The world was a barrenness,
And the gardens were as the waste.
And they turned them to the adventure of the dark,
To the travelling of the land without roads,
To the sailing of the sea that hath no beacons.
Why have they not returned?
Their quest hath found end in thee,
Or surely they had fared
Once more to the place whence they came,
As men that have travelled to a fruitless land.
They have looked on thy face,
And to them it is the countenance of Truth.
Thy silence is sweeter to them than the voice of love,
Thine embrace more dear than the clasp of the beloved.
They are fed with the emptiness past the veil,
And their hunger is filled;
They have found the waters of peace,
And are athirst no more.
— Clark Ashton Smith, “To the Darkness”
Introduction →
Let’s call the idea negativism. It’s the assertion that life is pointless, that language is meaningless, that truth is impossible. Assertions which cannot be denied, only ignored; because they resemble less assertions than gestures — primal acts of alogical aggression.
You can’t mount an argument against negativism; any argument you could compose is an act of language which is, arguendo, meaningless.
Negativism constitutes a kind of ‘saying the quiet part loud’ writ over all of life: We are all playing a game, but to be reminded of this breaks our immersion.
The rules of the game are many: that thought finds its expression through language; that language renders meaning; that meanings are true or false; that this truth can be agreed upon; that these agreements are achieved through debate.
These aren’t rules because they’re true — truth is a concept from inside the game. These are the rules, and you may choose to obey them, or not. You may choose to believe them, or not. You may choose to pretend and act them out, or you may not.
There are contradictions inherent to the game; and in fact, none of the rules (or premises, or axioms) are properly true. Negativism is the recognition of this. Negativism is a tool to break you and others out of the game (or, perhaps, matrix). Negativism doesn’t arise from outside the game; negativism is the game played upon itself.
Negativism, far from being negating, is freedom. Negativism is the ultimate exultation of skepticism, analysis, and, truly, the game itself.
(The whole aim of the postmodern project had been (still is?) the turning of the methods of reason upon itself. Analyzing analysis, critiquing critique.)
Negativism is self-awareness.
← Development →
If you squint your eyes and watch the flow of the rules of the game, you’ll see the point is connecting you to other people. The game starts with thought and ends with debate.
Negativism is rejecting the necessity of this pipeline. The game is not the only answer to dealing with different perspectives.
In order:
Thought is not solely expressed though language; there is also music, art, mathematics; there is also silence. Language is not the best expression of thought; it is not the measure nor totality of ourselves, it is not uniquely suited to rendering our rich inner lives.
Language does not solely render meaning. Language is sonic: the phonetic and music qualities of speech express in a way which is not strictly logical. Language is visual: the graphic and organizational qualities of text express in a way which is not strictly logical. Language is social: the connotative and gestural qualities of language express in ways which are, again, not strictly logical.
Meanings are not just constatively true or false. The richness of meaning cannot be reduced to this binary; what of fiction and poetry? Even in rhetoric or logic, the full reality of a statement cannot be pinned down to just truth or falsity. See, for instance, my post, Where Two-Valued Logic Fears to Tread.
A single coherent truth cannot be agreed upon by all players. Everyone has had different experiences and are always gaining new, different experiences. Different perspectives will always see different things. For every subset of assertions which can be culleted into agreements, there will always be aspects which remain unbreakable. (Look at it like a bayesian: everyone has different priors, and thus different estimations of probabilities given evidence.) This is good: monocultures are fragile; diversity is robust.
Debate is not the only way to achieve agreements; debate is not necessarily the best way to achieve agreements. Mutual understanding is what allows for agreement, and debates are not necessarily conducive to mutual understanding. And regardless, the point is that the supremacy of debate is an empirical claim, and not a philosophical one.
← Coda
So, what now? We’ve dissolved the game into its component dynamics, and we’ve put those dynamics in context. What, then, is the policy of a negativism? What’s the alternative to the game?
Nothing.
Negativism is a tool, an aggressive rejection of the game. The point is to destroy the tyrannical hegemony of the game, to escape conformity to the logical orthodoxy. The point is to wake you up from the dream of scholastic-industrial consciousness.
What happens next is your decision; you’re free now.
Do what you want. Have fun. Be excellent to each other.
And remember: