The Negative Way: Historicity, Dialectics and Metaphysics

Abstract

Metaphysics is necessary to history, in that it allows us to identify the relationship between the determinate becoming of problematic historical experience, always refutable by non-contradictory principles, and the transcendent becoming, teleologically founded but ungraspable in experience. It is not sufficient that the uncaused metaphysical principle is transcendent : it is necessary that the potential caused becoming is also transcendent as a condition of uncontradictoriness both of the principle of non-contradiction and of dialectical reasoning, which uses negation to refute any discourse that absolutizes experience. In turn, the absolutization of experience denies the transcendent metaphysical principle, but also denies – inevitably – the uncontradictoriness of caused becoming, arriving at the well-known Parmenidean solution, according to which only experience (or appearance) is an uncontradictory metaphysical whole and becoming in all its forms is extraneous to this whole.