ABSTRACT
Some years ago, there was a show on French television called Apostrophes. In one edition, Bernard Pivot, the host, asked his guests to state their favourite words. One man said ‘avec’ (with), since it was the opposite of ‘sans’ (without). It was a curious choice; logical enough but funny also. He might equally have chosen sans for being the word without which a full appreciation of avec would be impossible. To celebrate a word because it is the opposite of another is partly to favour the opposition itself. Well-being is often described with reference to plenitude and deficiency. We can call this the negation model; in Hegel an animal ‘negates’ the food it consumes. It seems a simple model and it appeals to our intuitions.
