Absolute Knowledge (w/ O.G. Rose)

Absolute Knowledge is a notoriously difficult and confusing concept in Hegel’s philosophy (and yet represents the name of the last chapter of his masterwork Phenomenology of Spirit). Here I attempt to frame the discourse by discussing the experiences I had in my maturation as an intellect in relation to evolutionary and religious philosophies about “absolute knowing”. Evolutionary thinkers tend to view absolute knowing as an anachronistic and unnecessary concept, a relic of pre-modern thinking before the emergence of the Darwinian universe, where everything is conceived as dynamic and changing (and thus a universe with no absolute). Religious thinkers tend to view absolute knowing as the self’s relation/knowledge of the absolute being (God), and tend to represent this knowing as either an abrupt phase transition or a gradual deepening where the subject feels “one” with a perfect order of being. We attempt to discuss how AK — as a type of constant that is both beneath and beyond the dialectical process (and thus non-evolutionary), and as a state governed by negativity (and thus not perfect being) — requires a new thinking about the journey of a subject’s process of self-knowing within common life and institutional contexts. We suggest that the subject necessarily has to leave common life for a journey of self-knowing, or else it will simply remain a raw unmediated subjectivity; but that the subject also has to return to common life, and avoid withdrawal into a domain of static knowledge isolated from others, in order to both complete its own dialectical process, and prevent society at large from dissolving at the unconscious hand of sexual antagonisms and fascist political order.