The Negative
Since we find that the only plausible reason of things is reason as a reason for itself by self-relation—and that this is impossible logically, and considerable only as seeming a psychological fact in empirical “self-consciousness”—and that this seeming fact (self-consciousness) is by our highest authorities determined as an illusion; and since we find, in the problem of causation, that no being can be held to contain potentially another being, neither to empirically produce another being; there remains only, to account for existence, the presumption of its eternity as matter of fact, whose only ground of being, in either fact or observation, is the void, conceivable as in lieu of all content, and named, for speculative purposes, the negative.
It may be admitted (at least by us, who live only to surely die) that a real void (however may be the case of a logical one) would vacate all being and distinction; but since being in general persists in spite of our solipsistic failure, the question remains, as to being in general, whether there is a principle of necessity which eternally holds and held it positive in fact—not antagonized but rather sustained and emphasized by the void, which should prove only a suggestion or shadow of our own finite fate and limitation, against the ever-living truth and fact that being must be.
Parmenides argued earnestly that “not-being” is only a play upon words, with no thought behind them.
Hegel argued, quite as earnestly, that in the world of pure thought, where the matter should be determined, the vitality of the negative is essentially the life of being, and that negation is “positive in its result.”
In the same spirit Heracleitus made opposition the basis of distinction, and strife the father of things. Said Parmenides:
“Listen and I will instruct thee, what are the two only paths of research open to thinking. One path is: That Being doth be, and Non-Being is not: this is the way of Conviction, for Truth follows hard in her footsteps. The other path is: That Being is not (All) and Non-Being must be. This one, I tell thee in truth, is an all-incredible pathway; for thou never canst know what is not (for none can conceive it) nor canst thou give it expression, for one thing are Thinking and Being.
“Never I ween shalt thou learn that Being can be of what is not. For is is of Being; Nothing must needs not be.
“What is is birthless and deathless, whole and moveless and ever enduring. Never it was or shall be, but the all simultaneously now is, one continuous one.
“How or whence it hath sprung I shall not permit thee to tell me; neither to think ‘of what is not’; for none can say or imagine how Not-Is becomes Is, or, what should have stirred it, after or before its beginning, to issue from nothing?
“Men have set up for themselves twin shapes to be named by Opinion (one they cannot set up, and herein they wander in error), and they have made them distinct in their natures, and marked them with tokens. . . . All things now being marked with the names of Light and of Darkness—yea, set apart by the powers of One or the Other, so that the All is at once full of light and invisible darkness, both being equal, and naught being common to one with the other.”
As unfalteringly as he defined idealism against the face of experience, so Hegel thus announced the positive negative, with its essential contradiction, as the logical necessity of reason, and the only possibility of philosophy:
“The only thing (!) essentially necessary to an insight of the method of scientific evolution is a knowledge of the logical nature of the negative: that it is positive in its results. . . . Its self-contradiction does not result in zero, or the abstract nothing, but rather in the subversion of its special content (or topic) only. . . . In the result is preserved essentially that from which it resulted.”
This, then, is philosophy: what is not, and cost nothing, is the matrix and the mother of what is; yon mist that rises from the rotting compost heap—it is the breath of life. . . . the secret then, the problem, the Mystery, the Veil, and what is behind it?—The voice is “dialectic”—the Vision is of a fig-leaf on the occult genitals of Death.
Dialectic, which for Plato meant conversation, as rendering opposite sides, is an esoteric diversion, in which the negative has been exploited as a quasi positive. Whether seriously or otherwise, Democritus is credited or discredited with the saying, “Being is by nothing more real than not-being.” Equivalently he might have said, “Visible and material body is no more real than invisible and formal mind”—and then added, “Logical concepts are as real as rational percepts; and but for Aristotle, and especially but for Kant, the notion might still be tolerated.” The whim is as old as Lucifer, and as man’s fall through knowledge, that by some inveterate perversity nothing must be something. Even Parmenides, however stoutly affirming as the only “truth” that “being alone is, and non-being is not,” confessed to an “opinion,” held with all the conviction of empirical life, that there was a being of not-being, which yet should be carefully ignored.
(Even Shakespeare furthered the jest, in “King Lear.” The king had retorted on some extravagance of his “fool,” that it was “nothing”; and could Nuncle make no use of nothing? This was a pity, since the king had so much of it: all his rents footed up to just that amount; whereat the loyal Kent remarked, “This is not altogether fool, my lord.”)
