The Absolute

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The Absolute is a name for unconditioned ultimate reality — for whatever depends on nothing beyond itself, and on which everything else depends. The term is built from the Latin absolutus, “loosed from” or “set free”: what is absolute is released from every limit, relation, and condition that would make it one thing among others. To call something the Absolute is to claim it is not relative to anything at all.

As a technical word the Absolute is most at home in German Idealism, where it became the central problem of philosophy for a generation. It was not, however, coined there. The noun first surfaces in Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century, and its immediate ancestor is Kant’s das Unbedingte, the unconditioned — for Kant a necessary idea of reason that the mind is driven to seek but can never know, since knowledge is confined to appearances and the unconditioned lies beyond them. What German Idealism did was not to invent the term but to seize it: to take the very thing Kant had quarantined as off-limits and install it at the foundation of a system, as the one positive first principle from which everything else might be derived.

That program of a single first principle is what made the word central. If philosophy is to be a system, the idealists reasoned, it must rest on something unconditioned — for any conditioned starting point would depend on a difference outside itself and so could not be first. Reinhold opened the search with his “principle of consciousness”; Fichte radicalized it into the absolute I, the self-positing act that lays down the distinction between the I and the not-I and grounds all consciousness in it; and the early Romantics around Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel pressed the same demand toward what came to be called absolute idealism. The question of the age was no longer whether there was an Absolute but how thought could lay hold of it.

Schelling and Hegel, writing in the decades around 1800, gave the two answers that defined the dispute. For Schelling the Absolute was the identity of subject and object — the point of indifference at which that division is not abolished but recognized as grounded in a deeper unity, the link that makes knowing possible at all because subject and object are, at bottom, one. He held that it could be reached directly, by intellectual intuition, a non-conceptual apprehension that grasps the whole at a stroke. Hegel mocked this immediacy: an Absolute given all at once, drained of all difference, was for him “the night in which all cows are black,” empty of the determinations that make it anything in particular. For Hegel the Absolute was no static substance behind appearances but a process — Spirit, Geist, coming to know itself through history and through the very finite minds that think it, reached only by passing through every form of consciousness in turn. The Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 traces that ascent up to Absolute Knowing; the Science of Logic culminates in the Absolute Idea, the identity of thought and being. On the traditional reading this is the mind of God growing actual through its dispersal into finite creatures; on a more deflationary one it names simply self-critical reason freed of dogmatic assumption — a dispute the term still carries with it.

The English word inherits all of this. British idealism took it up at the century’s end, above all in F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality of 1893, where the Absolute is one all-inclusive sentient experience, a single system embracing every partial diversity in concord. Bradley argued that relations are unintelligible whether taken with their terms or without them, and so belong to mere appearance: the Absolute is not many, there are no independent reals, and what looks like separate things are appearances absorbed and transmuted into the whole, possessing only degrees of reality. Here the Absolute is at once substance monism and idealism — reality is one, and that one is experience.

Behind the modern word stand older attempts at the same thought. Negative theology in the Christian and Jewish traditions had long held that the highest reality can be described only by what it is not, since every positive attribute would limit it. The comparison most often drawn, though, reaches outside the West. Advaita Vedānta speaks of Brahman, the one reality without a second, beyond name and form, with which the innermost self is ultimately identical — and it draws within that term the very tension the West frames as the impersonal Absolute against the personal God. There is nirguna Brahman, the reality without qualities, undescribable, approached only by the negation neti neti, “not this, not that”; and there is saguna Brahman, the reality with attributes, the form fit for devotion. Liberation, for Advaita, comes through knowing the first. Neoplatonism, for its part, speaks of the One, beyond being and beyond thought, from which all things proceed: the apex of a Greek metaphysical system rather than of a modern argument, and treated in full elsewhere. Both Brahman and the One name a ground that is unconditioned and that the human mind cannot fully circumscribe.

It was the nineteenth century that pressed these terms together under the single English noun, and the clearest case is the esoteric one. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine opens by positing “an omnipresent, eternal, boundless, and immutable principle on which all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human conception” — named Parabrahm, “the rootless root,” and described not as Being but as Be-ness, devoid of all attributes and without relation to finite existence. Theosophy openly aligned this with Vedantic Brahman and drew on the Neoplatonic One besides, making “the Absolute” the umbrella under which traditions could be gathered. That gathering is part of why the word now reads as though it belonged to no tradition in particular.

These convergences are not illusions; the comparativists who traced them — the Theosophists most boldly — were reading something genuinely there. What they were not reading was a single shared doctrine. Brahman is approached through a path of liberating knowledge and framed by the texts of a living religion; the One is the apex of a Greek metaphysical system; the Idealist Absolute is the conclusion of a modern argument about the conditions of knowledge, and for Hegel in particular it is bound up with history in a way the others are not. Each names something exact by its highest word, and the reaching of it exacts a different price in each. What recurs across them is the demand itself — the insistence that thought cannot rest in the conditioned, and must finally point past it to something that simply is.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926) · The Vedânta-Sûtras with Śankara's Commentary (Thibaut, 1896)

→ Related: The One · Monism · Metaphysics · Neoplatonism