Absolute Negativity

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Reply Tue 2 Mar, 2010 03:55 am
I'm speculating that "nous" in some of the ancient uses of the word is pure negativity, which cannot be conceptualized except in the concept of being, which being a concept, is not pure negativity, but only abstraction (via nous) taken to its utmost limit.

Heidegger asked again and again: "what is the Being of beings?" At some point he started crossing out this word Being, as "Being" was a being. Man thinks digitally, only in terms of being. It seems to me that Heidegger was just repeating what the negative theology in the manner of Nicolas of Cusa had already wrestled with. And Heidegger didn't add much, as far as I can tell. Of course this was only one of Heidegger's issues, and he still deserves credit for the return to the center of transcendental philosophy.

It now seems to me that Hegel was already on this, whether Heidegger knew it or not. Did Heidegger know? I don't know Heidegger well enough.
Hegel wrote that understanding must "tarry with the negative."

This is also a way to understand the Catholic trinity (one of perhaps several ways.) If the Father is viewed as the demiurge, or the creator, then the Father provided us with continuous space and continous time (represented by infinity, which cannot truly be conceptualized, but only reduced to the one of Parmenides or Jehova,) and everything within them, excluding nous.

The Holy Spirit would be pure negativity which is also numinous, as well as nous. At the top of the trinity is not the Father but the Son, for the Father can only be known by the son, who is the collision not only of the transcendental and the incidental (being and negativity), but also of two clashing transcendentals, which are transcendental continuous space and time, and an entirely different digital nous. Nous or the Holy Spirit is the Pure Negativity that makes conceptualization and number possible.

Number is closer to pure negativity than word, except for those few words that are entirely abstracted....like Being, Totality, the Absolute, God, One...

But these abstractions can only exist for a transcendental subject capable not only of ideal geometry (transcendental space and time) but also of nous. It's only the combination of these two elements that allows the understanding of both eternity and time to be engendered in time by the self-consciousness of the Logos, or the Son, or temporally existing man.

The whole process is driven by the splendor of nous-meeting-being. It's as if man if drawn to truth as a moth is to light. Hence the motivation to abstract and attain transcendental self-consciousness. (The goal is to know that one is essentially a triangle, or a plus sign, to speak symbolically....)

Pure subjectivity is nothing but an abstraction. There is only Being and Negativity. Pure subjectivity is just the reduction of Being to empty timeless transcendental space and the reduction of concept to "I."

(I just figured that last part out....3 days of thinking of nothing else will do that sometimes...)
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 01:40 am
@Reconstructo,
Check it out..........-
 
Pepijn Sweep
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 02:30 am
@Reconstructo,
Do this nous-beings translate to the djins in the Islam-tradition ? I all-ways believed in the ancient Ka and Bha duality.:perplexed:
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 03:19 pm
@Pepijn Sweep,
Pepijn Sweep;135290 wrote:
Do this nous-beings translate to the djins in the Islam-tradition ? I all-ways believed in the ancient Ka and Bha duality.:perplexed:


I don't know. this negativity might refer to what I've heard desribed as the "uncreated" maybe even the tao, from whence the one comes. Pure negation is prior to the concept of oneness. its one of the two parents. negation and space = object/number/thought
 
sometime sun
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 05:07 pm
@Reconstructo,
Just a thought may not apply;
Trinity is first - minus, absence, negative, not formed, without reason, no where to go.
second = equalising mass, matter, how its done, first question, why, search for reason.
finaly + plus, presence, positive, fully realised, the explanation, the answer, and ever all shall end.
Life is simply -=+ begininng, middle, end. Void, Earth, Us. Less, Some, All. Ghost, Father, Son. Undone, Task, Done.
It does make me wonder if when we are finished we go back to the beginning? Can you be All and not cancel the Task out? Ergo back to the start.
Sorry but not if this didn't make much sense. Or fulfil the brief.
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 10:57 pm
@sometime sun,
sometime sun;135646 wrote:
Just a thought may not apply;
Trinity is first - minus, absence, negative, not formed, without reason, no where to go.
second = equalising mass, matter, how its done, first question, why, search for reason.
finaly + plus, presence, positive, fully realised, the explanation, the answer, and ever all shall end.
Life is simply -=+ begininng, middle, end. Void, Earth, Us. Less, Some, All. Ghost, Father, Son. Undone, Task, Done.
It does make me wonder if when we are finished we go back to the beginning? Can you be All and not cancel the Task out? Ergo back to the start.
Sorry but not if this didn't make much sense. Or fulfil the brief.


