absolute

In philosophy, the opposite of relative, dependent, or conditioned. The underlying view is that any particular thing is incomplete and therefore not fully real: it is only the totality, the universe as a whole, beyond which nothing is, that has unrestricted reality. Ultimately it is this whole or absolute that is the only object of genuine knowledge.

The notion goes back to Parmenides. Plato regards the absolute as the source and principle of all reality, as do such later rationalist thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, and the absolute idealist philosophers Schelling and Hegel.

Philosophers of a more empirical temper reject this whole approach and deny that there is an absolute, or that knowledge of a part (as against the whole) is not genuine. Indeed they argue that all knowledge is of this partial kind, since in order to know we must be able to distinguish different features; and, moreover, we must recognize a contrast between knower and known.