“Nothing” proves a very available stuff; it is at least half of the stock of metaphysics. In science too, it has indispensable uses. A couple of gallons of nothing, for instance, are indispensable in the experiment proving that in vacuo the guinea and the feather fall synchronously, and that a wheel will revolve therein for an unaccountable time. It would be necessary, too, in the proof that the resisting and negative air is the positive sustenance and fulcrum of a bird’s flight through it, and that in fact a bird could not fly in a vacuum at all. This obvious inference is very consolatory in any conjecture as to the forces requisite to the motion of the celestial orbs; for if a planet’s atmosphere is wholly its own, that envelope should not retard its motion in clear space; and as our moon has no atmosphere at all, one whiff from a goose feather should suffice to revolve it till time shall be no more.
Even thus we may gossip at the verge of the insidious maelstrom that has engulfed all the philosophic sails that have defied its vortex. The fault was not in their stars but in themselves that they went down as underlings. The rash assertion of Hegel in the beginning of his logic, that being and not-being are the same, should have been of itself a signal of logical distress. The same? Certainly, weighed as abstractions, mere topics of thought, they are as such the same. Even contradictions are facts, for discussion, or dialectic. Reality, negation, nonsense, the unutterable, the unthinkable, are alike real topics for metaphysical talk; but they have no basis or foothold in the dependable world; they are verbal concepts which have no perceptual corroboration—adjectives flying regardless of appropriate nouns. The moment that being and not-being are required to serve as qualifications of any objective reality, their difference is evident and fatal. All the value in the world, and all distinction of values, are in being, while all non-being is alike and worthless. When it is said that non-being has being, or that nothings are somethings, what are the empirical percepts that should staminate this fluorescent nonentity? They have no concrete life or force. No Kantian can affirm non-being.
Experience and history, reflection upon sleep and death, the admonition that there is no knowledge nor device in the grave whither thou goest, have indeed impressed upon us the sad truth that there is and was for us a condition of not-being; but these empirical considerations have no bearing on the similarity of being and not-being save as logical abstractions regardless of their concrete filling or special content. In saying that being and not-being are the same, Hegel could not mean that life and death are the same; his logical interest lay in the fact that it requires force to destroy as well as to create and that, therefore, in the self-relation of the ego as subject-object, the objective or quasi passive side implicates an equal subjective initiative. But the goal of his logic was development of the Absolute Spirit as the essential activity and process of self-relation.
Stoutly ignoring the unknown root of all sense and human understanding, Hegel fell back upon the purely logical and dialectic Inevitable of Heracleitus, and as a merely formal and speculative proposition the Inevitable is sure and simple enough, if we allow the single presumption that opposition is the basis of distinction—or, as Heracleitus phrased it, that “strife is the father of all things.” If being is such and conceivable, not as an independent entity, but only as the opposite of not-being, they cannot be separated; either assures the presence of the other, and so the inevitable existence of both. Total non-being is impossible in or for thought. The being of a hole is as real as that of a plug; as a mere topic of thought the one is quite as conversable as the other. But such conversation is mere diversion. If we were comparing reality and unreality, the one, as a topic, would be as real as the other; but that kind of reality is mere supposition, a play of fancy, the stuff that dreams are made on, a saying that the hole is essential in the doughnut.
Negation is mighty only by reason of its positive given force. In a world of purely logical forms and schemes this were the acme of triumphant thinking. But when the plain man asks after its results, he is put off with the glory of the action; the strength displayed in destruction is the same as that proper for creation. But if negation is positive in its results, wherein does it oppose assertion? and by what means shall we get any denial or any destructive result? Our only inference is that assertion and negation are alike merely verbally constructive, and that real destruction is logically impossible; the void remains.
Contemplating the field of psychological experience, Heracleitus seems to have been the first to signalize the fact that one is made by limiting, and that everything gets special existence not only by contrast, but by opposition and strife with its environment, which serves as background and frame, and gives it distinction, relief and individuality. In the consciousness of lights and shadows, and of pains and pleasures; in the contemplation of the ups and downs of fortune; in the estimation of size and value, and the appreciation of the present as in memory of the past, everywhere he found the One getting its distinction, emphasis and éclat through a compensation of the Other. This is the most striking and poetical lesson of experience, and it oriented his metaphysical speculation to the merely relative truth that being depends upon not-being.
We may say here, somewhat gratuitously perhaps, that this was rather a poetical than a philosophical observation on the part of Heracleitus. Had he enforced and brought home his principle—that “strife is the father of things,” or, that opposition is the basis of distinction—he would have had to found reason upon unreason, as equally authoritative, and conclusion would have become impossible.
It is our instant necessity here to see that however contrast and compensation enter into and emphasize distinction, they do not infer nor require the opposition which has been utilized to construe the inevitable by making the mere contrast of being and not-being the productive ground of true being, on the theory that negation is positive in its result. This result, properly considered, is merely logical, formal and schematic. Let non-being, in its transcendent thought-world, be ever so much a reality and a proper topic for contemplation—whereof we may consistently discuss the existence, or the possibility, as well as we may the prevalence of the content of being—yet we instantly perceive that being proper embraces and identifies the whole real world, and that not-being is only a mental supposition of death, which, realized, would vacate the field of thought. It lives only as a hypothetic mental relation or supposition. The fact appears that mere opposition will not assure being, and that there may be difference and distinction without antagonism, peacefully side by side, however contrast may emphasize it: this because contrast may come as well from new excess in nature as from the negation and non-being of the passing or the past.