I think we is in a greet-ment. (Excuse the Joycean worldplay...)

I agree with your trinity except maybe for one thing, because i might be misunderstanding you. it seems to me that the negative element is the same element imposing concepts. i think of it as a buried one in our souls that drive us to make meaning out of the second element, which would be all sensation and emotion, paintings and music & the sensual elements interactions. In speech, both of these elements are manifested simultaneously, for speech is the movement of face and air (sound), from both of which meaning is abstracted.
So man is the meeting of the negative one and the infinity sign....and he is the plus sign and always was the plus sign, and this plus sign is the system of concept that floats on the water of sensation & emotion....and it's within this ocean that "reality" is dreamed up.....including this little peace of poetry-truth-lie-reality.......(and at this moment, self-consciously self-conscious Geist!
 
Fido
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 11:05 pm
@Reconstructo,
Reconstructo;134506 wrote:
I'm speculating that "nous" in some of the ancient uses of the word is pure negativity, which cannot be conceptualized except in the concept of being, which being a concept, is not pure negativity, but only abstraction (via nous) taken to its utmost limit.

Heidegger asked again and again: "what is the Being of beings?" At some point he started crossing out this word Being, as "Being" was a being. Man thinks digitally, only in terms of being. It seems to me that Heidegger was just repeating what the negative theology in the manner of Nicolas of Cusa had already wrestled with. And Heidegger didn't add much, as far as I can tell. Of course this was only one of Heidegger's issues, and he still deserves credit for the return to the center of transcendental philosophy.

It now seems to me that Hegel was already on this, whether Heidegger knew it or not. Did Heidegger know? I don't know Heidegger well enough.
Hegel wrote that understanding must "tarry with the negative."

This is also a way to understand the Catholic trinity (one of perhaps several ways.) If the Father is viewed as the demiurge, or the creator, then the Father provided us with continuous space and continous time (represented by infinity, which cannot truly be conceptualized, but only reduced to the one of Parmenides or Jehova,) and everything within them, excluding nous.

The Holy Spirit would be pure negativity which is also numinous, as well as nous. At the top of the trinity is not the Father but the Son, for the Father can only be known by the son, who is the collision not only of the transcendental and the incidental (being and negativity), but also of two clashing transcendentals, which are transcendental continuous space and time, and an entirely different digital nous. Nous or the Holy Spirit is the Pure Negativity that makes conceptualization and number possible.

Number is closer to pure negativity than word, except for those few words that are entirely abstracted....like Being, Totality, the Absolute, God, One...

But these abstractions can only exist for a transcendental subject capable not only of ideal geometry (transcendental space and time) but also of nous. It's only the combination of these two elements that allows the understanding of both eternity and time to be engendered in time by the self-consciousness of the Logos, or the Son, or temporally existing man.

The whole process is driven by the splendor of nous-meeting-being. It's as if man if drawn to truth as a moth is to light. Hence the motivation to abstract and attain transcendental self-consciousness. (The goal is to know that one is essentially a triangle, or a plus sign, to speak symbolically....)

Pure subjectivity is nothing but an abstraction. There is only Being and Negativity. Pure subjectivity is just the reduction of Being to empty timeless transcendental space and the reduction of concept to "I."

(I just figured that last part out....3 days of thinking of nothing else will do that sometimes...)

