Absolute Dialetheism: Hegel, Schelling, and the End of Alterity

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:01]Hi everybody. Today it's my pleasure to share with you my new book Absolute Dialetheism Hegel, Schelling, and the end of alterity.

[00:00:10]And today I'll be reading from the preface, the Theocene, to give you a sense of the book. So let me just say a few comments about the book before I start to read.

[00:00:23]So the book hopefully will appear on May 31st.

[00:00:26]That's the day of the recording.

[00:00:30]And um I hope by reading the preface to give you a sense of the program, the overall program of the book and the motivation for rethinking the absolute once again in the 21st century. So the book is not only about the history of philosophy. Hegel and Schelling show up in the subtitle, um but instead we're using the history of philosophy and thinking about the history of philosophy in order to think about what the absolute is and in order to um develop insights into the nature of absolute truth and absolute existence.

[00:01:07]So in this way the book is not just historical, but it's really a systematic work that draws on historical figures in order to develop systematic insights.

[00:01:16]And for this reason the book really you could say is the beginning of my own my own system of philosophy, which is still developing.

[00:01:28]Um My hope though with the book is that readers will think more critically about the absolute.

[00:01:35]And then in the 21st century we can think more critically about the absolute than we have perhaps in the past.

[00:01:41]Um There is a subtle play on words in the title. The subtitle is end of alterity.

[00:01:49]So on the one hand, because we're thinking about the absolute, we're thinking about what is relative to nothing. We're thinking about that which ultimately has nothing beyond it and in that sense there's the absence of alterity. It's also um carefully chosen words because we're we're being critical of those philosophies that privilege alterity and otherness um in an effort to block or to undermine the possibility of absolute knowledge or completeness.

[00:02:17]Uh but end of alterity also signifies the purpose of otherness or the purpose of alterity. So it's not to deny its existence but to rethink its purpose in connection to the absolute and the true infinite.

[00:02:31]And uh finally I'll say that this book is just programmatic. In the book I develop um a theory of the absolute with focus on the concept and intuition or philosophy and religion. And in the follow-up uh book hopefully that will appear in the next year or two I will be um discussing the place of imagination and art, especially poetry, in thinking about the absolute. So the imaginative absolute and there will be a special focus on myth and mythology uh in that text. So that's something you can look forward to.

[00:03:02]So with that said, I will go ahead and read this from the uh preface, the theocene, and I hope that uh for those of you who might be interested in the book um you can uh read further on your own.

[00:03:16]The preface, the theocene.

[00:03:18]Part one, a philosophical reformation.

[00:03:22]The age of the anthropos is a trans-anthropological age. It is the chiros of the theos, the theocene.

[00:03:28]The theocene marks a distinct metaphysical and theological epoch, an epoch in which the absolute first appears in the light of truth.

[00:03:36]We philosophers are called to carry the torch of the absolute, to preserve that light whereby truth is revealed in every age.

[00:03:43]We are the god-positing consciousness.

[00:03:46]We know the absolute because there is that of the absolute in us.

[00:03:50]The alpha and omega, that thing which greater can be conceived, cannot be conceived as totally other to us.

[00:03:58]The absolute smashes the idol of otherness, for it is relative to nothing. It is Cusanus's non aliud. Give your ear to Eckhart. The eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me.

[00:04:10]The theoscene reveals the anthropological absolute.

[00:04:13]The anthropos, the vessel of absolute self-knowledge, is nothing less than the organ of the absolute and a testimony to infinite personality.

[00:04:22]The spirit of the absolute expresses itself in art, religion, and philosophy, tirelessly revealing itself in the work of the human spirit. And yet everywhere we hear about the death of God as though this were an established fact.

[00:04:35]As though it were an axiom for serious philosophy. If everywhere we hear the rallying cry of otherness, infinitude, of difference, and the heterogeneous, if everywhere the absolute goes missing, and only relative existence appears, what could be more untimely than a return to absolute thinking?

[00:04:53]Absolute thinking may be untimely, but that only means there are untimely truths.

[00:04:58]We take consolation in knowing that the absolute cannot die, or better, if the absolute must die, the death of the absolute in the death of the absolute must die.

[00:05:14]Say this again. Or better, if the absolute must die, the death of the absolute in the philosophy of the present age, only absolute ties to relative existence. The absolute must live, for it preserves itself even where it ceases to be, even in the most forlorn scientist.

[00:05:28]Philosophy can and should recollect the untimely truth, the death of the absolute must die.

[00:05:33]By preserving conceptual consciousness of the absolute, philosophy has an essential place in the theoscene.

[00:05:39]For it is in philosophy that the absolute makes its earthy appearance in the light of conceptual truth.

[00:05:44]In short, philosophy is only true to itself when it dwells the absolute both as its final end and wellspring of of inspiration.

[00:05:53]When philosophy proclaims the death of the absolute, it commits suicide. And philosophy without the absolute is alienated from itself.

[00:05:59]A stranger to its own rhythm of life and its beloved, it is an unhappy lover and an unhappy consciousness.

[00:06:06]But the critic is well-educated. They will rightly observe that absolute knowledge is a contradiction in terms.

[00:06:11]Time and again from logical positivism to postmodernism, the same echo resounds. One cannot conceive the absolute without falling into contradiction. The absolute is not relative, but insofar as it is not relative, it is opposed to relativity and consequently opposed to all relative being. Thus, any attempt to conceive the absolute inevitably thinks the absolute as relative to relative being as not absolute.

