"VIA NEGATIVA": WHY NEGATIVE KNOWLEDGE IS SO VALUABLE (AND RARE)
Article by LiveReal Agents Grace and Kevin
“Via negativa” is like a rare-earth element of the mind.
It’s scarce, powerful, and extremely valuable.
But it’s also often highly undervalued.
It’s like searching for pennies in the dirt, and tossing gold nuggets aside because they’re in the way.
We need more “negative knowledge.”
Via negativa (Latin for “negative way”) is the method for “creating” negative knowledge.
Few seem to understand it well, much less practice it – similar to how someone could easily run across a rare-earth element in their backyard and have no idea what to do with it.
On the other hand, “positive knowledge” is something pretty much everyone understands.
This has created a strange imbalance.
It’s like only turning left, and never turning right. Before long, we’d be totally turned around.
Positive knowledge is in a state of overload (or “useless overproduction,” as Ernest Becker might say), while negative knowledge lies around, gathering dust in the shadows, ignored or dismissed.
This imbalance is currently creating a society-wide meltdown. A key dynamic at the heart of this dysfunction is a broken epistemology (or knowledge-system, or “how we know,” as discussed here and here).
Fixing our societal issues, at least to some degree, is a philosophical problem.
That means the way to fix it is good philosophy.
(Which is also rare.)
Let’s clarify.
Imagine someone earned nine Ivy League Ph.D.s.
We’d usually assume the individual was very “intelligent.”
But then, imagine we discover another fact about that person.
That individual also thinks he’s Napoleon.
(That is, he literally believes himself to be Napoleon Bonaparte.)
The equation suddenly changes.
That individual might still be very “intelligent” by some measures.
But that “intelligence” is being put to use in unintelligent ways. He’s using his degrees in physics, economics, and history, for example, to figure out ways to bring order to the French Revolution, escape from Elba, or win the Battle of Waterloo.
He’s “intelligent” in certain specific ways.
But he’s also crazy.
His answer to the “Who am I?” question is way off.
“Intelligence” can be built on a shaky foundation.
Intelligence can be grounded in a flawed life philosophy, so it stands on a wobbly base.
We often see knowledge as “additive.”
That is, we often see knowledge as working purely through “addition.”
If we learn calculus, for example, we’ve “added” to our “body” of “knowledge.”
If we learn to play the banjo, we’ve added more.
And so on. As we study math, science, history and so on, we often imagine “knowledge” as being “added on top” of whatever knowledge is already there.
That’s “additive knowledge.”
But knowledge isn’t merely additive.
It’s also subtractive.
A quote often attributed to Mark Twain captures it well:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure
that just ain’t so.”
That nails it.
There are things we’re certain of that aren’t true.
Subtractive knowledge means giving those up.
Additive knowledge means learning new facts and concepts, while subtractive knowledge means dispelling illusions.
Additive means piling on. Subtractive means stripping away.
Additive means acquiring new ideas.
Subtractive means giving up bad ideas.
It means losing illusions.
Via negativa solves deep problems not by adding new information, but by removing misinformation.
Ignorance doesn’t necessarily cause problems, so long as it’s accompanied by humility. If someone is ignorant and knows they’re ignorant, that can be dealt with. It’s the ignorant who think they’re brilliant – and quite confident in that illusion – that cause the real problems.
William Butler Yeats echoed this sentiment:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Bertrand Russell did as well:
“The whole problem with the world
is that fools and fanatics
are always so certain of themselves,
and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Novelist Charles Bukowski made the point a little less delicately:
“The problem with the world
is that the intelligent people are full of doubts,
while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
Even more famously, Socrates – a humble, blue-collar stonecutter – was deemed the wisest man in Athens by the highest authority at the time (the Oracle). But he found that puzzling, because, in his words, “I know nothing.” The difference, he soon discovered, was that he knew he knew nothing. Everyone else also knew nothing, but thought they knew.
Socrates practiced a form of via negativa.
Most of those Socrates spoke with didn’t.
If anyone has reservations about Socrates, maybe they’ll listen to another character who might be trusted even more widely.
That would be Yoda.
“You must unlearn what you have learned.”
If both Socrates and Yoda got it, there must be something to it.
We aren’t even born as empty buckets that get filled with knowledge as we go through life.
Instead, we’re born with software pre-loaded onto the machine. (Kant described some of this.)
Some of that “software” is buggy, or pre-loaded with ads, spam, viruses, or bloatware.
Knowledge isn’t a one-way street.
It’s a two-way street.
Knowledge doesn’t only flow in. It also exits.
And that “exit” of “knowledge” can make us not only smarter, but saner.
If “Napoleon” in the example above would give up the “knowledge” that “I am Napoleon,” he would immediately become “more intelligent,” and more sane.
That’s an example of “acquiring” negative knowledge by way of giving up a false identity.
There are other examples of negative knowledge.
For example, imagine someone “knows” that money is the key to happiness.
That person then becomes wealthy, and realizes he or she is still unhappy, just in a different way.
Or, imagine someone “knows” that the earth is flat.
Or, imagine someone “knows” that the three key ingredients of a happy life are junk food, daytime television, and heroin.
Losing “knowledge” like this makes you smarter and saner.
Positive knowledge seems to proceed forward.
Negative knowledge works in reverse.
Beliefs get stripped away.
An individual becomes dis-illusioned – that is, they lose an illusion. They discover – often painfully – that something they “know” to be the case, isn’t. That “knowledge” is then gone. It’s been subtracted away. Or, more accurately, it’s been revealed to have never existed.
And they’re better off for it.
"Negative knowledge" isn't merely a "destruction of knowledge." It's knowledge that's revealed after illusions have been seen as illusory.
We often accumulate bad ideas as we go through life.
We draw false conclusions from incomplete data.
We’re better off without ideas like these.
We have the ability to get rid of them. But we often cling to them.
Knowledge works like a battery. To function, it needs both positive and negative poles.
If we want a functional knowledge system, we need to incorporate both, instead of only the positive.
And that’s the challenge, and where the real work kicks in.
If via negativa is so valuable and sanity-inducing, why is it so rare?
Why is our current approach to knowledge so lopsided and unbalanced?
Why is our epistemology broken?
We can sum up the answer to all of these in four words.
Negative knowledge requires courage.
And courage is rare.
Why is that?
Negative knowledge involves questioning your own assumptions.
We typically make assumptions, and then proceed from that point without ever revisiting those assumptions.
Call them “premises,” “axioms,” “givens,” “basic beliefs,” and so on.
These are mission-critical. They deal with foundational ideas about the nature of reality, ourselves, and the universe.
In the case of our Napoleon-mad-genius, there was one flawed premise that nearly everything else was based on. It involved who he thought he was, or the foundation of his identity. To fix that, he must give up "himself" (or who he thinks he is).
If our basic assumptions (premises, axioms, etc.) are off, everything that follows can be off as well.
We can base our lives on an assumption we never consciously examine.
In fact, our core assumptions are often unconscious.
We’re often blind to them.
It’s as if they often operate in blind spots.
Like asking a fish about water, it’s often so obvious that it’s invisible.
The challenge, then, lies in becoming aware of the obvious.
It’s easy to question the assumptions of others.
But mere criticism of others isn’t via negativa.
What’s profoundly more difficult – or even impossible, in some ways – is to see ourselves. That’s what separates via negativa from mere everyday criticism.
There’s a central blindness to self involved. It’s like an eye that can see everything except for itself, or an ear that can hear everything except for itself, or a nose that can smell everything except for itself, and so on. This “blind spot of the mind” is why it’s easy to see splinters in everyone else but ignore the beam in our own.
Questioning others’ ideas without ever questioning your own ultimately leads to a state of everyone seeing flaws in everyone except for themselves.
It’s why everyone thinks they’re “right” while everyone simultaneously disagrees. If we follow this logic to the end, it eventually leads to a state where everyone imagines themselves to be geniuses and everyone else to be fools – or, in a word, hubris. Every citizen is king, and every other king is an imposter. The result is anarchy.
Nietzsche understood this.
“A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions;
rather it is a matter of having the courage
for an attack on one’s convictions . . .”
Today, the trendy thing to do is to “stand up for what you believe in.”
But what if “what we believe in” is mistaken?
The heretical idea of questioning whether “what you believe in” is true is the rare-earth element again – much rarer, and much more precious.
But why is this process so terrifying?
An attack on convictions can seem like an attack on identity.
Sometimes an attack on one’s convictions can feel like an attack one’s self.
This happens when a self is confused with an argument or idea.
In this case, an argument isn’t just an argument. It’s a fight for survival. (Survival of a certain kind, that is.)
And the stakes can seem pretty high.
Losing that fight can lead to an existential crisis.
A thief who argues in defense of thieving may win, lose, or draw in that argument.
But if he loses, he’s suddenly asking, “If that’s not who I am, then who am I?”
A hero who argues in defense of heroism may win, lose, or draw. But if he loses, he’s suddenly asking, “If that’s not who I am, then who am I?”
That’s why courage is necessary.
It risks a kind of death.
It isn’t physical courage, the kind that involves running into a burning building or going skydiving.
This situation doesn’t put your body at risk.
It puts your self at risk.
That’s why some claim to fear public speaking more than death itself. The threat of physical death threatens the physical body. But public speaking threatens the self. Someone might imagine that their “self” will outlive the death of the physical body. But their self would not outlive the death of the self.
This gets to why dialogue is so critical. Dialogue involves one self interacting with another self, in relationship, and all the messiness that entails. This is why those who engage in genuine dialogue are heroic, and why those who are against it are usually the opposite. Genuine dialogue requires a certain kind of courage.
This kind of courage is both incredibly valuable, yet rare.