Didn't lord Heidegger also ask: What is the farting of farters... Heideggers question makes him look less like a winner and more like an also ran...
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 11:09 pm
@Fido,
Fido;135767 wrote:
Didn't lord Heidegger also ask: What is the farting of farters... Heideggers question makes him look less like a winner and more like an also ran...



At the moment, I think Heidegger shoulda cracked that little fudge-bar known as being!

But he was right in a way. The pure abstraction is a clue to our nature. All these one-nesses. We are machines that spit out synthesis. (?) 1+1+1+1+1+! (1+1+"eye"?)

He got moral/world-concerned. He was a mean hippy?
 
Fido
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 11:20 pm
@Reconstructo,
Reconstructo;135768 wrote:
At the moment, I think Heidegger shoulda cracked that little fudge-bar known as being!

But he was right in a way. The pure abstraction is a clue to our nature. All these one-nesses. We are machines that spit out synthesis. (?) 1+1+1+1+1+! (1+1+"eye"?)

He got moral/world-concerned. He was a mean hippy?


We spit out syllogisms in the effort to find unity...Only works with physical forms...
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Wed 3 Mar, 2010 11:29 pm
@Fido,
Fido;135773 wrote:
We spit out syllogisms in the effort to find unity...Only works with physical forms...


Yes. For practical purposes. But man can invent coherent world-views for the pleasure of it. Even if he does not believe. Or perhaps the challenge is integrating the practical into the beautiful or at least tolerable greater conceptual structure. An ontology science-religion. In fact I think we all do this perhaps..

There are always master concepts in our concept systems. That incorporate the practical with the speculative & numinous.....

---------- Post added 03-04-2010 at 01:58 AM ----------

Wittgenstein. Check it out.

Quote:

6.231 It is a property of affirmation that it can be construed as double
negation. It is a property of '1 + 1 + 1 + 1' that it can be construed
as '(1 + 1) + (1 + 1)'.
Quote:

6.232 Frege says that the two expressions have the same meaning but
different senses. But the essential point about an equation is that it
is not necessary in order to show that the two expressions connected by
the sign of equality have the same meaning, since this can be seen from
the two expressions themselves.
Quote:

6.2323 An equation merely marks the point of view from which I consider
the two expressions: it marks their equivalence in meaning.
Quote:

6.234 Mathematics is a method of logic.
Quote:

6.362 What can be described can happen too: and what the law of
causality is meant to exclude cannot even be described.
Quote:

For all that happens and is the case
is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world,
since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the
world.


---------- Post added 03-04-2010 at 02:00 AM ----------

I can put together a transcendental negative theologian out of pieces from Wittgenstein. FrankenWittgenstein....


Quote:

Ethics is
transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)
Quote:

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration
but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the
present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field
has no limits.
Quote:

6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference
for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.


---------- Post added 03-04-2010 at 02:04 AM ----------

Quote:

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it
exists.
Quote:

6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a
limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is
mystical.
Quote:

6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question
be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be
framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.
..and this is the answer?

---------- Post added 03-04-2010 at 02:06 AM ----------

Quote:


7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Silence is the presence of an absence? Is he whispering -1, or not even that.
[quote]
3.23 The requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement
that sense be determinate.
[/quote]
[quote]
2.033 Form is the possibility of structure.
[/quote]


---------- Post added 03-04-2010 at 02:11 AM ----------

Quote:


2.04 The totality of existing states of affairs is the world.

A concept to join the rest. The meta-concept. The one behind ones.
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Sun 7 Mar, 2010 08:57 am
@Reconstructo,
Negation is a thorn in the side of being, that keeps it turning. Or sand in the oyster. Occam's razor isn't logical but aesthetic?
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Tue 6 Apr, 2010 11:23 pm
@Reconstructo,
To see a television as a television, we have to see the not-television as not-television. The negativity is the frame that makes positivity possible. Yin-yang, etc. I think this is what Hegel and Witt meant. Tautology and contradiction. Being and nothingness. The donut is not a donut without its hole and the hole cannot exist except within being.
 
 

 
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