Absolute — That which exists in and through itself, unconditioned and independent of anything else. The term derives from the Latin absolutus (“loosened, detached, free from”), the participle of absolvere, and denotes whatever is released from every relation, limit, or external determination — thus standing opposed to the relative, which exists only in reference to something else. In classical metaphysics the concept approaches the ultimate ground of reality, but it is in German idealism that the Absolute becomes the central problem. In his philosophy of identity, Schelling conceives the Absolute as the original indifference between subject and object, nature and spirit. Hegel criticizes this conception for reducing the Absolute to an empty, motionless unity — “the night in which all cows are black” — and proposes to think it not as static substance but as a subject that develops. For Hegel the Absolute is Spirit (Geist), which realizes itself dialectically throughout history, passing through alienation and contradiction until it attains complete self-knowledge; in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) this journey is narrated as the education of consciousness, and in the Science of Logic it culminates in what he calls the Absolute Idea. Concretely, this means that human thought, art, religion, and philosophy are moments through which the Absolute comes to consciousness of itself. The Hegelian Absolute therefore differs from the theist’s “God”: it is not a reality external and transcendent to the world, but immanent to the historical process itself. Later, British idealists such as F. H. Bradley took up the term to designate the ultimate, coherent totality of experience. Closely related concepts are the dialectic and Absolute Spirit.
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