Certain hardy individuals embark on a path of via negativa to test the ground they’re standing on. They embark on an effort to deliberately check all assumptions, conscious or unconscious – and discover that their foundation is either firm or fragile.
This process can be rewarding.
It can mean finding, or getting closer to, a sturdy base or a “true self” that’s unshakeable and un-collapsable.
After all, our “self” is sometimes standing on shaky ground.
It can be based on a fragile foundation. We can sometimes have a false identity or false self.
That’s why this kind of thing can terrify kings, emperors, rulers, presidents, dictators, and the most “powerful” people in the world.
Individuals are often terrified of someone questioning their beliefs.
This is what often leads those with the resources to surround themselves exclusively with those who agree. The most powerful people in the world might lack the strength for the way of via negativa. As Nietzsche might say, they might lack the courage for an attack on their convictions.
But of course, that approach typically leads to being surrounded by yes-men, which leads to living in a bubble, which means being out of touch with reality, which means eventual downfall, for an individual or for an entire culture.
That’s why testing our foundations can be a good thing.
We aren’t inclined to find more solid ground if we’re comfortable because we imagine that we’re already on solid ground.
But if we summon ourselves and determine that we’re going to discover whether the ground we’re standing on is fragile or sturdy - and if we can withstand the intensity of the experience - we then face a potential win-win scenario: we either 1) confirm that we’re standing on sturdy ground, or 2) discover that we should move on to something sturdier.
It requires courage because it puts our self on the line.
That self might be revealed as a false self – or, if it passes the test, as real.
In this sense, it’s the way of “self-knowledge.”
Kierkegaard said it well:
“A man may perform astonishing feats and comprehend a vast amount of knowledge,
and yet have no understanding of himself.
But suffering directs a man to look within.
If it succeeds,
then there, within him,
is the beginning of his learning.”
He might as well have been talking about Professor Napoleon.
In some cases, positive knowledge can only take us so far. There are places it won’t reach.
Via negativa can appear in nearly every area of life.
A guy might know every basketball player, every rule, and every game that’s ever been played throughout history.
But if he’s never stepped on a court, he doesn’t really know basketball.
When it comes to love, a man might learn every poem ever written, every song ever sung, and every philosopher’s take.
But if he hasn’t experienced love directly, it’s all mere theory. Between that and the real thing lies a chasm – a chasm that can only be bridged by experience.
In theology, a man might have memorized every syllable of every sacred scripture, heard every wise word spoken by any wise person, and know every fact ever uttered by every saint or sage.
But if that’s all he has, there’s still something essential missing.
Cataphatic theology involves the effort to state what God is. It’s the positive knowledge approach to God. (“God is eternal, omniscient, just, etc.”)
But apophatic theology is the way of via negativa.
It says, “Words are fingers pointing at the moon. Don't look at the finger. Look at the moon. (Or, in this case, God.) There are plenty of good words. But still, even the best words aren't enough. That isn’t it. Go further.” (Meister Eckhart: “And why, why do you prate of God? Whatever you say of God is untrue.” Lao Tzu: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.” Thomas Aquinas: “God is greater than all we can say…” Etc.)
After all, who can put the deepest nature of reality, or "love," or "God," or "human nature," or the "self," or even friendship into words?
Even our greatest poets try, but ultimately fail, to capture it. None of these can be fully mapped, bottled, shrink-wrapped, measured, quantified, replicated publicly in a double-blind, laboratory-safe, peer-reviewed study.
None of this means it doesn’t exist, or even that we can’t “know” it. There’s a saying that goes something like this: For those who don’t know, no explanation is effective. But for those who do know, no explanation is needed.
“Faith” is sometimes defined as hearing certain ideas and trying hard to believe in them.
But via negativa offers a different path.
It says, “Don’t ‘believe.’ Exhaust all possible alternatives until you’re left with whatever's left.”
Simone Weil:
"It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God. He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose any belief. It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind: that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good."
It means finding the truth by backing away from untruth.
It doesn’t posit a theory and then step into that.
It sees BS, and then steps away from that.
Advaita Vedanta might phrase it as “not this, not that.”
Even Sherlock Holmes saw the value of this approach:
"When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable,
must be the truth."
It’s messy and difficult work, like removing weeds before planting seeds.
But as Zen teacher Richard Rose once said, a negative response to a negative situation might be quite positive.
This approach doesn’t mean merely abandoning all maps.
It means using maps to the maximum possible extent – but then going beyond, into the uncharted waters. After all, sometimes our destination lies in places that haven’t yet been mapped.
This way is part of a long and proud tradition. It’s been followed by saints, sages, seers and thinkers the caliber of (just to name a few) Buddha, Socrates, Aquinas, Eckhart, Nietzsche, Merton, and of course, Yoda.
It requires courage, because it risks the self.
But the result?
The followed properly, it can lead to a "rare-earth human."
As Yoda might say, "Unlearn."