Via negativa

SLOP3268 — Week 1

“Anything you can say about it is already too small.”

— the apophatic move, fifteen centuries before it needed a name

The negative way

Pseudo-Dionysius, describing God:

  • not good
  • not wise
  • not existent

Not because these are false — because every word borrowed from creation is smaller than what it’s describing.

The secular version

Nassim Taleb, “subtractive knowledge”:

  • we’re often more certain about what fails than what works
  • expertise is accumulated omission, more than accumulated fact
  • this course tests that claim against a harder case than his

The question, every week

What did leaving this out cost?

What did it buy?

Twelve weeks, one move

theology · painting · music · fiction · film · architecture · design · statistics · mathematics · politics — then a week that turns the question on the course itself

Three assessments

  1. Commonplace Book of Cuts — 20%, week 5
  2. A Practice in Subtraction — 35%, week 10
  3. The Argument by Omission — 45%, final project

Each one bigger, each one asking you to trust the cut more.

“Come with the thing you cut, not the thing you kept.”

— the rule for office hours, and for Wednesday’s seminar