Negation

Abstract

The problem of negation is an important one since it has a bearing on the nature of truth itself. Negation involves firstly the denial of something and it cannot be said to be mere denial. The denial of something involves the apprehension of something that is other than that which is denied, whose place it has taken, or it might be it is the denial of the existence of the something merely without any reference to any other thing s existence or presence. Secondly, it might mean the apprehension of the absence at some place and time of something already experienced, and as such it is definition or determination of non-correspondence with the past experience merely without a detailed investigation of the present experience. Negation taken as a judgment even does not and cannot escape the reference to the negative fact, so to speak, of the actual apprehension of a thing's absence. If we inspect this phase of negation, we shall see that absence as such is experienced to be the nature of the situation, and as such perception is the instrument of our cognition of absence. It may be said that perception can only give the 'given,' the presented objects, and cannot present non-absence of the objects, and as such we must have a different instrument of cognition such as non-cognition or nonperception, anupalabdhi, to prove non-existence (abh¡va). But this is all right so long as we take this non-existence presented in the so called non-apprehension (anupalabdhi), (for it is indeed an apprehender of the alleged abh¡va), to be a mere abh¡va, an uncharacterised somewhat and not a positive entity of absence. Carefully inspected we find that the situation or position taken up by the Advaitin is similar to his position in regard to the nirvikalpaka pratyakÀa, a bare and un-inspected or unimagined or integrated experience of absence because of non-perception of anything determinate over there. There is an element of contra-definition or counter correlative which is defined more or less clearly even in the most incipient perceptual experience of negative fact or absence, which precisely reveals the difference,