candour. Everything of this nature by definition lies outside our human capabilities. This means that the only intellectually honest attitude to the Universe is to accept it as a constantly mutable entity that continuously evades us, pantheism’s the One as God, the explanatory closure par excellence.
But we are also living in an informationalist world – no longer in a world of just written language or oral communication – where the total quantity of information is expanding at such tremendous speed that the world around us is becoming increasingly difficult to grasp and more and more incomprehensible to us. We see how the ontic deluge in the Universe gets an ontological equivalent in the gigantic, rapidly expanding and thereby incalculable flow of words, thoughts and ideas that confront us in our immediate environment. This ontological rather than ontic flow of impulses gushes – with the same torrential force as our expanding Universe – through the interlinked, interacting and therefore in practice convergent media that shape and dictate the conditions of our socio-cultural biotopes, which puts a lot of pressure on our brains and senses. We cannot possibly not be part of it, but instead live very much within – always and only within – the ontic as well as ontological flows of existence. This means that the principle of explanatory closure, at least under informationalism, also must include ourselves and our communications with each other and the world around us.
The concept of information stress is not particularly old, but with the advent of informationalism we have been forced to relate to this phenomenon and create strategies for managing it to some extent and preserving at least an illusion of overview and control. This means that our only possibility of embracing the world as a whole under informationalism arises if we complement the ontic relationalism for the natural sciences with ontological relationalism.html">social relationalism for the social sciences. We are now being forced to realise that we are not only constantly forced to eternalise the mobilist world around us in order to make it understandable and manageable (see The Global Empire), but that in addition our new eternalisations on top of our earlier eternalisations – because of the explosive expansion of the Universe and the sheer quantity of information – are constantly being moved further and further away from the fundamental mobilist ontics of existence. This insight means that we are reduced to trying to manage our relations with both the surrounding world and ourselves, our own identity as ethical creatures, through transrationalism – and with the starting point in a conception of existence as an open entirety, not through rationalism based on a conception of existence as a closed logical construction in all its constituent parts.
We are forced to abandon the old Cartesian internarcissism in order to construct a universocentric interdependism instead. And based on a universocentric interdependism, society or the social must be a primary emergence, that is, we apply the One in a Spinozist sense to the social under the name Syntheos, in the same way that we already apply the One to the universal under the name Pantheos. What is essential here is that the social as a whole thereby precedes the Kantian relation between the subject and the object instead of the other way around, just as the Universe on the whole precedes all kinds of atomist constructions within physics. In addition, interdependism must be relationalist and not relativist; the mutual dependence of the agents applies at all levels in the hierarchy, and thus also within the phenomena themselves.
But since syntheism, when it investigates the world, finds neither individuals nor atoms, it becomes necessary to break with the individualist-atomist paradigm in order to connect instead to the metaphysical alternative that actually has support in the sciences’ observations of the world, that is, network dynamics and its attendant relationalism.html">social relationalism. Just like in relationalist physics, there are only relations on top of other relations and probabilities on top of other probabilities even within psychology and sociology, and these relations and probabilities do not stop at the externally interactive: they are very much also internally intra-acting. First there is the network, then there is the node and only thereafter does the subjective experience arise. What applies here is thus an inverted procedure compared to Descartes’ and Kant’s narcissistic fantasy of the genesis of the subject and its position in the Universe: “I am, therefore I think.” Man himself is a phenomenon of network dynamics, localised within other network-dynamical phenomena. But when she also becomes conscious of this, he can start to act as something far more than merely a relationalist subject, namely as the syntheist agent, syntheism’s ethical human ideal.
Thus, the conditions for the development of consciousness are not either in any way universal, but rather highly contingent and bound to a very specific, spatio-temporal situation. The Kantian transcendental subject must be replaced by the syntheist immanent subject. And the syntheist immanent subject has no need whatsoever of any kind of correlationalism, in either the weak Kantian or the strong relativist sense. In a radically relationalist universe the need for correlationalism disappears. Thus, the syntheist immanent subject does not arise in opposition to the phenomenon but instead is an integral part of the same. The subject is best described as the phenomenon’s agentiality.
Individualism’s misleading anthropomorphisation of consciousness leads straight towards an impossible dead end. But it is not merely Kantian correlationism that must be discarded in conjunction with the necessary massive clean-out associated with the transition to relationalism. This also applies, to take one example, to all Eastern or New Age-related ideas of some kind of cosmic consciousness. The Universe not only lacks a brain to be conscious with: the Universe has de facto no incentive to acquire a consciousness, since consciousness is only produced in order to cover up the failings that are specific to the life situations of human beings. Not only is Man the only animal that talks – and thereby also thinks in the abstract – he is also the only animal who develops this ability in order to be able to survive at all. Language is developed as a Darwinian response to the human being’s evolutionary shortcomings. To speak and think is just the human being’s way of compensating for her own physical weakness and the evolutionary advantages of other animal species.
However, the Universe has no need whatsoever of or interest in language or thoughts or any kind of consciousness. While consciousness might be extremely valuable and remarkable for the human being in her self-absorption, it is completely meaningless for all other significant entities in the Universe. There really was not even the slightest trace of words in the beginning. The Word can only be placed at the beginning of Creation when the uniquely talkative Man uses language in order to try and comprehend that which is difficult to comprehend, locked in a consciousness that is furnished and wallpapered with language. Language and thereby also thinking and consciousness has actually been around for 200,000 years at most. And what do a mere 200,000 years of gossiping and reflecting within one single species of animal on just one single planet matter in a 14 billion-year-old, gigantic and moreover constantly expanding Universe? The question is of course rhetorical and the answer is nought. We have an endearing tendency to mistake what appears important to ourselves for what is important in an overarching perspective.