[00:06:34]Since no contradiction can be true, there cannot be any absolute cognition.

[00:06:39]But if absolute knowledge really is impossible as critics suggest and the location of philosophy is absolute knowledge, philosophy is condemned to authenticity.

[00:06:46]The candle's blown out and we must find our way in absolute darkness.

[00:06:51]Absolute dialetheism invites the reader to find a detour around this contradiction. We wager that no detour is possible. The absolute contradiction is the fate of being.

[00:07:00]Even if the doors to philosophy are closed, one might surely insist that the doors of art and religion might still remain open. And yet, there remains a lingering sense that something is wrong.

[00:07:10]If the absolute really is non-allude, it cannot be barred from the halls of philosophy. An absolute that is too weak for philosophy is nothing absolute.

[00:07:18]An absolute that can only live in art and religion is a powerless idol, a thing fit for nothing but Abraham's hammer.

[00:07:26]The absolute can only be conceived as a contradiction. But, whenever I doubt that the absolute exists, it appears again. If I proclaim that there is no absolute, then I assert the truth of the absolute. Nothing is absolute. This means that everything is relative. And the absolute is indubitable, for it cannot be outstripped.

[00:07:44]As every beginner knows, the denial of absolute truth is itself one. We cannot successfully doubt the absolute, for doubting it only [snorts] works to animate it again. But if there cannot be true contradictions, as our critics contest, then no thought about the absolute can be true.

[00:07:59]Given these difficulties, how can we give new life to philosophy in the Theaetetus scene? God is dead means the fruit is rotten, the tree has withered, and we cannot ignore the fact that this disease is internal, for it is philosophy itself who makes war on the absolute and thus makes war on herself.

[00:08:14]In order to heal, we must discover the root of the problem. Accordingly, we might ought first to return to the roots of our tradition.

[00:08:21]As its etymology indicates, all radical thinking returns to its roots.

[00:08:27]Just like Luther's reformation, his transformation of tradition is made possible by returning to Augustine. We can only reform philosophy in the 21st century by returning to the roots of modernity, the life of Cartesian doubt.

[00:08:40]By returning to Descartes's radical doubt, we hope to find the root of this disease.

[00:08:45]Part two, radical doubt.

[00:08:47]Descartes's meditation has been thought and rethought a thousand times over. And here, I do not wish to lose myself in details, but to reawaken the spirit of doubt that animates the Cartesian project. Certainty requires the thinker to first recognize that, quote, the whole structure would have to be utterly demolished, close quote.

[00:09:06]Suspicious students always ask, but did Descartes doubt the principle of non-contradiction, the PNC? In short, no. Descartes never calls the PNC into question. From beginning to end, he operates under the assumption that the PNC is true. However, the thought experiment of meditation one that undermines the certainty of all claims to know certainly ought to apply to the principle of non-contradiction.

[00:09:28]On his own terms, nothing in the meditations demonstrates that the PNC is true. The Cartesian skeptical hypothesis ought not spare the PNC.

[00:09:37]And because this doubt is absolute, one cannot exempt it from the skeptical hypothesis with which the treatise begins.

[00:09:43]We must reanimate Cartesian doubt, subject it to critique, and reshape it for the task of absolute thinking. This means to speak with Husserl to make his doubt vital again. Quote, "This manner of clarifying history by inquiring back into the primal establishment of the goals, which bind together the chain of future generations, insofar as these goals live on in sedimented forms, it can be reawakened again and again, and in their new vitality be criticized." Close quote.

[00:10:11]To begin philosophy anew, once more from the beginning, is not novel.

[00:10:14]Here we mean to return to the spirit of the first meditation, and even though we mean to doubt with Descartes to doubt even more deeply than him. In order to free ourselves from our prejudices, we cannot simply accept the PNC.

[00:10:27]To doubt absolutely, we must cast out into cast everything into doubt, even the principle of non-contradiction. And under the auspices of this more radical doubt, in the double sense of thorough and rooted in tradition, we can doubt the PNC, and on the grounds of radical doubt admit that it is possible for the absolute to exist as a true contradiction.

[00:10:49]To ground the new science, Descartes understood that he was charged with the historic task of freeing philosophy from the presuppositions it inherited from Aristotle. And even though the PNC lies at the foundation of Aristotle's logic, Descartes never doubted the PNC.

[00:11:04]For the grounding of modern science, by his lights anyway, never demanded this of him.

[00:11:09]However, we do not have such a luxury, for here it is the absolute that is at stake, and it cannot be thought consistently.

[00:11:16]Having overcome Aristotle's philosophy of nature, biology, and physics, and his metaphysics, it is high time that philosophy free itself from the foundational principle of his logic, too, the PNC.

[00:11:27]To save the absolute and ourselves, we must make a radical new beginning. We can begin by re-envisioning a new modernity, a modernity without the PNC.

[00:11:37]By reawakening and extending the sedimented power of Cartesian doubt, we discover new possibilities. Is it possible that the absolute exists as a true contradiction?

[00:11:46]It is possible, but is it true? Does the absolute exist? Does it exist as a true contradiction? Is absolute knowledge contradictory in nature? Absolute dialetheism asks you, dear reader, to open yourself to these possibilities and to let the spirit of radical doubt reign within you.

