The origin of the problem of negation in Plato's dialogues.

Every "not," in every saying of "not," whether explicitly expressed or implicit, has, as a speaking about something, the character of exhibition. Even the empty "not," the mere exclusion of something over and against something arbitrary, shows, but it simply shows that on which the negation is founded, thus what, in saying, "not," is delimited against the nothing. This empty negation places discernment, legein and noein, prior to the nothing; it lets the nothing be seen as founded by the negated. That is the meaning of negation in Parmenides. This negation, placed prior to the nothing and purely exclusionary, has thus been uncovered for the first time in the history of the development of our logic, in our grasp of logoV. That should not seduce us into thinking that this negation, empty exclusion, is the most immediate one and the primary one carried out in legein. One the contrary, the original negation is precisely the one Plato exposes as antiqesiV and Aristotle then, in a remarkable reversal of terms, calls enantiwsiV. The empty negation, as it dominated the understanding of legein up to Plato, did not spring from a primordial study of logoV but from the ground of a particular and over-hasty (this is not meant as a reproach) theory of Being, namely the Parmenidean theory of Being. The universal character of presence, of einai, which Parmenides was the first to see, became for him the substantive realm of beings in general. He thus identified the ontological meaning of Being with the ontical totality of beings. To that extent, for every saying "no," there remained left over only the nothing, since indeed it is nothing else then the en as on. This makes it clear that the clarification of logoV and logic leads back to the respective level of clarity concerning the meaning of Being. We may suppose that Plato acquired, on the basis of the new insight into the on of mh on, a new basis for the interpretation of logoV and that therefore Plato's advance in the determination and clarification of beings corresponds to a new possibility of a radical conception of logoV, as in fact occurred for the first time in the Sophist.

P. 395-396

antiqesiV: opposite
einai: Being
en: one
enantiwsiV: contradiction
legein: to speak
logoV: speech, discourse
on: being
mh on: non-being
noein: to discern, perceive  ¶ 1:29 PM