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11:9

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

It quite simply does not matter that we know that Atheos is just the name of the void. We still perceive a substance behind the name Atheos, it is quite simply how we are programmed to perceive our environment, and moreover this substance is extraordinarily productive and functional for our senses. Towards the end of the 18th century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German classicist, argues that it is part of the nature of the subject to maintain an obscurity for itself. The subject must experience itself as incredibly small when it is brought face to face with the immensity of existence. And it is precisely this terrifying insignificance in the face of the immensity of existence that generates precisely the psychotic compensatory reaction within the young subject which is subsequently its engine throughout life, its constitutional lie, as Slavoj Zizek expresses the matter. So if anyone manages to capture the syntheist credo of the subject’s relation to the surrounding world, it is Goethe. Atheos lives, thrives and produces subjectivity in this obscurity.