The term ‘Absolute’ in ancient and modern metaphysics refers to that which transcends all manifestations, differentiations and distinctions. When the terms ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ are used together as correlatives, each is dependent on the other for its meaning. There is evidently a significant difference between the term ‘absolute’ per se and when it is used as a correlative term. The philosophical connection between these two uses of the term ‘absolute’ has a mystical and ethical importance, which is crucial to our understanding. The Absolute is transcendent, in relation to both Being and non-Being. At the same time, it is a well-tested maxim that to be is to be intelligible. This standpoint is truly Platonic and is the primary root of absolute idealism. Plato himself was an objective idealist, unlike subjective idealists of the Berkeleian or the later Yogachara schools, which deny that the world has any reality apart from the thoughts and conceptions of beings. For the objective idealist the world, though deeply rooted in ideal forms, archetypal thoughts and a hidden realm of noumenal reality, also mirrors that fecund reality in the entire vast assemblage of variegated forms moving in the panoramic region of particulars.

 For Plato, anything that exists can, in principle, become an object of thought, of cognition and, therefore, of what we call shareable knowledge, at different degrees of individual apprehension. The other tradition, which is also old, but which has come to dominate in the last three centuries with monopolistic pretensions, is that of empiricism, wherein to be is to be experienced. There is a significant difference between intelligibility in thought and what we may call experience, which inevitably has an element that is common and concrete among all beings. It customarily pertains to the prosaic sensory world of external objects and all the complex connections between them. ‘Experience’, in this sense, is central to the empirical conception of the known yet shifting boundaries of reality and causality, of identity and inter-connection.

 Regardless of each of these standpoints, if the transcendental Absolute is by its very nature both beyond and also within every atom in the worlds of relativity, the use of ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ as correlative, contrasting terms becomes comprehensible, reliable and meaningful. It is reliable as a means of measurement in science and mathematics. It is meaningful as a basis of appraisal in ethics and aesthetics and, in general, comprehensible as a basis of grading in regard to all finite objects and subjects, contexts, conditions and states. In other words, as long as we can speak of more or less, greater or lesser, more true, more beautiful and more good, or, less true, less beautiful and less good, as long as we can make all these discriminations in the world of particulars, it is indeed possible for us to use consistently as a pair of opposites the terms ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’. An example from science immediately comes to mind, the notion of absolute temperature, which in fact is not based upon any ultimate zero point, but conventionally and sensibly upon a certain degree which has become the effective standard of measurement because, below that temperature, gases cease to coalesce. The entire concept of absolute temperature is related to the known laws of thermodynamics and, in this sense, there is something conventional about it. All measurements of temperature gauged by it are meaningful in relation to a norm that has been taken as fixed because it is both conceptually and practically convenient. That is, it is operationally convenient in understanding the behavior of gases.

 When we use the term ‘absolute’ in regard to any limited context, as for example when we say, “This is absolutely true”, we mean ‘without qualification’. We implicitly draw a contrast with a whole lot of other things which will need qualifications, or which have a lesser sphere of reference, or which refer with much less degree of relevance and intensity to that situation. We are perfectly familiar with using these terms ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ as correlates. And yet, neither of these has anything to do with the intrinsic transcendence of what we call the Absolute. But because it is immanent in every atom, the most transcendental is also the most immanent, though hidden to the gaze of the physical eye and hidden also to the purview of the perceiving mind as it normally functions. Therefore, it is not surprising that what is so supremely transcendental also enters always and everywhere as an often overlooked element in our agreed appraisals in a world of relativities.

 Philosophically, the Absolute is “unthinkable and unknowable”, in the words of the Mandukya Upanishad, and yet partially apprehensible and cognizable by contrast with what we can know or apprehend of the relative. To say that it is unthinkable and unknowable is merely to say that all thinking and all knowing must fall far short of the very reality, the very nature, the very essence of the Absolute. But to say that it is apprehensible and knowable by contrast with what we know of the relative simply means that we may know something, may have some apprehension, even of what is indefinitely large, extremely remote, or conceptually transcendental such as when we talk of an ideal number or an ideal point, or when we talk of the ideal of perpetual motion. All of these are perfectly meaningful because they serve as standards of reference or as means of negation and transcendence of all that is on a lesser scale by some implicit standard of commensuration. Such a standard is implicit because commensuration may pertain to a vast array of particulars, and then take a big jump — what is sometimes called a conceptual shift or quantum leap — to the notion of an ideal or an absolute level. Yet this is intelligible and manageable. Indeed, it is also widely relevant because of the mathematical notion of the actual infinite, which is a concrete notion in applied science, in mechanics and in some of the influential geometries of the last hundred years.

 To say this is to lend meaningfulness as well as a due measure of agnosticism to all modes of knowing. It is to give limit and value to all levels of being and reality, but, at the same time, recognize the relative illusoriness of all states and conditions. This noetic standpoint is somewhat difficult to sustain today even in theory, let alone in practice. And yet, it is truly challenging to intellectual indolence and mental passivity, to non-exertion and non-trying, as well as to the deep-seated incurable craving in human beings for certainty and finality in a world of ever-changing phenomena. Above all, it is a helpful corrective to the unconscious but sometimes explicit obsessional tendency to absolutize the relative, as well as implicitly to settle for some frozen image or stipulated relativation of the Absolute.

Raghavan Iyer
The Gupta Vidya II