Being And Nothing

If nothing exists, then there is being, and if nothing does not exist, then by the law of double negation, something exists. This is the Parmenidean problem: what-is-not cannot be thought or spoken of because we can only think and speak of what is. So there is no absolute nothingness because the category contradicts itself. Parmenides used this insight to argue against the reality of motion. Advaita Vedanta believes that pure being has no opposite; it knows no non-being. But the world is negatable; hence, it cannot be pure being. It still appears as an object of consciousness, and so it is different from non-being. Being and Non-Being then are contraries whose negation can be found in one substratum. Dvaita Vedanta firmly advocated against this that Being and Non-Being are contradictories — the negation of Being is Non-Being, and the negation of Non-Being is Being. In this case, then the negation of Being is Absolute Non-Being, and they believe we can talk about what-is-not without making ‘nothing’ an entity.

Plato believed that Parmenides was correct in rejecting absolute nothingness, but there is still relative non-being. Relative Non-Being is difference or otherness; it is encapsulated in a sentence like ‘A is not B’ rather than ‘A is not’. The former is relative negation; the latter is absolute negation. A statement like ‘Pegasus does not exist’ would be understood as the difference of ‘horse’ from ‘wings’ or the negation of the combination of these two existents. It is an assertion that these two exclude each other. So a statement can be both meaningful and false, contrary to Parmenides. The highest principle — the One or the Good has no otherness, and hence it is beyond ‘being and essence’, as Plato says in the Republic.

Hegel, on the other hand, makes ‘otherness’ an essential moment of God’s Self-Consciousness. What is other than God is a contradictory category because there is no ‘other than God’, but if there is nothing other than God, then there is no creation — the theological version of Parmenides’s problem. The solution he offers is: God is identical with Himself in what is other than Himself. It is a proposition that finite human understanding cannot grasp because the latter is based on the formal principle of non-contradiction, but Reason can understand this proposition. Everything that is, is through the negation of its opposite — there is no identity without difference.

So we can meaningfully talk about nothing, and yet nothing is not. You have to either abandon the idea that there is absolute non-being (so you can say ‘nothing is’ understood as about relative non-being and ‘nothing is not’ understood as about absolute nothingness) or, like Dvaitins say, that meaningful speech about absolute non-being is possible without making the inference that ‘non-being is’. I would advocate the former course because I cannot see how discourse about absolute non-being can be meaningful. Also, in this approach we need not take the world to be mithya (Plato does consider the sensible world to be an appearance, but not in the sense that it is negatable with reference to past, present and future in the substratum in which it appears — the definition of mithya).