Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Introduction

Introduction Fixed bridges are firmly anchored structures that enable one to travel from one shore to another, whereas pontoon bridges are temporary connections that facilitate movement across a body of water. Cyberlinks arise anywhere and nowhere to create transitory ties joining images, sound bytes, and fragmentary messages. In the essays that follow, the risks and ambiguities, the unstable concatenations of contemporary thought as manifested in many and varied contexts —in the desire for transcendence and in meanings ascribed to corporeality, in critical dilemmas of ethical existence and in the status of philosophical inquiry itself—will be explored as expressions of negation loosely linked in a nexus of crossings. The philosophy of Hegel describes the emergence of an all-encompassing Absolute that comes into being at the end of history, an ontological and logical vacuum that has sucked into itself all that is and sees itself as having brought to completion the work of historical and philosophical negation, thereby obviating the need for further inquiry into the labor of the negative. Still, one may ask, does not a work such as Koheleth, the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, not disclose in a more fundamental and unambiguous fashion the vanity of all things, the existence of a world from which meaning has been drained, thereby exposing the weariness of the world?1 Without prescinding from the power of Koheleth to envision the world as vanity, we may nevertheless concede that Hegelian thought reflects an 1 unending struggle with the negative, not only as intrinsic to each moment of Spirit’s checkered history, but as the possibility of the nonexistence of the totality of all that is currently seen as world or as the maximal intensity of disvalue that can be attributed to the world. Still, in the end, is the sublation of the negative, its ultimate overcoming , not intrinsic to each moment of Spirit’s history? In the essays that follow, philosophical accounts of expressions of the negative are seen as a complex of crossings, no one of which is designed to endure but which, taken together, sway in the manner of fragile, loosely linked ropes that connect efforts to overcome manifestations of the negative to claims about its irrevocability. Such analyses need not be seen as signs of a postmetaphysical exhaustion but rather point to the need for further inquiry into theological, ethical, and aesthetic interpretations of negatives. New conceptual challenges to the understanding of negatives cannot be resolved by turning to positivism or linguistic analysis. There are few who today would hold to the narrow view that to be is to be the value of a variable . The limitations of defining analysis as a formal semantics or as the investigation of truth conditions as applied by the natural sciences to their objects of inquiry were already clearly grasped by the early Wittgenstein, who writes: At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.2 People stop short at Natural Laws as at something unassailable as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, insofar as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.3 Wittgenstein’s reservations concerning the usefulness of the method of the natural sciences in interpreting other areas of experience cannot be dismissed, but his disclaimer may not simply be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the rapidly expanding interests of the sciences. What is called for is a reenvisioning of the negative, of the meaning of being and nonbeing. Should a work that purports to be a philosophical work delving into significations of the negative not disclose its agenda by opening with a preface, a summary statement of the conclusions to be drawn from the arguments that the work expounds? Yet Hegel, who does 2 Introduction not shy away from composing prefaces, warns that ‘‘whatever might appropriately be said about philosophy in a preface—say, a historical statement of the main drift and point of view, the general content and results, a string of random assertions and assurances about truth— none of this can be accepted as the way in which to expound philosophical truth.’’4 Philosophy is for him a progressive unfolding of truth, a transformation of the love of knowing into actual knowing. Like...