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Full Idea
To adopt any kind of normative stance is to commit oneself necessarily to the possibility of negation. It involves doing something correctly or incorrectly, so there must exist the possibility of denying or affirming.
Gist of Idea
Normativity needs the possibility of negation, in affirmation and denial
Source
report of Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 05
Book Ref
Pinkard,Terry: 'German Philosophy 1760-1860' [CUP 2002], p.115
A Reaction
This seems to be the key idea for understanding Hegel's logic. Personally I think animals have a non-verbal experience of negation - when a partner dies, for example.
| 20788 | The contradictory of a contradictory is an affirmation [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 22017 | Normativity needs the possibility of negation, in affirmation and denial [Fichte, by Pinkard] |
| 21777 | Negation of negation doubles back into a self-relationship [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| 16489 | Is it possible to state every possible truth about the whole course of nature without using 'not'? [Russell] |
| 18722 | Negations are not just reversals of truth-value, since that can happen without negation [Wittgenstein on Russell] |
| 18723 | We may correctly use 'not' without making the rule explicit [Wittgenstein] |
| 23493 | 'Not' isn't an object, because not-not-p would then differ from p [Wittgenstein] |
| 23066 | Negation doesn't arise from reasoning, but from deep instincts [Cioran] |
| 18903 | Sommers promotes the old idea that negation basically refers to terms [Sommers, by Engelbretsen] |
| 18801 | Classical negation is circular, if it relies on knowing negation-conditions from truth-conditions [Dummett] |
| 19052 | Natural language 'not' doesn't apply to sentences [Dummett] |
| 18476 | 'A is F' may not be positive ('is dead'), and 'A is not-F' may not be negative ('is not blind') [MacBride] |
| 18908 | Standard logic only negates sentences, even via negated general terms or predicates [Engelbretsen] |