To the dismay of the Hegelians, absolute can never rid itself of the garb of relativity. Relativity can only be a bounded absolute…yet the kiss remains.

In modern physics mass is bounded energy. Temporality is the boundary. Therefore, the temporal constraints of mass is plural. Different temporalities employ different environmental iterations (i.e., in a certain culturally situated vernacular ‘laws of physics’). Some of the earliest particles can only be studied by replicating the earliest conditions where they can exist which is why we have CERN.

Physics is a metaphor which, in its earliest Greek sense, attained a kind of specificity without being bound by a concrete absolute. From early Christianity to Newton we see an absolute form of being and time and space which lost sight of its cultural/linguistic relativity and boundedness of time and space such that a monotheistic God appeared and the boundary was replaced with absolute time and space.

In modern physics, Einsteinian cracks have appeared in classic absolutism. Environmental situated-ness gives place to a Christian God and absolute time and space. Situated-ness is relative frames of reference wherein certain predictions can legitimately find a difference between noise and meaning. Yet the later Greek notion of atoms in Democritus which were the smallest possible particle moving in ‘the void’ were metaphysically taken up later without the ‘void’, the yawning gap of Hesiod, in the historic and temporally bound absolutism of classicism. The classic ‘view’ of history is now only ‘visible’ outside its own frame of reference. However, the absolute as the metaphorically ‘smallest particle’ has remained especially evidenced in Hegelian philosophy, terrorism and classic physics.

The Idea in Hegel can only be bounded by itself. Yet its boundedness is demarcated in terms of dichotomous and contradictory absolutes which can only be resolved in a transformation which gives way to yet another Gordian Knot to be tied and untied. The end result being the classicism of Democritus’ smallest particle which has lost the void, the Idea.

The idea loses the notion of exteriority along the way as yet another idea. Leibniz’ monad has realized itself in the Idea of Hegel. The void of the earliest Greeks, the play of being as temporal form in the physics of endless change (nomos and phusis), has become the self-determination of the Idea without the void, the concrete absolute.

The language employed in Hegelian absolutism can never be divorced from Idea. Absolutism forms the concretization of the Idea which in practice the Idea can never rid itself of. The idea can never conceive of its non-existence except as yet another idea. This reduction wherein the void cannot be except as idea requires externality as merely the face of idea and internality its antithesis. Externality must ‘produce’ internality to negate itself and rise once again to the transformational Idea.

Pain also knows no externality. Pain is itself without an other. Pain, as is the case of the Hegelian Idea, has lost its boundedness and has become the Absolute. Pain is the absolute extinction of otherness. However, pain yearns for an end as Idea yearns for self-determination. Pain, as for Hegel’s Idea, can never rid itself of its yearning, this is the kiss.

Modern physics has done much to dislodge its myopia towards Classicism. Yet its diligent yearning remains. As Christianity becomes more dislodged from its absolute historical roots, it as any religion, can only rise again as fanaticism. Without yearning, the Idea would have no concern for self-determination. Yearning refuses reduction to an absolute. Yearning requires boundary, end, telos. Yearning requires what it is not, what it can never be, it requires the other. The other is not Idea, it is love…the kiss of love. Yearning is the lost lover, the lost child, an ‘un-resolve’ which can never be reduced or supplanted by merely more of its own situatedness. Yearning requires an exterior which has no place, it finds no situatedness. It is the void, the fertile void, which can never end in the whimper of a ‘no’, a negative, an absolute. Yearning even moves in death, the cessation of pain, the moment of release. Death cannot kill yearning only the one that yearns. Hesiod wrote of the yawning gap, might we think of this as the yearning gap?

Yearning makes hopelessness impossible. Hopelessness, Dread in Kierkegaard, can never contain itself. It can never be in and of itself. As long as galaxies move in unimaginable temporal frames and human beings fashion historic and linguistic abodes yearning will kiss us in the lips of the other, remembering a future that we know will never come but yearning for it all the same.