The Fall of Absolutes

Around the 19th century the notion of absolutes collapsed. 19th century scientists, mathematicians, citizens of civic and academic communities alike were finding our that human beings have limited access to any supposed absolute. An absolute is a universal supposition that is not accidental to a circumstantial occurrence, in a given time or place, we treat absolutes as being enshrined in the intelligible fabric of the cosmos. Unchanging, unwavering, the notion of absolutes treated ‘Truth’ as an accessible, still and unchanging ontological thing we can hold, grasp, investigate, rather than a process of discovery that usually involves centuries of human intellectual efforts to simply approach the truth. Forget ever actually reaching it! Our individual and even civilizational observations are much more relative to the ‘observer’. Einstein was uncovering that space-time can only substantively be spoken about relative to some position in space and an observer’s experience of time. The observer’s experience is formally structured by conditions of their sensibility, these conditions, much to the credit of Kant, were the intuitions of S&T. Goedel was making a similar discovery for mathematical systems bound to the axioms set by the ‘observer'.