A Critique of Negation

[Disclaimer, I know Absolutely nothing about Hegel's metaphysics, nor even really that much about Deleuze, this was a fun exercise though. I'm kind of sloppy all the way through with interpretation.]

I. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze critiques Hegel's metaphysics for making determinate negation the engine of history, change, differentiation, and individuation. For Hegel existence is constant change. However, it is not chaotic Heraclitean flux, but rather the logical unfolding of a constantly inverting movement: dialectics. This inversion is the process of negation. The negation of a thing (or of the absolute, at the largest scale) is entirely contained within that thing-itself, such that the way it (the dialectic) unfolds is determined according to the movement already contained within itself. History moves according to change, which moves according to the negation of concrete forms. This is where his contradictions come from - the movement ~p is contained in p. The main reason Hegel needs to affirm contradictions in this way is to avoid collapsing into Eleatic homogeneity, which would otherwise be a consequence of his monism. He has to save the intelligibility of the world and it can't be done with just being, thus he appeals to non-being (negation). Thus, Hegel's system must necessarily be both teleological ("It may seem as if this progression were to go on into infinitude, but it had an absolute end in view") and deterministic ("the whole of the history of philosophy is a progression impelled by an inherent necessity...a priori determined through its Idea...Contingency must vanish") as each moment is both directed-towards some end and contains within it a necessary direction (the negation of itself), according to its internal constitution. It strictly excludes any external determination. Therefore, future situations and possibilities are limited in advance by their constitutive conditions.

II. Deleuze takes issue with both the teleology and determinism in Hegel. He is both anti-teleological and a metaphysical indeterminist. These are closely allied positions in some ways but not exactly the same. Teleology requires that there be some final causal explanation of the movement of the universe that is not sufficiently explained by efficient causal laws or movements, which Hegel seems to endorse. Determinism only requires that the consequent state of the universe is necessarily entailed by the antecedent state at any given time. However, if the strong teleology outlined above is true of the universe, it entails determinism because future states are always contained in the present states.

Deleuze's opposition to such views is a feature contained in both: that the development of a thing is rigidly determined by its internal constitution. He wants to say the opposite: that the nature of a thing is not determined in advance, according to internal initial conditions of the universe. Rather it is a product of the varying ways in which absolute difference produces a situation of things for it to interact with, conditioning it in ways external to itself, neither determined nor pre-existing in the present. For Deleuze, history is novel and directionless - a continuous journey without destination. I will not defend this family of views explicitly here, it's just worth knowing where he's coming from. We will be talking about negation primarily. 

Thus, in Difference and Repetition he writes, critiquing Hegelian negation:

There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the space of play is differences. The negative is the image of difference, but a flattened and inverted image...it is not difference which presupposes opposition but opposition which presupposes difference, and far from resolving difference by tracing it back to a foundation, opposition betrays and distorts it. Our claim is not only that difference in itself is not 'already' contradiction, but that it cannnot be reduced or traced back to contradiction, since the latter is not more but less profound than difference.

All he is saying here is that Hegel is wrong to cite being (affirmation) and non-being (negation) as the primary metaphysical processes. We do not need the negation of some determinate form in order to explain metaphysical differentiation and change. Rather we can take formless differentiation and change - pure differentiated becoming - to be metaphysically primary, and get form out of that. (Of course, work needs to be done in order to show this, but it is possible.) In this scheme, the apparent negation of p, that is, the apparent non-being in ~p, does not denote an existent negative at all like Hegel thinks. Rather, it denotes a sharp contrast of two positive affirmations in tension. Deleuze writes: "oppositions are roughly cut from a delicate milieu of overlapping perspectives, of communicating distances, divergences and disparities, of heterogeneous potentials and intensities." Here opposition and negation are immanent and perhaps competing or contrary, but not contradictory and thus remain affirmations. This means that contradiction is never brought into existence like in Hegel, it is rather an illusory epiphenomenon of the sharp distinction between how novel forms are individuated, actualised, and referred to. This is an extremely brief gloss, but hopefully, the idea is there.

III. So far I have shown that negation or non-being is not necessary (in the sense that one's metaphysics do not need it) to recover intelligible differentiation and change. However, it will strengthen the prospect for a metaphysics of process or becoming (which is the necessary alternative) to give an argument for why the Hegelian solution is positively incorrect. If this is the case then we can avoid both Hegelian non-being (because negation is unnecessary) and Eleatic homogeneity (because heterogeneity is primitive in becoming). If we can paraphrase the content of negation as something that is merely a view of the mind with the purpose of action, then we have reason to take seriously the rejection of Hegel. In Bergson's work Creative Evolution, he attacks the concept of 'nothing' and 'negation', quite convincingly, as being empty of metaphysical meaning. The following arguments are his. (I recommend reading section II again after the two following this one, as it explicitly goes over the argument offered implicitly there. It should shed some light on the word vomit I offered up to you.)

