Relativists are the true absolutists, and absolutism alone does justice to the relative

Evidence

The illegitimate absolutism, the allegedly definitive stamp of its formulations, with which philosophy is reproached, derives precisely from the abyss of relativity. The exaggerations of speculative metaphysics are scars of reflecting reason, and the unproven alone unmasks proof as tautology. In contrast, the immediate proviso of relativity, the modesty that remains within whatever conceptual area has been marked off for it, denies itself by its very caution the experience of its limit, to think which is, according to Hegel’s superb insight, the same thing as to cross it. Thus the relativists are the real – the bad – absolutists and, moreover, the bourgeois, who need to make sure of their knowledge as of a possession, only to lose it all the more thoroughly. The claim to the absolute that overleaps its own shadow alone does justice to the relative. By taking untruth upon itself, it leads to the threshold of truth in its concrete awareness of the conditionality of human knowledge. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 153

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dialectical reversal that upends commonsense epistemology: modesty about relativity is secretly absolutist and bourgeois, while claiming the absolute does justice to the relative. Resists all summary.
• SEED: Essay angle: how epistemic modesty functions as bourgeois possession-holding, and why overreaching claims alone reach the threshold of truth.
• XREF: Echoes Hegel’s Phenomenology on the ‘bad infinity’ of Relativismus and anticipates the whole ‘identity thinking’ critique of Negative Dialectics.