When it comes to the historically necessary decentralisation of consciousness, syntheism differs radically from objective pantheism in all its variants, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism and New Age. Searching for a cosmic consciousness outside Man, as these ideologies are doing, is nothing other than a childishly misdirected projection of anthropocentric, internarcissistic fantasies onto something that is particularly ill-suited for this. The truth is that the Universe, with its enormous creative potential, is far too fantastic to need a consciousness. Narrowly limited human beings on the other hand are – probably – the only consciousness in the Universe, since consciousness has arisen solely as a means of damage control, precisely because of Man’s existential limitations. Syntheism therefore only professes itself an adherent to subjective pantheism and not to the objective variant. We choose to project divinity onto existence as a whole – subjective pantheism is instead truth as an act par excellence – instead of believing that the cosmos imposes its divinity on us through a variety of dubious and self-appointed messengers. Syntheologically, we locate consciousness between Entheos (the dividual subject) and Syntheos (the collective subject), dancing on top of Atheos (the engine of the subject). But it is extremely important to keep it as far away as possible from Pantheos and all other superstitions regarding a cosmic consciousness.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze devoted a lot of work to the art of managing the chaos that occurs in the world before Man appears. He goes back to humanity’s nomadic roots and calls this deeper picture of the human being the dividual (the divisible human being), in contrast to the capitalist individual (the indivisible human being). Deleuze’s post-humanist dividual in turn happens to fit perfectly as an ideal for the rising netocracy under informationalism (see The Netocrats). Deleuze argues that the dividual is autoimmune. To be autoimmune is to see both good and bad sides in oneself as necessary. To be autoimmune is to acknowledge that one is finite and constantly divided in every moment, driven by internal desires and drives, which in the encounter with an incessant flow of external memes unite around the nomadic, dividual identity. To be autoimmune is to give full expression to our pathological sorrow and fear of death. The dividual is of course always conscious of the fact that the Universe has both the right and the capacity to crush her at any moment. Life is very fragile for real; this is not just some maudlin, sentimental phrase.
In contrast to the fixed individual, the nomadic dividual is just as playfully divisible inwardly as he is flexibly inconstant outwardly. In addition, the dividual is not the least bit interested in acting as some kind of centre of existence on individualism’s ramshackle, theatrical stage. In contrast to the Cartesian individual’s existential self-absorption – what else could we expect from a starting point that says “the only thing I am aware of is that I myself exist” – the dividual sees and understands herself as a kind of auto-suggested spectre of the mind, an emergent by-product from a specific evolutionary process, a highly peripheral creature in a monstrous Universe, who only gets a value for itself through creative interaction with other dividuals, who also themselves in the same way are always mutable. The dividual is not merely the historical and philosophical replacement of the individual, but also the consequence of the dismantling and decentralisation of the individual. Because it is not the dividual but the network that is syntheism’s metaphysical core.
This means that syntheism liberates Man from anthropocentrism and internarcissism. That the individual human being is freed from the responsibility of being an individual and instead is being encouraged to be a dividual is something that syntheism regards as a kind of existential salvation. Dividualism colours every fibre of the syntheist agent. Man is not the centre of existence any more than the ego could be the centre of Man (since it does not exist – see The Body Machines). Obviously, humanity and its attributes have no primary status in the Universe. Civilisations have arisen as an emergent phenomenon on a planet after aeons of history without any people at all. They have also perished without the Universe taking the slightest bit of notice. Humanity is a phenomenon that has sprung from other intra-acting phenomena. Nor is any human being created by other humans. Biological parents do not create their offspring – despite the fact that they would like to believe that this is the case – but are rather tools for the Universe’s constant production of new organisms furnished with bodies, language, ideas, consciousnesses and subconsciousnesses.
The cosmological drive is without a doubt considerably more complex than any anthropocentric projection can ever do justice to. Above all, it wants nothing in advance. It is not a hunter who fells its prey in order to try to impress a partner in conjunction with an approaching tribal mating dance. And it does not seek any kind of power, since it does not find anything that it must control in order to serve a specific purpose. Honestly, it does not matter if we ourselves exist; in the universocentric world view the main thing is that the Universe – this something without a doubt, rather than nothing – manifests itself for itself through us. If we only leave our own subjective experience of the surrounding world and consider that the Universe is the world before the world itself, then we ourselves are not wiped out by death either, since existence continues beyond death. Existence in fact never ceases to exist; dying is to return to the enormous dimensions of existence from which we come. Death is nothing other than the termination of the momentary, marginal fluctuation in the vast history that we, from our twisted perspective, call our existence, the Universe’s minimal and local game with itself. Birth is the loan and death is the just and reasonable payment. The Universe always wins in the end, just as the house always wins at the casino. And we are and always will be participants in the Universe.
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.
Free will is a dualist myth, which has been produced in order for us to be able to hold the soul responsible for the weak and dissolute body, which it is of course set to battle with in the eternal duel of dualism (see The Body Machines). On the other hand, we can speak of free choice in a contingently monist universe, with the quantity of different choices that are offered the body in every given situation. However, there is no such thing as a will that is free in the midst of this choosing, nor is there any agency of will where this illusory will could be given shelter and exercised. The will is nothing other than the status of the moment in the current tug-of-war between the desire and the drive, and since these dwell in the subconscious it is not possible to achieve any conscious balancing between them. There is thus no individual free will, but rather an endless plurality of wills, which hardly become fewer because the current situation offers so many different choices.
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 syntheist agent stands out even more clearly with Hegel’s successor Martin Heidegger. He mistrusts Buddhism’s idea of enlightenment as a possible and desirable consciousness beyond the subject, and argues that the subject is located in and expands from its formative illusion. With Heidegger, the illusion is the subject’s engine – that is, identical with syntheology’s Atheos – and not a problem for the existential experience. It is instead the illusory quality that gives the subject its – for Heidegger decisive – presence. Heidegger here stands considerably closer to syntheism than Buddhism. The syntheist agent’s character traits present themselves most clearly in her relation to her own transience. This is the engine of culture: our mortality and the mystery of death. Death is characterised first and foremost by its anonymity; the subject is dissolved at death into a pre-dividual anonymous dimension. To die is to be dissolved into the Universe, to become part of that which is universal, which already within the subject is greater than the particular subject per se. That which dies in death is dividuation and nothing else. According to Gilles Deleuze, the death instinct should primarily be understood as a lack of imagination in relation to the existential experience. A lack of imagination which the syntheist culture is more than happy to remedy, and where the point of departure is given: Be your desire, be your drive, ignore everything else so that you may live life to the full!