[00:12:03]We must remember that Descartes doubts everything, and by doubting everything, Descartes discovered that doubting itself cannot be doubted. For any doubting that doubting exists would immediately undermine itself. And in this case, doubting would be immediately intuited, immediately encountered in the act of doubting the existence of doubt.

[00:12:19]In addition to the certainty that thinking is, there is another truth lurking in the depths of Cartesian doubt. It lurks in the absolute ambition of Descartes's philosophy.

[00:12:29]Absolute doubt must commit itself to the absolute, for the method leaves no stone unturned. It means to raise everything to the ground.

[00:12:39]There's nothing to which doubt cannot be applied.

[00:12:42]Since there is not one thing that cannot be subjected to doubt, doubting is absolute. At bottom, this is phenomenological. To every object put before the reflecting mind, I can always ask, "Why?"

[00:12:54]Absolute doubt teaches absolute doubt itself teaches us that the absolute must be.

[00:13:00]Absolute doubting demands doubting absolute doubt by looking for something to which I cannot put the question, "Why?"

[00:13:07]But there is nothing to which I cannot at least put the question, "Why?" No counterexample can be given. For any counterexample put before me, I can authentically inquire, "Yes, but why?"

[00:13:17]And this is at least one totality, the totality to which doubt itself can be applied, the totality to which one can put the question.

[00:13:25]The PNC is dubious, the absolute is not.

[00:13:27]In Descartes' fairy method of doubt, the absolute lies in wait. Radical original doubt teaches us two indubitabilities, thinking and the absolute. Radical doubt teaches us that there is, as skipped, absolute thinking.

[00:13:40]The why by which we put everything into question is not unnatural. We are naturally curious beings, beings who from an early age indiscriminately put everything into question.

[00:13:49]In the fullness of its maturation, the why to which we are drawn by nature, draws us to the threshold of the absolute.

[00:13:56]God positing consciousness is not unnatural.

[00:13:59]We want to know as a species, it is, as the history of philosophy will attest, one of our most distinctive ends.

[00:14:10]Radical doubt aims at an end, the revelation of the absolute, the fulfillment of the theodicy.

[00:14:15]Section three, the return of of Theos, sorry, the return of phusis, the return of phusis.

[00:14:21]By radical doubt, we can begin to appreciate how philosophy might be wedded to a thinking the absolute. If the absolute is that which cannot be outstripped, and the absolute can only be conceived as a contradiction, philosophy is only true to itself when it thinks the absolute as a true contradiction, what I call absolute dialetheism. Absolute dialetheism is both an ontological and an epistemological position. It is the view that the absolute exists as a true contradiction, and that the absolute can only be known by means of contradictory concepts.

[00:14:49]To speak in more recent analytic terms, the contradictory absolute is the truth maker of our contradictory judgments about the absolute. Judgments, of course, that do not take place outside the absolute, for there is no such thing as outside the absolute.

[00:15:02]Let us not forget the original meaning of our historical reflection.

[00:15:06]We turn to Descartes to recover the sedimented meaning of doubt, of Cartesian doubt.

[00:15:13]And we have reawakened this doubt in order to remember the absolute, thereby revealing the root of our alienation from the absolute and absolute thinking.

[00:15:21]And what has been revealed?

[00:15:23]Our brief foray into early modernity has been fruitful, for it has revealed that the PNC has made our thinking sick. If there cannot be true contradictions, then we cannot truly think the absolute.

[00:15:33]If there cannot be true contradictions, then we certainly cannot think the absolute truly.

[00:15:38]Why have we alienated ourselves from our shiksa, as God positive consciousness?

[00:15:43]Because we worship at the wrong altar, the altar of the PNC. And the PNC is the ultimate principle of division and otherness, splitting concepts from their negations.

[00:15:52]Here finitude reigns, for each is limited by its negation. Here the infinite has no advocate.

[00:15:59]When the wilderness of the absolute and absolute thinking is caged in a zoo, like a lion that is no longer free to roam, the spirit of its life begins to wither.

[00:16:09]The spirit of absolute thinking is dead because it cannot grow.

[00:16:12]Thinking must be set free. The wilderness of thought cannot be enslaved to human artifice. Like St. Mar, our thinking too can be free, if only we dare to let it loose, and dare to let it live.

[00:16:25]The PNC preserves otherness only by killing the possibility of growth.

[00:16:29]Ironically, only through the idolatry of self-identity does otherness reign supreme.

[00:16:35]One cannot rage against self-identity while simultaneously elevating otherness to an absolute principle.

[00:16:40]For it is the former that enables the latter. The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.

[00:16:45]How can we smash the idol of otherness without addressing the idol of self-identity?

[00:16:50]Here our hammer cannot make an exception. Abraham must turn his eye to the idol of self-identity. The twilight The twilight of the idols must come to fruition, and twilight must turn to night.

[00:17:02]Rooting out the PNC and freeing thinking from its domination, absolute thinking can live again. Growth is impossible when the when the principle of life remains static.

[00:17:12]If thinking cannot be other than what it is, if it must always remain the same, it cannot move, transform, or grow. And by the power of the PNC, absolute thinking was destined for death from the very beginning.

[00:17:27]So, by the power of the PNC, absolute thinking was destined for death in the very beginning. Well, what is worse, it could never die because it never lived.

[00:17:35]If the PNC is absolute, nothing can die.

[00:17:37]Absolute ties in the PNC means to deny one's very mortality, an inauthentic posture if there ever were one.

[00:17:43]Certainly, there is peace in the absolute consistency of the PNC, a truth which Nietzsche knew better than anyone.

[00:17:49]But such a peace is a betrayal of life.

[00:17:51]It is a dead peace. Life is constituted by contradiction, and it is the affirmation of the consistency and persistence of contradiction that constitutes a living peace and authentic life.

[00:18:03]As relative to nothing, the absolute is determined by nothing but itself. As absolutely self-determining, it is total freedom.

[00:18:09]Absolute thinking serves absolute freedom alone. It is mastered only by suspicion towards all masters. Free of all gods, it raises total freedom to the throne of the absolute.

[00:18:19]Absolute dialetheism is a monotheism of total freedom. Our thinking is set free by the power of absolute freedom.

[00:18:27]According to the Gospel of John, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Close quote.

[00:18:32]In order to live and die and grow and be free, absolute thinking must be able to transform itself to become other than what it is. Without this contradiction, there is no growth or development.

[00:18:42]On the one hand, by constantly othering itself, the absolute never remains the same.

[00:18:47]Time and history have their right, each defined by constant upheaval and change.

[00:18:52]And upheaval and change constituted by perpetual self-contradiction. On the other hand, the absolute is is always the same. It is that which is other to itself in every iteration of its being.

[00:19:02]And just as a person can undergo constant transformations and still remain the same person, so the absolute in absolute thinking can, too.

[00:19:11]Absolute dialetheism is the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal is imminent history and time.

[00:19:16]Of course, while the PNC is non-demonstrable principle of thinking, is a non-demonstrable principle of thinking and being in Aristotle's philosophy, it has its roots in Plato and Parmenides.

[00:19:26]On the one hand, by overturning the PNC, our doubt puts the >> [clears throat] >> puts the heart of classical Greek thinking into question.

[00:19:33]On the other hand, absolute thinking reanimates a dormant potential of Greek thinking. For each form is auto cath auto itself by itself. What else is the absolute except auto cath auto?

[00:19:45]That which is in virtue of itself and that which is itself by itself.

[00:19:49]Far from denying the Greeks their truth, we mean only to reanimate the life of form. As relative to nothing, the absolute is itself by itself.

[00:19:58]Philosophy, like any human action, is end-oriented. I think for a purpose, to think the absolute. And having learned of Protagoras's lesson, one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, our thinking does not proceed with indifference to our own experience. For this way, it is essential.

[00:20:14]To the contrary, thinking that is true to itself cannot forget the purposeful striving of human experience.

[00:20:20]Of the finite human experience.

[00:20:23]Right? That's fundamental for alterity.

[00:20:25]Philosophy works towards an end, knowing the absolute. And following Aristotle, absolute thinking is entelecheia, being at work staying itself.

[00:20:34]Which is a purposeful activity in which the thinking of the absolute is the absolute thinking itself.

[00:20:40]However, as self-contradictory, absolute thinking only stays itself in so far as it is constantly transcends itself.

[00:20:47]Absolute thinking qua entelecheia must become ecstatic.

[00:20:51]We think in the completeness of entelecheia, a self-contradictory end in itself.

[00:20:57]Ecstatic form is nothing less than Heraclitus's cosmic logos, the palintropos of the back-turning harmony.

[00:21:02]Far from denying the truth of form, absolute thinking inspired by radical doubt recovers phusis. Phusis, her nature, is the internal principle of motion. The form of the absolute is its phusis, and without the principle of self-contradiction, the absolute cannot move. By rooting out the PNC, we enable the absolute to have a nature. And far from rejecting the theory of forms, thinking the absolute recovers the ancient power of form.

[00:21:26]With the animation of the absolute through the power of self-contradiction, Aristotle's thought lives in new form.

[00:21:32]Section fourth, the building of absolute spirit.

[00:21:36]If the vocation of philosophy is to conceive the absolute, and the PNC cannot be taken for granted, philosophy requires a new logic by which the absolute can be conceived. Old habits die hard, and rather than attend to what immediately faces us, we feel ourselves at a loss about how to proceed.

[00:21:53]Our critics might ask in despair, "Well, if the absolute negates every consistent conceptualization, how can any concept ever successfully correspond to the absolute?"

[00:22:03]We raise our thoughts to the absolute, and there we find contradiction. In every case, our thought about the absolute corresponds with it. For in each case, the concept of contradiction corresponds with the absolute. Far from implying incompleteness, the contradictory appearance of the absolute actually signifies the completeness of philosophical knowledge. It is following Ishida, the logic of paradox. If we fall back on old habits, if we operate by that prejudice whereby conceptual knowledge only succeeds on the condition of consistency, then the absolute can never appear. We are always only one step behind it. God never died because God never lived. But these prejudices are unjustified, for the absolute does appear in the completeness of self-contradiction.

[00:22:48]The key to completeness faces us directly, but we are clouded with prejudice. The thought is simple, no contradiction, no completeness.

[00:22:58]The meaning of the absolute contradiction, as well as its consequences, must be thought through.

[00:23:02]Truth and existence must be rethought in light of this sought.

[00:23:07]If nothing exists independently of the absolute, for it is non-allude, then everything that exists depends on the truth of the absolute contradiction.

