SYNTHESIS

in philosophy, the combination of parts, or elements, in order to form a more complete view or system. The coherent whole that results is considered to show the truth more completely than would a mere collection of parts. The term synthesis also refers, in the dialectical philosophy of the 19th-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, to the higher stage of truth that combines the truth of a thesis and an antithesis. Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy underscores an existential type of synthesis. In Being and Nothingness, consciousness (pour-soi) is always trying to become being (en-soi), to achieve a synthesis, as it were, between no-thing and some-thing.