Granting that a relative non-being is necessary to logical or conceptual being, and that conceptual difference is necessary to logical and truthful identity; granted that dark lines and shadows are necessary and relevant to the “high lights” of the picture; granted that it were practically the same disaster, whether all the light or all the darkness went away; you are yet nowhere near the affirmation that darkness is necessary to light, or that non-being is the ground of being, or that opposition rather than friendly difference is necessary to subjective distinction. Nature solves this problem by her purely gratuitous and miraculous excess and bounty, putting all assertion into being, and outfacing all pretense of positive negation with her everlasting Yea. “God is light,” said the ancient, “and in Him is no darkness at all.” Yet “one star differs from another star in glory”; there is no cosmic shame; there is no cosmic evil; but there are degrees of light which afford æsthetic shadows of their own order and genius. The all-bounteous Good of Nature ruffles with compensating waves the deep that knows no change, and lends variety and beauty to the spiritual world as fortune favors one with ten talents, and another with five, and another with only one. And if he who has none at all shall renounce a losing game and destroy himself, who knows what compensation may attend his faith in another world than this.
We may illustrate the utter relativity, or the purely mental hypothecation of “the negative,” by the revolution of a spoked wheel. Fancy such a wheel before us, on a track that leads to the right. We first lift the wheel from the track and revolve it around its own centre, its top rolling to the right while its bottom goes to the left. If now, while the wheel is still revolving, we set it down upon the track, the bottom will catch and hold to the track in a punctual and motionless contact; the centre will move to the right with the same speed with which the bottom was before moving toward the left, and the top will go to the right with twice the speed of the centre, while the leftward motion of the bottom is lost, being shifted to the centre: there is no longer any leftward motion of the wheel in the real world. But if now we go with the wheel—fix our identity and viewpoint at the centre of the wheel, regardless of its environment, the leftward motion of the bottom is as rapid and real as it was before it caught the track—but this motion is only assumed as relative to an artificial and unreal viewpoint—there is no one living at the centre of the wheel, and there is no such backward or negating motion for any observer in the world of real experience.
We may readily convert this demonstration to the assumed “positive result” of the negative as a factor in the sustenance or production of being. Let it be granted that in a static and changeless world, where contrast or even opposition were necessary to distinction, non-being would be necessary to being. But such a static world is a purely mental supposition; there is no such world in time’s reality. On the contrary in the gratuitous becoming of the excess of Nature, being gets vital distinction in the on-coming future, and becomes itself the negative or background in a world new-born. Here is no Heracleitic strife or struggle for mere being—no grudging result of the mere activity of negation and opposition, but rather the bounty of a miraculous becoming, ever new, and ever more.
We remarked above that in saying that “being and not-being are the same” Hegel did not pretend that life and death are the same. But why not, if he meant anything that concerns humanity? As a literary fact the words life and death and truth have no patronage in transcendental philosophy; neither does any fact of experience have weight in formal logic—a kind of esoteric toy which, like a fragment of looking glass in the hands of a mischievous schoolboy, can be made to throw artificial reflections into startled eyes.
It is logically true that one is made by limiting—that its determination is negation—as well by exclusion as by inclusion; and it is ever true that in contemplation, as in a picture, light and being get emphasis and éclat from darkness and death. But this contemplation is but artistic conception. When the inexorable sure method demands the percepts of this fruitful negation—the basic experience that should staminate this fluorescent inanity—it finds that the real negative, as the smouldering compost from which the negative concept is exhaled, is the sad fate of humanity when the lights are out and the curtain is down, and the voice of the Preacher admonishes us that there is no wisdom nor device nor knowledge in the grave whither we go. Transcendental dialectic, positive negation, truth as contradiction and essential opposition and inconsequent process—all this is but a house of cards, the baseless fabric of a vision, an insubstantial pageant that will leave not a rack behind. No less, it is the best that philosophy has done, or promises to do.
We should gather from the citations foregoing that in self-relation and positive negation the German genius has exhausted the only sources or ground of cosmic explanation. If the Whole is to be in any way exploited it must be by either itself or nothing—a desperate alternative surely; yet we have seen however that “nothing can come from nothing,” the negative may be at least logically fruitful, and “not altogether fool.”