[00:23:15]Nothing that exists, nothing that is true exists independently of the absolute.

[00:23:19]The transconsistent theory of truth developed in the course of our investigation grows out of this implication of absolute dialetheism, namely that all truth and all existence depend on contradiction. As Plato says, like a Spartan hound, we will make every effort to follow thought wherever it leads.

[00:23:36]Absolute thinking calls for a new logic.

[00:23:38]Rational dialetheism teaches that conceptual form can successfully articulate the contradictory identity of absolute being.

[00:23:45]Rational dialetheism is a form of absolute spirit.

[00:23:50]For the contradiction by which I know the absolute is the same contradiction that constitutes the absolute's being.

[00:23:57]We are the organs of absolute self-knowledge.

[00:23:59]If the absolute really exists as a contradiction and it is conceptual in form, then it cannot only be conceptual.

[00:24:05]And since it is not itself the conceptual being of the absolute, must transform its conceptual being into a non-conceptual being.

[00:24:12]And in so far as it is not conceptual, the absolute cannot be known by concepts.

[00:24:17]And with the self-transformation of the absolute into non-conceptual totality, the method by which we think the absolute must transform itself, too.

[00:24:25]Absolute thinking can only know the absolute by transcending conceptual cognition. Accordingly, rational dialetheism transforms itself into mystical dialetheism. The view that the absolute exists as a true contradiction, but cannot be grasped conceptually.

[00:24:39]In mystical dialetheism, otherness is resurrected. The absolute transcends the concept. The absolute [clears throat] is what Tanabe, despite his disdain for mysticism, calls tariki, the other power.

[00:24:50]And by thinking the absolute non-conceptually, there is no conceptual difference between thinking the absolute and the absolute itself.

[00:24:57]The experience is rational for it is an intellectual experience of news, but the experience is also mystical for there is no conceptual difference separating the knower from the known. In the depths of this mystical intuition, the absolute is revealed as infinite personality.

[00:25:10]Critchley is right, quoting him, "Mysticism is about the possibility of the ecstatic life. For the last couple of centuries, philosophy has more or less successfully inoculated itself against the kind of experiences of ecstasy we find in the mystics. It is time to reintroduce the virus." Close quote.

[00:25:26]In short, if absolute thinking really means to meet the demands of the absolute, it must transform itself. It must think ecstatically. And since the absolute transforms itself, so must absolute thinking transform itself.

[00:25:39]Absolute thinking can only be true to itself qua absolute by transforming itself. And for this reason, the logical cognition of the absolute must overthrow itself.

[00:25:48]With absolute thinking, we carry the reformation forward always and again as self-reformation.

[00:25:54]Accordingly, if we philosophers are thinking the absolute, we cannot forget ourselves. Absolute thinking must turn the light on itself. Absolute thinking is to remember the Platonic meaning, recollection.

[00:26:05]Because we are here engaged in the practice of absolute thinking, our thinking cannot forget itself.

[00:26:12]It must be engaged in constant self-transformation. Each stage of absolute thinking overcomes itself and only thereby can it be Geisteswissenschaft, a science or Wissenschaft of the appearance of the absolute, a reanimated phenomenology of spirit. The maxim is, "Fix your thoughts upon the absolute and discover that by clinging to it for dear life, you may be surprised to find the ground give way beneath you, but that is the cost of life and growth the absolute forces."

[00:26:41]Section five, philosophical religion, system, and singularity.

[00:26:46]Although the ground gives way beneath us, the absolute solidifies itself in our free fall.

[00:26:52]Exactly there in mystical experience where all conceptual differences disappear, there we find the resurrection of reason and the power of the concept. Because mystical intuition annihilates every conceptual difference, the absolute cannot be differentiated from the conceptual.

[00:27:06]Thus, the absolute overcomes its one-sidedness, reveals itself to be conceptually mediated. Out of the dark night of the soul, out of the depths of mystical nothingness, the logos redeems itself through its power of self-universalization and self-conceptualization.

[00:27:20]As we traverse the path of rational and mystical dialecticism, we learn that the absolute is not really conceptual or non-conceptual, but the contradictory unity of the two.

[00:27:29]The true absolute is not revealed by the concept alone, neither does it purely non-conceptual intuition suffice for absolute knowing.

[00:27:36]Philosophical religion is the pure experience of absolute thinking in which the rational and mystical sides of absolute thought are unified into a single absolute self-revelation.

[00:27:46]Our knowing of God is transformed into God's knowing of himself, and with theosis enters the theose.

[00:27:54]Because this process is a form of Bildung, there is no certainty that any individual will not get stranded at various stations along the way. Some never see beyond the concept, while others get stranded in the mystical absolute on the banks of the Lorelei.

[00:28:08]With all things educational, there is no guarantee of success.

[00:28:12]And philosophical religion uncovers the synthetic unity of the conceptual with the transconceptual, the equal truth of rational and mystical dialecticism.

[00:28:20]Everywhere we look, we discover that the conceptual meets the transconceptual.

[00:28:24]The one seen it cannot be unseen.

[00:28:26]Whether we maximally zoom out or maximally zoom in, we find the same pair.

[00:28:30]So, zoom out. Think the macrocosm of singular being, the absolute. It is relative to nothing, it's by itself. And since universals can be multiply instantiated and the absolute is unique or ansich optic, the absolute is not a universal.

