In every transcendental theory of being-there, the question of negation is very complex. This is testified to in particular by the very dense passage that Kant devotes to the conceptualization of the ‘nothing’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, at the very end of the ‘Transcendental Analytic’. Kant claims that as such the question ‘is not in itself especially indispensable’. In effect, he makes do with a page and a half, opening without delay onto the Dialectic, after an absolutely impenetrable formula: ‘Negation as well as the mere form of intuition are, without something real, not objects’. This suggests that appearing or phenomenality—in which everything presents itself to intuition under the form of the object—knows no negation. But the question is really far more complex. Kant has little difficulty in identifying negation on the side of the concept: there is the ‘empty concept without object’, which is to say that which, albeit coherent for thought, does not relate to any intuitable object, for example, the Kantian notion of the noumenon. And there is the concept that contradicts itself, like the square circle, which makes any object impossible. In these two cases, the concept points to the absence of any object: nothing appears, there is nothing there.
Or, as in the case of the word ‘noumenon’, nothing is there but being without being-there, being out of the world. Except that Kant also wishes to extend the question of the negative to intuition, which is where things get rather awkward. He isolates the ‘pure form of intuition’ in its empty exercise, or designated as empty, which is to say ‘without object’. This goes for the a priori forms of sensibility: time and space. Must we accord to these forms a trans-phenomenal real? Does Kant want to say that the forms of objectivity are active ‘nothings’? This path is very obscure and it leads back to the theory of the faculties, to the transcendental imagination in particular. What’s more, this form of the nothing is named
‘ens imaginarium’. Symmetrically—and as far as our question is concerned
decisively—he posits that there are ‘objects empty of a concept’, that is objects designated by the concept of their lack alone. Here it seems we are touching on the negation of a real, on that which in appearing displays the negative. Moreover, in order to designate this case, Kant writes:
‘Reality is something, negation is nothing, namely, a concept of the absence of an object’. The goal seems to have been attained: there is the nothing of what is, and the negative appears as a derivative intuition.
Unfortunately, Kant’s concrete references are entirely disappointing:
shadow, cold. . . Further on, he will unconvincingly declare: ‘If light has not been given to the senses, one cannot represent darkness to oneself’.
Ultimately, this subtle classification only results in the traditional para-logisms of sensation. Why would cold be more negative than heat, night than day? It seems that Kant fails to set out the appearing of the nothing under the category of ‘nihil privativum’ or of ‘object empty of concept’. For real lack cannot be illustrated by cold or shadow, which are themselves nothing but transcendental degrees applied to neutral objects: temperature and luminosity. The fundamental reason for this difficulty rests on the fact that appearing is in itself an affirmation, the affirmation of being-there.
But how then could one define the negation of anything at all from within appearing? Of course, it is possible to think the non-apparent in a determinate world. That is indeed the aim of the first transcendental oper-ation (the minimum). The underlying affirmoper-ation is that of a multiple, of which the only thing that will be said is that its degree of appearance in a world has a nil transcendental value. In other words, we support the negation of appearance on the being of a multiple. Once it has been onto-logically identified, thanks to the order of transcendental degrees we can think the non-appearance of this multiple in such and such a world. The negation of being-there rests on the affirmative identification of being qua being.
But the non-apparent is not the apparent negation of the apparent. What we are concerned with here is the difficulty—clearly recognized by Kant himself—of making negation appear. Truth be told, this question has haunted philosophy from its very origins. On the basis of the impossibility for negation to come into the light of appearing, Parmenides concluded that it was a mere fiction which thought had to turn away from. Plato takes his cue from an entirely opposite fact: there is an appearing of the negative, which is nothing other than the sophist, or the lie, or Gorgias himself, with his treatise on non-being. It is therefore necessary to posit a category capable of grasping the being-there of negation, and not only, as in the
Parmenidean prohibition, the non-being-there of non-being. This may be called the first transcendental inquiry in the history of thought, cul-minating with the introduction, in The Sophist, of the Idea of the Other.
However, Plato still leaves in abeyance the Other’s proper mode of appearance. What I mean to say is that although he establishes that the Other allows us to think that non-being can appear, he says nothing about the way in which this appearance is effective. How does the Other, deter-mined as a category, support the entry into appearing, not only of alterity (two different truths, for example), but of negation (the false and the true)? I can clearly see how the Other justifies the thought that this does not appear in the same way as that. A very dense passage from the Timaeus—concerning the fabrication by the demiurge of the soul of the world—bears on this point:
From the substance which is indivisible and unchangeable, and from that kind of being which can be divided among bodies, he compounded a third and intermediate kind of substance, comprising the nature of the Same and that of the Other. And thus he formed it, between the indivisible element of these two realities and the divisible substance of bodies. Then, taking the three substances, he mingled them all into one form, harmonising by force the reluctant and unsociable nature of the Other into the Same. When he had mingled them with the intermediate kind of being and out of three made one, he again divided this whole into as many portions as was fitting, each portion being a compound of the Same, the Other, and the aforementioned third substance.
This text, in the form of a narration (of what, from the beginning of the Timaeus, Plato calls a ‘plausible fable’), expressly deals with the origin of the being-there of negation. More precisely, of negation such as it is originally immanent to the soul of the world. The demiurge effectively composes this soul with a substance that comprises the Same and the Other, and which interposes itself between the indivisibility of Ideas (Idea of the Same and Idea of the Other) and the divisibility of bodies. We are at the heart of an investigation of being-there. The mixture of Same and Other (of affirm-ation and negaffirm-ation) is indeed the transcendental structure which, enabling the articulation of the indivisible and the divisible, will prepare the soul for a cosmic government of being-there.
The question then becomes: how are the Same and the Other conjoined in the substance of the soul of the world? This time, Plato’s answer is disappointing: the demiurge, who like us recognizes that the Other
‘reluctantly’ mixes with the Same, acts ‘by force’. Consequently, the origin of being-there remains assigned to an irrational moment of the narration.
Plato’s effort, as is often the case, only results in a fable which tells us that while the ‘ontological’ problem is soluble (how can we think that non-being is?), the ‘phenomenological’ problem (how can non-non-being appear?) is not.
To tease out the complexity of the problem, we can once again refer to Sartre, since the question of the effectiveness of negation is really what commands the entire construction of Being and Nothingness, assuring the corruption of pure being-in-itself (massive and absurd) by the nihilating penetration of the for-itself (a consciousness ontologically identical to its own freedom). Sartre’s solution, as brilliant as its consequences may be (an absolutist theory of freedom), is in a certain sense tautological: negation comes to the world inasmuch as ‘the world’ as such supposes a constitution by the nothing. Otherwise, there would be nothing but the absurd amorphousness of being-in-itself. Therefore, negation appears because only the nothing grounds the fact that there is appearing.
The line we shall follow consists in basing the logical possibility of negation in appearing, without thereby positing that negation as such appears. In effect, the concept suited to the apparent will not be, in a given world, its negation, but what we will call its reverse.
The three fundamental properties of the reverse will be the following:
1. The reverse of a being-there (or, more precisely, of the measure of appearance of a multiple in a world) is in general a being-there in the same world (another measure of intensity of appearance in this world).
2. The reverse has in common with negation the fact that one can say that a being-there and its reverse do not have, in the world, anything in common (the conjunction of their degrees of intensity is nil).
3. In general, however, the reverse does not have all the properties of classical negation. In particular, the reverse of the reverse of a degree of appearance is not necessarily identical to that degree. Furthermore, the union of an apparent and its reverse is not necessarily equal to the measure of appearance of the world in its entirety.
In the end we can say that the concept of reverse supports in appearing an expanded thinking of negation, and that we only encounter classical negation for some particular transcendentals.