To The Things Not-in-Themselves!

Positivity is bad faith--this could be the slogan of our times, the latter designation applying to the post-WWII world. Everything turns upon this negation.

The positive as that which is itself in itself, or rather even for itself, cannot be but is. We cannot help doubting the utter inconceivability of something complete, even as we strive for it in all branches of thought, positive or negative as they may be. This is the great paradox, that thought as universal becomes its dialectical opposite, that negation of which the determinateness of all being is constituted. Positivity being bad faith, where does that leave negativity? One cannot be utterly negative, try as Adorno did. The time for that striving for completeness in incompleteness has come and gone. But this criticism is not just one blindly putting forth the positivity in all things due to their givenness--this Hegel destroyed in the very first deduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Rather, what we are left with is the quality of positivity as concreteness. It is the only positivity that still makes sense. But how exactly is it positive?

The concrete is "positive", in that the particularity of the given is constituted by determinate negation. Not that the negation of the negation is positive, but that, on a surface-level, objects are constituted concretely by determinate negation. There is no longer the question, as there was for Hegel, as to whether essence appears and is that very appearance. Rather, our question is different, given our immediate discounting of the question of essence. We ask whether the surface phenomena do not themselves preclude the possibility of themselves, not just of their essences, having a really determinate existence. In other words, we no longer believe in the whole, whether a Concept/Notion (Begriff) or the totality itself, and rightly so. We need a new relation to the whole and especially the totality, a negative and contradictory one. It cannot be such that it is a self-positing subject, as it was for Hegel. Rather it will be a self-negating, truly dialectical totality. It is thus a dialectic that will never cease--the prospect is scary. As Marcuse said: Reason is the truly undialectical element of Hegel's philosophy (paraphrased from Reason and Revolution).

So how to synthesize this with my previous thoughts on the totality relating to the theory of mysticism? Inevitably it has something to do with the nature of determinate negation and its relation to non-duality, and that would work it in nicely with revolutionary politics. So, onward! To the things not-in-themselves!