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?
In the same way that cosmologists and quantum physicists strive for agreement on a theory of everything in physics, syntheologists are working towards constructing a social theory of everything for informationalism. What is striking about the syntheist utopia is that it cannot be formulated beforehand – since it is located in a contingent and indeterministic universe – which means that instead it must be practised before it is articulated. Therefore it is of central importance for both syntheist ethics and creative development that the ideas in a society are not kept locked away behind virtual firewalls or towers of legal papers, but that they can be exchanged in complete freedom between the active dividuals on the Internet. The syntheist utopia is thus first and foremost a society where ideas are free and are not owned by anybody, where the memes form memeplexes that wander freely from human to human, from network to network, and are transformed during these movements without being met with any resistance whatsoever anywhere, apart from the lack of attention that sifts out all memetic losers. Therefore, the digital integrity movement receives the syntheist movement’s full support as the necessary path to this state, which we consequently call utopian memetics.
Statism, faith in the nation state’s necessary supremacy and monopoly on violence, is capitalism’s political supra-ideology. Under statism’s banner, conservatism emerges as a protector of the establishment and its interests; liberalism constitutes a faith in the individual as a rational accumulator of resources in a market governed by a mystical hand which is invisible to the naked eye; while socialism is a blind faith in the political party as a substitute for God. Obviously, the advent of informationalism puts all these ideologies into deep crisis, since it attacks the very foundation for statism by undermining the drawing of borders in an increasingly irrelevant geography, which makes accessible alternative and infinitely much more tempting possibilities in terms of identity creation. In this process, not only is meliorism exposed as a banal myth, it also loses all its power of attraction; the netocratic dividual would much rather experience herself as a constantly ongoing and dynamic event throughout life than as a representative of any kind of slowly developed and predetermined progress. The old ideologies are quite simply plagued by statism’s deterministic view of history, which no longer has any credibility in an indeterministic universe. Therefore the ideological work must be done anew, and in that case all the way up from the theological foundation.
Regardless of whether we introduce divinities or not in syntheist metaphysics, the actual process is finally about taking advantage of metaphysics’ unique opportunity to imagine existence to its utmost limit. To convert metaphysics into theology, to think about God, is thus not a matter of some kind of shallow fantasising about an Old Testament father figure who sits above the clouds and observes his children playing on the face of the Earth with tender or irascible eyes. Instead, theologising metaphysics is thinking one’s way forth to the outermost horizon of the time in which one is living and based on the knowledge and spiritual experiences that one has access to. And then not merely in a physical sense, with God as the concept for the beginning, middle and end of the Universe – in that case we might just as well settle for classical pantheism and not need to develop its completion syntheism – but even more so with God as the name of the surface on which to project the meaning and purpose of everything. In that sense, the concept of God is fundamentally not just the Universe (Pantheos), but also the utopia (Syntheos), the imagined backdrop located in the future – a backdrop that nourishes all of humanity’s dreams and aspirations.
Between these extremes we find people in alternating states of confusion and wonder where everything, including ourselves, exists in ecstatic intensities. What classical atheism does not seem to understand is that it is precisely in this existential confusion and wonder that religion has its origin, not in any quasi-scientific, more or less lame logic. Religion comes out of mysticism’s handling of the immensity of existence, and that immensity has neither shrunk physically nor become any less fantastic as a result of the last century’s overwhelming scientific advances – from quantum physics to cosmology. Logically, we ought to be considerably more religious now than ever before. The miracle of reality is constantly becoming ever more fascinating. From our wonder at the immensity of existence (Pantheos) we continue to our wonder at our fellow human being’s difference in relation to ourselves (Entheos) and to reconnection between people as an empathic collective (Syntheos). For where the Universe meets us with indifference, we meet the potential for love in our fellow humans. It is when we build further from pantheism to syntheism that love comes into the picture. By definition love cannot expect love in return as a condition. Then it is not love, but merely internarcissistic manipulation (what follows from this manipulation is then the individualistic idea that the other is to be conquered and owned as a kind of colonised possession).
In Ancient Greece, three different concepts of love are used: metaphysical love (agape), erotic love (eros) and friendship love (philia). The definitive test for love is attraction to the radically other, and this can only arise as agape. In this way, the three loves form not just a triangle but also an inclined plane, sloping from agape down towards the pair philia and eros. In the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza added a fourth concept of love: amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God, a love sprung from an intellectual conviction and recognition of the actual conditions of things, above all in relation to his monist universe where God and Nature are two names for one and the same thing, Deus sive Natura. Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis is first and foremost a radical act of will, which makes it truth as an act par excellence. For he maintains that the ethically desired attraction to the radically other does not start with the emotions we normally associate with love, but as a logically and cogently performed act of duty.
Spinoza’s concept amor dei intellectualis is a predecessor to Nietzsche’s complementary term amor fati, which was coined 200 years later. It is enough to add duration to Spinoza’s love which is dependent on logical dutifulness to the Universe in order to get Nietzsche’s love which is dependent on logical dutifulness to fate. In both cases it is about the same attraction as a truth as an act, where the identity-reflecting decision precedes the emotion. Syntheologically of course we place the universe-fixated Spinoza with Pantheos and the time-fixated Nietzsche with Entheos. That Nietzsche adds the arrow of time to the ethical equation results in amor dei intellectualis and agape being merged as the basis for amor fati. His own world view is of course based on the Abrahamic God’s death, and since it also heralds the death of the individual, the Nietzschean übermensch ends up in a deadlock where everything in history up until now must be loved – both dutifully and without reservation – since no external salvation or other mental relief whatsoever exists. This means that an accepting attitude is not enough: Nietzsche unreasonably maintains that in fact a transcendent love is required for a possible reconciliation with fate. Since the love of fate is logically deduced, a necessity for the ethical substance rather than some kind of freely chosen emotion, only metaphysical love, agape, is suitable for this task. Fate arises and must be loved as truth as an act where the events are fixed in history. Therefore we place amor fati in the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.
The most intimate of relations remind us that everything essential in life starts with two and not one. One is nothing: the attraction always starts with two. And as the definitive truth event, attraction is in focus for mysticism. Zoroaster already understood and talked of this already with his concept asha in ancient Iran, followed by Heraclitus, who consummates the idea with his concept anchibasie in ancient Greece. Interestingly enough, both concepts are ambiguous: they can be translated as both to be present and to be close to being (not to be confused with late capitalism’s obsession with all kinds of pseudo-Buddhist mindfulness). Because two is the minimum in syntheist ontology – nothing can ever be just a one, other than the One, the Universe as a whole itself – a closer association with the object cannot either be a point of departure for the ontology. Instead this must be based on the actual relation between at least two, from the existential being in the division between them. Thereby asha and anchibasie, brilliantly, have not just ontological and epistemological but also ethical consequences. To live, understand and act correctly is to constantly remain as close to the states asha or anchibasie as possible.
The consequence of this is that, if we try to avoid asha or anchibasie as an onto-epistemological foundation, it becomes necessary to deny all forms of motion at all. This means that all motion without exception must be regarded as illusory. Parmenides is the Greek philosopher who draws this logically necessary conclusion, and with Parmenides the revolt against Heraclitus’ pioneering, counter-intuitive, but nevertheless logical insights is born. Parmenides’ ambition is fulfilled by the physicists Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein when they create a world view where all motion is illusory in a Platonist block universe, where the various forms of laws and determinism in a frozen space–time precede everything else. The problem is however that mathematics does not precede physics. Existence is not primarily mathematical (ideal) and secondarily physical (actual), as Plato claims. It is merely physical. We quite simply do not live in some form of Einsteinian block universe, however tidy this might look on the drawing board; we live de facto in a considerably more complicated Bohrian network universe.
Thereafter we only have to reverse the addition to get subtraction, the temporarily negative addition – neither more nor less. In the next step, we build further with multiplication and division as shortcuts to increasingly complex additions and subtractions. And so on, and so forth. But we never leave eternalism within mathematics, which of course ultimately is applied eternalism par excellence. Mobilist existence outside mathematical construction does not take any notice of this however; it is not the least bit more mathematical than it is eternalist. All such things are merely illusory conceptions that are nourished by our inadequate albeit functional aids for navigating the turmoil of existence. It is important to note here that mathematics does not distinguish itself from physics as some kind of latter-day emergence – no such suddenly arisen mystical degree of complexity is needed – rather, this separation actually occurs right at the same moment that mathematics starts to come into use at all. The structured fantasy sets off in one direction, the chaotic reality in another. We live in a radically relationalist universe – not in a mathematical one. We must not follow the autistic Plato and mistake mathematics’ tempting simplifications and fancy symmetries for endlessly complex reality per se. Mathematics is merely our eternalised way of trying to understand a mobilist environment that constantly evades our descriptions of it, and at the end of the day this must also apply to mathematical formulas per se, which become tangible within Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. According to the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, one of Whitehead’s most prominent disciples, Cantor succeeds in creating a science of infinity. Syntheism can only agree and if nothing else say thank you for the inspiring metaphors.
Heraclitus is the first person in history who seriously both realises and formulates this. His universe is vertical and sees context as primary. Parmenides responds with a universe that is horizontal and sees sequences as primary. It is not the degree of truth of these statements themselves that determines which of these branches dominates the philosophical arena, but how well they match and adapt to the prevailing power structures. It is thus nothing other than the usefulness of Parmenides’ world view to the feudalist and capitalist elites that gives it its dominant status, right up until Whitehead’s and Bohr’s relationalism arrives when, after all this time, Heraclitus is proven right – at least for the time being. The Enlightenment’s three celebrated civilisational mainstays – the individual, the atom and capital – and the primordial forms of Kant’s subject and object, have their roots with Parmenides. At the same time as the network-dynamical revolution pulls the rug out from under the feet of individualism and atomism as well as capitalism, and thereby from Parmenides’ entire legacy.
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.
But if nature does not actively provide us as passive receivers with any valuations whatsoever, a possible future extinction of the Universe does not do so either, since the annihilation most definitely also is part of the nature that, according to Brassier, is silent. Syntheism is therefore based on an even more radical nihilism than that of Brassier, since its emptiness is even deeper and above all lacks Brassier’s wishful-thinking foothold along one of Atheos’ slippery verges. Within syntheology per se, the existential experience – regardless of whether it has the trauma of extinction as a backdrop or not – offers no possible values. The insight that reaches us when we take atheism to its utmost limit is instead that valuations really must be created strictly ex nihilo. This is atheism.html">radical atheism, the dialectical turning point where the fully reasoned nihilism, as a notorious extinguisher of all historical values and valuations, is converted into affirmative syntheism.
Nietzsche, the father of European nihilism, interestingly enough goes in the opposite direction compared to Brassier and instead argues for an ethics based on resistance to nature’s doings. He pits culture against nature and finds the heart of the übermensch in a kind of aesthetics of resistance – but not without first confronting Man with his deep animalistic nature – an ethical turnaround that is investigated and applied to perfection by his French successor Georges Bataille among others who, with his extensive atheological project in the 1950s in turn is one of Lacan’s and obviously also syntheism’s foremost sources of inspiration. According to Nietzsche and Bataille, it is precisely by opposing the natural – by surviving rather than conforming – that Man gets his own ethical substance. So if the Universe really is on the road to a final death and extinction, a Nietzschean response to this state of affairs might be to defend survival against extinction as a norm through every thought, every word, every act. Thereby Nietzsche with his wealth of tragic heroes is the ethicist of survival par excellence. He pits the principle of maximisation of existential pleasure against Brassier’s ambition to speed up and put into effect the death-wishing masochism of the subconscious.
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.
