I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Today I want to write about a life defined by saying no: the vita negativa. But I am going to start with something different: the via negativa, a way of describing and knowing, that has usually been applied to the question of what God is and is not. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb expanded the via negativa’s domain to apply to any situation in life.
Via negativa as theology and as a principle for understanding the world
In Skin in the Game, Taleb defines the via negativa as:
the principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.
The term has usually been used in the context of theology, suggesting a way to understand God, by saying what God is not rather than by saying what God is. That’s known as apophatic theology, coming from the Greek word for denial. Apophatic theologians think that because God is infinite and transcends human experience it cannot be described by humans.
But Taleb applies this to non-theological situations. In his article Via Negativa: The Process of Making Good Decisions by Eliminating Bad Ones, Abhishek Chakraborty elucidates Taleb’s principle:
Most business plans are made, how-to books are written, and policies are designed by charlatans pretending to be experts. The learning of life is more about what to avoid. For e.g., avoiding cigarettes, junk food, toxic relationships, slow friends, overconfident confidants.
Warren Buffett advices the same when he says that the first rule of investment is, Never lose money. The second rule is, Never forget Rule 1. Since we know what is fragile, eliminating fragilities by reducing downsides is in itself a good winning strategy. For example, removing a bad hire or a bad leader is thus far more effective than adding good hires or appointing good leaders. Similarly, not doing what we know is wrong is far more effective than doing what we think is right….
Not going bust, not losing friends, not making stupid decisions, and not having any downsides are effective steps towards achieving antifragility—a state of a system when it gains more from disorders, stressors, and shocks.
My new trading regime has at its heart a desire to reduce and avoid large drawdowns, so it uses the via negativa. However, it doesn’t guarantee I won’t lose money. It simply reduces the chances of that.
How not to live, from Byung-Chul Han
The via negativa makes me think of Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of what’s wrong with society in his book The Burnout Society. Written in German with the title Müdigkeitsgesellschaft which translates to “Tiredness Society” or “Society of Fatigue,” it describes the shift from a disciplinary society where institutions control what people do to an achievement society, where people drive themselves towards the aims of society such as accruing money, building social prestige, and acquiring consumer goods.
Han writes:
The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination [Herrschaftsinstanz] forcing it to work, much less exploiting it. It is lord and master of itself. Thus, it is subject to no one—or, as the case may be, only to itself. It differs from the obedience-subject on this score. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement.
Han’s book largely describes what not to do with one’s life, that is, do not engage in auto-exploitation, driving yourself towards greater and greater achievement. But he spends a bit of time talking about what to do instead. His answer is the vita contemplativa, i.e., the contemplative life, a life Nietzsche described and lived.
But this way of life is still expressed in the negative, as a not-doing instead of a doing:
The vita contemplativa is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens. Instead, it offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli. Instead of surrendering the gaze to external impulses, it steers them in sovereign fashion. As a mode of saying no, sovereign action [Tun] proves more active than any and all hyperactivity, which represents a symptom of mental exhaustion.
So here, the vita contemplativa is a vita negativa, a life of saying no.
Living the vita negativa
What does it look like to take sovereign action of the kind Han describes, saying no? It looks like: Refusing to go back to a corporate technology job which was soul-killing even as it was bank-account-filling. Resisting the call of society to partner up when singlehood proves more authentic. Dropping the idea of turning a hobby into a bustling, hustling business.
This creates space in life that some self help authors might say will make room for what you really want to show up. But maybe the emptiness is it. Maybe what’s not there is more important than what is there.