A HOLE IN BEING:

NOTES ON NEGATIVITY

G. W. F. Hegel and his able interpreter Alexandre Kojève

claim that the essence of consciousness is “negativity,” that
man lives “outside himself,” that man “negates” of “nihilates”
nature, that man is a “nothingness” or a “hole in being,” that
man is “time that negates space.” What does this mean?
First let’s consider the claim that man contains a negativity
or absence within him. Imagine you are holding a rock in your
hand. A rock is a paradigmatic natural object. It is an inert
lump of matter. A rock is complete and self-contained. To say
that the rock is self-contained is to say that it does not need an-
ything from outside of itself in order to go on being a rock. A
plant, by contrast, is not self-contained; it needs things outside
of itself—water, nutrients, sunlight—in order to go on being a
plant. Without these things, it is reduced to a mass of inert mat-
ter, like the rock.
To say that the plant is not self-contained and self-sufficient
is to say that it has an absence or lack within it; its need is a
hole in it that must be filled by something from outside it. The
rock, because it has no needs, is wholly self-sufficient and self-
contained; it has no absences within it.
Another way of understanding this is to say that what
makes the plant whole lies outside of its skin, outside of the
space that it inhabits and occupies; what makes the plant whole
is literally outside it; the plant is outside of itself, displaced
from the physical space that it occupies; another way of putting
this is to say that the plant is “ecstatic,” for the word “ecstatic”
literally means “out-standing,” being outside of or beside one-
self.
The rock, by contrast, is not ecstatic; because it needs noth-
ing from outside itself to make it complete, all that it is lies
within the physical space it occupies. To understand a plant as
a whole, one cannot simply look at the plant, for what the plant
is, is not wholly within its skin; the things that make the plant a
2 Greg Johnson

whole are found outside it, in the needs which are fulfilled
from the environment in which it dwells.
When Hegel/Kojève claim that man contains negativity and
absence in him, they mean, first of all, that man has needs and
desires, that man is not wholly self-sufficient and self-
contained. Human beings lie outside of themselves, outside of
their skins, for it is only outside of ourselves that we find those
things which fulfill our needs and make us complete.
Next, let’s consider the ideas of “negating” and “nihilating”
nature. When a plant or an animal finds something from the
external world that fulfills its needs, it must remove that thing
from the outside world and transform and incorporate it into
itself. Hegel and Kojève refer to this activity as “negating,” i.e.,
saying “no.”
A plant transforms sunlight, nutrients, and water into some-
thing that they are not; it in effect says “no” to them as they are
given and transforms them into something it can use; it says
“no” to their objective, external being and makes them part of
itself.
When a cow eats the plant, it says “no” to the plant as an ob-
jective, external being and incorporates it into itself.
When a human being takes a rock and transforms it into a
paperweight or an example, we say “no” to its objective, exter-
nal being and incorporate it into the network of human mean-
ings and purposes.
Now what does it mean to say that man is “time” that ne-
gates “space”? To understand this, we must appreciate an es-
sential difference between human beings and other kinds of
beings. All living things, save for human beings, have needs
which are given by nature and which are satisfied within the
natural world. Animals may say “no” to given nature, but it is
only to satisfy their natural needs, so the process of negation is
situated within and bounded by the order or economy of na-
ture.
This is not the case with human beings. Human beings have
needs which are not given by nature and which cannot be satis-
fied by given nature. Human beings, unlike all other living
things, can say “no” to their own naturally given needs—to their
 A Hole in Being: Notes on Negativity 3

animal natures—and to the entire economy of the natural

world. Human beings say “no” to the real in the name of the
unreal or the unrealized, of the ideal or the idealized.
Human beings have the power of language, reason, speech,
abstraction, invention, creativity, logos—what Hegel calls the
realm of the concept—which allows them to create needs, ide-
als, and plans which are not based on nature and cannot be sat-
isfied by it. They can be satisfied only by the transformation of
the natural world through work. It is here that the dimension of
time enters in.
Hegel claims that:

Man = Negativity = Time = Concept

To say that the concept = time is to say that the concept is a

plan, a blueprint for a process of transforming what is given in
the present into what is desired in the future. To say that man =
time is to say that man’s unique mode of being, man’s unique
mode of negativity, is the transformation of the natural world
through our projects. Man, therefore, is time that negates.
But what does it mean to say that man is time that negates
space? By space, Hegel/Kojève mean nature, given being, inert
reality, which is to be changed in light of our concepts and
plans. Hegel/Kojève use “space” to designate given being, be-
cause given beings, unlike living beings, are wholly self-
contained and self-sufficient; because they need nothing out-
side of themselves to be complete, all that they are is found
within their given spatial location.
To say that man is time that negates space, is, therefore, to
say that man is time that negates given being in the light of his
concepts and plans. We say “no” to what is given now in the
name of the not yet, what is conceived in the mind and realized
through the transformation of given nature.
There is a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre that is often quoted
by people who want to argue that French philosophy is all a
bunch of gobbledygook:

Man is what he is not and is not what he is.

4 Greg Johnson

On the surface this does sound like nonsense, but it actually

makes a great deal of Kojèvian sense.
To say that man is what he is not, is to say that human be-
ings are not just lumps of inert given being; human beings have
physical-material-animal bodies, but the body is simply the site
at which a potential of infinity of plans and projects burst out
in all directions, toward myriad possible futures.
Human beings are what they are not because they live in
their plans and projects, encountering their given reality as in-
complete in light of all the things they want to achieve.
Human beings are not what they are—i.e., the given matter
within our skins—because what we are is radically incomplete,
and can be completed only by completing our plans and pro-
jects, and since we always have uncompleted plans and pro-
jects, which are cut off only by death, man is always incom-
plete, a hole in being that will never be fully filled.

Counter-Currents/North American New Right,

December 15, 2012