Squareinthecircle
20th November 2025, 00:07
The In-Betweens: How the Negative Shapes the Positive
Why Everything Is Known By What It Is Not
https://kasspert.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cracks.jpg
by Kevin Boykin
11/19/2025
“Music is the space between the notes.”- Claude Debussy.
Meaning doesn’t emerge from what’s easily perceived but from what resists being seen. The articulated is only so due to the spaces between. The universe, like a photograph, reveals its truth through contrast. Light alone is chaos — aimless, without definition. When light finds its target it is recognized by its limitation, denoted by defined edges and their relationship with negative space. The cosmos is therefore not a creation of substance alone, but of opposition: the silent architecture of the negative.
A Principle of Negative Definition (https://kasspert.wordpress.com/2025/07/30/the-principle-of-negative-definition/) if you will — the idea that what is known comes courtesy of what is not. A virtue is best comprehended in its absence. Beauty exists because ugliness informed us. Truth emerges only against the substrate that allows it shape. Clarity and focus then rely on the unknown, the blurry, at least temporarily. The moral, aesthetic, and physical orders are bound by this.
Human perception, too, works using this negative/positive, photographic process. We define ourselves by resistance — by the forces that limit. “How much do you bench?” “What’s your fastest time?” “What grade did you get?” When an individual meets adversity and endures they don’t merely survive; they come into focus, they define themselves. What was once amorphous becomes something that can be understood under pressure. Suffering and limitation turn the cruelties of existence into development, multiple chemical baths that reveal the art underneath.
And in art, negation gives rise to texture, composition, depth; in ethics, it directs conscience. The yin and yang, the path and the wilderness, Shiva and Brahma, order and chaos — contrast is the universal grammar. Even this essay requires the white of the page to make its point, exploiting the very principle described.
https://kasspert.wordpress.com/2025/11/19/the-in-betweens-how-the-negative-shapes-the-positive/
Why Everything Is Known By What It Is Not
https://kasspert.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cracks.jpg
by Kevin Boykin
11/19/2025
“Music is the space between the notes.”- Claude Debussy.
Meaning doesn’t emerge from what’s easily perceived but from what resists being seen. The articulated is only so due to the spaces between. The universe, like a photograph, reveals its truth through contrast. Light alone is chaos — aimless, without definition. When light finds its target it is recognized by its limitation, denoted by defined edges and their relationship with negative space. The cosmos is therefore not a creation of substance alone, but of opposition: the silent architecture of the negative.
A Principle of Negative Definition (https://kasspert.wordpress.com/2025/07/30/the-principle-of-negative-definition/) if you will — the idea that what is known comes courtesy of what is not. A virtue is best comprehended in its absence. Beauty exists because ugliness informed us. Truth emerges only against the substrate that allows it shape. Clarity and focus then rely on the unknown, the blurry, at least temporarily. The moral, aesthetic, and physical orders are bound by this.
Human perception, too, works using this negative/positive, photographic process. We define ourselves by resistance — by the forces that limit. “How much do you bench?” “What’s your fastest time?” “What grade did you get?” When an individual meets adversity and endures they don’t merely survive; they come into focus, they define themselves. What was once amorphous becomes something that can be understood under pressure. Suffering and limitation turn the cruelties of existence into development, multiple chemical baths that reveal the art underneath.
And in art, negation gives rise to texture, composition, depth; in ethics, it directs conscience. The yin and yang, the path and the wilderness, Shiva and Brahma, order and chaos — contrast is the universal grammar. Even this essay requires the white of the page to make its point, exploiting the very principle described.
https://kasspert.wordpress.com/2025/11/19/the-in-betweens-how-the-negative-shapes-the-positive/