The phrase negation of the negation is greatest recognized from Karl Marx’s work, as when he makes use of it to explain capitalist manufacturing in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that appears merely redundant within the formal logic taught to analytic philosophers and pc scientists. There, the precept of double negation elimination tells you ¬¬P -> P: that’s, the detrimental of the detrimental is the constructive, and nothing extra. Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica say merely: “a proposition is equal of the falsehood of its negation.” On that account, to “negate the negation” of one thing simply leaves you with its affirmation, the unique factor you had been negating: all you’re doing is being unnecessarily wordy, by saying not-not-P when you possibly can have simply stated P.
However in Marx’s inspiration Hegel, there may be rather more to the phrase than this redundancy. An excessive amount of Hegel’s thought proceeds within the form of three-part development that introductions to Hegel typically name thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (although Hegel by no means used these phrases in that approach). When pondering by means of a selected concept we start in a primary, unquestioned or rapid, place – a prejudice. This concept will get challenged by its reverse, the negation or detrimental second. The third and last step is in some methods closer to the first than to the second, however it’s crucially completely different: it takes up the reality of the second inside it, transcends and includes it. That is negating the negation: negating here’s a course of, not a easy inversion or reverse however a rational motion ahead. That motion is on the coronary heart of Hegel’s thought.
I used to be startled not too long ago to come across the phrase “negation of negation” in a somewhat completely different place: the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. At first, Eckhart’s solely apparent commonality with Hegel and Marx is that they’re all German. However the commonalities go deeper, not less than with Hegel. Hegel isn’t clearly a mystic: his logocentrism leaves little room for ineffability or thriller, and leaves him to be disdainful of mystical expertise. But relying on how one defines mysticism, there’s a mystical dimension not less than in Hegel’s nondualism, the place all the things comes again to a spirit or thoughts (Geist) that’s each topic and object, each God and self. And Hegel traces that nondualism immediately again to Eckhart himself. Within the Lectures on the Philosophy of Faith, Hegel describes Eckhart as having “a radical grasp of the divine depth” on this passage from Eckhart’s sermons:
the attention with which God sees me is the attention with which I see Him; my eye and His eye are one. By a righteous customary I’m weighed in God, and God in me. If God weren’t, I might not be; if I weren’t, then He weren’t.
Hegel and Eckhart share the concept that actuality is in the end one, and that that one is in a roundabout way each human subjectivity and God. (And sure, in case you’re questioning, the Church did convict Eckhart of heresy for all this.) For Eckhart, not less than, it’s within the context of this divine oneness that he employs the time period “negation of negation”.
Eckhart says that God’s divine nature needs to be described with the predicate “one” (unum). In his Commentary on Knowledge he says that to explain God as one “sounds detrimental however is in actuality affirmative; it’s the negation of negation, which is the purest affirmation and the fullness of the time period affirmed.” In their introduction to Eckhart’s writings, Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn clarify the “negation of negation” on this passage as “the affirmation that it’s not aside from itself.” (Meister Eckhart 34) That affirmation signifies the purity of God’s being in a approach that even the time period “being” itself doesn’t.
I’m taking that rationalization largely from Colledge and McGinn; I don’t perceive Eckhart’s troublesome concepts effectively sufficient to know precisely what he means by all this. However it appears clear sufficient that when Eckhart says the negation of negation is “the purest affirmation and the fullness of the time period affirmed”, he’s already disagreeing with the later formal logic of Russell and Whitehead: negating the negation isn’t just any affirmation, and is due to this fact not merely equal to affirmation. You’re doing one thing particular, one thing completely different, one thing important to the understanding of God’s purity. I don’t suppose that is precisely what “negation of the negation” means in Eckhart’s fellow nondualist Hegel, however they clearly share the understanding that negating the negation isn’t simply the constructive or affirmative.
Now Marx takes up none of Eckhart’s or Hegel’s nondualism. In Marx’s thought, from a very young age, actuality shouldn’t be fundamentaly spirit however matter; that’s his deepest break from Hegel. And I don’t suppose there’s any unity that Marx sees in that matter, the best way that Hegel and Eckhart do in divine spirit. However Marx does take up the core concept that negating the negation isn’t simply equal to the unique affirmative. Here’s the key passage in Capital:
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the results of the capitalist mode of manufacturing, produces capitalist non-public property. That is the primary negation of particular person non-public property, as based on the labour of the proprietor. However capitalist manufacturing begets, with the inexorability of a regulation of Nature, its personal negation. It’s the negation of negation. This doesn’t re-establish non-public property for the producer, however offers him particular person property primarily based on the acquisitions of the capitalist period: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in widespread of the land and of the technique of manufacturing.
As I perceive it right here, the concept is that non-public property is a negation of widespread property, however that socialism or communism will attain the next stage by negating that negation. Hunter-gatherer societies have a “primitive communism” that precedes non-public property, and that’s the mere affirmative; the superior communist state that Marx seeks is at the next stage, a negated negation, that follows non-public property. That is how Engels takes the phrase in the Anti-Dühring, not less than:
widespread possession turns into in the midst of the event of agriculture a fetter on manufacturing. It’s abolished, negated, and after an extended or shorter collection of intermediate phases is remodeled into non-public property. However at the next stage of agricultural growth, led to by non-public property in land itself, non-public property conversely turns into a fetter on manufacturing, as is the case immediately each with small and huge landownership. The demand that it, too, needs to be negated, that it ought to as soon as once more be remodeled into widespread property, essentially arises. However this demand doesn’t imply the restoration of the aboriginal widespread possession, however the establishment of a far increased and extra developed type of possession in widespread which, removed from being a hindrance to manufacturing, quite the opposite for the primary time will free manufacturing from all fetters and allow it to make full use of recent chemical discoveries and mechanical innovations.
As in Hegel – and perhaps Thucydides and Plato – there’s a third stage, after negation, that leaves you someplace completely different than the place you had been earlier than the negation. The technologically enabled communist utopia envisioned by Engels is one thing very completely different from the widespread property of hunter-gatherers. It’s trans rather than pre.
None of that is to say Eckhart or Hegel or Marx are proper in regards to the specific methods by which they apply the negation of the negation. (In any case, we’re almost 150 years after Marx’s dying, and the negation of personal property doesn’t appear any nearer.) However it’s hanging that such completely different thinkers share the concept in widespread. And I do suppose they’re on to one thing essential with the concept: the method of negating a negation actually isn’t simply the identical factor as affirming the unique affirmation. That’s a degree that formal logic doesn’t catch.