Eternalism distinguishes itself from totalism inasmuch as it does not adduce any kind of ontological status or pretend to be primary and external in relation to mobilist reality. Instead it is strictly phenomenological. The father of pragmatism Peirce emphasises mobilism’s primary ontological status precisely by calling it firstness; consequently he confers a status on eternalism denoted as secondness and in closing refers to the dialectic between them (that is, when phenomenology returns to mobilism after a digression via eternalism) as thirdness. Thus as secondness, eternalism has no Platonist ambitions at all. It instead apprehends itself as a brilliant, perceptive response to the massive semiotic flow from an immanent and contingent universe (Peirce is not very surprisingly also the father of semiotics). Eternalism is thereby very much in fact a transcendence as an activity, exactly what Heidegger would like to see, and as such it manages all of totalism’s hobbyhorses excellently without totalism being able to sneak in the back door and once again try to attack mobilist ontology.
If spoken language constituted the first dimension in the complex universe of language, written language must have appeared as pure magic when it gained a foothold as the second dimension and in a heartbeat enabled the building of the first civilisations and empires in history. And it is exactly thus – as (dangerous) magic – that Plato portrays writing in the dialogue Faidros. It is sufficient to imagine how impressive the first agricultural temples must have appeared in comparison with nomadism’s unassuming, temporary earthen floors for rain dancing which preceded them. With the arrival of the printing press, humanity entered the third mass medial dimension in the universe of language. Now it was accessibility – written texts suddenly became much cheaper – and the speed of the production of text that impressed to such a degree that the entire activity suddenly shone with a magical glow.
The Internet is of course the fourth dimension in the universe of language. If we had asked someone a hundred years ago how that person would perceive a world where billions of people and trillions of machines are intimately, communicatively, entangled with each other at every moment, constantly communicating, this fourth dimension of language would hardly have been called anything other than magic. The Internet has such dramatic consequences and thereby entails such a radical revolution that we must also regard this phenomenon as a fourth dimension in relation to three-dimensional physical space. Global geography is being rocked to its foundations because of the radically truncated distances on the planet – this applies both to human and mechanical players – that the Internet entails. And every time this magic appears, it means that a new hope is born. It does not require any unrealistic superfluity of historical insight to understand the human need for utopias. For without utopias, there are of course no visions, no ideals in common to strive for; and without visions there is of course no hope, at least not in the form of any concrete formulation that can constitute an objective for how society should be organised. To long for the utopia is therefore not to wish for the impossible; it is rather to understand the importance of thinking the magical, that which today seems completely impossible, as something that is tomorrow’s most necessary, beautiful and actually most reasonable possibility. So what then does the road to the utopia look like?
This applies to social emergences just as much as physical emergences. Biology brings something new to chemistry as such, which in turn brings something new to physics as such. In the same way that the Internet brings something new to the mass media from precisely a mass medial perspective, which in turn adds something to written language as such. How could the potentialities of physics or written language be apparent to us today without their subsequent and amplifying historical actualisations? This becomes even clearer when one brings into the argument the fact that there are no laws that make these emergences necessary in advance in our contingent universe. As Hegel very correctly points out, the actualisations only appear as necessary afterwards for us constant rewriters of history. The reason for this is that the emergences – in contrast to, for example, the phase transitions in physics – are not preprogrammed within the phenomena that are located in the hierarchy’s lower tier. The emergences are completely contingent phenomena. They thus arise ex nihilo at a certain, arbitrary moment, without, as is the case with the phase transitions, having been built into the lower tiers from the start.
An event is a spectacular occurrence, a revolution is a spectacular event, and a singularity is a spectacular revolution. Events of various importance take place several times per year, genuine revolutions only once or twice per millennium. Singularities are easily counted, from an anthropocentric perspective we can only be said to have gone through three singularities: the commencement of the Universe, the genesis of life and the birth of consciousness. The question is whether we can imagine such a fourth singularity. For syntheism however the answer is clear. The fourth singularity must be God’s entry into history. For whatever it is that would be able to match the weight of the emergent genesis of existence, of life and of consciousness earlier in history, for the people of today it must have the same weight as if God suddenly appeared. Whatever it is that is hiding beyond the fourth dimension, its right and only name is God. Thereby the interesting question is what the arrival of God might be and what forms it might assume.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou, one of Jacques Lacan’s most well-known successors, starting with his work Being and Event, constructs a complete philosophical system based on the informationalist event as the deepest truth about Man’s existence. The biological, mental, and social structures that characterise Man are empirically verifiable generalities, and as such are of course contingent. The truths we produce and know of are dependent on this contingency, which summarises them all. Being is not everything to Man, as the totalist philosophers imagine. Thinking can very well be constructed with its starting point in ontology’s constant inconsistency instead of using the fictive being as the basis. However, Badiou argues that the universal is independent on the contingency. Every singularity in itself consists of an infinitely internal chaos, but through the singularity’s internalisation of this chaos, a kind of encircling stability is created around the chaos which makes the universal’s identity possible. From a geometric perspective, we can express this by saying that it is the stable ring around what is transient and chaotic that is the actual singularity; a stable universe around chaotic matter, a stable life around a chaotic biology, a stable consciousness around a chaotic hodgepodge of thoughts, followed by God as a kind of stable ring around a chaotic future.
Never before has the ethical imperative of the truth as an act been clearer. What then follows in a Badiouian scenario is that the activism that emanates from the three unnamable names Atheos, Entheos and Pantheos builds the stable foundation for Syntheos, the formalisation and realisation of the utopia. Since syntheism’s mobilist universe is both contingent and indeterministic, obviously Syntheos cannot be realised through the historical objective’s mystical, eschatological arrival, in keeping with what Marxism and the Abrahamic religions so imaginatively preach. Syntheos is instead realised through a focused but nomadic, creative activism in a capricious, contingent universe, driven by the hope of the impossible suddenly appearing and being realised as the fourth singularity – an idea which is consummated by being theologised by Badiou’s declared syntheist disciple Quentin Meillassoux. The lesson from both Badiou and Levinas is that life-long devotion to truth as an act is the innermost existentialist substance of metaphysics.