But the transcendental exfoliation exhausted all the fertility of its ground. Poor Psyche became so soiled and mussed-up by dialectic manipulation that her sacred character was compromised. If mere logical concepts could be posed as realities, mind-stuff was no better than matter-stuff, which was equally feasible and less disputable. Besides, Hegel had insisted upon exalting his Absolute to the very questionable eminence of Personality: “The highest, steepest thought is Personality.” Such a claim was shadowed not only by all the atrocities of the old, but by the present controversy over the Christian divinity.
The Good has a promising name, but it is not adequate as a first principle. It is tainted with passion and personality; it is partial and hence unjust; its favor to the present depletes the justice due to the unborn. There is but so much for all, and what comparative has a surplus to spare? Shall not justice suffice? The Good reeks with the old duplexity; justice alone is passionless and integral and safe: for what hinders that the unbalanced Good should turn into evil at its personal whim? It does not appear that the Good had been deserved, and the flush on its countenance argues distemperature in the bosom of fate.
Surely we must welcome the Good; the downpour of gratuitous Nature dissolves the logical necessity which renders negation positive in its results; but for philosophy as explanation the gift of nature still taxes the wonder which the charm of dialectic had for its moment meretriciously disenchanted. The secret remains intact. The Good is not the best.
In any event, personality is the last philosophical canon of divinity. “Ever not quite” is a motto particularly significant here. The groundlings of skepticism will degrade its most spiritual conceptions with visceral necessities which impeach the sincerity of unqualified devotion. There is a flaw in its supremacy, a fig-leaf on the statue. Not even hatred and bigotry shall be genuine while they spare a loin-cloth to the uplifted Christ.
We cannot wonder that a surfeit of personal idealism put forth a score of post-Kantian philosophemes in the direction of materialism, all in favor of a depersonalized intelligence which dispensed with God while utilizing at will His attributes. Schopenhauer charged in from the field of pantheism with a blind and striving will, still abetted by an imminent clairvoyancy—most happily characterized by our Professor Howison as “a kind of Blind Tom.” Hartmann followed with the Unconscious—a merely titular pose of the subconscious, as somewhat that can see without eyes, and speak without articulation—the voice of the heart, as of Jacobi, and the “something higher than science” which Schelling (with many others) said he surely knew. Then came Duhring with the Actual, freshly qualifying the “thing in itself” (which Kant had left as merely problematical), as the real thing that by a vacation of solipsism, and a restoration of practical sanity, would restore reality to the common sense which idealism had abused. And then came Lange (contemporary in time, and consecutive only in the process of mental evolution), overweaning the rallying cry of “back to Kant” with an impeachment of that Master himself. For Kant had rushed where Aristotle could tread only tentatively, and had rather conceitedly assumed to name all of the “categories” (the innate faculties or laws of thought) in accordance with some determinate principle. Lange, breaking down Kant’s perfunctory bars to scientific progress, insisted that the a priori as well as the merely sensuous was divinely “given,” and that the laws of the mind, even as the laws of matter, shall be codified by induction—so clearing the path for that trend toward materialism, or toward that mitigation of its esoteric crudity, which has encumbered the post-Kantian régime.
And Lange forthright staunched his criticism of the “Critique of Pure Reason” by the instance of motion as one of the “forms” of sense, equally with space and time, and possibly the key to various paradoxes, which it factually is.
I shall introduce in the next chapter a neglected handmaid of Truth, a sort of metaphysical Cinderella, under the title of Ancillary Evidence, hoping thereby to lend something of dignity to that catchword, “ever not quite,” which Professor James adopted as Pluralism’s heraldic device. Her credentials shall be at once signal and authentic. There are in philosophy many loose ends of the inevitable duplexity, many theoretical oppositions whose poles do not quite meet; there is a penumbra that defeats every claim to explicit definition and contact. For example, in the saying (as old as Heracleitus) “being and not being are the same,” there is this discrepancy at least that they cannot be quite the same, so long as the means are different or supposing that they are the same, the same is not quite the same, for, logically, the same is another that is like—there needs two for a sameness, as well as an identity for a difference. So nothing is not quite that; if it were, one could not be a thinking being and make it topical.
But this ancillary penumbra has more serious importance in the larger fields of philosophy, where ultimate distinction wavers and confuses definition. The static and dynamic viewpoints cannot be held utterly asunder; they are both feasible, but if they did not somehow compromise their opposition thought and life would be impossible. Contradiction cannot utterly contradict, nor can being exclusive be. Kant said well that all entities have community, and that all value and quantity have intensive degree, which scales somewhere between entity and zero, but by the ancillary shading which our title adumbrates; there is no modus vivendi without it. The present tense, where we must live, is but a hole in the ground, if you withdraw the ancillary presence of the past and the future; yet the metalogical life, our Cinderella of all work, as a sprite rising from Truth’s bottomless well, clings stoutly to the skirts of the vanishing past, while trembling on the verge of the precipitous future.