[00:28:43]And yet, in order to know its truth, the philosopher must conceptualize the absolute as this unique being. In conceiving it as unique does not distinguish it from any other unique being.

[00:28:53]Thinking it while unique inevitably conceives it as a universal.

[00:28:57]One cannot say what is purely unique without spoiling its uniqueness.

[00:29:01]Philosophical religion expresses exactly this result for this pure experience of absolute thinking conceives the absolute as both conceptual and transconceptual.

[00:29:10]Zoom in. Forget the totality and think the microcosm of singular being. Zoom in upon this unique being, this non-repeatable free act of the will, this conversation at this fleeting instant.

[00:29:22]It is not repeatable.

[00:29:23]Thus, it cannot be universal. And yet we cannot conceive it as such without conceiving it to be non-repeatable. In saying that this singularity is non-repeatable, we say the same thing about each unique being.

[00:29:34]The unity of the conceptual with the non-conceptual reaches to the fringes of existence, freely giving itself to everything in abundance.

[00:29:42]Nothing escapes the singularity of the absolute, for it permeates and penetrates all things. The formula of the macrocosm is the same of the microcosm. Everything is a singular being.

[00:29:52]Singularity is the unity of particular and universal. As non-conceptual, it is particular, and as conceptual, it is universal.

[00:29:59]Nothing escapes the singularity of existence.

[00:30:02]For too long philosophers have labored under the illusion that singularity cannot be systematized, for every systematization would universalize what is not universal.

[00:30:10]We are reminded of Kierkegaard's objection that systematic thinking is always indifferent to the singular individual.

[00:30:16]But we have lived in fear of contradiction for too long. For the fear of contradiction implies a fear of absolute truth.

[00:30:22]The contradiction at the heart of singularity is not proof that the absolute exceeds the system, for the system is constituted by that very contradiction.

[00:30:31]Here the dream of Rosenzweig is realized. System and singularity belong together in one system, neither compromising the other.

[00:30:38]The system is singular and the singular is systematic, for completeness can and is realized in the absolute contradiction. Absolute dialetheism is the one and only system, singular being.

[00:30:50]Now we have the final section, absolute dialetheism today, the end of finitude.

[00:30:55]Although there are bright spots, so much of the history of analytic and continental philosophy is dedicated to eliminating the absolute from knowing and being.

[00:31:02]Having recognized the paradoxes engendered by absolute thought, Russell undercut self-reference with his vicious circularity principle, according to which what applies to all the collection cannot be one member of that collection.

[00:31:15]But this principle is contradictory, for if it ranges over all collections, it must range over the collection of propositions, and if so, it must apply to itself, such that the vicious circularity principle would be included in the set of propositions about which it makes a claim.

[00:31:30]The forgetfulness of being is equally discernable in the verification principle of the logical positivists.

[00:31:36]Fearing absolute thinking and its looming contradictions, they restricted all language to speech about relative and empirical being.

[00:31:44]Naturally, this principle cannot be empirically verified, so it is meaningless on its own terms. Positivism is another tired repetition of Hume, whose inquiry teaches the equally unverifiable and indemonstrable principle that no term can be meaningful unless it is derived from some primitive sensory impression.

[00:32:01]Advancing beyond Russell, Wittgenstein recognized the contradiction in Russell's principle. One cannot represent logical space within logical space without a contradiction.

[00:32:11]But one [clears throat] cannot represent it otherwise, for the limit of logic is the limit of the world. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a bright spot, for he recognized the mystical nature of the world engendered by the self-referential character of absolute thinking.

[00:32:25]Despite his authentic concerns about the public nature of meaning, his turn to ordinary language philosophy seriously alienated philosophy from its original vocation.

[00:32:33]With the inanity of ordinary language philosophy behind us, the thoughtless appeal to intuitions in the sense of hunches or immediate feelings still dominate so much of philosophical work and thought.

[00:32:46]Descartes' clear and distinct ideas have morphed into intuition pumps. And despite the embarrassing nature of those appeals, our intuitions can be widely wrong, even collective ones. And just as there is nothing about ordinary language that tells us how we should do philosophy, our intuitions cannot give us any guidance on the method of philosophizing itself.

[00:33:05]The return of metaphysics in the analytic tradition also brings hope for philosophers of the absolute.

[00:33:10]By thinking about the ultimate grounds of being, we should be led back to the absolute as the ultimate ground of being.

[00:33:17]But this return This return to metaphysics brings new dangers. Namely, we risk losing the hard-won self-consciousness of Hegelian science trend targets. For instance, in his famous on what grounds what, Jonathan Schaffer assumes that grounding relations are irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive.

[00:33:36]But the absolute, the ultimate ground of being, is inherently reflexive. The relation of the absolute to the relative is constituted by a self-relation.

[00:33:43]Absolute thinking is self-referential.

[00:33:45]And if we mean to return to the question of being, we cannot forget ourselves.

[00:33:50]While much of the analytic tradition is dogged by the forgetfulness of being, to use Heidegger's terms, so much of continental philosophy is plagued by the opposite problem. Rather than forget itself, it poses a heightened self-consciousness about the limit problems in philosophy. Rather than face up to the absolute that stands before it, it is overburdened by the self-consciousness it's acquired, goes underground, and bows its head to the god of otherness. And despite their divergence, both traditions are worshipped are disposed to worship at the altar of finitude, thinking and living into the forgetfulness of being.

