The seventeenth century

The seventeenth century appears as a philosophical reference point for a decisive shift: the absolute is not an object that thought constructs and knows, but the lived existence of the knower. This distinction allows the text to affirm an absolute without turning consciousness into a substance or making existence relative to knowledge.

The Rationalist Conception

The text recalls that the rationalists of the seventeenth century defined and logically constituted the absolute as an object of knowledge. In that framework, the absolute is approached through thought as something to be established and comprehended. The account sets this conception against its own starting point: the knower’s being is encountered not by making knowledge primary, but by attending to existence.

An Absolute of Existence

Abandoning the primacy of knowledge leads to the being of the knower and, with it, to an absolute of existence. This absolute is not the result of a logical construction; it is the subject of the most concrete experience. Nor is it relative to that experience, because it is that experience itself. The contrast turns on what the absolute is: not an object known from a standpoint outside it, but existence as concretely lived.

Consciousness Without Substance

This account also rejects the idea that an absolute must be substantial. Consciousness has nothing substantial about it: it is pure appearance, existing only insofar as it appears. Since the entire world is outside consciousness, consciousness is total emptiness; yet that very emptiness, and the identity of appearance and existence within it, is what allows it to be considered absolute. The seventeenth-century reference thus marks a contrast between a logically constituted absolute and an absolute disclosed in the existence of consciousness.