Wartime Culture in Guilin, 1938–1944 by Zhu Pingchao;

Author:Zhu, Pingchao;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 8

Selves and the Absolute

The stage is now clearly set for the idea of the Absolute to enter into the picture and force reason to reflect upon it. McTaggart swears by reason no end, notwithstanding that he is said to have had mystical experiences—called by himself a “saul feeling”—from time to time. Indeed, McTaggart strove hard not to allow his mystical vision of REALITY as such to overwhelm him so as to dictate terms to his rational consciousness, which according to him consisted, minimally, in defending through argument and even a priori reasoning what one believed about the fundamental nature of reality. Kantian skepticism about any attempt to know such as a thing as God, or soul, or things-in-themselves notwithstanding, postulation of an absolute has been integral to many a system of metaphysics, including the idealistic ones, whether before or after Kant. Different philosophers have been led up to the Absolute by different arguments and by different routes, and these have depended in no small measure upon the ultimate status that finite reality, specially finite individuals, hold within the system in question. Of course there seems to have been some consensus on at least some of the features of the Absolute. That the Absolute is absolutely real; that it is a spiritual unity; that it is all-inclusive and so a whole or totality; and that it is unconditioned and infinite­—emphases such as these are generally acceptable to the protagonists of the idea of the Absolute, even if opinion has diverged on the meaning of the terms involved. With some thinkers again—Spinoza, Hegel, Shelling, and subsequently, Lotze, Bradley and Bosanquet—the Absolute has been the highest reality and concern with it a primary metaphysical concern. Thus a recent scholar Frederick Beiser writes about Hegel in his essay titled “Hegel and the problem of metaphysics”:

[Hegel] had a conception of philosophy that can only be described as “metaphysical.” In his early Jena years, and indeed throughout his career, Hegel saw the purpose of philosophy as the rational knowledge of the absolute. This conforms to one of the classical senses of the term “metaphysics,” a sense given to it by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason: the attempt to know the unconditioned through pure reason.1

It is also known that some thinkers preach, in one way or other, the doctrine of “degrees of reality” which, among other things, provides the basis2 of their discourse of the Absolute. But lest this picture mislead one into reading too much in the limited agreement found among some (foremost) philosophers, it must be mentioned that major difficulties have shadowed monistic idealism in the past on the question of the ultimate status of the finite self, and the blending or coalescence of these selves in the Absolute. While some have gone to the length of looking upon separate individuals as transitory, inadequate and precarious appearances, which are “adjectival” to the Real,3 or, as Hegel said, a moment, trace, or shading in the whole, some others have emphasized the ultimate character of each individual as a “focalization” of the universe which is nowhere exactly repeated.

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