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 belongs above all to German Idealism, where it became the central problem of philosophy for a generation. Schelling and Hegel, writing in the decades around 1800, used it to name the single unconditioned ground that thought is forced to posit once it asks what underlies the divided world of subject and object, mind and nature. For Schelling the Absolute was the point of indifference where those opposites coincide; for Hegel it was not a static substance behind appearances but a process — spirit coming to know itself through history and through the very finite minds that think it. The disagreement between them, over whether the Absolute is best reached by intuition or by patient logical labour, shaped much of what followed. The English term carries this German inheritance, and its later use in the British idealism of Bradley and others descends from it.

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; Neoplatonism speaks of the One, beyond being and beyond thought, from which all things proceed. Both name a ground that is unconditioned and that the human mind cannot fully circumscribe.

The resemblances are real, and the philosophers who noticed them were not inventing the likeness. They are not, however, the same 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 tradition means something exact by its highest term, and reaching that term costs something different 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 · Brahmanism · Neoplatonism · Nous