The philosophical relativist is the knower of the Absolute

But what is relativism?

Relativism is the intellectual ability to step out of one’s present situation in time and space and recognise alternative viewpoints – from other times and from other points of space. This ‘stepping out’ of the present situation is often made easier if the alternative temporal-spatial view is imagined to be that of another person.

We are all relativists to a greater or lesser extent. Most of us are able to recognise that the mug in front of me might look different to our friend sat opposite us at the table. We would have relatively little difficulty in imagining how the handle on the right-hand side might appear on the left-hand side to our friend. However humble this skill might seem – these are our early majestic intimations of our knowledge of the Absolute.

Yes, humble as it seems, we should not forget that the autistic person, whose capacity for relativism is so low that they struggle in society, would not find it so easy to ‘step out’ of their present moment mindset. The experts called this a failure of ‘theory of mind’ – by that they mean other people’s minds; actually, it is a broader deficit than that – it is the inability to access the higher vantage of the Absolute.

The capacity for relativism lies on a spectrum. At one end is the autistic person entirely trapped in the idiosyncratic viewpoint (and the etymology of the word autistic ((as well as idiot)) suggests precisely this). As we move along we find people who would struggle to understand how the joke they laugh at might leave the next person cold. Rather than realise that funniness might depend on one’s socio-cultural history, one’s experiences etc., this person seems adamant that they alone know what’s funny and that the next person does not have a sense of humour. The best brands of coffee, the most attractive flower, and other matters of perceptual taste are all matters that the person with the underdeveloped relativistic faculty would argue about, working on the assumption that there are absolutely correct understandings on these things and that they themselves understand them correctly.

As we move along the spectrum we pass the peak of the bell curve and start to encounter issues that fewer people are able to view relatively. Political views and systems, matters of law and order, the interpretation of historical events, high and low art are all arenas where the rarer relativist’s voice might be heard – and increasingly opposed.

As we go beyond this and the conventions of popular opinion get left behind, the ‘stepping out’ of the relativist gets harder to do, and recriminations for doing so start to build. While many might have moments of insight into how the good act might also sometimes be viewed as evil, few would have the courage to express their opinions except to sympathetic ears.

But those who do so are the philosophers, and they pride themselves of their love of wisdom. And wisdom they have - in abundance – but of this elite there are few who are able to ‘step out’ to the extent that goodness is indistinguishable from evil, that matter is equivalent to idea, that freedom and determination are just two perspectives on the very same coin.

Yet the philosopher is not at the farthest end of the relativistic spectrum, for there is one question that even the philosopher cannot entertain. The philosopher cannot divest themselves of the belief that they are a subject trying to acquire knowledge of an objective world ‘out there’. Were they to see that that subject and object split is a quite one-sided, and therefore untenable interpretation of experience then the whole notion of knowledge and understanding would be voided (for a thread on this see:

Beyond the philosopher, the person at the far end of the spectrum is the mystic – the person who, through patient and systematic enquiry, has come to understand that alongside the world and the self it is also valid to say that there is no world and no self. Their understanding of the Absolute started when they saw, in their ‘mind’s eye’ that the mug’s handle might also be viewed as being on the left-hand side. That mind’s eye, was the Absolute eye – the eye of God if your terms of expression are religious. That mind’s eye grew and grew with discernment and insight as it transcended the illusion of the individual in the present, and expanded into absolute knowledge.

We all have a great deal of this wisdom, this absolute knowledge – but we all have our limitations. Our limitations are where we find ourselves unable to accept the relativistic viewpoint. Limitation means that we cannot imagine alternatives – imagination, of course, being the ability to access the Absolute perspective. The term mystic is often associated with religious figures – this is only because most Western mystics have lived in times when religious narratives were the conventional narratives to employ. Yes we have religions mystics (Jesus, Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross); but we also have scientific mystics (Einstein, Newton) and philosophical mystics (Socrates, Plotinus, Buddha).

Relativism is a dirty word to many, and yet we define ourselves as being in a post-modern age – an age of perspective and narrative plurality. Iris Murdoch famously wondered what word we would use for the time after post-modernism. The answer is the Age of Mysticism. In the age to come, the pre-eminent thinkers shall have gone beyond mere philosophy, beyond the nonsense theology of Christianity and the rest, and will have plunged themselves directly into the Absolute.

Thank you for reading this far.