Absolute and Relative, Umberto Eco
Absolute and Relative
IF YOU ARE HERE this evening in spite of the terroristic title of my talk, that means you are prepared for anything—though a serious lecture about Absolute and Relative ought to last at least two and a half thousand years, as long as the debate itself. The title of this year’s Milanesiana festival is “Conflict and the Absolute,” and naturally I have been wondering what these words mean. It’s the most basic question any philosopher must ask.
Since I haven’t been to the festival’s other events, I did a search on the Internet for pictures by artists who refer to the Absolute, and there I found Magritte’s La connaissance absolue, as well as various works by others I needn’t name—Painting the Absolute, Quête d’absolu, In Search of the Absolute, Marcheur d’absolu—and several advertisements like the one for Absolut vodka. The Absolute, it seems, is selling well.
The notion of Absolute also brought to mind one of its opposites, namely, the notion of Relative, which has become rather fashionable ever since leading churchmen, and even some secular thinkers, began a campaign against what they call relativism. It’s a term that has become derogatory, used for almost terroristic ends, like Berlusconi’s use of the word communism. But here I will limit myself to confounding your ideas rather than clarifying them, suggesting how each of these terms—depending on the circumstances—means many different things, and that they shouldn’t be used as baseball bats.
According to dictionaries on philosophy, Absolute means anything that is ab solutus, free from ties or limits, something that does not depend on something else, which has its own inherent reason, cause, and explanation. Something therefore very similar to God, in the sense that he describes himself as “I am who I am” (ego sum qui sum), to which everything else is contingent and therefore does not have its own inherent cause and—even if it happens to exist—it could just as well not exist, or not exist tomorrow, as is the case with the solar system or with each one of us.
As we are contingent beings, and therefore destined to die, we desperately need to think there is something to fasten onto that will not perish, in other words, an Absolute. But this Absolute can be transcendent, like the biblical divinity, or immanent. Without discussing Spinoza or Giordano Bruno, with the idealist philosophers we ourselves enter to become part of the Absolute, since the Absolute (for example, in Schelling) would be the indissoluble unity of the conscious being and of such things that were once considered extraneous to the individual, such as nature or the world. In the Absolute we identify with God, we are part of something that is not yet fully complete: a process, a development, infinite growth, and infinite self-definition. But if this is how things are, we can never define or know the Absolute since we are part of it, and trying to understand it would be like Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair.
The alternative, then, is to think of the Absolute as something that we are not, and that is elsewhere, not dependent on us, like the god of Aristotle, who thinks of himself as thinking, and who, according to Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Back in the fifteenth century, in fact, Nicholas of Cusa in De docta ignorantia wrote, “Deus est absolutus.”
But since God is Absolute, said Nicholas, he can never fully be reached. The relationship between our knowledge and God is the same as that between a polygon and the circumference into which it is drawn: as the sides of the polygon gradually increase, it comes closer and closer to the circumference, but the polygon and the circumference will never be the same. God, said Nicholas, is like a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Is it possible to imagine a circle with its center everywhere and no circumference? Obviously not. And yet we can describe it, which is what I am doing now, and each of you understand that I’m talking about something to do with geometry, except that it is geometrically impossible and unimaginable. There is therefore a difference between whether or not we can imagine a thing and whether we can nevertheless name it, give it some meaning.
What does it mean to use a word and give it a meaning? It means many things.
A. To have instructions for recognizing such an object or situation or event. For example, the meaning of the word dog or stumble includes a series of descriptions, also in the form of images, for recognizing a dog and distinguishing it from a cat, and differentiating a stumble from a jump.
B. To have a definition or classification. Definitions and classifications are given to a dog but also to events or situations such as voluntary manslaughter, as opposed to involuntary manslaughter.
C. To know about other properties, facts, or encyclopedic details of a given entity. For example, I know that dogs are faithful and good for hunting or guarding; I know that a conviction for voluntary manslaughter can lead to a particular sentence of imprisonment, and so forth.
D. Where possible, to have instructions on how to produce the corresponding object or event. I know what vase means since I know how a vase is produced even though I am not a potter—and the same is true for terms like decapitation or sulfuric acid. Whereas for a word like brain, I know meanings A and B, and some of the properties in C, but I do not know how to produce one.
A magnificent case in which I know properties A, B, C, and D is offered by C. S. Peirce, who defines lithium as follows:
If you look into a textbook of chemistry for a definition of lithium, you may be told that it is that element whose atomic weight is 7 very nearly. But if the author has a more logical mind he will tell you that if you search among minerals that are vitreous, translucent, grey or white, very hard, brittle and insoluble, for one which imparts a crimson tinge to an unluminous flame, this mineral being triturated with lime or witherite rats-bane, and then fused, can be partly dissolved in muriatic acid; and if this solution be evaporated and the residue be extracted with sulphuric acid, and duly purified, it can be converted by ordinary methods into a chloride, which being obtained in the solid state, fused, and electrolyzed with half a dozen powerful cells, will yield a globule of pinkish silvery metal that will float on gasoline; and the material of that is a specimen of lithium. The peculiarity of this definition—or rather this precept that is more serviceable than a definition—is that it tells you what the word lithium denotes by prescribing what you are to do in order to gain a perceptual acquaintance with the object of the word. (Collected Papers, volume 2, paragraph 330)
This is a good example of a complete and satisfactory representation of the meaning of a term. But other expressions have a hazy and imprecise meaning—and lesser degrees of clarity. For example, even the expression “the highest even number” has a meaning, since we know it would have to have the property of being divisible by two (and we would therefore be able to distinguish it from the highest odd number), and we also have a vague instruction on how to generate it, in the sense that we can imagine counting higher and higher numbers, separating odd from even . . .
Except that we realize we will never get there, as in a dream wherein we think we can grasp hold of something without ever managing to do so. But an expression like “a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” doesn’t suggest any rule for producing a corresponding object. Not only does it fail to support any definition, but it frustrates every effort to imagine one, apart from making us feel dizzy. An expression like Absolute has a definition that is, all in all, tautological (a thing is absolute when it is not contingent; it is contingent when it is not absolute), but it does not suggest descriptions, definitions, and classifications; we cannot think of any instructions for producing anything corresponding to it, nor do we know any of its properties, except to suppose that it has everything and it is probably what Saint Anselm of Canterbury described as id cujus nihil majus cogitari possit (something beyond which nothing greater can be thought), which brings to mind the saying attributed to the pianist Arthur Rubinstein: “Do I believe in God? No, what I believe in is something much greater.” What we can imagine at most in trying to conceive of God is the classic night in which all cows are black.
It is certainly possible not only to name but also to represent visually what we cannot conceive. But these images do not represent the unimaginable: they simply invite us to try to picture something unimaginable, and then frustrate our expectation. What we experience in trying to understand them is that very sense of impotence expressed by Dante in the last canto of Paradise (no. 33, lines 82–96, translated by Mark Musa), when he wants to describe to us what he saw at the moment when he fixed his gaze on the Divinity, but all he can say is that he cannot
