Absolute, The
"The Absolute" is a term used by philosophers to signify the ultimate reality regarded as one and yet as the source of variety; as complete, or perfect, and yet as not divorced from the finite, imperfect world. The term was introduced into the philosophical vocabulary at the very end of the eighteenth century by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and was naturalized into English by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as early as 1809–1810 in The Friend. Later in the century it was an important term in the writings of such Idealist philosophers as James Frederick Ferrier, Francis Herbert Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and Josiah Royce.
Introduction of the Term
One of the sources of the philosophy of the Absolute is the literature about Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza commencing with Moses Mendelssohn's Morgenstunden (1785) and F. H. Jacobi's Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (1785). The expression "the Absolute" does not appear in these books, but there is a discussion of Spinoza's view that God does not transcend the world but is the sole infinite substance in which everything has its being. In the second edition of his book (1789), Jacobi printed as an appendix passages from Giordano Bruno's De la causa, principio et uno (1584) in order to call attention to a defense of pantheism that had, in Jacobi's view, influenced both Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 2,581 words (approx. 9 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Absolute, The Access Pass.
