Via Negativa & Decision Making 

August 2020

I just remove everything that is not David  - Michelangelo

In an age increasingly intoxicated by the virtues of accumulation, more facts, more tools, more goals, we might pause to consider the quiet strength of an older, sterner doctrine: the doctrine of subtraction. There exists, both in theology and in life, a method by which truth is arrived at not by accretion, but by elimination. It is called Via Negativa, the way of negation.

This approach, though perhaps unfashionable in the present moment of restless expansion, is not without distinguished origin. It emerges from the austere beauty of Christian scholasticism, where thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas contended that God, being infinite, could not be known through human categories. “De Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit,” he wrote. We cannot say what God is, only what He is not. Thus, theology advanced not by description, but by the removal of error, false likeness, and human conceit.

A similar logic governs the older philosophies of the East. The yogic sages of India practiced Neti Neti, “not this, not that”, in their pursuit of the absolute. The self was to be discerned not by naming or grasping, but by discarding all that was transient: not the body, not the mind, not even thought itself. The aim was not knowledge in the conventional sense, but the arrival at truth by a progressive stripping away of illusion. What remained, what could not be denied or negated, was held to be real.

There is, in both cases, a recognition that reality is not something to be built from the outside in, but to be revealed from the inside out. Michelangelo is said to have described his method thus: he simply removed from the marble everything that was not David. The statue already existed within the stone; it needed only to be liberated. The artist’s task was not invention, but revelation.

The modern mind, oriented as it is toward growth and addition, finds this mode of thought curiously austere. We are apt to believe that improvement consists in accumulation, that the ideal life, or career, or institution is one constructed like a tower, brick upon brick. Yet there is ample evidence to suggest that it is often the clearing away of excess, the pruning of what is false or burdensome, that yields the most lasting results.

Saint-Exupéry, the aviator-poet, writing of aircraft design, captured this paradox with economy: “Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.” The line is often quoted, seldom practiced. For the impulse to do more, to add another feature, another obligation, another pursuit, is difficult to resist. But it is precisely this refusal to subtract that clouds judgment and weakens design.

And now, having spoken of the men born of the pilot's craft, I shall say something about the tool with which they work - the airplane. Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. 

In economics, in philosophy, and in the affairs of practical life, we would do well to remember that the clearest path is not always the one with the most signposts. It may instead be the one from which unnecessary directions have been quietly removed. The clean ledger, the simplified policy, the uncluttered mind, these are not romantic ideals, but instruments of real efficacy.

There is, of course, a danger of austerity carried to excess, a puritanism of negation. But this is no argument against the method itself, only against its unreflective application. The virtue lies not in subtraction for its own sake, but in subtraction rightly judged. To know what to remove is as much a discipline as to know what to preserve.

There is, it must be confessed, something almost countercultural in this method of proceeding. We are trained, by our schools, our institutions, and above all, by our markets, to associate virtue with doing: with effort, with construction, with production. The notion that wisdom might consist not in greater exertion but in thoughtful omission is quietly radical, though not without pedigree.

A clear mind, for instance, is not one that has been densely packed with affirmations or aphorisms. It is rather a mind unburdened, freed from the rattle and clutter of borrowed assumptions and passing excitements. Similarly, good writing is not a product of elaborate expression, but of austere craftsmanship: a sentence that has had the indulgences stripped from it, until only necessity remains. And what is a healthy regimen, if not an absence? We may eat quinoa and flaxseed, but their benefits pale next to the simple power of forgoing what corrodes.

This is the practicality of via negativa, as Taleb reminds us. It is not born of mysticism but of observation. We are more reliably informed by what injures us than by what might improve us. Subtractive knowledge, to borrow his phrase, is the more robust knowledge, not because it is more profound, but because it has been tested and found wanting. It survives not by its perfection but by the failures it escapes.

“Via negativa: 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.”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

We understand this instinctively in the realm of engineering. A bridge does not collapse for lack of elegance; it collapses under stress it was not built to bear. The analysis that follows is not aesthetic but structural. Likewise, when a startup fails, it is not because its ambition was insufficient but because its vision was scattered, its attention divided, its risks unbounded. Lives, too, come undone not through sloth, but through unchecked accumulation. There is too much, not too little.

And so the case must be made, gently, but firmly, that refinement by subtraction is not a passive principle. It is not idleness under another name. It is the active choice to narrow, to prune, to discard. It requires not less vigilance, but more. To subtract with discipline is to declare that we do not trust every signal, do not pursue every invitation, do not inflate every ambition.

This, indeed, is the precondition for clarity, mental, strategic, or moral. For strategies to endure, they must shed what is brittle. For bodies to heal, they must rid themselves of the inflammatory and the artificial. For truths to emerge, they must no longer be drowned by noise. In all cases, the movement is the same: from the excess toward the essential. And at the heart of it is a sober realization: that the measure of wisdom is often the ability to cease, to stop, to let go.

It is the simplest and most liberating insight of all: that improvement begins not in knowing what to do, but in knowing what to refrain from doing.

That, I think, is where the argument must rest. The civilization of the future, if it is to endure and not merely accelerate toward collapse, will need to recover this ancient knowledge. For it is not the compounding of tools and knowledge that makes a system robust, but the careful elimination of what makes it fragile.

There is a certain dignity in restraint. A clarity in paring down. In this light, via negativa is not a negation of action, but a higher form of judgment, a recognition that true refinement consists not in more, but in less.

Let that be the temper of our times: not the manic acquisition of means, but the deliberate subtraction of error. Not the fanfare of novelty, but the silence of what has been wisely left undone.

In the end, Via Negativa reminds us that the form we seek, whether in marble or in life, is often already there. Our task is not to build blindly, but to see clearly. And for that, the first step is not addition, but removal.