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Does something always come from something or does something come from nothing?

The concept of ‘coming from’ of becoming requires not just something but also nothing because becoming is the coming forth of that which was not. In Parmenides’s Eleatic Monism, we find that Pure Being is the first principle, but this led him to deny the reality of becoming because this involves negation. If we hold fast to the principle that what is, cannot not be, and what is not, cannot come to be, then becoming is impossible. I concur with Hegel on this point - pure being is indistinguishable from nothing, it resides neither in pure being nor in non-being but in their combination - being and nothing. Anything that is or has being also has the opposite, which is nothing. For anything x that is, it is in so far as it is distinct from something else y, this is to say it is through negating something other than itself. There is no identity without difference and no difference without identity. This leads us towards the concept of unity, which is a unity of opposites that holds together things different from each other and does not simply collapse their distinction within the void of identity or as Hegel says, the night in which all cows are black.

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