Necessary Evil and the Thing-In-Itself

Something interesting that came up in the discussion of ethics in the Phenomenology of Mind: Ethics, being an absolute and perfect universal, can never be fully realised in any particular form.

Avctivity does not bridge this gap slightly merely by becoming more moral, because the closer activity comes to the absolute, the more significant the necessary dissimilarity between the universal and the particular becomes. In real terms, this can be seen in that a perfect selfless, saintly act still carries with it an element of moral satisfaction which is felt by the person responsible. This means that the action can be described as motivated by selfishness.

It strikes me that this problem is relevant to knowledge in general. The thing-in-itself, which is the objectas it really is regardless of perception, will always be distorted by the methods we use to try and understand it. If we try to view an object, then remove the distortion that our method of viewing it has brought, then we use another method to remove the distortion, and this method again distorts the thing-in-itself.

I haven't studied dialectical logic for a while, but as I remember it Adorno tries to solve this problem by saying that thought creates a simulation of reality out of concepts, while
Žižek says that the truth, which is ultimately unknowable, can be approached by "the dialectical tension" between the unknown thing-in-itself and the concept.

But as we approach the thing-in-itself we really approach the necessary dissimilarity between the concept and the object. So, trying to get around the problem by focusing on the mediating term through whichnotion and object become similar is not an ideal method for perfecting understanding.

In ethics, the answer, as I understand it, is in a very basic sense that we must learn to forgive the particularity of others. I wonder if something simialr could be applicable here.