An invitation to ponder entered my mind when I read what Aristotle first asserts in the beginning of the chapter, “First affirmation, then negation, is one enunciative speech.” I asked myself, “Why is affirmation first?” It seemed to me, that the Philosopher was implying, that if we begin with a negative assertion about something, or someone, we cannot know the truth, or the falsity of the premise at all to begin with.
I wondered to the tutor that if this is because, “… negation, being relative to affirmation, cannot stand alone without being at risk, and subject to an indefinite metaphysical reality, and contradictions.” The tutor affirmed my assertion as being logically sound and then opened up my mind to something I was not seeing before. That affirmation, and negation, once made from an enunciation, can each then be respectively examined for truth, or falsity. This was a profound moment for me, because I was treating affirmation with truth, and negation with falsehood, as synonymous terms, or perhaps far too generally in my mind; therefore, my command over their distinctions in application was getting very muddied while attempting to employ their use with my own reasoning.
I can’t help but now wonder at the implications of this with other topics I hear all around me in my own personal life, at work, at home, in public, on the news, in the Church, etc. It seems as if I hear a lot of negative enunciations ad nauseum: e.g. “this team is not pulling their weight”, “this man is not good”, “this President is not my President”, “the Pope is not the successor to Peter”, “the Eucharist is not Jesus”, etc. Ecclesiastes 1:15, and 10:20 come to mind, and I am certainly guilty of falling into both categories, especially prior to my studies with Aristotle.
EAR