We do not have to reach the excesses of Nineteen Eighty-four to recognize ourselves as beings who need an enemy. We are witnessing the fear that can be caused by new influxes of migrants. In Italy today, Romanians are being portrayed as the enemy by extending to a whole ethnic culture the characteristics of a few of its marginalized members, thus providing an ideal scapegoat for a society that, caught up in change—including ethnic change—is no longer able to recognize itself.
Sartre provides the most pessimistic vision in this respect in No Exit. We can recognize ourselves only in the presence of an Other, and on this the rules of coexistence and submission are based. But it is more likely that we find this Other intolerable because to some degree he is not us. In this way, by reducing him to an enemy, we create our hell on earth. When Sartre locks up three people who have died, who didn’t know each other in life, in a hotel bedroom, one of them realizes the terrible truth: “Wait! You’ll see how simple it is. Childishly simple. Obviously there aren’t any physical torments. You agree, don’t you? And yet, we’re in hell. And no one else will come here. We’ll stay in this room, the three of us, for ever and ever . . . In short, there’s someone absent here, the official torturer . . . It’s obvious what they’re after—an economy of manpower . . . each of us will act as torturer of the two others” (translated by Stuart Gilbert).
[Lecture given at Bologna University on May 15, 2008, as part of a series of evenings on the classics, published in Elogio della politica, edited by Ivano Dionigi (Milan: BUR, 2009).]
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)