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~ Critical Approaches to the Study of Religion

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Tag Archives: negation

Hegel’s Return

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Andrew W. Hass in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, dialectic, Hegel, Marx, negation

Stubbornly, Hegel keeps returning. Just when we think this notorious philosopher, or any of the numerous Hegelianisms spawned in his name, have had their day, Hegel keeps coming back. And today he is back with a renaissance as considerable as any. Why is this case?

One might argue it is because Marx keeps coming back. And every time Marx returns, Hegel is always lurking in the shadow, or lurking precisely as the shadow, the negative inverse of what Marx had championed in the name of a dialectical materialism, that is, a direct challenge to capitalism’s political economy by means of a confrontational critique of its ideology and a revolutionary reaction on the ground. Certainly, one need not go far to find a Marxist resurgence somewhere in motion. But Hegel is not Marx. Nor is Hegel always an inverted Marx, or perhaps we should better say, nor is Marx always an inverted Hegel. If Marx keeps returning as some form of a critique, directed against a hegemonic power or against the injustices of an economic system, Hegel is far less outspoken, far less confrontational. In fact, he is still often perceived, politically, as Marx’s very antithesis, a champion of the right and the conservative, or at least of an ideal form of political thinking that favours the establishment.

And yet despite this gross misreading, Hegel keeps returning. One way to think about this insistence of Hegel, before or beyond Marx, is to think about the very driving force behind Hegel’s thought. For many, this has been called the “dialectic”, a kind of triadic movement by which two opposing forces collide with each other to produce a third force, one that keeps elements of the original two oppositions, but raises them to a higher and more productive level, thereby preserving and negating them at the same time, in a new reality that is wholly unique, but also one that fully comprehends what it has just accomplished.

Yet recent thinkers, especially from Continental Europe, have begun, over the last decades, to ask a more fundamental question: what drives this process itself, the process of the dialectic? And here they alight upon something that was previously considered as only one side of the dialectic, or just one of the original oppositions: negation. But how could negation be seen as the driving force of the process in which it is one of the elements? How could it stand both within and without that process simultaneously? Is not this a bit like saying that what makes chess work as a game are the black pieces? They are necessary, to be sure, but not, as the philosophers say, sufficient. Or perhaps less crudely, is it not like contending that the process of pollination for certain plants is driven by bees? The bees are certainly crucial for the process to work, but they hardly impel and determine by themselves the overall process. That role, we say, is taken by “mother nature”, working to unite both sides.

This problem of contradiction (both within and without) gets to the very nub of why Hegel remains such a potent figure for the modernity in which we presently live. If Hegel really taught that negation was a prime motivating force, and that nothing moves or has life without this force – and this is what he is really saying, with all its paradoxical implications – then what does this say about the modernity we have inherited not only from Hegel but from his modern forebears?

The problem is inherent to modernity itself. If we characterise this modernity as a fundamental shift in our understanding about the nature of origin, and origination, then we might better grasp our dilemma. Now why has modernity has been so obsessed with rethinking origin – everyone from Darwin to those working on the Hadron Collider? The pre-modern understanding of origination was grounded upon a Creator God, who brings all things into being, at their origin, and who is thus Origin itself, as eternal origination. This meant that we looked back for the ground and authority of our being. But the origins of modernity are based upon a break from this way of thinking, in an attempt – religiously by the Lutheran reforms and philosophically by Descartes’ revolution – to free us from the abuse or uncertainty such authority was deemed to have institutionalised. This break called us to look forward to the ever new, rather than to the established. (Hence the term “modern”, based on the Latin “modo” – “just now”.)

But in order to free our being to the ever new, a new ground was needed – a ground of freedom. This modernity found in consciousness, and more specifically, in self-consciousness. And here we need to see consciousness not merely as matter of awareness (as it is most generally understood), but also as a matter of origination, originating the very individuality of our selves through the freedom of self-determination.

But in making this move, we instigate an internal split. For self-consciousness requires that we be both subject and object to ourselves at the same time. What I am conscious of, as a subject, is myself, now as an object. If in this process consciousness brings the self into existence through its own internal freedom – no other higher Origin necessitates my being; it is my own freedom that allows me to be who I am, even if I later choose to embrace that higher Origin – then at the heart of this consciousness is a contradiction: I am who I am (subjectively) only by negating myself (turning myself into subject’s opposite – an object). We can see this very phenomenon in a common experience of romance: “I didn’t realise I loved her until she left me!” The realisation is predicated upon its very absence.

Now Hegel, I contend, was the first philosopher to properly seize upon, not this internal contradiction per se, but its most potent solution. Negation must not be seen as a force that, first and foremost, eradicates or takes away (one side of a dialectic). Negation must be seen as a primordial force that brings into existence. And what it brings into existence (just like the new modern self) is, first and foremost, itself!

