Being and non-being tempt us to treat them as equal complementary components
Evidence
The bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own nothingness of being. If then I am not my own past, this can not be in the original mode of becoming; the truth is that I have to be it in order not to be it and I have not to be it in order to be it. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 429 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Imagination, which in Kant’s famous definition is what permits ‘something to be represented in its absence’, initiates a determinate relation between being and non-being. The entity imagined is neither present nor absent. Transcendental imagination, presupposing the co-implication of being and non-being which governs every determination of presence, is specifically the modern modality of the originary unity of opposites. The concept of ens imaginarium supplies to the modern moment of plasticity that very category of a relative non-being which is its correlative. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 897 (
#expands, via linked claim)
The permanent possibility of non-being, outside us and within, conditions our questions about being. Furthermore it is non-being which is going to limit the reply. What being will be must of necessity arise on the basis of what it is not. Whatever being is, it will allow this formulation: “Being is that and outside of that, nothing.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 183 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The being of appearances may differ in kind from appearances of being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 121; Non-being has transphenomenal objectivity just as being does.; Being and non-being relate only through an internal nihilating bond — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 429 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Being and non-being relate only through an internal nihilating bond
#expands(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 429 - Transcendental imagination holds being and non-being in co-implication as relative non-being
#expands(0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 897 - Being is necessarily defined against what it is not
#corroborates(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 183 - Human reality consists of two ekstases, one into being and one into non-being
#qualifies(0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 261 - Identity is internally mediated by the non-identical
#expands(0.70) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1223