Within the depth-psychology and philosophical corpus catalogued in this library, ‘Not Being’ emerges not as simple negation or privation but as a concept with its own positive ontological weight — a domain where the most searching minds have repeatedly found that the apparent void proves philosophically indispensable. The central tension runs from Plato’s Eleatic inheritance, wherein Not-Being is absolutely prohibited as self-contradictory, through his own corrective in the Sophist, where Not-Being is rehabilitated as Otherness — a principle diffused through all things, structurally necessary for predication, falsehood, and difference itself. Parmenides disciplines the paradox further: if the One is not, it nevertheless partakes of greatness, smallness, and equality, forcing Not-Being into a peculiar half-existence. Plotinus responds by relocating Being in eternal actualization, leaving Not-Being as the residue of matter and potentiality. Heidegger transforms the terrain decisively: the ‘not’ embedded in Dasein’s guilt, thrownness, and nullity is not logical negation but an existential structure — Being-the-basis-of-a-nullity. McGilchrist extends this via Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts selbst nichtet’: Nothing actively ‘noths,’ functioning as a generative force rather than an absence. Aurobindo further dissolves the binary, arguing that Nihil, properly examined, is an ‘indefinable Infinite’ that merely appears blank to finite mind. Together these voices establish Not-Being as the indispensable shadow-structure of ontology.
not-being is the principle of the other which runs through all things, being not excepted. And ‘being’ is one thing, and ‘not-being’ includes and is all other things. And not-being is not the opposite of being, but only the other.
Plato’s Stranger establishes the decisive rehabilitation of Not-Being as Otherness — a universal principle co-extensive with Being rather than its simple negation.
, Sophist, -360thesis
while the absoluteness of Being was asserted in every form of language, the sensible world and all the phenomena of experience were comprehended under Not-being.
The introduction to the Sophist diagnoses the Eleatic collapse of experience into Not-Being as the productive crisis that compels a new ontological account.
, Sophist, -360thesis
not-being in itself can neither be spoken, uttered, or thought, but that it is unthinkable, unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable
The passage dramatizes the aporia that strict Not-Being resists all predication and number, demonstrating why it cannot be simply posited without contradiction.
, Sophist, -360thesis
If not-being has no part in the proposition, then all things must be true; but if not-being has a part, then false opinion and false speech are possible
Plato argues that the intelligibility of falsehood — and therefore of sophistry itself — depends on Not-Being’s participation in discourse and thought.
, Sophist, -360thesis
Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies (it positively ‘noths’).
McGilchrist explicates Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts selbst nichtet’ to argue that Nothing is not privation but an active, generative ontological force.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies (it positively ‘noths’).
A parallel rendering of McGilchrist’s interpretation of Heideggerian Nothingness as positive activity rather than mere negation.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the one, which is not, partakes, as would appear, of greatness and smallness and equality… it must be so, for if not, then we should not speak the truth in saying that the one is not.
In the Parmenides, Plato demonstrates that even a non-existent One must paradoxically partake of positive determinations, forcing Not-Being into an equivocal being.
, Parmenides, -370thesis
when we examine closely the Nihil of certain philosophies, we begin to perceive that it is a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions
Aurobindo reframes philosophical Nothingness as a plenitude that exceeds finite cognition, dissolving the binary between Not-Being and Being at the metaphysical ground.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
the one does not exist in such way as to be one; for if it were and partook of being, it would already be; but if the argument is to be trusted, the one neither is nor is one
The Parmenides pursues the hypothesis of the non-existent One to its extreme, demonstrating that total Not-Being entails the impossibility of all predication and relation.
, Parmenides, -370thesis
we define the formally existential idea of the ‘Guilty!’ as “Being-the-basis for a Being which has been defined by a ‘not’” — that is to say, as “Being-the-basis of a nullity”.
Heidegger locates a structural ‘not’ within Dasein’s very constitution — guilt as Being-the-basis-of-a-nullity — converting Not-Being from logical negation into an existential determination.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Is the not-beautiful anything but this — an existence parted off from a certain kind of existence, and again from another point of view opposed to an existing something? … the not-beautiful turns out to be the opposition of being to being
The Sophist demonstrates through the example of the not-beautiful that Not-Being is a relational determination between existences, not an absolute void.
, Sophist, -360supporting
knowledge corresponded to being and ignorance of necessity to not-being, for that intermediate between being and not-being there has to be discovered a corresponding intermediate between ignorance and knowledge
The Republic maps Not-Being epistemologically as the correlate of ignorance, establishing a graduated ontological-cognitive scale with opinion occupying the intermediate region.
, Republic, -380supporting
the word ‘not’ does not altogether annihilate the positive meaning of the word ‘just’: at least, it does not prevent our looking for the ‘not-just’ in or about the same class in which we might expect to find the ‘just.’
The editorial commentary on the Sophist argues that Platonic negation preserves positive semantic content, anticipating the doctrine that Not-Being is Otherness rather than annihilation.
, Sophist, -360supporting
the Sophist will deny these statements… in maintaining this, we are compelled over and over again to assert being of not-being, which we admitted just now to be an utter impossibility.
The dialogue identifies the sophist’s refuge in absolute Not-Being as the strategic move that must be overcome to make falsehood — and dialectic itself — possible.
, Sophist, -360supporting
do the terms “inauthentic” and “non-authentic” signify ‘really not’, as if in this mode of Being, Dasein were altogether to lose its Being… “Inauthenticity” does not mean anything like Being-no-longer-in-the-world
Heidegger clarifies that inauthenticity — a mode of ‘not being’ oneself — does not entail ontological loss but a distinctive, world-absorbed manner of Being-in-the-world.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
being, if not all things, lacks something of the nature of being, and becomes not-being
The Sophist shows that any deficiency within Being — any failure to be all things — logically precipitates into Not-Being, pressing the ontological inquiry toward a unified account.
, Sophist, -360supporting
Being [Être] brings each existent [étant] into being, it must itself be beyond all existence [Étant]… To confuse Being with a being is the metaphysical catastrophe. It is the ‘death of Being’
Miller, via Corbin, argues that the confusion of Being with a supreme being constitutes a metaphysical annihilation — a form of Not-Being produced by ontological category error.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
to that which is not, there is no attribute or relative, neither name nor word nor idea nor science nor perception nor opinion appertaining. One, then, is neither named, nor uttered, nor known, nor perceived, nor imagined.
The Parmenides establishes that absolute Not-Being — the One that wholly is not — is semantically and cognitively inaccessible, stripped of all predication and relation.
, Parmenides, -370supporting
it constantly is not other possibilities, and it has waived these in its existentiell projection
Heidegger notes that Dasein’s actualized possibilities entail the structural not-being of unchosen alternatives, embedding Not-Being within the existential structure of projection.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
the being has several forms and consequently several entelechies… while this phase actualizes, other latent and real phases exist… and the being consists in them as well as in its phase
Simondon implicitly treats Not-Being as the domain of latent, non-actualized phases that nonetheless constitute the being’s full ontological reality.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside
time may be thought of as not belonging to beings, or to beingness (ousia) in any pure and simple fashion
Derrida, tracing Aristotle’s evasion, notes that time’s undecidable belonging to Being implicitly opens a domain of Not-Being within the metaphysical tradition’s foundational question.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside