Abstract
The place of negation in truth has been acknowledged yet misunderstood ever since Aristotle remarked that truth involves stating the being of what is and the nonbeing of what is not, whereas falsity involves affirming the being of what is not and the nonbeing of what is.1 Following Aristotle’s observation, negation has been treated as if it only truthfully figured in the denial of what is not. Negation has otherwise been held to be absent from the being of what is as well as from its affirmation.
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Notes
Hence, as Eva Brann points out, “Nothing is not Nonbeing. For the latter is, even as its opposite, a relative to Being, while Nothing is beyond both Being and Nonbeing, just a blank.” See Eva Brann, The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefleld, 2001), p. 189. Properly speaking, the being that stands in contrast to nonbeing is either a determinate being confronting its negation or the being and nothing that are united within the stable unity of determinate being.
For this reason, R. G. Collingwood proclaims that there can be “no science of pure being,” as he titles ch. II of An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 11) and that metaphysics must abandon ontology. “A science of being is a contradiction in terms” (p. 13), he writes, for “the science of pure being would have a subject-matter entirely devoid of particularities; a subject-matter, therefore, containing nothing to differentiate it from anything else, or from nothing at all” (p. 14).
Peirce shows this same outcome regarding the idea of the absolutely First, which must be purely immediate. “The idea of the absolutely First must be entirely separated from all conception of or reference to anything else; for what involves a second is itself a second to that second. … The First … cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else.” See Charles S. Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 6, 1886–1890, ed. Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 170.
Derrida presents his classic statement of this view in the essay “La Différance.” See Jacques Derrida, Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1972), pp. 1–29.
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 2001), p. 175.
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© 2014 Richard Dien Winfield
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Winfield, R.D. (2014). Negation and Truth. In: Hegel and the Future of Systematic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442383_2
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