Negation as a constituting act separates what is not factually distinct
Evidence
To make this clearer, let us employ a comparison. When two curves are tangential to one another, they offer a type of presence without intermediaries. Nevertheless the eye grasps only a single line for the length of their tangency. Moreover if the two curves were hidden so that one could see only the length A B where they are tangential to each other, it would be impossible to distinguish them. Actually what separates them is nothing; there is neither continuity nor discontinuity but pure identity. Now suddenly uncover the two figures and we apprehend them once again as being two throughout all their length. This situation derives not from an abrupt factual separation which would suddenly be realized between them but from the fact that the two movements by which we draw the two curves so as to perceive them include each one a negation as a constituting act. Thus what separates the two curves at the very spot of their tangency is nothing, not even a distance; it is a pure negativity as the counterpart of a constituting synthesis. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 581
Categorization
- DEFINE: The tangent-curves analogy illustrates how pure negativity — not factual separation — grounds the for-itself’s denial of the in-itself.
- ADDENDUM: The structure of a pure negativity that separates yet is not a distance recalls the nothing that grounds presence, relevant to framing sacrifice as a negating act.
- XREF: connects to: Negation is a constitutive structure of spatial distance itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 218; The word “and” expresses an external negation separating thises — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 602; The duality of negations grounding being-for-others is irreducible to any synthesis
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Negation is a constitutive structure of spatial distance itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 218; The word “and” expresses an external negation separating thises — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 602; The duality of negations grounding being-for-others is irreducible to any synthesis