The Fragile Absolute

If the Transparent Ironist were asked to summarise his life so far, he would reply with a somewhat cryptic phrase : the infinite passion for the Fragile Absolute.

It was his habit of reading books, one that he developed during his school years, that first set him on the track towards searching for an Absolute that time cannot touch, that age cannot wither, and that impermanence cannot corrupt. He spent the greater part of those formative years sitting at his table, quietly bent over his books for sometimes as long as fourteen hours a day, devouring one after the other not only his school text-books but also Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marvell, Marlowe, Keats, Milton, Shelley, Byron, Dryden, Herbert, Pope, Dickens, Yeats, the Brontes, Dickinson, and Eliot. He diligently ploughed his way through the history of the Greeks, the architecture of the Romans, the great civilisation of the Middle Ages, the flowering of the Renaissance, the rise of Western capitalism, and the freedom struggles of the Indians.

It is perhaps because of this childhood regime that he went through that he feels somewhat baffled when he comes across people within the Academy who do not share his fanatical passion for Absolute knowledge, and who see their practice of book-reading as some kind of an onerous 'duty' that they have to (mechanically?) perform (to pass their exams?) and not, like him, as synonymous with the very process of staying alive. For him, books are to a student in the Academy what water is to a fish, the air is to a bird, or honey is to a bee; and he sometimes wonders why everyone in the Academy does not live in accordance with such a passionate (and neurotic?) 'fundamentalism'. He feels equally puzzled, moreover, when he reads about people who pick up one sub-sub-sub-speciality within one field and stick on to it for twenty years of their lives as if nothing existed outside that localised context of their enquiry. Perhaps he does not know whether he would prefer a 'depth' in one particular discipline or a 'breadth' that would encompass all possible disciplines : thankfully, however, as a student of philosophy, he does not need to make an Either/Or choice in this matter for philosophy is a 'subject' that allows him to make the (foolhardy?) attempt to develop both at the same time. For in philosophy the term 'knowledge' truly comes into its own : it no longer means, as it may do so in some disciplines, an accumulation of information, but refers to an unquenchable thirst for finding out the unbreakable connection between the way things really are and the way one ought to live in this world.

And yet, in spite of his infinite passion for Absolute knowledge (where 'knowledge' is understood in the sense defined in the previous sentence), he knows that this search for the Absolute stands under the sign of a fragility that radically infects all human endeavour. In the course of the ongoing journey towards this Absolute, the Ironist continues to be aware of the finitude of his life which is like a mist that can disappear in a moment of bright sunlight, and of the bitter truth that he shall never, in fact, be able to reach this Absolute and hold It in his hands. At best, he can only come asymptotically close to it, and no matter how desperately he tries to grasp at It, It will continue to slip away from him.

Thus his hankering is expressed within a temporal context where he continues to experience infinite longings, a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the impermanence of everything that is mortal, a radical protest against the inevitability of his impending death, a profound awareness of his inability to respond to a love that arrives gratuitously at his door-step, an unbearable torment at his failure to find that which time cannot dissolve, a hidden guilt over his past that remains unredeemed, and yet, in spite of all these, an unfathomable hope that his search will be one that will not be in vain. Thus, it is the Absoluteness of knowledge that he yearns for, and this despite his realisation that he must resign himself to be content with, at best, a fragile and temporally limited version of it.