[00:34:25]Critique of Pure of Pure Reason relegated the absolute to a regulative ideal beyond the scope of human cognition.

[00:34:34]Reason aims for the absolute but is tragically bound to relative knowledge.

[00:34:38]Antinomies block the door to absolute knowing. In following in his footsteps, Husserl's phenomenology would inherit Kant's regulative ideal, an ideal that would stamp transcendental phenomenology with an infinite and thereby incompletable task. In his wake, philos- Heidegger teaches us that we are always on the way to being, a being that perpetually issues logical articulation.

[00:34:59]Like thinking sign, Heidegger recognized the aporia of the absolute. By recognizing the contradiction at the heart of being, Heidegger acknowledges that being cannot remain a purely regulative ideal.

[00:35:14]Instead, with Heidegger, philosophical thinking seeds the ground to poetic language, a primordial speech that accommodates contradiction and ecstasy, but now in imaginative, metaphorical terms.

[00:35:26]The French tradition would take up the lessons of German philosophy, everywhere recognizing the impossibility of truth infinitude. Sartre insisted that although the human being always aims for God, being in and for itself, we always come up short. With the birth of post-structuralism and postmodernism, the impossibility of absolute knowledge articulated itself in Lyotard's skepticism towards metanarratives.

[00:35:48]Post-structuralists would endorse the self-negating feature of their thinking as the very contradiction that precludes absolute knowing.

[00:35:55]Derrida's différance engenders infinite deferrals, infinitely deferring the arrival of the absolute that can never arrive. Everywhere new limits are uncovered and new contradictions, new impossibilities are discovered.

[00:36:07]From Levinas's otherwise than being to the absolute contingency of Meillassoux, finally with Badiou and Gabriel, the European spirit gives up the ghost. The one is not, the world does not exist.

[00:36:18]Of course, the list goes on.

[00:36:20]In the domain of philosophical thinking, intersubjectivity, language, knowing, and existence, everywhere the infinite appears as an indivisible remainder, and completeness disappears from the purview of knowledge.

[00:36:32]Everywhere thinkers parade the finitude of thought and being as revolutionary gestures, when in fact it is a tired trope. The impossibility of completeness, the finitude of human knowledge, these have become safe and highly conservative positions.

[00:36:46]One overhears one philosopher grumbling, "But you've contradicted yourself. You can't be right." The rare but honest response is equally telling that I cannot evade it. The contradiction shows the inexhaustibility of the other.

[00:36:58]The former wields the PNC as a weapon to bludgeon their opponents. The latter acknowledges that they cannot avoid violating the PNC, but for that reason they despair of knowing the absolute.

[00:37:08]The phenomenon, they will tell you, breaks out beyond the logic of self-identity. Each tradition belongs to the other, but they share a common god.

[00:37:15]The merry-go-round of bad infinity must be broken, and the high priest return to her rightful place.

[00:37:21]Do we have reason to hope that philosophy in the 21st century will return to the philosophy of the absolute?

[00:37:27]There is reason to hope. For a long time the fetish for the finite went unchallenged, but today lines of resistance are forming on all sides.

[00:37:35]Within the Anglo-American, European, and Chinese traditions, rebellion is fomenting. The true infinite cannot be held at bay. It must express itself, however imperfectly the resources of that expression may be.

[00:37:47]By explicitly drawing on the logic of self-reference in his Beyond the Limits of Thought, Graham Priest's enclosure schema establishes the contradictory nature of reality. His penetrating analysis of Cantor shows that the contradiction, quoting him, at the heart of the absolute was bound to surface sooner or later. Let's quote.

[00:38:03]He says, "Contradictions are endemic to reality." Quoting him, "When I say that reality is contradictory, I mean that it is such as to render those contradictory statements true." Let's quote.

[00:38:12]We share Priest's hope that, quoting him, "Maybe this century will see a return to the mainstreaming of a more traditional philosophical issue, the the of reality. And if I am right, a nature that is contradictory. Close quote.

[00:38:24]Priest is not alone. From J.C. Beall's The Contradictory Christ to Zach Weber's Paradoxes and Inconsistent Mathematics, the web of contradiction continues to grow. Rather than preclude absolute knowledge, Priest and co. acknowledge the capacity of reason to know the contradictory absolute.

[00:38:42]The burden is not carried by analytic philosophers alone. European philosophy, too, is learning to recognize the place of contradiction in the life of the absolute. In his recent Christian Atheism, Žižek begins by acknowledging the act that the absolute cannot evade contradiction, quoting him, "When we try to speak about the oneness of supreme divine reality, our position of enunciation necessarily gets inconsistent, caught in contradictions." Close quote.

[00:39:07]For decades, Žižek has insisted that the gap between our knowing of the real and the real does not take place outside the real, but is endemic to the real, quoting him, "While our starting point is, as usual, the gap between that separates us our finite mind from the absolute, the solution, the way out, is not somehow overcome this gap, to rejoin the absolute, but to transpose the gap into the absolute itself.

[00:39:29]Despite their profound differences, self-reference is just as essential for Žižek's reflection as it is for Priest.

[00:39:34]Žižek does not forget his own thinking.