As long, therefore, as modernity is beholden to a notion of consciousness as freedom and of freedom as consciousness – and this continues to be confirmed to us in virtually every sphere of our contemporary experience, whether political, aesthetic, judicial, relational, etc. – then Hegel will keep returning, because Hegel challenges us to embrace a negation at the very core of our modern self-understanding and self-identity, and, in effect, to negate it, by turning it into something productive. But we can only do that, ironically, through negation.

Negativity is everywhere in our globalised world today. We don’t have to work hard to find it, nor to justify its existence. Modern media incessantly shows us the rampant ills of our present state. But if we want to convert that negativity into something positive, or, dare I say, into something positively negative, then we need to appeal to Hegel. And this is why Hegel returns. But such an appeal is not to invent a new Hegelianism. On the contrary, it is actually to outstrip Hegel, and any system that might be built in his name, by being most consistent to his thought. Paradoxically, we are truest to Hegel when we go beyond him in his own name. This is what keeps Hegel original – and I mean this in the most original sense of the term “original”. The origins of Hegel and his thought are in his own negation, which, Hegel taught, we must now make our own.

The Squaring of Zero, Part II

09 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by Andrew W. Hass in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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concept of zero, crisis, culture, negation

(This is Part II of a blog entry from last month. Comments are welcome below on both Parts.)

So where then does the symbol of zero enter our Western world? If we turn to the etymology of the word “zero” we will find a telling trajectory of its history. And the origins in fact turn out to be not from the West at all, but from the East. This perhaps should not surprise us, since we know that both Hinduism and Buddhism are much more embracing of the notion of nothingness or the void. The notion is built into the very roots of their thinking, since all reality first stems from and then returns to the void. We might even say that coming to terms with this void is the heart and soul of these systems of thought and practice, even in all their variations. Take for instance the Atman, the supreme principle of the universe in Hindu belief. This principle, as a total and all-encompassing infinity, is in effect identical with a pure nothing, since it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In coming to terms with this nothing one comes to term with both self and universe.

In India, the Sanskrit word for “empty” or “blank” is sunya. This sunya is transliterated, within the Indian system of numerology, as the idea of zero and indeed the symbol “0” as we know it today. If we think about the round circle, it suddenly takes on an appropriateness to the notion of nothing, even pictographically. For at the centre of its circumference is a blank, a void, an abyss. It as if we are peering into an empty chasm, brought into greater relief by the circumference, but of course a relief that is an inverse relief, with an infinite inversion.

This symbol and its idea then begins to move West. Sunya is transliterated in Arabic as çifr. The Islamic world picked up the zero form of O when they conquered India in the 8th century. From there they passed it on to the West. This development, one might argue, is one of the most essential and primary dividing lines between the Western and Arabic worlds, but one that is rarely if ever understood or acknowledged. For in accepting and adopting the concept of nothingness from their contact with India, the Arabic people, and the Islam they espoused, was in effect rejecting the Greek heritage. They were gainsaying the idea of logos and its conceptual tradition built up by the august Greeks, and gainsaying what came to be the ruling Aristotelian cosmological view, which had rejected any possibility of the void (even if, ironically, it was through medieval Arabic scholarship that Aristotle was re-introduced to the West). Islam could reconcile the idea of the nothing with the Abrahamic notion of void as it is presented in the first creation story of Genesis (the Elohimic tradition), without having to accept the Logos tradition that Christianity later appropriated from the Greeks, as in John’s reworking of Elohim’s void in John 1.1: “In the beginning was the Logos”. In permitting the void conceptually, there was thus little resistance to its use as a written symbol, and hence the zero entered into the Arabic system of numerical notation. This is the system the West inherited to replace the Roman numeral system, and still uses today. But the inheritance was not without its misgivings: originally zero, as “0”, was called the “infidel symbol”, since it admitted a concept that defied Christian orthodoxy. It was only after accounting systems required more sophisticated notation – and the rise of capitalism is extremely significant in this regard – that Western Christian resistance to the “0” eventually breaks down.

Finally, in its etymological development, çifr gives way to the Latin cifra or ciphra, from which we get our word “cipher”. From cipher we get zefiro or zephiro, which in turn, through cognate Latinate languages (French, Italian), becomes “zero”. (Connected to cifra is also the French word chiffre, which means “digit”.) Nothing then becomes official, at least in terms of accounting. And it becomes acceptable, at least in terms of a workable, if still dangerous, concept.

So from both the symbol and the word, we can see that zero is not something indigenous to the Hellenised West. Moreover, the passage back to its Eastern roots is one often fraught with tension and unease, or even, as we continue to see in today’s geo-political and geo-theological world, with division and conflict.

