The Meaning of Nonbeing:
Nonbeing is one of the most difficult and most discussed concepts. Parminides tried to remove it as a concept. But in order to do so he had to sacrifice life. Democritus re-established it and identified it with empty space in order to make movement thinkable. Plato used the concept of nonbeing because without it the contrast of existence with the pure essences is beyond understanding. It is implied in Aristotle's distinction between matter and form. It gave Plotinus the means of describing the loss of self in the human soul, and it gave Augustine the means for an ontological interpretation of human sin. For Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite nonbeing became the principle in his mystical doctrine of God. Jacob Boehme, the Protestant mystic and philosopher of life, made the classical statement that all things are rooted in the Yes and No. In Leibnitz's doctrine of finitude and evil as well as in Kant's analysis of the finitude of categorical forms nonbeing is implied. Hegel's dilectic makes negation the dynamic power in nature and history; and the philosophers of life, since Schelling and Schopenhauer, use "will" as the basic ontological category because it has the power of negating itself without losing itself. The concepts of process and becoming in philosophers like Bergson and Whitehead imply nonbeing as well as being. Recent Existentialists, especially Heidegger and Sartre, have put nonbeing (das Nichts, le neant) in the center of thier ontological thought; abd Berdyev, a follower of both Dionysius and Boehme, has developed an ontology of nonbeing which accounts for the "me-ontic" freedom in God and man. These philosophical ways of using the concept of nonbeing can be viewed against the background of the religious experience of the transitoriness of everything created and the power of the "demonic" in the human soul and in history.
What does the fact of negative judgements tell about the character of being? What is the ontological condition of negative judgements? How is the realm constituted in which negative judgements are possible? Certainly nonbeing is not a concept like others. It is the negation of every concept; but as such it is an inescapable content of thought and, as the history of thought has shown, the most important one after being itself.
If one is asked how nonbeing is related to being-itself, one can only answer metaphorically: being "embraces" itself and nonbeing. Being has nonbeing "within" itself as that which is eternally present and eternally overcome in the process of divine life.