[lit-ideas] Re: Negative Polarity
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 10 Aug 2004 21:52:31 PDT
I'm way behind on this thread and bookless to boot. Two things, though.
1. Pythagorean 'opposites,' which seem to be some sort of original stuff, are
invoked in Phaedo as part of an attempted argument for the immortality of the
soul. The argument is roughly that of conceptual dependence (not Plato's words!)
such that, for example, out of sleeping waking comes (waking and sleeping are
'opposites'), and in the important case, life from death and conversely. Life
and death are 'essentially' paired: death comes from life, life comes from
death. One of the important verbs is something like 'generated (from),' which I
blurrily remember as 'gegnesthai.' (Mike will I hope clear this up.) To say that
the soul could be just alive, or just dead, won't do, because neither term can
be understood except by way of contrast with the other. Real opposites, and some
quasi-opposites, seem to have this necessary feature; one cannot learn one of
them without understanding that it is opposed to the other. Genuine opposites
are not just contingently opposed, but _really_ opposed. What this means, Mike
will also I hope explain.
That is, something can be green, e.g., but not essentially in contrast to blue
or red or purple or any other color: you can learn about green without needing
to answer the question 'as opposed to what?' by referring to a _specific_
different color. Indeed, non-green things might be transparent.
When life is said to come from death there must be a process of becoming between
them, and when death 'comes from' life, a similar process the other way. The hot
becomes the cold, the cold becomes the hot. This is true of all genuine
'opposites,' and as living and dead are genuine opposites there must be such
reciprocal causal processes here too. (We 'see' one of the processes, death from
life, and we're meant to infer that there's a 'way back,' from death to life, a
way back for a kind of thing, the soul, from one state to the other.) The
argument doesn't exactly knock your socks off, but it does reveal another aspect
of Plato's indebtedness to Pythagoras.
2. Trying to understand the pre-Socratic and Platonic concepts of 'negation' (if
there really even is such a thing) in terms of the modern negation sign will add
nothing but confusion to a topic that's already confusing enough. In modern
logic, the negation sign attaches to whole propositions (molecular or atomic).
In early Greek thought this would have been mysterious. In fact, in the
traditional formal logic, there was no negation of entire propositions.
We write 'It is not the case that [for all x, if x is F, x is G'] where x is a
thing and F and G are properties or predicates (is a dog, and is a marsupial,
respectively, perhaps).
Kant would have had to write 'All dogs are non-marsupials,' or 'No dogs are
marsupials.'
I don't think that either of these notations could appear in the Sophist, where
it is being and non-being, not negation that is under investigation. One of the
problems there is how one can speak falsely; and no conception of negation as it
is now understood, sheds light on this.
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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