[00:39:37]The absolute cannot exclude the contradiction that arises in every thought about the absolute. That gap must be transposed into the absolute itself.

[00:39:45]Looking back to Asia, we find friends in the Tiantai tradition. Brooks Ziporyn is one of the most visible advocates for the truth contradiction. His mystical atheism does not mince words, quoting him, "In fact, the very fact that it is the necessary condition of all coherence is what makes it necessarily incoherent.

[00:40:02]Since it is everywhere, again, speaking of the whole, it cannot be coherently determined, for to deter- for to be determined is to be contrasted with another, and to be contrasted to another is to have something outside itself to fail to be exceptionalist."

[00:40:15]Ziporyn's analysis of the exceptionalist absolute, and three truths Tendai Buddhism unveils that coherence is only possible on the condition of a fundamental incoherence. Inspired by European and Asian traditions, we look with eagerness to other world traditions, too, with the hope that they too can help us free ourselves from the chains unduly placed upon the life of thought by certain parochialisms of particular European heritages.

[00:40:41]On the one hand, while we walk arm in arm with our dialetheist friends, for example, Priest and Weber, our method diverges from them, for our logic is not formal. Like Nishida and Hegel before us, we are skeptical that a logic of the absolute can be adequately expressed by formal thinking alone. While formality certainly has a place in thinking the absolute, by my lights, it is still an alienated form of absolute thought in which the absolute remains hidden to itself. This is a Hegelian reflection.

[00:41:05]On the other hand, while we welcome Žižek and Siporin's honest insight that contradiction is endemic to reality itself, we insist that the absolute does not eschew reason, but is rational through and through. Although we are with Critchley, we insist upon a form of mysticism that is born from nous. Even in mysticism, reason reigns. In the 21st century, we are still living in the shadow of 20th century traditions. To treat this hangover from the 20th century, we we need only recognize that the relativization of the absolute that so thoroughly characterizes analytic and continental thought is itself an element of absolute thinking. Rather than expunge both traditions from our thinking, we invite them to the table.

[00:41:43]And by canceling and preserving, aufheben, the relativization of the absolute as it appears in these traditions, we can begin to think anew about the absolute in the 21st century.

[00:41:53]Even if they are canceled and preserved, thinking the absolute cannot look to these traditions for its inspiration, for the absolute does not live in their thinking. The heart of the absolute does not beat within them.

[00:42:05]To look forward to the 21st century, we should look back to the 18th century Jena, the 20th century Kyoto. Jena and Kyoto, German idealism and the Kyoto School, recognize what continental analytic philosophy you not. The vocation of the absolute is to conceive the absolute.

[00:42:23]The vocation of philosophy is to conceive the absolute. Of course, the last thing we need today is another mindless repetition of a dead tradition.

[00:42:30]Instead, the idea is to look back for inspiration to re-enlivened thinking by looking back through the logic of absolute thought in other traditions.

[00:42:38]Because academic thinking about the form of reason and its limits has been too conservative, for inspiration we looked at Nishida's logic of contradictory identity.

[00:42:46]There we discover a logic of the absolute that is nothing if not an absolute non-formal structure of self-referential categories.

[00:42:54]As the tired saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

[00:42:58]While absolute dialecticism takes its inspiration from the Western tradition, from my own app to Jena, Nishida's logic of contradictory identity and his concept of pure experience deserves special mention, since they're indispensable to our concept of philosophical religion.

[00:43:14]In this way, actually Nishida is the unspoken hero of the book and really deserved a place in the subtitle. So, this is, you could say, a very um obvious influence when you read the book, but he's in a way a hidden hero just looking at the title.

[00:43:29]Although absolute thinking fell on deaf ears in the early 20th century, early mid, and I would even say going to the late, it found a new home on Japanese soil in the philosophy of the Kyoto School, especially Nishida, Tanabe, Nishitani, and Ueda. The spirit of the absolute that animated Jena in the early 19th century quietly took refuge in Kyoto, where Nishida and Tanabe infused it with new life.

[00:43:50]While Hegel failed to acknowledge the equiprimordiality of non-conceptual thinking, Nishida took the next step by recognizing the equiprimordiality of non-conceptual being already implied by Hegel's dialectical method.

[00:44:03]Nevertheless, in his mature thought, Nishida pitted his logic of paradox against the mysticism of his early work on pure experience. Indeed, although both Nishida and Tanabe's philosophies seek a unity of reason and non-reason, Nishida and Tanabe's general opposition to mysticism is a mistake.

[00:44:18]A mistake that is visible in the very trajectory of Nishida's life work.

[00:44:22]But the autobiography of Nishida's intellectual life illustrates the truth of philosophical religion. In the natural course of his thinking, Nishida transformed his mystical approach into a rational one.

[00:44:32]We must also recognize what Nishida does what Nishida does not. The logic of paradox also works in reverse. The rational insight transforms itself into a mystical one.

[00:44:42]Nishida has this insight, but he doesn't really call it mystical or think of it as mystical, and I I think that this is a shortcoming that we can that we can correct. Following Critchley's call back to mysticism, Absolute Dialecticism, in the spirit of Nishida, hopes to marry conceptual cognition with the deepest impulses of religious life.

[00:45:01]Thanks for listening, and I hope that you're able to pick up the book and um that you enjoy it and that you you you learn something from it, benefit from it, and that it challenge you to think.

[00:45:12]Thanks.