Via negativa

 So, I'm reading a book called The History of Negation, that touches on some interesting themes. It is far more common in Western philosophy to privilege positive facts over negative facts. While there is no great impulse in Eastern philosophy to privilege negative facts over positive facts, there are occasions in which it's emphasized. These occasions were formative for me.

To date, there is no one who says we should privilege negative facts over positive facts. However, there are some who believe they are equally valuable. Where could such a notion come from? The Tao Te Ching.

“Thirty spokes converge at the hub,
but emptiness completes the wheel.
Clay is shaped to make a pot,
and what’s useful is its emptiness.
Carve fine doors and windows,
but the room is useful in its emptiness.
What is
is beneficial, while what is not
also proves useful.”

Achieving a balance between the positive and the negative is the goal of Taoism. Analytically, however, we can get into some weirdness. The cup and where it isn't, that is to say, the empty space that holds the liquid, doesn't "exist" in a traditional sense of is-ness. Perhaps you can formulate a way to make it fit, but you have an absence that is carried with the cup wherever you take it. That absence is created or derived from the presence of the cup. In Western ontology, the dependent variable is considered a child-variable. Eastern ontology may not differ all that much, but we have Zen and Taoism which consider the issue of balance. However, if we ascribe is-ness to an absence, we run the risk of paradox.

We may have already run into a paradox. Because if our desire for a cup is the cause of it's making, then the empty space predates the cup and hence, derivative to the need for making it, the desire for it, the lack of it. One negative space gives birth to another, and both are more useful than the cup itself which can be reduplicated indefinitely now. The power that gave birth to the cup is the desire for the cup and the ingenuity it took to produce the cup. These are primary to the cup itself. The cup is derived from this. So, the fact of the cup, it's positive existence, may not necessarily deserve its place of privilege.

Perhaps, the negative facts, lacks, and desires are all related to our human existence in a way that is genuinely more important than positive facts. Maybe not. We don't want to replace one mistake with another. Nonetheless, there is a case to make. It's bizarre that it's so infrequently made.