First of all syntheism assumes that time is real in a contingent universe. This makes all predictions extremely uncertain, at least in the long-term, just like within meteorology or ecology. But there is also a built-in paralysis in the faith in some kind of generally positive or predominantly negative development. Whether the expectations tip this way or that way basically does not matter; merely the fact that the expectations tip in any direction whatsoever weakens the will to act. If the driving existentialist principle in syntheist ethics is that truth is an act – you are everything if you act, you are nothing if you do not act and are content to react – it has the consequence that if the actor is to maximise his or her opportunities for power and influence, all predictions concerning the future must start from an absolute neutral position. The future is not better or worse in any objective sense: meliorism is fundamentally mendacious, the mythology of doom likewise, the future is merely open, full stop. It is from this prediction-neutral starting point that the syntheist ethical imperatives can be formulated. The impossible is possible – if you want to be associated with truth: act!
Convention says that death frightens us with all the pain, sorrow, loneliness, powerlessness and mystery with which it is associated. But even if the pain, sorrow and loneliness are factored out, the fascination still remains the same. Thus the powerlessness and mystery remain. In other words, death frightens us by how it reveals our powerlessness and lack of knowledge. It humiliates us all, not least those of us who have had power and social status during our lifetimes. It strips us of anthropocentric internarcissism. But death also reveals our existential banality, our entirely non-existent significance for the Universe. And what frightens us most of all is how death reveals our own lack of significance for the divine, that is, for Pantheos. At the deepest level, the Christian lie is that each and every one of us means something to God, that we are actually a desirable lot and cherished jewels for a god who thus has nothing better to do than to sit and coddle us and the likes of us (literally) in all eternity, like a dead robot god surrounded by dead rag dolls.
Quentin Meillassoux formulates his radical utopianism in L’inexistence divine, a work published in instalments which, at the time of writing, is not yet complete. According to him, the history of the Universe contains three decisive leaps that cannot be understood as any originally built-in phase transitions – as totalists from Plato to Einstein imagine them to be – but rather as contingent emergences that suddenly appear from nowhere and out of anything, and which radically change existence, without thus having any mysterious qualities at all. Physics does obviously obey certain specific laws in our part of space–time, but physics per se does not obey any preordained laws whatsoever – it is instead radically contingent. For example, the Universe as a whole can evidently expand considerably faster than the speed of light, which the existence of cosmic inflation proves with abundant clarity. The laws of physics, or rather its behaviour or habits, can therefore change however and whenever, and without us being consulted about the matter. Otherwise, these behaviours would be compelled to precede the physics that they are deemed to regulate and the natural sciences have never found any support for any such mystical non-material pre-existence of the laws of nature. This is quite simply a matter of a somewhat embarrassing logical error, and a projection of this kind of bizarre metalaw of existence means if anything a depressing return to Newton’s unfounded assumption of an external creator of the Universe, which this creator thus precedes (which of course constitutes the beginning of an unspeakably tedious and meaningless regression without end: who created the creator, who created the creator of the creator, and so on).
Meillassoux bases his philosophical system on four concepts: potentiality, contingency, virtuality and chance. These constitute two spheres of being. At the local level, potentiality is pitted against chance; at the global level virtuality is pitted against contingency. His Syntheos is justice, where justice consummates a history that runs via existence, life and thinking as the previous immanent miracles. Note that according to Meillassoux, a miracle is to be understood as proof that God does not exist. Rather, miracles open up the possibility of the Universe being God – a universe as a god that expresses itself to itself. But as the radical indeterminist that Meillassoux is, he opens the way for the possibility that justice never occurs (a reminder of the neutral position of Badiouian ethics). And above all, Meillassoux claims that justice can never occur unless it is first desired. His god is thereby the Marxist god par excellence. But it is a contingent Marxist god in an indeterministic world with a wide-open future, a singularity that Karl Marx himself would scarcely have understood.
Meillassoux’s contribution to syntheist thinking is obviously both welcome and exciting. This is true, not least of his concept hyperchaos: absolutely everything is contingent. Even the change per se is contingent. Existence has no sense. Instead non-sense rules. The world does not contradict itself, but operates within a permanent condition of non-sense and constant change in all directions and on all levels. At the same time, a universe that finds itself in hyperchaos might very well be consistent. Hyperchaos does not mean that the Universe must be unstable. Contingency is thus something completely different from just chance. Here Meillassoux, just like Badiou, gets inspiration from Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. The laws of physics can be suddenly changed, but as long as they function they are extremely stable. Here both Badiou and Meillassoux open the way for a new realism: mathematics can measure physics in such an exact way that we can experience the world around us almost precisely as it is.
From once having been an obscure philosophical idea, emergence with time has become a central concept within the sciences. The idea is that a specific system can change so dramatically in conjunction with a small shift in its degree of complexity – at a tipping point – that the system as a whole is transformed from one kind of phenomenon into something completely different, where the new emergent phenomenon appears with entirely new properties and qualities that entail that it must be classified as something entirely new in relation to the original system. According to relationalist physics, an emergence moreover means that nature as a whole goes through a change. The emergence has such a decisive ontological significance that a return from the new to the old paradigm is impossible after the emergence. Between different emergent phenomena with, in principle, the same component parts, there is a hierarchy. Every emergent transition forms a new level in the hierarchy. But because every suddenly arisen emergence has its own just as suddenly arisen laws and rules – this is quite possible as long as the newly created laws and rules do not threaten the existence of the actual hierarchy – it also changes nature as a whole for all time in a relationalist universe.
The syntheist biologist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman investigates the metaphysical significance of emergences in his book Reinventing The Sacred. Kauffman points out that there is nothing built into physics from the start that says that it should emerge and give rise to chemistry, in the same manner that there is nothing built into chemistry from the beginning that says that it should emerge and give rise to biology. Neither chemistry’s nor biology’s future births are in any mysterious way preprogrammed within the Big Bang at the genesis of the Universe. Rather, emergences tend to occur quite suddenly, and quite independently of all previously applying laws of nature. They thereby add an increased complexity to the Universe, rather than just develop something built in beforehand, as the totalist determinists from Plato via Newton to Einstein interpret the function of emergences.