IV. The first part of the critique is that we don't have any 'empiricist' reason to assert the real existence of negation (in a kind of Humean copy principle kind of way). In taking any concept, you can show that our supposed experience of its negation is not the recognition of something real, it is rather to express the thing in terms of something else. For example, if you pick up a cider, thinking it was a beer, you might say "this is not a beer." However, this negation does not track to the world, you did not literally pick up a lack of beer. Rather, you picked up a cider and expressed it as a function of the beer. In other words, you expressed the data of your perception, the cider, with different words from what you would normally express that content as. You are expressing the substitution of one positive object for another. The lack being expressed in the assertion is not the intrusion of non-being in the world, it is rather a comparison with some other reality.

The reason we say things like this is that we are able to abstract beyond our immediate experience. It comes from a subversion of expectation, recollection, or from being contrary to one's preferences. However, it is a great benefit to us to talk in terms of this lack. Indeed, lack is the very thing we are most familiar with. Our desires are necessarily a dissatisfaction, a desire for something and much of our conversation reflects this lack. However, its ubiquity is liable to trick us into taking negation to be something more than it is. When someone asks me if there is any beer in the fridge and I take a look and say "there's nothing in there" I am not saying that there is non-existent beer in the fridge, nor am I saying it is empty, I am (elliptically) expressing an entirely positive state of affairs - the relevant contents of the fridge. The reason I say 'nothing', rather than enumerating the precise makeup of gasses in the air is because I either don't know or more than likely, don't care. There is no content in the fridge relevant to the conversation, but that does not mean there was literally nothing there. This seems to be the main reason to speak in negations: because we almost always have no knowledge of the complete positive content of our experience at any given moment and even when do, it is because we almost never care.

If you are not convinced that negation is an addition of the mind and social convenience, not actually experienced, imagine a person without memory, nor any sociality whatsoever. This person would "follow purely and simply the thread of experience, there would be no void, no thought, even relative or partial, no possible negation. Such a mind would see facts succeeded facts, states succeed states, things succeeded things. What it would note at each moment would be things existing, states appearing, events happening. It would live in the actual, and, if it were capable of judging, it would never affirm anything except the existence of the present." Negation, to someone like this, would never come on the scene, it is only our unique ability of memory to think beyond the moment and compare that would bring it about. In doing so we forget that all we see is a constant stream of being.

Any negation, non-being, or nothingness, is not something we actually experience, it is merely a useful way of communicating different positive states of reality. We have developed a language for talking about and comparing different aspects of affirmative reality according to reasons of social necessity and convenience. The error is in elevating this language to the metaphysical level of affirmation, as if it is objective reality, rather than merely a way of speaking. This should remind you of Hume's critique of causation, where we cannot justify our belief in cause and effect merely by recourse to our experience. The same thing can be said of negation: there is nothing in the content of our experience to indicate such existence. Plus, the apparent existence can be explained by showing that in asserting a negation we are really affirming something else. However, there are other ways of defending negation.


V. The second part of the critique is that we don't have any rational reason to assert the real existence of negation. It might be agreed that we do not experience real negation, but we can come to an idea of negation by reasoning, rather than by experience. We do not actually experience negation, rather we conceive of it. We can take any given object, the beer, and conceive of its annihilation. From this, we can imagine annihilating each object until we get to the idea of absolute nothingness, pure negation. However, there is a problem with this. We can conceive of some pretty crazy things, like thousand sided polygons or a tree extending infinitely into space, but, we cannot generate conceptions of things logically contradictory to each other. In these cases, the constituents are reduced to mere words. For example, if you take a circle, you can conceive of one embodying many spectacular qualities (colour, shape, size). However, you cannot conceive of a square circle, because the concept of a circle contradicts the concept of a square. Talking about it is mere wordplay.

In the same way, it is impossible to conceive of real nothingness without existence. In fact, it is impossible even to conceive of real negation either. Why is that? Well, let's move away from the notion of complete nothingness, and annihilation (which brings too spatial a connotation). Let's keep it simple. Why can't we take some object A, and conceive of its non-existence? The reason you can't is that in order to conceive of its non-existence you must first conceive of it as existing. In order to think about the non-existence of something, you must think about the thing first. Similarly, for the concept of nothingness, you must first think of the entirety of the real in order to then think of its negation. Thus, we can see rather paradoxically that negation is always more than the object itself, rather than less. It is the idea of the object existing plus the idea of a world without the object. However, when one tries to do the same operation on all of reality, we have to have the idea of the universe existing plus the idea of a universe without the universe existing. "The act by which we declare an object unreal therefore posits the existence of the real in general." The concept of negation without existence is inconceivable because some existence has to be assumed in order to think it. Thus, things like negation, non-existence, lack, void, in themselves are inconceivable, and therefore, empty of metaphysical content. Negation is meaningless as an existential attribution because being-in-itself cannot have non-being and non-being-in-itself cannot have being. 

