denial of Not-Being

denial of Not-Being, in Eleatic philosophy, the assertion of the monistic philosopher Parmenides of Elea that only Being exists and that Not-Being is not, and can never be. Being is necessarily described as one, unique, unborn and indestructible, and immovable.

The opposite of Being is Not-Being (to mē eon), which for the Eleatics meant absolute nothingness, the total negation of Being; hence, Not-Being can never be. Parmenides knew that the assertion that Not-Being also exists must be wrong, although no formal logic existed that would enable him to say precisely what was wrong with it. But he was nonetheless certain about his position: “For you cannot know Not-Being (to mē eon), nor even say it.”

The problem of the existence of total nothingness, or “the void” (Greek: kenon), was important in the theoretical foundations of Greek atomism, which asserted, despite the seemingly rigorous logic of the Eleatics, that nothingness must in fact exist. See also Eleatic One.

The Eleatic denial of the void is sometimes seen as a direct refutation of an earlier Pythagorean view, a pre-Parmenidean atomism asserting that a kind of Not-Being, understood as a cosmic air, exists. No documentary evidence for such a view has survived, however.

In the 20th century the question was treated in a revolutionary way by the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, who summarized the function of Not-Being in the neologistic words das Nichts nichtet (“Not-Being, or Nothingness, Denied”).