NONBEING

Nonbeing or, in modern philosophical usage, nothing, is the negation of being; as such, it is to be distinguished from evil, which is the privation of being. Nonbeing is a being of reason, i.e., its meaning is constituted through reference to being by way of negation, which is an act of the intellect (aristotle, Meta. 1003b 10; 1004a 9–12; thomas aquinas, Summa theologiae 1a, 16.3 ad 2, 5 ad 3, 7 ad 4; De ver. 1.5 ad 2). Because being has many senses, nonbeing, the product of its negation, has many senses also (Meta. 1089a 16). Thus plotinus calls the One as well as matter and evil nonbeing because they are not essence, which he identifies with being (Enneads 1.8.3.1–8; 3.6.7.9–13; 3.8.10.28–32;5.2.1.1–7; 5.5.6.1–13).

Nonbeing is not independent of being, nor is being constituted by nonbeing, as G. W. F. hegel claimed. In its adequating and assimilating grasp of being, the intellect produces—as a by-product, as it were—that which is inadequate or unassimilated to being, viz, nonbeing. Being is evident to the intellect as not nothing. This "not nothing," however, is not that which causes being to be; rather being is not nothing simply because being is.

The theological truth of creation out of nothing deepens the metaphysics of nonbeing. "Out of nothing" does not mean that nothing itself is a kind of matter out of which creatures come to be. Rather, it implies that the being of creatures—as a participation of, and therefore a nonidentity with, the being of God—is made possible by the divine intellection of that which is simply other than God. But that which is simply other than God, the Subsisting Being, is "pure" nothing. Creatures could not exist as other than God, if before creation God did not know what is simply other than Himself. This "other" in no way measures God's knowledge, but depends upon it. The divine ideas as the exemplars of creatures are the divine essence known as able to be participated. Since participation implies difference, God must know the ways in which creatures differ from His own being (deficiunt a vero esse; cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, C. gent. 1.54) as well as the ways in which they imitate it. But that which is simply different from, or other than, the subsisting plentitude of being (esse ) is nothing. Such an explanation avoids pantheism and explains the diversity in being without supposing matter or possibles independent of creation and without introducing real diversity into God, the source of the diversity of being. Essence, not nothing, is the intrinsic principle of the finitude of beings other than God. Nevertheless, nonbeing is the condition of the possibility of the procession of essence (as the principle limiting the esse of creatures) from God.

For parmenides and Gorgias, nonbeing is not in any sense whatsoever. In the Parmenides (142A; 161E–164B) and the Sophist (237A–239E; 257B–259B), plato suggests a reality of nonbeing that grounds becoming and multiplicity (cf. Aristotle, Phys. 191a 23–191b 34). For Aquinas the first division or opposition is that between being and nonbeing; from this first otherness (alteritas ) springs the plurality of beings and their difference from each other and from the First Cause (In Boeth. de Trin. 4.1). For B. pascal, man is the mean between God and nothing, so that nothing is one of the extremes that locate man's being. For H. bergson, nothing is a pseudo-idea, resulting from a generalization of the displacement of one being by another. For M. heidegger, the naught is both the veil and the unveiling of the "to be," because the "to be" is not the totality of "that which is." In dread, the pathos of the naught or of the "nothingness " of the "to be," man transcends beings or "that which is" toward the "to be" itself. For J. P. sartre, man is his own nothing and the being in which nothing comes into the world, because the primordial fluidity and otherness of consciousness is not held by any being-in-itself. (see existentialism)

See Also: privation (philosophy).

Bibliography: g. kahl-furthmann, Das Problem des Nichts (Berlin 1934). e. paci, Il nulla e il problema dell'uomo (Turin 1950). g. siewerth Der Thomismus als Identitätsystem (2nd ed. Frankfurt a. M. 1961). h. bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. a. mitchell (New York 1944). m. heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (8th ed. Frankfurt am Mainz 1960), tr. in part in Existence and Being, introd. w. brock (2nd ed. London 1957). j. p. sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. h. e. barnes (New York 1956).

[t. prufer]