THE DIVISIONS OF THE ABSOLUTE
Being is, nonbeing is not. This affirmation leads Parmenides to posit the absolute. But was this a uniquely logical and ontological enunciation or the expression of a mystical vision at the same time?
This question of historical order leads us to pose a more general question: will we reach the absolute by knowledge, will we reach it by feeling?
(Absolute movement, says Bergson, is felt movement.)
In the Parmenides Plato critiques the Eleatic philosopher, showing that if the One is purely one, we reach a transcendent absolute about which we can say nothing, and if the One is, we reach an immanent absolute about which we can say everything.
Therefore we see that the thought of the Absolute is refracted in the intellect and in feeling, and in its turn, the intelligence is refracted in a transcendent absolute and immanent absolute.
Perhaps we could even demonstrate an analogous refraction in feeling. Novalis’s Romanticism and Romanticism in general conceives of feeling as fusion, as identification. A different conception, where beings remain separate in love—present, but present opposite one another, rather than present in one another—appeared with Scheler, with Lawrence, and in France with Gabriel Marcel. These writers found in love the principle of alterity and transcendence.
We could say that the thought of the absolute is divided by entering into contact with our thought, and remains always beyond it.1
There is an absolute into which one sinks, and an absolute into which one collides.
There is an absolute that assimilates and an absolute that remains separated: one is that of Bradley, for example, the other is that of negative theology.
(Bradley’s absolute is also Hegel’s, but without the movement being too apparent that in Hegel causes inferior manifestations to pass into superior manifestations of the absolute. There comes about from here the similar rupture in Bradley between reality and appearance.)
They seem completely opposed, and yet the first leads to the second. Hence this would be the affirmation of the absolute: the affirmation that what is separated from all (ab-solutus) is at the same time what contains all (absolute in the ordinary sense).
(Transferring this affirmation to the practical domain, we arrive at the idea that in being detached from all, one is united to all.)
This divided absolute about which we are speaking is at the same time an absolutely united absolute.
THE BEYOND AND THE BELOW
We have said that the absolute remains beyond.
But if the absolute escapes language and thought, it is less so because its idea is the idea of something that is beyond, than because it is that of a below.
In the transcendent, there is simultaneously the transascendent and the transdescendent. But there is also the idea that these distinctions are futile.
Nowhere more so than when the subject is the absolute is it felt that our ideas are infested with spatial thinking. The very negation of space is still expressed and thought of in terms of space.
THE ABSOLUTE AND TIME
The absolute is represented as rest, and yet the thought of it is inseparable from the thought of a movement. This last affirmation leads to the affirmation of the necessity of a dialectic: Platonic dialectic, Hegelian dialectic.
As Plato says in the Philebus, there is, moreover in a different sense, a genesis eis ousian.
And the Sophist already gave rise to the thought that there is life and movement in being.
Enjoyment is likewise represented as rest, and one proceeds to enjoyment only through a movement.
The absolute separates, and the thought of the eternal partakes of time.
Plato says that perfect being is rest and movement.
Perhaps Rimbaud wanted to express the same vision:
Elle est retrouvée
Quoi? L’éternité.
C’est la mer mêlée au soleil.
Found again.
What? Eternity.
The sea mixed up with the sun.2
Nietzsche’s eternal return is a matter of a hopeless effort to place the absolute in the ephemeral, to the great terror of men and the great joy of the Overman.
Thanks to the eternal return, the poet is right to say:
Aimez ce que jamais l’on ne verra deux fois,
Love everything you will not twice see,3
and the other poet is equally right to say:
Qu’est-ce que tout cela qui n’est pas éternel ?
What is all this that is not eternal?4
For the eternal is precisely that which ordinary men never suppose to see twice.
Under another form, the same union of sentiments is seen in Novalis and Proust.
This idea of the infinitely recurring instant, of an instant in which the future and past are united, is also present in Kierkegaard. On this point as well, Heidegger and Jaspers spring from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.
But as I said, all this effort is hopeless and this idea of an eternal instant is a myth.
THE ABSOLUTE TODAY
There are some writers today who imagine themselves very far from the idea of the absolute, but their thought is dominated by this idea. What they search for in despair is this purity that they can no longer find in hope. What they seek in chance is absolute detachment from everything, a radical beginning and entrance into a completely different context where they can be arrested by something that is absolutely transcendent in relation to themselves.
THE ABSOLUTE AND THE PARTIAL
In Hegelianism, the absolute is the totality of relations (a view that ends up being intellectualized by Hamelin and sensualized by Bradley).
But the protestations of a philosophy founded on the study of focused and passionate visions of the world will always be brought to bear on this idea. I think of Jaspers’s meditations on Kierkegaard’s philosophy: an intense experience is more absolute than the relational totality of experiences. The absolute ought not to be thought in comprehension more than in extension. This is still to remain in a quantitative domain. If I can put it this way, it ought to be thought in intensity.
Hegel tried to clarify the idea of the absolute with the help of the idea of the concrete universal. After him, Bradley and above all Bosanquet defined it as a world.
But a poet like Blake sometimes puts us in the presence of the particular minute,5 a tiny fragment of the universe, and he teaches us to find the absolute here.
ABSOLUTE AND RELATION WITH THE ABSOLUTE
The absolute only exists within the relation that we have with it. Such was Kierkegaard’s idea: if we think absolutely (in an infinite tension with ourselves) then we feel the absolute (I say “feel” because it is necessary to employ some word or other).
The absolute is in the tension between it and myself. If there were an absolute that was like a datum, there would not be between it and us this tension that is essential to it—a tension that attempts to think that which escapes it: me, the absolute.
To exist, and, even more so, to exist absolutely, is to be aware of this insurgent ground of consciousness.
The absolute is the tension, which grounds it within me, and this that resists it outside of me, and the passage to the outside by means of what is more internal within us. At the same time, it is the destruction of these distinctions.
RELATION OF THE CRITIQUE OF THE ABSOLUTE WITH BELIEF IN IT
Our thought of the absolute would be that it is not necessary to seek the absolute in the totality nor in eternity, but in the partial and in the ephemeral felt with intensity.
Our thought of the absolute is above all a critique, the critique of classical conceptions of the absolute.
However, it leaves intact the aspiration that was the origin of these conceptions. It itself inhabits the tension between this critique and this aspiration that escapes critique, because it is below and above all critique, rejoining us with what Boehme calls the Grund and Lawrence calls the dark God.
The thought of the absolute is the thought of this atmosphere and domain where I realize myself by destroying myself.
1. Proclus spoke of the tearing apart of indivisible knowledge.
2. [Rimbaud’s poetry is remarkably difficult to establish, given multiple versions and the uncertainty of dating the composition. The text provided in the Oxford World Classics critical edition is dated May 1872. The last two lines vary from what is, as quoted by Wahl, a single line:
Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi?—L’Éternité.
C’est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.
Found again. What?
Eternity.
The sea gone
With the sun.
Arthur Rimbaud, “Eternity,” Collected Poems (French/English en face), trans. Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 180/181.]
3. [Alfred de Vigny, “La maison du Berger (III),” Les destinées, ed. V. L. Saulnier (Paris: Minard, 1967).]
4. [This line is the fourth of the penultimate quatrain of Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle, “L’illusion suprême,” Poèmes tragiques (rpt.; Paris: Hachette, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2012.)]
5. [This italicized phrase is in English in the original.]