 

(To follow up in greater detail on the idea and history of zero, there are four key texts, all of which have helped to inform the discussion here: Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Macmillan Press, 1987); Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of O (London: Oxford University Press, 1999); Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (London: Souvenir Press, 2000); and John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing (London: Vintage, 2001).)

Note that due to holidays, it may take time for comments to be approved and responded to, but it WILL happen!

 

The Squaring of Zero, Part I

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by Andrew W. Hass in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on The Squaring of Zero, Part I

Tags

concept of zero, crisis, culture, negation

(This is Part I of a two-part posting. Part II will appear early next month, when the opportunity for comments will be made available.)

We have been thinking in past blogs about the nature of negation, and how it has ascended into the imagination of our culture and society not necessarily as something to be scorned or regretted, but as something with which to be, in some cultural, philosophical, or even religious form, reconciled. Of course its primary symbol, in terms of production, is the figure of zero. But before we can understand how this figure might work its way into and through our present world, we need first to ask, whence zero? For its history is by no means one we might expect.

If we go back to the beginnings of scripted language and numerology, zero was not necessarily there at the outset. The ancient Egyptians developed a system of accounting based on a pictography – notation in pictures. Of course with pictographic language, a positive referent is needed to which one can point in the world. But when it comes to an understanding of nothing, pictography is ill-suited. For how does one picture nothing? The whole point of nothing is that it cannot be seen. To envision it, it must be turned into something abstract, like a concept, beyond pictures. Now we know the ancient Egyptian civilization was famed for mathematics – their pyramids proved their excellence at geometry, the configuration of shapes through mathematical precision. And yet in all this excellence, they never required zero in their computations, and therefore never developed any corresponding symbol. This says as much about their cosmological and theological understanding as it does about their mathematical acumen. For from the Book of the Dead we learn that death was not about returning to an abyssal place of nothing. Significantly, the ferryman who transported the dead soul across the river to the netherworld denied passage to anyone “who does not know the number of his fingers”. This showed the importance of accounting: as accounting was important for the Pharaohs who exacted some form of taxation upon their people, so too in death it is important to know how to account for oneself. (One must be counted, it appears, even in the afterlife.) And so there was a deliberate avoidance of nothing, because nothing troubles the system of accounting, whether financial, philosophical or religious. It is therefore not surprising that the Egyptians developed such a sophisticated technique of bodily preservation upon death. Mummification, we might say, is a gesture against the void, or it is a gesture of containment and preservation against that which negates us. The pyramids, we remember, functioned as tombs. So it is that the shape of O, as zero, figures neither in the pyramidical shape nor in the afterlife. Zero would be a perilous ticket for the ferryman.

The ancient Greeks too did not have a symbol for zero. This might seem even more incredible, since they had a distinct predilection for conceptualising. But as early as the Presocratics, those philosophers who preceded Socrates and Plato, there was a general repulsion to the concept of nothing. Parmenides, for example, talked much about the concept of a changeless One, but was adamant about the impossibility for “what is not” to exist, or even to be thought of. He therefore instructs us not to think on it. And for the most part the Greeks heeded his instruction, and shunned thinking about the nothing altogether. If we consider Greek thinking from the Presocratics onwards, we know that so much emphasis is placed on ratio, on ordering things in relation to one another. This is inherent in their term “logos”, which is accompanied by the notions of rationality and proportionality. (Ratio is part of the rational.) Reality then, underwritten as it is by logos, must remain accountable, or countable. The Pythagoreans were extreme in championing countability, to the point where reality in fact becomes number. But zero does not figure in this reality. In Greek logic (the logic of logos) zero cannot be a number as such. For the “0” introduces a void, and voids, by definition, cannot be counted. It is void of all quantification. If the cosmos is structured upon the logos, even a quasi-divinised Logos, which allows us to think rationally about it, to speak of it and (ac)count for it, it must remain positive. The idea of the nothing or of the negative cannot be part of the equation or the calculation. Thus like the Egyptians, the Greeks also did not develop any symbol for the naught in their numerology.

Nor did the Romans. Having been Hellenised by the Greeks, the Roman numeral system developed conspicuously without any figure for zero. And this from an empire who took accounting, and indeed taxation, to new and perfected heights across an extraordinary range of geography and peoples. This absence is felt throughout Roman culture, even in something as functional as their clocks: the Roman sundials were without a zero point, which means time was always positive – a god, in fact, like the Greek’s Chronos. This despite the fact that the sundial’s circular path outlined an “O”, the figure used elsewhere for the sign of nothing – a sign of the times to come, we might say, when the Roman numeral system proved inadequate, and the West had to turn and face its own nothing.

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