Definition
In philosophy, the principle of fundamental reality that underlines and sustains the various forms it assumes in the world. Although the idea of an unconditioned Absolute is as old as Plato, the term is associated with 19th-century German idealist philosophy, most notably in the work of G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel maintained "the Absolute is spirit; this is the highest definition of the absolute." For Hegel, the role of great art—for example, Greek tragedy—was to provide the average person with an approach to the Absolute that was more accessible than philosophy.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted this principle in developing his theory of literature, a theory in which nature appears as the Absolute. Coleridge's conception assumed a dominant place in 19th-century literary theory. Among reactions in the early years of the 20th century to Coleridge's Romanticism, the movement known as the New Humanism, led by the scholars Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, called for a rejection of transcendental, idealist terms, of which the Coleridgean Absolute was a major example.Jacques Derrida, the principal exponent of deconstruction, criticized Western thought for operating on the basis of logocentrism, the belief that there exists an Absolute, a "logos" that transcends the limitations of language.The scholar Robert Calasso used the term absolute literature to describe writings that reveal a search for an absolute.
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