You might still not be convinced of this point. You might think, I can do something still, I can affirm p and thus I can negate it: ~p. Done! What is so incomprehensible about that? We do not even need it to be in the real world, it is a purely intellectual activity. You might say: asserting "this is not a beer" is the negation and thus the categorical rejection of "this is a beer." However, not even this can be done. There is a hidden assumption that is wrong here. It is to assume that affirmation and negation are to be interpreted with symmetrical metaphysical force. In assuming this we trick ourselves into thinking negation has independent existence or meaning in the same way affirmation does. However, as noted earlier, a negation is merely an attitude of the mind taken toward an eventual affirmation. When I assert "this is not a beer" all that is happening is that someone believes that the thing in question is a beer and I am telling them that they ought to believe it is actually a different positive existent. Rather than being a judgement about the world (like "this is a beer" would be), negations are rather judgements about a judgement. The statement "the beer bottle is not brown" is meaningless if I was not affirming that there is some beer bottle of a different colour (which I wouldn't have to specify unless the conversation called for it). "Negation, therefore, differs properly so-called in that it is an affirmation of the second degree: it affirms something of an affirmation which itself affirms something of an object."

The conclusion of these sections is that is unintelligible to talk of negation existing in any way that does not refer back to an affirmation. It means ultimately that we can only have a metaphysics of pure affirmation, of pure being, that subordinates negation to a mere epiphenomenal illusion.


VI. What the argument ultimately shows is that Hegel is wrong to think that a determined path of the oscillation between affirmation and the determinate negation it contains within itself is the engine of history, change, differentiation, and individuation. Negation simply cannot have real existence. Hegel champions a metaphysics of the squared circle (Hegelians would love this characterisation). 

Though not discussed above what a large part of the disagreement comes down to between philosophers such as Plato, Leibniz, or Hegel, and philosophers such as Kant, Bergson, or Deleuze, is that the former assume that ultimate reality, as it is in itself, is (or more charitably, must be) conceptually structured. (That is, structured the same as the forms in which we cognize reality.) What I think both Bergson and Deleuze are doing is taking seriously the Kantian idea that experiential concepts are the wrong kind of thing to be applying to metaphysical reality. They are doing or trying to do transcendental empiricism. Indeed, it is something really bordering on hubris to think that somehow the way we relate to the world in experience (especially if you accept anything like evolutionary theory as an explanation for the way in which our faculties of judgement and perception are) also happens to map precisely to the way the world really is. 

Interestingly though, if Bergson's critique is right, taking pure affirmation to its metaphysical conclusions could mean a complete overhaul of metaphysics. In losing the principle of differentiation and movement that Hegel supplied for us, and in sidelining any metaphysical notions less than reality proper, such as disorder, possibility and the future, which are, similarly to negation, projections of the mind (an argument for another time), we ourselves now risk falling back into Eleatic homogeneity. 

Thus, to enjoy some of my own hubris, we must follow those like Bergson, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, who posit as primitive a non-propositional, sub-representational, movement or difference that is both beneath, different from, and constitutive of discourse, subject, and object in order to be able to provide a transcendental explanation of the mobile reality we inhabit and observe. Rather than subordinate our metaphysics to conceptual form, we must subordinate conceptual form to differential metaphysics. Even though I obviously haven't defended these claims here, the real meaning of the critique of negation, and the affirmation of affirmation is that causation is an illusion, determinism is false and that the universe is one unified striving of pure differentiation and non-identity with no endpoint, advancing into absolute novelty. Why? Because that is the only explanation. We are duration, will to power, difference-in-itself - in short - pure becoming.

This long analysis has been necessary to show that a self-sufficient reality is not necessarily a reality foreign to duration. If we pass (consciously or unconsciously) through the idea of the nought in order to reach that of being, the being to which we come is a logical or mathematical essence, therefore non-temporal. And, consequently, a static conception of the real is forced on us: everything appears given once for all, in eternity. But we must accustom ourselves to think being directly, without making a detour, without first appealing to the phantom of the nought which interposes itself between it and us. We must strive to see in order to see, and no longer to see in order to act. Then the Absolute is revealed very near us and, in a certain measure, in us. It is of psychological and not of mathematical nor logical essence. It lives with us. Like us, but in certain aspects infinitely more concentrated and more gathered up in itself, it endures.