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11:3

(In »Syntheism as a radicalisation of atheism – and its dialectical dissolution«)

The foundation for this transrationalism – the conviction that rationality only functions within those areas where it is possible, and that critical thinking must be fully conscious of and discount this limitation in its world view – is laid with the Renaissance and Romanticism to then be consummated with syntheism. This means that syntheism’s connection to its previous sister epochs is cultural rather than epistemological. In addition, there is a strongly pragmatist connection: We humans are our actions just as much as we are our thoughts. To be a syntheist is to act based on one’s richest knowledge of the state of existence, but it is above all to always dare to act, and then draw valuable conclusions from this truth as an act. Or to personify syntheist activism: its heart does not get its nourishment from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s rationalist idealism, but from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Romantic pragmatism. We act with an open, contingent and indeterministic future as the backdrop; a backdrop that we can know a lot about, but never everything, before we act. And in this situation, we honestly have no more reliable resource to use than intuitive reason, the ideal of the Renaissance and Romanticism.