The emergence’s potentiality is based on a single simple principle: however many actualities might exist in physics, the potentialities that precede these actualities are always still far more numerous. It is sufficient to go to every human being’s genesis in order to establish that this is the case: for every dividual that is born, nature wastes millions and millions of sperm and also a large number of eggs, which are never made use of at all. And now we are just talking about the eggs and sperm that in spite of everything are actualised as precisely eggs and sperm – the virtual eggs and sperm are in turn many times more numerous. Out of this infinite multiplicity, the emergences stand out as the great winners, as the possibilities that an ultra-creative universe sooner or later must produce anyway, and they are impressive in their pre-adaptive ability to self-organise durable and stable complexities. It is not strange that people have allowed themselves to be carried away by nature’s ability to generate emergences throughout history.
On the other hand, it is a mistake to imagine that in some mysterious way these emergences are givens, that they follow some kind of metalaw of nature – which in that case must exist even before the genesis of the Universe, which of course is an impossibility in an internal self-creating universe without a creating god that is both external and preceding. The Universe has namely not created itself in the past, it is creating itself all the time. In this, Kauffman breaks radically with reductionism, the fundamental axiom of the sciences since Newton’s heyday. According to reductionism, everything can be deduced downwards in the hierarchy; as if everything that arises higher up and on a later occasion always lies fully preprogrammed at one of the lower levels on a previous occasion. According to reductionism for example, biology is really only an advanced form of chemistry, while chemistry is really only an advanced form of physics, and nothing more than this.
Reductionism quite simply assumes that the Universe and its history follow a preordained trajectory, which in some mysterious way is preprogrammed even in the Big Bang. Bizarrely enough, the actual creation of the Universe must therefore be both well-planned, immediate and long since concluded. Kauffman replies that this absurd idea – the reductionist illusion – arises because philosophers and scientists are fixated on only following the hierarchies from the top down, as if things cannot be anything other or more and greater than the sum of their constituent parts. But if one instead studies the hierarchies from the bottom up along the arrow of time – contrary to the masochistic fantasy of how spiritual power and thereby also physical existence must be structured from the top down – one discovers how suddenly arising emergences change the entire playing field once and for all through contingently introducing new phenomena into existence, which in turn contingently give rise to new paradigms in history. Emergences quite simply generate new laws and rules in at least their own region of the Universe, without these specific behavioural patterns having existed anywhere else previously. Thereby it is proven that the arrow of time is real – rather than illusory, as Plato, Newton and Einstein imagine it to be – and determinism is thus dead.
A dynamic system is regarded as ergodic if its behavioural patterns on average over time concur with its behavioural patterns on average in space. Scientists are fond of ergodic systems since they are relatively simple to turn into mathematics – they are of course, seen as totalities, comfortable constants rather than messy variables – and thereby even relatively simple to use as building blocks. However we do not live in an ergodic universe, which reductionism persistently insists that we do. In fact, nothing occurs in the same way twice, every event is instead completely unique, every apparently identical repetition takes place in a completely new, specific context. Kauffman even claims that without the reductionist illusion, the metaphysical premise for classical atheism also falls down. The insight that we live in a non-ergodic universe must quite simply have dramatic consequences for metaphysics too. An anti-reductionist explanatory model is required that replaces the reductionist model. Existence is enormously much more complicated, the future is enormously much more open and harder to predict, and the Universe is enormously much more active than the reductionist illusion has led us to believe.
Kauffman points out that above all the Universe is characterised by an enormous, constant creativity – it is quite simply capable, in a pantheist spirit, of constantly giving rise to completely new phenomena with completely new laws and rules, right down to their metaphysical foundations. Therefore Kauffman draws the conclusion that the presence of emergences calls upon us to create a new religion – or to use his own parlance: he encourages us to allow a new religion to emerge from our consciousness – once the insight of the central roles of the emergence and self-organisation in relationist physics become widely accepted with full force in informationalist metaphysics. Decades of extensive complexity-theory studies have made Kauffman a convinced and almost militant syntheist. His book’s title Reinventing The Sacred says it all.
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.
The obligation to love fate under all circumstances, Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s ethical ideal amor fati, is a central concept in syntheism. The Universe is indifferent to our human cares and woes, does not give our species preferential treatment over someone or something else, accords no special status whatsoever to anyone or anything in relation to anyone or anything else. We can only forgive ourselves for our shortcomings as human beings precisely because we are human beings, not heroes. And in this self-forgiveness, the now plays a central part. Since, according to Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s imperative, we are duty-bound to love all of history up until now – partly because it is the only history there is, partly because it is something that at any rate we cannot do anything about – we are also duty-bound to love our own life story up until now. And in this imposed love there also lies self-forgiveness as a logical obligation and not as a longed-for emotion. Syntheists create rituals in order to constantly return to the necessary self-forgiveness, including collective rituals to support the journey towards the insight of self-forgiveness, and then not least rituals that question and combat the enjoyment that is connected with self-hatred, the moralistic opposite of ethical self-forgiveness. There is in fact no place for self-hatred and its enjoyment within syntheist spiritual work.
When we move from the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos to the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos, we are also in a deeper sense moving from the transcendent to the immanent. That which binds the Universe together, for example, is not that it de facto is a cohesive unit per se – over time different parts of the Universe may have developed completely different laws, substantially independent of one another – but that the Universe has a single common origin and since then has been tied together by cosmic time. This means that the void and the Universe as transcendental concepts are tied together by the immanent time line. However, this does not mean that the possibility of a credible transcendental experience must be ruled out. Through structured shamanism and advanced psychedelic practices – for each and every one as dividuals, or even better and more powerfully as a community – the possibility of a transcendent experience that we associate with Entheos is opened up; an acceptance and enjoyment within the entheist oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos, with the utopian focus directed towards Syntheos.
The syntheist religious experience is thus a transcendental experience within an immanent world, and absolutely not some kind of mystical excursion to some other parallel world in a dualist universe. Syntheism is of course de facto radically monist. We therefore speak of an immanent transcendentalism, a strongly emotional experience of both boundary-transcendence (Entheos) and entanglement (Syntheos) within and deeper down in a strictly immanent world (localised between Atheos and Pantheos). Instead of for example the Abrahamic ascendance to a supernatural Heaven, here we are talking about a syntheist entry into immanent reality. And since syntheism is a metareligion, with Syntheos constantly in its sights, it promotes and celebrates this connection of people.
