Via Negativa & Aletheia

The via negativa is Christian apophatic theology — from Pseudo-Dionysius through John of the Cross — the practice of approaching God by the systematic removal of inadequate concepts. God is known by stripping rather than building. Meister Eckhart pushes this further: God is best known in the soul's emptiness, not its furnishings.

Aletheia is Heidegger's retrieval of the Greek word for truth. He notes that it literally means unconcealment. Truth is what is revealed when obscuring is taken away. Knowing is carving.

The two terms name a single operation in different vocabularies. The Christian mystics describe the soul's path to God by negation; Heidegger describes the philosopher's path to truth by unconcealment. Both are kinds of subtractive manifestation applied to knowledge.

Spinoza states the rule as a metaphysical axiom: omnis determinatio est negatio — all determination is negation. To specify anything is to exclude what it is not. Identity is the residue of exclusion. Neti, neti.