Absolute (n. das Absolute; or adj.

absolut) Hegels use of the term absolute is the source of a great deal of confusion. Nevertheless, it is the term most commonly associated with his philosophy. Hegel frequently uses it as an adjective, for example in Absolute Idea, Absolute Knowing, Absolute Religion and Absolute Spirit. He utilizes the substantive the Absolute less frequently. The term absolute has a long history in German philosophy. Nicholas of Cusa in his Of Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440) used the term absolutum to mean God, understood as a being that transcends all finite determinations: the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). Schellings use of Absolute is remarkably similar to Cusas. For Schelling, the Absolute is the indifference point beyond the distinction of subject and object, or any other distinction. In the famous Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel rejects this conception of the Absolute, referring to it derisively as the night in which all cows are black (Miller, 9; PG, 13). Hegel means that when the Absolute is conceived simply as the transcendent unity of all things (or as the cancellation of all difference) it really amounts to an idea devoid of all content. It is terribly easy to say in this world definite distinctions abide but in the Absolute all is one. But what does this really mean? One might think this would lead Hegel to reject the idea of an Absolute altogether, but he does not. The reason is that Hegel saw the aim of philosophy itself as knowledge of the Absolute, where this is understood, in very broad terms, as the ultimate ground or source of all being. It is this knowledge that was sought right from the beginning of the Western tradition in the Pre-Socratic philosopher Thales who declared that water is the source of all that is. According to Hegel, the trouble with Schelling is not that he has conceived of an Absolute, but that he has misconceived it (In fact, one might say that from the standpoint of a Hegelian, Hegels great achievement in the history of philosophy is to have arrived at a proper understanding of the Absolute.) Hegel retains the idea of the Absolute, and even agrees with Schellings description of it as somehow overcoming the subject-object distinction. For Hegel, however, the Absolute is the whole. The Absolute is not something