So if revolutions only occur of their own accord – whether they are emergent or contingent phenomena – how can syntheists steer the three dramatic and parallel revolutions of our time towards a single common event: the singularity? In the world of physics, a singularity is a state where temperature, pressure and curvature are infinite at the same time. In such a singularity a universe, for example, can expand ten million times in a single moment, which makes possible, for example, the cosmic inflation in conjunction with the birth of our own universe. The singularity is a possibility for a universe such as ours to arise spontaneously. Precisely because the universal expansion is an expansion within nothing, it may be inflationary, far beyond the speed of light (which is otherwise the greatest possible speed within this universe). So how does syntheism relate to the Universe? What characterises the relationship between Man and his feared superior – the Universe?
An excellent theological starting point is the experience “the Universe rolled right over and crushed me, with colossal and indifferent weight, and this steam-rolling made me both religious and deeply grateful”, a reaction that witnesses recount time after time after having, for example, gone through the ayahuasca and huachuma rituals in South America or the iboga rituals in Central Africa, which are considered the most powerful but also the most traditional psychedelic practices that humanity has developed. It becomes even more interesting when these recurring testimonies are followed by the words “And aside from this there is nothing in the experience that can be verbalised”. This is the core of the syntheist spiritual experience. Its doctrine takes us the whole way to its practice. But the syntheist spiritual experience in itself can never be verbalised and it is precisely for this reason that it goes under the paradoxical name the unnamable. What we both can and should verbalise, however, is the logical insight that we attain after the life-altering meeting with the unnamable: The criminalisation of entheogenic substances must be regarded as the greatest and most tragic case of mass religious persecution in history. Rarely if ever has human evil been so simple-minded and banal. Therefore first and foremost syntheism strives for humanity at long last to have access to complete freedom of religion. It might be about time.
Syntheism opens the way for an ethics of interactivity, based on the entangled, outstretched phenomenon’s quest for its own survival, its will to intensity and expansion. It is not in ethics and what the subject feels for the other that the primary arises. The primary is instead the existence of the Universe and how this existence manifests itself for itself by setting people in motion towards and with each other. Levinas’ individualistic infatuation is replaced by the manifestation of Syntheos in the encounter between people. This encounter does not get its existential substance via a certain emotion or a holy sacrifice in only one direction between two subjects isolated from each other, as Levinas imagines it, but in a conscious joint act between two equal agents – at once both entangled and autonomous – who realise that, through an act of will, they actually can and therefore choose to let agape into the relationship between them, who thus choose to sacralise the encounter and the joint action. Syntheos quite simply arises when love between people is established as a joint truth as an act.
Note that outside the anthropocentric fantasy, this entire mythological construction is in a worthless limbo. It is only within the capitalist fantasy, which revolves around the centrality of the individual and the substantiality of the atom and the insurmountable gap between them, that these mythological assertions can be distorted into categorical axioms. The sacralisations of life, the body and consciousness are by-products of the massive internarcissism; the collective self-glorification, which in turn is a consequence of fully implemented alienation. The truth is, however, that life, the body and consciousness are emergent phenomena in an open and contingent universe; phenomena that are characterised by constantly higher degrees of complexity, rather than by any form of sacredness. That which one can relate to in a deeper sense is not these three anthropocentric projections in themselves, but the common underlying variable; the constantly higher intensities of the current emergences. To a syntheist, concepts such as life, body or consciousness are not fundamental; rather, these must be regarded as secondary and precisely as anthropocentric projections onto the rich, creative ability of the Universe to produce hosts of different intensities. And it is the intensity that is sacred. The name of the intensity is Entheos.
Let us go to the history of philosophical vitalism in order to seek an answer. The difference between the individualist and the dividualist paradigms could not be any clearer than the difference that exists between the otherwise closely-related French philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson’s classical vitalism steadfastly sticks to the idea of the sacredness of life as an ontological foundation. For Deleuze however, the celebration of life becomes yet another banal anthropocentrism in a Cartesian universe that has been closed off and anaesthetised for no good reason. Instead, he sees the active intensity itself as the Universe’s fundamental expression for its existence in relation to itself. Deleuze’s pantheist rather than anthropocentric vitalism therefore remain – in the narrative about the Universe’s magnificent capacity for creativity and multiplicity – as much with the marvellous in quantum physics and cosmology as with the marvellous in plants and animals. Therefore it seems quite reasonable that Karen Barad’s, Manuel De Landa’s and Robert Corrington’s intensity-fixated variants of relationalism start from Deleuzian rather than Bergsonian vitalism. It is nature and not what is most closely related to Man that is the vital, and nature is vital in itself based on its own intensity. Therefore Deleuze, Barad and De Landa are naturalist philosophers. The self-confessed syntheist Corrington even calls his philosophical orientation ecstatic naturalism.
On closer inspection, intelligence is actually a symptom of a limitation or a weakness, a final weapon against another, greater power (and often one blissfully void of intelligence). Or to carry the matter to its extreme: If God had been in need of intelligent design in order to create the world – that is, a blueprint marked by an intelligence that must be followed by God and the angels of heaven, in the same way that construction workers relate to their instructions from the hopefully intelligent architect – God would instead be an expression of a lack of power and above all reveal his total lack of omnipotence. An omnipotent Universe therefore is not intelligent in the real sense of the word, since it emerges spontaneously. Intelligence is thus a human trait, originating from our complex limitations and inflicted powerlessness, and definitely not some divine property.
Since syntheism is fundamentally relationalist, it follows that syntheist ethics also must be relationalist. To begin with, ethics is always a matter of prioritisations. Nothing in itself has any kind of objectively valid value. In a greater objective sense, everything is meaningless, since no external god exists who cares about giving anything a value that endures regardless of the prevailing conditions. It is only a being whose existence is characterised by recurring deficits and limitations, and consequent necessary prioritisations, who is in need of a values system. A state of complete plenty – such as the Universe in itself – however needs no values at all. All argumentation around what Man values in the form of things and actions consequently revolves around the relationships of these things and actions to, and their significance for, himself as a creature inhibited by deficits and limitations.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58